“The results will be back on Monday. Your questions will have to wait until then.” I shook my head and gazed down at the too-clean tile floor, but the white-coated assistant’s distracted eyes never left his phone. 

Bastard, I thought then, though I could only smile. My bent grin now locked firmly in place by a pinched nerve, a long-dormant virus… or something much more sinister. Yet, as I returned home, my wonder, you ran to enfold me in your arms and asked, in your excited toddler’s voice, how my day had been.

We went to the park for your cousin’s birthday, and I watched you cascade on the zip line, yelling with excitement as the wind moved past your pink-framed glasses and stirred tiny strands of loosed hair. Your brother, as usual, was already knee deep in trouble, a mischievous smile showing through showers of brown mulch.

Dear daughter, when I first laid in that silent metallic tube, feeling the contrast’s sickening spread and listening to the whirs of the machine that would mark my fate, I was terrified… not of death, but of leaving you, by a life seized just at the moment when the world had, at long last, formed into a kind of coherence.

Then, that afternoon, at your cousin’s party, you and your brother danced to some unheard tune, bubbles wafted through unseasonably cool air, your mother’s hand found my own, and I was the luckiest person alive.

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Scott Ortolano is an English professor at Florida SouthWestern State College. His poetry and prose have most recently appeared in Ponder Review, Across The Margin, Hawai`i Pacific Review, Rathalla Review, Blood+Honey, and Apocalypse Confidential. You can usually find him reading, wandering, fishing, or frantically grading—often with his two children in tow. Follow him on Bluesky at @floridasnow.bsky.social and Instagram at florida_snow_.  More of his work is available at www.SOrtolano.com