Magnetic Resonance Imaging

It looked like a flower a jewel a prism a kaleidoscope of pink and red and green a mustard yellow. So beautiful it brought tears to my eyes. This part here, The Neurologist said, should be like a bush and it's more like a fern. The language of plants. I stood behind him, peering over his shoulder. My daughter's brain a bloom on a screen, his finger (or was it a pen) brushing along its tendrils, a fern not a bush. Space, too. Too much space there and there. How do I write this or do I not write this? Of course I will write this, me with the words, the ease of them. Call a flower tree and a tree flower (so I thought, lying on my back in the green grass of childhood) and what if we were just God's dream (God, not god, back then) and this, that, was a sort of dream. Calling a brain bush and bush fern. Standing there looking over his shoulder, my daughter's brain a bloom on the screen. The word atrophy. The feathering of a fern where there should be bush. The word cerebellum. I felt sick to my stomach for a moment, standing there, the dots in front of my eyes. Or was it faint? I need to sit down, I said, stumbled around the wheelchair and sat on the couch. I closed my eyes when he spun around on his chair. He's a nice man, a smart man, an honest man. Interesting that it was the tears that flustered him, not the brain a bloom on a screen. That's the way they are. I closed my eyes, heard him rummaging and then leave the room. Back in, he handed me a stack of paper towels, the brown rough ones from the bathroom. I thought that was funny. I really did. I thought it was funny. I'll write it all down, I thought, and then out. I'll build some kind of tension here on the page to mimic that in the room in the brain a bloom on the screen. Atrophy of the cerebellum. We'll need to compare it to an earlier scan (that I'll have to find, to root out from the bowels of some other hospital). The language of medicine mixed up with the language of business the language of poetry.  And I a master of all of it nodding my head words blooms from my mouth. On the written report: indicative of epilepsy treatment. I always knew it. The word treatment. Just to be clear: Sophie's recent magnetic resonance imaging showed a couple of troublesome spots, including atrophy of the cerebellum. This could account for her gradual decline in motor abilities (walking, coordinating movement, balance, swallowing). The cause is uncertain -- too many drugs? long-term use of benzodiazepines? underlying metabolic disorder? genetic mutation? -- as always.

How do I write what comes next? I still have some tricks up my sleeve, The Neurologist said, and I laughed. I really did. I thought it was funny. Should they use phrases like this? Me with the chalked hands and the pirouette toes up on the high wire for decades. You as spectator your breath held.

Bloom, brain.