“I have leprosy, Hansen’s disease. I am a leper.” She said and moved herself and all of her stuff off to a shack at the end of this road. “Nonsense” we said, though we understood that she might want to be alone for a while after the accident.

Nonsense we would say when we visited in the shack, she sitting in the corner drinking the jug wine we brought and would leave behind. We would argue that modern science had a cure, a six month multi drug therapy treatment. “Nonsense,” she would say right back. “If and when I choose to be cured I will get some chaulmoogra oil from an Ayurvedic clinic I know in Burma.”

She listened to NPR, we brought her mail, and the rest of the conversation is normal chit chat and liberal wishful thinking. When she did talk about leprosy she claimed that she was guided by how Moses’s sister had dealt with her own leprosy; she talked about herself in the second person.

Those of us who visited most often had been on the hike  with her when the accident happened. Her four month-old son was in the snugli on her breast when she tripped and fell forward onto talus. The baby died with a whimper and a gurgle and she, oh God what wailing, carried him all the way down in that blood-soaked snugli.

Here a moon prepares
A feast for its absence. And there a well in the garden’s
South has processioned a woman to a devil.    Mahmoud Darwish

George's selection of 66 Phlogs is available in print from People's Press.

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