It’s the time of the Great Evacuation. That’s what my friend Jess calls it. I’ve been bleeding all over the place. My body is emptying itself out. It’s undignified. And painful. 

Out for coffee with Jess one morning, I felt a gush and ran to the bathroom. Blood everywhere. All over my new sundress, dripping between my legs, the floor of the ladies’ room. I pulled every paper towel out of the dispenser, rinsed my sundress in the sink, texted her. I let her in and she gasped. A crime scene. 

My skin has developed a heroin chic pallor. Always a “summer,” I ask Jess what season I would be considered now. She tilts her head. “Halloween. Definitely.” 

Kyle doesn’t get it. He still wants me to go with him to Medicine Bow to see the cabin made out of dinosaur bones. An enthusiast, he’s been planning this trip for months. 

Finally, I make the appointment. Am interrogated. Palpated. Peered into. Speculum-ed. Scanned. When the results come in, the doctor who resembles Doris Day—a young April in Paris Doris Day—sits me down. 

She places the scans on the table before me with the satisfied air of a wedding photographer.

“Your uterus,” she announces, “is not happy.”

“I know,” I admit. “I have been sensing its unhappiness.”

“Fibroids,” she says. “Cysts. Look here. And here! This one must have burst.” 

That would have been the day I was crawling around the house on my hands and knees. Lilah, my only child, jumped on and off my back, meowing in confusion. 

My insides resemble a well-marbled steak. 

“Uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, cervix,” Dr. Doris Day says. “I say we take them all.” 

“That’s a lot of me,” I say. 

“Oh, you’d be surprised how little it is! You don’t want to get cancer, do you? You’re a great candidate.”

I have never been a great candidate for anything. I have mostly been a really good sport. 

My mom died of cancer when I was just a teenager. The only time I saw her cry was the day her hair fell out in alarming clumps to the bathroom floor. 

The doctor touches my hand. “You’re going to be a whole new woman.”

I wouldn’t mind being a whole new woman. I cradle the soft protuberance of my belly, imagine my insides, vast and empty and peaceful as Wyoming.  

A couple of nights before the surgery, Jess gets a sitter for her kid and takes me to T.G.I. Fridays with the intention of getting me hammered. 

“If I die, make sure they put ‘She was a really good sport’ on my gravestone.”

“Sure,” Jess says. “I mean, you took Kyle back. That was something.” 

“I did. It was.” 

She raises her glass of sparkling water. “Here’s to the Great Emptying.”

“The Great Removal.” 

“The Taking Out of the Trash.”

“Trash?”

“Anything that’s hurting you, my love.” 

“You’d be surprised how little it is.”