The C spine snakes upwards; from its mouth lines of blue and red and mustard yellow. Blue for veins, red for arteries, and yellow where the spinal cord merges into brainstem. C1 sits atop, a snug fit along the base of the skull. Here is your problem, she explains, it is off kilter, in need of alignment. The procedure feels like the end of the world but I am alive after.
Once, decades ago now, we sat at a table outside a restaurant in Greece. A pig’s head hung in the window and as we ate a man removed the head from its hook, laid it on a wooden block and chopped it open with a cleaver; the imagined sound, a thick sharp thwack.
In the days after the alignment I am still alive, I am off kilter, I am out of whack, and any other saying that softly describes a body that will not function as it should. There is an echo of a sound and it could be a cleaver, the slip of bone on bone, a tear in a vertebral artery. I cannot go outside, the world too full of sound and light. I can sit and read but my news feed is filled with the impossible; the world too has tilted and I wonder how one can be realigned without the other.
I am still
I am out of
I am off
It feels like a cleaver, I explain at the headache clinic, like something looking for a way out or a way in. I think but do not say that there is a pressure and piercing and a shimmer in the distance as the pain moves, stealthy, up and into being.
Once, when I was a student, I visited a medical museum and there was a shelf that held brains floating in a pale liquid. They were motionless and symmetrical, boring if anything, and I quickly moved onto the next exhibit, a nest of thick hair that had been removed from a women’s stomach.
I buy an ergonomic desk. I cut out all alcohol. I stay away from news headlines. I pick handfuls of sun-warmed raspberries and listen to audio books where lost love is found. I watch the trees turn bronze months too early. I cancel my appointment for the next alignment. I take fresh air in wide mouthfuls. I count the days since my last attack – one, two, three.
About the Author
Rachel Smith lives in Aotearoa New Zealand. She has been published in journals and anthologies including Landfall, Best Microfiction 2019, Best Small Fictions 2020 & 2025, Mslexia Best Women’s Short Fiction 2024, and Short Poto (MUP). Her reviews have appeared in takahē and Landfall Tauraka Review Online. She was screenwriter for the feature film, Stranded Pearl (2024), is an editor at Flash Frontier and writes for Bergman Gallery, Cook Islands. rachelmsmithnz.wixsite.com/rachel-smith
