When she’s gone, I go outside with the giant bag of gnarly old flower bulbs that I found under one of the newspaper mountains last night. I dig little holes with a tablespoon, and tuck the bulbs into the cooling earth, all over the yard. Mama would always snort at me when I turned up my nose at the insect-buzz of that beast of a rose bush, or the aphid-covered lupins in the ditch, or the slimy sadness of daffodils and hyacinths and lilies when they die.

“Good Lord, Crow, who complains about flowers?” she’d say. “They’re nothing but beauty-full.”

So this is me, apologizing for burning her papers and letting Char make off with a couple of photographs I mistakenly assumed Mama’d sooner be rid of. My sorry is as sorry does. By the time these flowers bloom in the spring all of this will be forgiven, if not forgotten.

On the first day of fall, Mama and I head to the Regional Hospital in the dreary morning dark for a fun-filled day of head cages, foot-long needles, and robo-surgeons. Mama squeezes my hand too hard as we walk down the hall to the desk where a terse and cranky woman hands me stacks of paperwork, and begins grilling me about when I ate, what colour my snot is, and where I’ve been.

“Christ, this one’s worse than Peggy,” I grumble. Mama discretely pinches the back of my arm. I jump a bit, smile, and answer.

“Last meal was twelve hours ago, nasal mucus is clear, and the only travel was flying back here from Toronto three and a half weeks ago.”

Then, a less cranky but equally terse woman leads me to the prep room and gives me a johnny coat.

“Why do I need to wear this if they’re drilling my head?” I say.

Mama, again with the pinch that says, Shut up. Stop being so contrary. These people are just doing their job. Put on the damn dress. And I do.

Next comes a little paper cup full of drugs to “make me more comfortable during the procedure.” Within twenty minutes of tossing those babies into my system, Mama’s got fuzzy grey kittens playing hide and seek in her hair, the monochrome blue concentric rings that pattern my johnny coat ebb and flow in sync with my breath, and the nurse’s words are the colour of Dijon mustard. Now I am definitely more comfortable, assuming “more comfortable” means “tripping balls.”

“Gosh, I hope you didn’t shave your head just for this!” the nurse says as she marks up my head with a ballpoint pen. “We only would have taken off a tiny bit of hair. The size of a stamp.”

“Nah, I did it ’cause I’m such a badass,” I hear myself trill. “And I needed a new do.”

They rig the cage contraption to my head and neck, screw me down to the table, run me through the MRI, and then wheel in the fancy Skype screen, upon which the face of a friendly neurosurgeon in Halifax appears to direct the guy with the scalpel, the drill, and the big, long, hollow needles. But I’m not paying attention to any of that. I’m too busy blabbering on about naming my tumours. Parry Homunculus lives way deep in my parietal lobe, where he fucks with my sensory processing. Ziggy Stardust is a wild one, dancing all over my occipital lobe making me see crazy shapes and colours. And the other one . . . fuck, I don’t have a good name for that one. Let’s call it Fuzzy. Fuzzy Wuzzy was a tumour. Fuzzy Wuzzy heard a rumour. I hum loud and tunelessly to drown out the whir of the drill and the drone of the doctors — who are not nearly as jazzed about the tumour names as I am — and watch the fluorescent lights on the ceiling explode into billions of light specks that scamper madly around the room like baby spiders newly hatched from their silvery scale egg, then dissolve.