Absorption vs. Abortion by Cynthia Pratt

In remembrance of James (Jimmie) Huega, one
of the first two members of the U.S. men's
team in 1964 to win an Olympic medal
in his sport, dying of MS in 2010

I already made the mistake of asking
my world history teacher what he meant
by circumcision to describe one of the rituals
of ancient peoples. My raised hand, a beacon
in still, cold air, voice clearly enunciated,
because my mother always encouraged
understanding of words in the context of
learning. My mother, a former, one-room
school teacher, now a mother of four daughters,
taught me to ask, speak up.

After the laughter and ridicule by 15-year-old
boys in class, especially Jimmie Heuga,
I almost dropped out of school. Of course,
I couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t, didn’t.

Then the biology test the next week
about cells, veins, and arteries, graded
by a fellow student’s paper.
Jimmie received mine. 100 percent correct
except for the spelling of absorption.

No s or p, so marked wrong,
and read aloud to Mr. Miller, our drunk
biology teacher, and the whole biology class.
The only thing left was laughter, including mine,
the contrast between the two words so obvious,
taking into, or taking out of, the body.

I knew about out-of-wedlock sex, teenage
girls leaving for a while, then coming back,
and even whispered fixes to unwanted
pregnancy, if not of desire and scarlet letters
then certainly of becoming mothers too soon.
That word ‘abort’ leading to
ending, canceling.

What I hoped: the teacher stopping Jimmie
in mid-sentence to avoid embarrassment
from the ridicule, but Miller was only
thinking of absorption:
addition, insertion, inclusion,
like gathering into oneself a substance.

In the end I remembered to accept
the fact that words matter,
dealing with those sitzmarks, eventually
fully understood, as I and Jimmie grew up, faced
life’s ice hitting us on the downhill icy slope,
his, absorbing a pronouncement of words---
MS. Mine was to let go of a life
inside of me that was not going to live.