Pierre L’Grommet ~ Letter to My Doctor

Dear Dr. Hanson, Nurse Cache and Lisa:

I just want­ed to write this note thank­ing you all for work­ing these many years to keep me upright and nom­i­nal­ly func­tion­al. Very kind of you all, and one of my few fond mem­o­ries of Penurburg, along with the many stu­dents at Penurburg State, and my den­tist. You guys are the best and have my unend­ing appreciation.

I have, after many months, engaged the ser­vices of a scoundrel here in North Carolina, a GP with a sim­i­lar­ly dour staff, and it was with a heavy heart that I dropped on him my 274 pages of med­ical his­to­ry from P’burg Clinic. “What?” he said. “Huh?” And so on. His office, a small, dark affair, at the rear of a sta­ble (itself a con­vert­ed gaso­line sta­tion), bare­ly the size of a humi­dor, is a spare and lone­ly place. There I sit look­ing at an emp­ty fish­bowl with a soli­tary gup­py nav­i­gat­ing in end­less cir­cles in an inch of cloudy water.

So it goes. I remain, alone, fac­ing the abyss.

~

Pierre L’Grommet has pub­lished short fic­tion in Damaged Goods, Topsail Literary Review, Mozambique, and else­where. He lives on Knotty Island off the coast of North Carolina.