When my daughters were little girls, one Christmas I was determined to create a gingerbread house, fancy with white icing and a scalloped rainbow of Necco wafers for roof tiles. I’d bought shoestring licorice for window mulleins, Andes mints to panel the door, lollipops for the house’s front yard lights, gumdrops for a rock garden. 

In our failing oven, however, the bready walls baked unevenly and buckled when erected. Without a scaffolding or trusses, the roof bowed. Desperately, I thickened the icing with powdered sugar as glue. My oldest propped up a wall with a chopstick. The girls hodgepodged the trimmings, then bundled into snowsuits and rushed outside to sled on yellow saucers. 

I set the platter and its sagging mess in the unheated greenhouse attached to the kitchen, to halt the meltdown. I swept powdered sugar from the kitchen table and floor and dumped the remaining sweets into a bowl. The girls had not opened the package of Swedish fish I’d bought for the pond. Whizzing down our snowy front hill, the children shrieked, long hair escaped from knitted pompom hats tangling in the wind. I slipped into the greenhouse, swirled icing beneath a blue Dumdum stuck in a chocolate kiss for a lampost, and built a pond of thirteen circling fish. 

The cottage, more a shack really, had no chimney or hearth; the center sank threateningly. Where this would end — the compost, and not our Christmas dinner table — was foreordained. I built a creek of solo fish through the candy corn garden patch and around the cottage’s corner, a whimsical fish escape. Did the phone ring then? A sweaty child rush in with a split lip from a spill on the ice? I never finished. 

*

A decade later, when those plastic yellow sleds had long ago been cracked and heaped in a Vermont landfill, a nurse named Lucia sat beside me in the chemo infusion room, eyes slitted in concentration as she pushed a vial of vincristine into my forearm’s vein. Sourced from the Madagascar periwinkle, Catharanthus roseus, the chemotherapy drug originated, like much of medicine, as an afterthought. This unobtrusive, creeping garden vine had been used as an astringent and cough remedy. As pharma evolved into big pharma in the twentieth century, these wonton-sized purple flowers were studied as a diabetes solution. The cheaper and widespread use of insulin knocked out that monetary venture. Vinca, as the ivy-ish plant was commonly known, was FDA-approved mid-century in an emerging line of cancer drugs. 

Double-gloved, in her blue protective gown, Lucia instructed me to chew ice chips. The drug, joining my coursing blood, would rapidly seek the warmest and weakest place in my body. My mouth’s roof would erupt into sores. That day, as I sat in a blue pleather recliner, five chemicals would mix in my 100-pound body, a meticulously coordinated medical assault on the lymphoma festering and growing in my belly. 

Lusciously crimson, vincristine flowed through the clear syringe like liquid Swedish fish. That gingerbread Christmas season, exceptionally cold, with middays that didn’t rise above zero, I had occasionally slipped through those greenhouse doors and pried free a half-frozen fish that I sucked as I fried sausage and onions for stuffing and hung sap-sticky pine boughs from the rough beams. The floor was so cold I clunked in my Danskos. That sugary project never graced our table, its roof stove in, two walls tumbled. The chocolate kisses and Reese cups had been raided. Only I relished the fish, one by one, my private treat as my censorious in-laws came and went, my husband hunched wordlessly over the roast turkey.

The syringe, shot through with sunlight, reminded me of college nights when the neon lights of Three Dollar Dewey’s gleamed through spilled beer on varnished tabletops. In those years, my now-departed husband and I had penciled our marriage map, aiming for mountain paths, determined to cleverly avoid our parents’ swampy mires of recrimination.

Finished, Lucia dropped the syringe in a bin. “You know what this drug is called? The Red Devil.”

Scarlet as a STOP sign.

Here’s my cancer patient lowdown: I sucked this poison in, its power propelling me to the whistling precipice of death. Stop, look, listen: I may not survive. My cancer was not without choices. I could take the drugs and risk decay, demise, death. Refuse the drugs, and I would die. 

*

Here’s a lesser-known side effect of my chemo mixture, cisplatin: lying in bed, a whooshing revolved in my left ear, a fluttering stir like a fledgling first stretching its wings. 

*

My old father, widowed and marooned in his faraway-from-me New Mexican home, hunched from a badly-mended cracked vertebrae, fiercely chased off dementia. Like my father, unable to drive, my balance scrambled not from age but disease and pharmaceuticals, I pitched into the Old Dad project by calling him each morning. A retired Great Books professor, he seemed busy enough in his days. By six p.m., ringing his kids and grandkids on FaceTime for company while he drank wine, he had mushed down into the day’s weariness. 

I kept my bald head swaddled not to startle the old man.  

“I have these two different computers, mine and your mother’s. I’m looking for this essay I wrote that I wanted you and your sister and brother to read. You should find it of interest as it’s family history. I only ever made three or four moral decisions in my life. Maybe some people don’t ever make any.”

I was knitting what my college friend Jean-François would call a “fuck me red” linen sweater, in hopes of wearing it this summer. I might be out in the social world, going to dinners and concerts, whatnot, happy in my skinny cancer body. A simple pattern, knit, knit, knit, a herringbone pattern over the chest. 

On my screen, the desert sunlight charmed my father’s curls gossamer, unkempt as The Shining’s Jack Nicholson’s madness, his head bobbing as he spoke. “It’s easiest to meander along in life. Remember that picnic spot we had on the flat rock beside the Onion River? We ate peanut butter sandwiches and watched the fish get sucked downstream, wherever they were headed? I woke up thinking about that rock this morning, how we dangled our feet in the water while we ate.” He glanced sideways, through his dining room window. “The problem is — the fault in this human choice system — is that we can only guess at the future. When we make decisions, we can’t understand how the complications of our choices will work out for the family. I decided to leave Los Alamos, and then we ended up in Boulder where I couldn’t get a job for the life of me. So we moved back East, which was probably a terrible idea. I thought New England was a good place to raise kids, but your mother…”

“My mother.”

My father had ditched his good wages at The Lab when his brand-new Cold War physics PhD and his youth were the most valuable commodities he’d ever possess. He repeated, as he had so often in my childhood, “I couldn’t see devoting my life to creating nuclear weapons.”

My mother, however, rued his decision and punished him with her unhappiness and depression for the remainder of their sixty-three-year marriage.

Knit, knit, knit, transforming string into a blouse. 

*

Myself, in my forties, I held to a decision to quit drinking, metamorphosized myself and the kids into a different town, a brand-new-to-us house filled with furniture and books from our past. 

*

In my ear, a churning like our childhood Frigidaire washing machine behemoth, or an essential internal component in my basement furnace breaking apart. Listen, the buzzing begged.

*

In January, with its dire subzero nights, Jean-François arrived from Switzerland. He knocked on our glass back door. On my dark deck behind him, ice lanterns and burning beeswax candles radiated, crystalline gifts from the neighbors. 

“Welcome,” I said.

Jean-François stepped into our house and coughed. “I have the flu. A miserable flu, for ten days. My doctor says I’m not contagious.” He sat on the couch, removed his mask, and raucously blew his nose. “I’ll take some tea.” The mask dangled from his ear. 

Across the room, I leaned back into the corner armchair. 

When he trudged jetlagged upstairs with his wheeled suitcase, my daughter sat on the bed, which my daughters had moved to my downstairs office after my first cancer hospitalization. Her eyes were candle flames. “That man has to go. You can’t go back to the hospital.”

I nodded. 

She leaned near me, her cheeks satiny and gorgeous with youth. “I know it’s hard, shocking, awful. It feels like betrayal.”

“That word: yes.”

“I’ll toss him out if you can’t.”

*

All night, upstairs, he hacked, honked his snotty nose. 

I lay fuming, remembering the vise of marriage, how I had lain awake nights, feigning sleep to avoid a man. My hips, stripped of fat from the devouring lymphoma, ached on my mattress. For most of my life, I had burdened myself with others’ exigencies. My mother’s misery lay on her daughters; if we were prettier or sparkier, her unhappiness might be lessened. We could be some recompense for remaining in her marriage. This childhood was followed by my husband’s fraught demands: please me, wife, be the made-up woman I imagine. Now, my old friend. What did he want from me?

*

Whoosh, churn. The dismantling of my inner ear. The vinca — such a tiny unprepossessing flower, thin velvet petals, thread stamen — bore power. 

*

Dawn splitting the sooty winter sky, I woke and drank espresso, brewed in my small silver pot, designed not to share. 

Masked, Jean-François padded into the kitchen.

I pushed my chair back from the table, smacked into the cabinets. “Here’s the facts. I have stage four lymphoma. I’m undergoing chemotherapy. I’ve been hospitalized twice in the last two months for life-threatening blood infections. You’re exhibiting flu symptoms, maybe even Covid, which I told you not to bring. You cannot stay here.”

“I understand, of course. Your health is the most important thing. But I’ve had this for ten days. My doctor said I’m not contagious, that this is fine. I didn’t know when I could reschedule, how many months that might be, and with my retirement coming up, it’s complicated, the company for sale and all.” He pushed a finger under his mask and itched his nose. 

“People with cancer die from complications.”

A glass container of cookies was on the table between us. My daughter had filled it with cookies she’d baked to take back to college. Jean-François tapped its red plastic cover and stared at me. He had flown over the globe’s arc to visit me. Why had his wife left him at the Swiss train station and driven off? Had she counseled him not to come? Absently, he pried off the plastic lid and pressed his thumb on a plump sugar cookie. Soiled. “What do you want me to do?”

“Take your things and go down to the diner — it’s in the village intersection — and figure out your plan.”

We sat. 

My daughter stared at us through the doorway. 

He waited. 

I waited. 

At last, he sighed and trudged back up the stairs. 

What had he wanted here, anyway? What had he sought from me?

My daughter stood beside my chair.

He wheeled in his luggage. “Will I see you again this trip?”

I stared at him over my mask. 

On our doormat, he shuffled into his shoes. “What a view you have here. It goes down steeply, doesn’t it? That must be nice.”

I had said all I needed to say.

He rolled his suitcase through the door and down our steps, head down, thinking what I could only speculate. 

My daughter shoved towels and washcloths and couch pillows into the washing machine, scrubbed down the bathroom and doorknobs and light switches with bleach. We tidied and polished, reclaimed our lemon-yellow painted rooms. 

I watered the cacti on the bathroom windowsill. Cardinals dipped in and out of the bare-branched mock orange bush where a bird feeder hung. Beneath the bush, I knew vinca spread, dormant beneath the gentle inches of downy snowflakes. A stranger had planted this flower years before we moved here, long enough ago that the vinca had rooted along the house’s sunny south side, spread under the porch, rooted into the woods in that narrow wild ravine. Tenacious, tough as hell, a survivor. 

About the Author:

Brett Ann Stanciu is the author of Call It Madness (Regal House Publishing, 2026), Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction (Steerforth Press, 2021), and Hidden View (Green Writers Press, 2016). She is a contributing writer and editor for the Vermont Almanac and received a 2024 Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts. Recipient of a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant, her essays and fiction appeared most recently in Under the Sun, Pause Press, and MUTHA Magazine. Mother of two grown daughters, Stanciu lives in a northern Vermont village, in a 100-year-old house built for granite workers and surrounded by lilacs. 

*Feature image by Mohamed Hassan on Unsplash