CNF: I Keep Thinking About that Scene From Buffy the Vampire Slayer

by Allison Blevins

 

Buffy comes home on a bright day, windows streaming day and sunshine. I sit on the sofa shivering, calmly stroking the soft hairs on the top of my daughter’s foot, her body half-on and half-off my body—languid. Hold music, soft violin and piano. Tell them you’re a call back patient, said the nurse who called to give me the results.

 

My husband paces the living room, plugs in the lights on the Christmas tree. My hand strokes my daughter’s foot. My husband mouths, 9 days? They don’t have an earlier appointment? And I remind myself to notice. Remember. Remember this. If you can take your memories with you.

 

The whole Summers’ house is horror movie bright. Buffy finds her mother on the sofa—eyes open and arms jutting. Joyce is all elbows and finger joints crooked. Her skirt is hitched ever so slightly higher than anyone would want for their own mother—who is soon to be found on the sofa by EMTs.

 

Later, I argue with my husband. It feels so good to scream. Get out of the bathroom. He says I’m misunderstanding. I wait motionless while he walks back and forth from bathroom to bedroom, bedroom to bathroom, bathroom to bedroom. When he finally leaves, I take a handful of pills I’ve been saving for an eventuality like this.

 

Buffy vomits on the floor, and she stares and stares, and it is so silent and the silence makes the brightness brighter. Louder. Later, Willow and Tara share their first kiss on screen.

 

Earlier, in my car in a basement parking lot, I move my body violently. After reading the report, I’d managed three floors down in the parking garage elevator. In the car, my body shakes my torso and jerks my hands from my arms—unnatural and sharp—my lungs scream despite my mouth’s resistance. I call my husband and tell him the report says right breast and multiple masses. I gasp and choke. The whole thing so desperate and raucous and embarrassing.

 

I think about those old tinny photos I took at the lake some summers. The one with my dad in a high backed wicker chair. He wears a soldier costume right out of a civil war reenactment.

 

This episode of Buffy is titled “The Body.” Apparently Joss Whedon didn’t want this episode to have an existential lesson. The point was for all of us to watch a person become a mere body.

 

I loved those photos, summers when our family rented a few nights at the lake and dad drove a rented speed boat and we ate banana saltwater taffy and raced at every go-kart track along the highway from our small town to the lake one state over.

 

The EMTs leave Joyce on the floor after performing CPR, leave the body with Buffy.  Unrealistic.  When Giles comes, Buffy exclaims, We aren’t supposed to move the body!

 

On the sofa shivering, waiting on hold, waiting to the soft, surprising on-hold music, I remember the day my mom called me to her room as a child. My mom had to tell me my friend since preschool was dead—driving to the city to shop for Christmas. I’ve had a recurring nightmare ever since. I killed her. My psychiatrist might call this a trauma response.

 

I can’t tell you much about what happens in the dream. I just know it’s my fault. In the dream. In the car after I read the report, I was screaming again and again against my closed mouth.

 

Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer. She is the author of Where Will We Live if the House Burns Down?, Cataloguing Pain, Handbook for the Newly Disabled: A Lyric Memoir, Slowly/Suddenly, and six chapbooks. Winner of the 2024 Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com

 

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