Milk Thistle
By Jess Golden
November 15, 2024
November 15, 2024
My sister Evelyn is turning yellow. Not just her skin, but the whites of her eyes, too. She’s nestled under a stiff, wiry blanket, hair pulled to the side in a messy braid, oil gathering at the scalp. Smiling as if everything were okay.
I want to know how long she’s known about this, but she won’t tell me.
The nurse won’t tell me either, says it’s against hospital policy. But he can only say it to the floor, and I know what that means.
“Just to be clear,” I ask him, “this was preventable?”
“Uhm. Well. Modern antiviral medications are very effective at curing Hepatitis C,” he says softly. “It doesn’t often come to this anymore.”
Evelyn’s bedside table is cluttered with lumps of quartz and citrine. A wheel-spun mug. A glass jar of dried plant clippings hand-labeled Milk Thistle.
All she had to do was fill a fucking prescription and swallow the pills.
But she didn’t. Because she wouldn’t. And now we’re here.
“I wish you would’ve returned my calls,” she says.
I don’t say anything because the things I want to say are gathering in my lungs, bubbling acidic against the tissues around them, and they’ll come rushing out in a tangled scream if I don’t hold onto them carefully.
I used to want to be more like her. Evelyn always made everything seem more fun than it really was. Magical, even. I’ve always been the shy, practical one.
When we were kids, I loved all the weird crafts she made, the way she filled her window frames with stones and twigs and moss from the woods out back. And she had this way of talking to people. She never seemed scared of anything.
When she bought her house, a tiny one just outside of town, she grew this incredible garden, this wild mess of color that took over the whole yard, and she started inviting everyone she knew over on Saturday afternoons. She fed us all lentil soup, stuffed eggplants, homemade sourdough. She chased giggling children around the tables.
“Why don’t you take a seat,” she says now.
She points at a chair and I sit.
It hurts to look at her.
My head thumps, sore, under pressure.
I remember the steaming mugs of medicinal tea Evelyn used to make for me. She probably still makes them for the neighbors. Feverfew for headaches, fennel for menstrual cramps, lavender for anxiety.
“I’ve missed you,” she says.
Something happened during the pandemic, something we never managed to fix. I’m sure you’ve heard this one before. It’s about the uncomfortable masks she wouldn’t wear. The Saturday lunches she wouldn’t trade for Zoom calls. Then, one day, a sign stabbed in next to her driveway, a black syringe crossed off in red. That’s when I stopped speaking to her.
It’s been almost four years.
And now this. An entirely separate problem, technically, but one that feels familiar. I try to let the newest absurdity sink in, but I can’t. It won’t. None of this makes any sense.
Out in the hallway, I gasp for air, back to wall, hands to thighs. The space around me shimmers.
Then a hand on my elbow, a gentle voice telling me to sit down, to put my head between my knees.
It’s the nurse from earlier. I listen to him because he’s right, and also because he’s got this look on his face. Like there’s nothing he hasn’t seen before, like there’s nothing that could rattle his calm. And I realize how small Evelyn’s one preventable tragedy must look to him, to someone who’s spent every day wading through a sea of them.
That train of thought makes it even harder to breathe. I put my hand on my chest and try to push it in and out, and I feel the necklace hanging there, an amethyst one Evelyn gave me forever ago, a marbled crystal on a thin silver chain that she said would help relieve stress and tension. It’s one that I used to wear often, just in case. And even though her crystals and her herbs are my biggest source of stress and tension right now, I still feel better holding the necklace, so I hold it, and I keep pushing the air in and out with my hand and my lungs until I’ve decided I’m ready to go back in there and talk to her.
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Jess Golden is an American fiction writer with a preference for flash and a tendency to move around a lot. At the moment, she can be found in Seoul. Her stories have previously appeared in Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Fictive Dream, Passages North, and elsewhere.
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Author’s Note:
For many years now, I’ve been fascinated by contemporary social fractures. “Milk Thistle” was written during the lead-up to the recent US elections, and it reflects some of the shock and confusion I’ve felt at witnessing that process unfold.