Two Boobs in a Room

You're sitting at the head of the table in a conference room cramped with chairs and people. You're sitting there in your splashy polyester button-up, you and five distinguished male doctors--three handsome, two not so much--who radiate authority. You're acting outside the parameters of your job description: you're filling in for a coworker at the weekly Scientific Review Committee meeting. (You're expected to take down minutes; your participation is peripheral.) You're wishing you felt an ounce confident, sitting as you are before a sampling of the Center's most esteemed clinical investigators. Instead you feel like an inhibited adolescent, with your wide eyes and your immature style (the shirt!). You watch the proceedings unfold. Dr. Greer, Committee Chair, leads the discussion while you struggle to steer it into words on your canary yellow steno pad. You wind up writing about the Center's new breast screening program, the movement of the mammography division to a more sensible location, the necessity of another "breast doc" in the oncology department... Suddenly an acute awareness of your own modest rack washes over you, and it's now you realize it: Everyone has a stake. The commentary is exhaustive, it's prodigious! Breasts, the venerable and ubiquitous: Enthrone them. Why not! You fight for self-control. Wound around revelatory glee, you are. You glimpse yourself, caught up in the nipple storm of the century; springing to and fro on impossibly soft, porous bosoms; pitching and falling with the throb of the Magnificent Mammarian Sea. You pan the room and think, how strange, this breast fixation: if it's not one thing it's another.

Kristen Elde is the writer/editor behind www.editthiskristen.com. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pindeldyboz, McSweeney's, Word Riot, Facsimilation, and Knot Magazine, and various health and fitness-related publications. Her first work of nonfiction is in the works.

You can email Kristen at kje7@u.washington.edu .