The Results

The kitchen calendar became a grid of anxiety,

a staggered sequence of visits to that place

of sterile corridors, past rooms where

some people speak and others stare into

what they feared the most.

He'd sat amongst the filling-station flowers and

scrolling mobiles, waiting to be processed

through the system, a one-size-fits-all leviathan

that clicks and whirrs and spits you out into

the cold, to wait and see.

He was now a reference number watching their

secret words being hunted and pecked into some

distant cloud, their questions ricocheting at right

angles from their screens and drifting past his

bewilderment into the afterwards.

Slowly, he'd learned how to occupy that space

between symptom and diagnosis: probing,

painful invasion, whirring machines breaching his

defences, searching out his every secret fear

with indifference.

And now there was nothing left but the wait,

that feared period buoyed by hope and well meaning,

but so easily punctured by concerned inquiry,

or that anxious glance you were never

intended to catch.

At five he thought he'd heard it, and again at six.

At seven-thirty, the unmistakeable snap of the

letter box brought him to the bannister, where

he saw the envelope lying on the mat,

pregnant with conclusion.

He turned away into the bathroom

and closed the door.