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À La Carte: The Properties of Mercury

July 8, 2019/ Cynthia Stock

[creative nonfiction]

I refuse to trivialize them by calling them “Hallmark moments,” those times when something unexpected rips open the solid, mental door of my emotional panic room and liberates feelings imprisoned behind it.

Bohemian Rhapsody triggered one of those. I couldn’t take my eyes off Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury. His strut, his swagger. His body taut and muscled, yet fluid; a body in motion demanding my undivided attention. I often partied at gay bars, admired buff bodies in the second skin of tight t-shirts, the then new fashion statement of wearing running shoes, the eye-catching contour along the button-downs or zippers of jeans. I looked, didn’t touch, never felt threatened, and always had a dance partner.

In the movie, the scene that oiled the rusty hinges of my closeted grief showed Rami/Freddie leaving a medical clinic. Pale green blended the hallway with the lighting and coated a bench where a lone patient primly sat. I couldn’t decide if he was contemplating the reality of his diagnosis or waiting for death to appear in its tangible, stereotypic form, a skeleton in a hooded robe with a scythe. When Rami/Freddie walked by, the pallid blonde man, marked by a Kaposi’s sarcoma on his forehead, softly issued, “Aaaa Oooo,” a trademark Mercury crowd rouser. Freddie answered softly, a gentle acknowledgment: “Aaaa Oooo.”

*     *    *

And then it began. I remember leaning against the sink in the ICU, preparing, yet again, for the loss of another young patient. I stood next to an Infectious Disease doctor who competed with me at feeling useless. “How many more do we have to lose?” I asked. I pulled a coarse paper towel from the dispenser and wiped away my tears.

“I don’t know.”

When I watched the movie, I relived the moment I saw a friend, who had been my student and who became a colleague, walk through the sunlight fragmenting the hospital atrium. Isolated strands of gray broke through thick, close-cropped black hair. He wore a shirt, with a button-down collar, pressed slacks, and a simple gold bracelet. Nothing ostentatious, nothing reminiscent of the young man who, after a weekend of clubbing, raved about the bodies of the men he met. “They had bodies of death,” he laughed, never realizing the irony of foreshadowing. No amount of make-up could cover the Kaposi’s, that’s what we called them then, on his nose. It bloomed with the deep purple and distinct outline of an O’Keefe flower.

“Hey, wait up,” I hollered.

He stopped in the sunlight. I wanted to remember him that way, ablaze in nature’s glory.

“How are you doing? Give me a hug.” We embraced. His body shuddered against me. I realized he was crying.

“Nobody ever hugs me anymore.”

Fear unleashes cruelty in even the best people.

The movie continued. I saw the subtle signs of Freddie’s decline and his compulsion to live every day as he wished. I thought of the patients who died, whose names I shamefully can’t remember. Gowns and gloves became mandatory attire caring for AIDs patients, when just twenty-four hours before we knew what we knew, I went home with their blood and sweat on my hands. I was too young or too stupid to be afraid. All I saw were people I might have been dancing next to the previous weekend.

There are no pretty words for that.

During her career in Critical Care nursing, Cynthia Stock pursued writing through UT Dallas, SMU, and The Writer’s Garret, publishing The Final Harvest of Judah Woodbine in 2014. When she discovered Writing Workshops Dallas, Blake Kimzey (her teacher and mentor) steered her creativity in new directions. In 2018, her short stories appeared in SHARK REEF, Potato Soup Journal, and the I AM STRENGTH anthology (Blind Faith Books). In August, she will have a personal essay in HerStry. Cynthia identifies as a late bloomer in the craft of writing and is gratified by the acceptance of “The Properties of Mercy.”

Amuse-Bouche Archive

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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

Behind the Eight Ball: How to Become Homeless in the Richest Country in the World

June 13, 2025/in Blog / Valerie Nyberg
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Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

May 9, 2025/in Blog / Gale Naylor
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Products of Our Environment

March 14, 2025/in Blog / Mitko Grigorov
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Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Dig Into Genre

May 23, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Lauren Howard
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The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

April 25, 2025/in Midnight Snack / paparouna
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On The Map

March 28, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Ariadne Will
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School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
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A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
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Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
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Word From the Editor

The managers of Lunch Ticket all agreed that issue 26 needed to have a theme, and that theme had a responsibility to call for work relating to what we are seeing in society. We wanted a theme that resonated with Antioch University MFA’s mission of advancing “racial, social, economic, disability, gender, and environmental justice,” and we felt it was time to take a stand…

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