{"id":657,"date":"2019-01-03T01:53:11","date_gmt":"2019-01-03T01:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/?p=657"},"modified":"2019-01-03T06:12:57","modified_gmt":"2019-01-03T06:12:57","slug":"painless-by-julia-ballerini-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/2019\/01\/03\/painless-by-julia-ballerini-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Painless by Julia Ballerini"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A former professor of art history who has lived many years in several countries, Julia Ballerini is now settled in Manhattan where she is devoted full time to writing fiction. Several of her stories have been published in print and online. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Painless<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

         The dog was licking her face. A furry\nblack dog. It was dark. How long had she been lying on the pavement? It had\nbeen daylight when she fell. That she remembers. She crawled over cobblestones\nand gravel, the dog ahead, barking. That she remembers. Then whiteness. Space\nof no memories. Ambulence. Her mother bending over her. Can you hear me, hear\nme, hear me! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Was it the next day that someone\nbrought her two orange fish in a round bowl? She remembers them swimming in and\nout of her mind\u2019s whiteness as she lay cranked to a tilt on a bed as white as\nher mind. Watery black eyes stared, slithery mouths gulped open. Did she\nscream? The orange fish were soon disappeared. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2248<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Her mother was folding clothes into a\nsuitcase, a suitcase that smelled of newness. She was fourteen and being packed\naway to boarding school, disappeared like the gulping goldfish. It was then,\nseven years after the fall, that her mother, smoothing a new blue sweater into\na new brown valise\u2013\u2013it was then that her mother said, stop crying, you\u2019re lucky\nto be alive, you almost died in that accident. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2248<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Now she watches her own child\nscrambling up a slide in the playground holding tight its silvery edges. She\nhas a startling memory of having not having held on to the rusty rails of that\nlong-ago fire escape, of having leaned into the fall, of having given herself\nup to it. Not because of a will to die, but because of an absence of a will to\nlive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         She closes her eyes trying to conjur a\nmemory of pain. The pain immediately after the fall or the pain that must have\nsliced its way through the drugs in the hospital. Nothing. Her breath comes in\nand out of her lungs, her belly expands and subsides, but she can\u2019t remember\nthe pain, only the horror of the staring, gulping fish. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Back home from the playground, her\nlittle girl tucked safely in bed, she goes to the computer. She types: memory\nand pain. Site after site is about the short-term memory of pain, not the\nlong-term forgetting of it. The newsletter of the International Association for\nthe Study of Pain is no help. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Yet the search has its rewards. She\nlearns about nerves that carry pain signals to the spinal cord and brain to\nexcite the cells that make memories of pain\u2013\u2013a cellular excitation that\nproduces an hightened reactivity to pain that can last for months. Her cells\nmust have been revved up, excited, sensitive to a pain she can no longer\nrecall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         \u201cExcite\u201d a technical term. Yes, but she\npictures a nervy little creature bringing a message of pain to a nebbish\nlooking cell. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         \u201cYo man, belly just sliced open like a\nsausage. Blood spurting everywhere. What a scene! Hurts like hell.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         \u201cWow! Cool. Tell me more. Hold on,\nlemmy grab a pencil and paper.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         She learns about molecules called ERKs\u00ad\u2013\u2013extracellular\nsignal-related kinases\u2013\u2013that can change the memory of cells in the spinal cord\nand brain. Molecular psycotherapy! She reads up on the marine snail Aplysia\nthat is very attractive to neurobiologists because of large brain cells that\nare up to one millimeter in diameter. One millimeter! What is the size of a\nhuman brain cell? She hasn\u2019t a clue. She logs out, shuts down her computer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         She calls her friend Richard whose\nstore of knowledge is phenomenal and who was once married to a doctor. \u201cMemory\nis not intended to be an archive,\u201d he tells her. \u201cWe have an automatic\nextinguishing mechanism that remembers having the pain but not the pain itself.\nOtherwise we could not go on.\u201d That makes sense. Except for certain phobias and\nan intense dislike of oatmeal Richard usually makes sense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         It is reassuring to know that, even if\nher brain cells turn out to be smaller than those of a mollusk, her pain\nextinguishing mechanism is working in full force. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Tomorrow she and her daughter will make\nup a story about a brainy snail named Aplysia. A snail who feels no pain. A\njoyous snail with a will to live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A former professor of art history who has lived many years in several countries, Julia Ballerini is now settled in Manhattan where she is devoted full time to writing fiction. Several of her stories have been published in print and online. Painless          The dog was licking her face. A furry black dog. It was … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-aB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":660,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions\/660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}