The Big Two Oh

Nothing had prepared me for my twentieth birthday. One day I was young and healthy, and the next I awoke with an odd lump on the back of my hand near the wrist: cancer, of course, or something worse, like whatever had happened to the guy I saw that same afternoon on the way to see Blade Runner. Surely he’d caught the exact same kind of wrist cancer, and it had spread upwards, wasting the muscles and burning the skin so that his arm looked like so much cured meat stretched over the bone. That’s how it felt turning twenty.