Lucy Zhang
Eczema
My mother called it a number of things: a curse wrought from neglecting to burn incense before the delivery, the revenge of our ancestors who lost most of their descendants to tuberculosis, the manifestation of a snowflake generation, the irreversible doom created by my estrogen-deprived brain. What it truly was: blood poisoning, septicemia, an infection through broken skin—hundreds of names that, no matter how scientific the jargon your heart desired to shield itself with, led to death against an underdeveloped immune system. Skin so weepy you’d think it the confluence of all Hell’s rivers weaving through volcanic rock and molten lava. A red so vivid it’d put the 福 paper cuttings my mother hung in her house to shame. I’d stopped counting the rashes because they’d blurred into one massive splotch. I stopped counting many things since then: the number of infected internal organs, the hours from doctors declaring defeat to complete immune system forfeit, the weeks left in my maternity leave-turned-bereavement, the remaining roma tomatoes that’d gone moldy from neglect, the flakes of cradle cap I uncovered with every jostled bed sheet and carpet, the unwashed onesies crusted yellow from blisters.
In the following days, like a ghost demanding vengeance on multiple generations in order to move onto the afterlife, eczema bloomed over my stomach, breasts, back, and shoulders. The itch left me awake longer than my newborn’s cries and nightly feeds once did. The dermatologist prescribed me 2.5% hydrocortisone, triamcinolone, Eucrisa, Zyrtec, Claritin—tubes and ointments cluttering a cabinet that I rarely opened. Instead, I scratched each night, a ritual of clawing my skin without even a swaddle to restrain my hands and uncut nails. It’s the remains of the curse, I declared. It only made sense for me to bear it in full force. I rubbed my skin raw. Peeling it off sounded more appealing than reaching for the steroid creams. At least there’d be something left beneath these layers of tissue: a mature if overreactive immune system, a beating heart, and high levels of prolactin that failed to get the memo.
In the following days, like a ghost demanding vengeance on multiple generations in order to move onto the afterlife, eczema bloomed over my stomach, breasts, back, and shoulders. The itch left me awake longer than my newborn’s cries and nightly feeds once did. The dermatologist prescribed me 2.5% hydrocortisone, triamcinolone, Eucrisa, Zyrtec, Claritin—tubes and ointments cluttering a cabinet that I rarely opened. Instead, I scratched each night, a ritual of clawing my skin without even a swaddle to restrain my hands and uncut nails. It’s the remains of the curse, I declared. It only made sense for me to bear it in full force. I rubbed my skin raw. Peeling it off sounded more appealing than reaching for the steroid creams. At least there’d be something left beneath these layers of tissue: a mature if overreactive immune system, a beating heart, and high levels of prolactin that failed to get the memo.
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Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.