Lori Jakiela is the author of four books, including the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (2016), which received the 2016 Saroyan Prize, was a finalist for the Council of Literary Magazines and Small Presses Firecracker Award and the Housatonic Book Award, and was named one of twenty Not-to-Miss Nonfiction Books of 2015 by The Huffington Post. She directs the undergraduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where she is a professor of English and Creative/Professional Writing

ESSAY

We Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice

By LORI JAKIELA

The doctor shows me cross-sections of my breasts on her computer screen. The images look like something from the Weather Channel, a satellite tracking a monochrome storm.

“You see here,” the doctor says, pointing out a line of tiny white spots, innocent as grains of rice. “And also here.”

***

At New York City street fairs, there’s always a booth claiming: We will write your name on a grain of rice.

Why write someone’s name so tiny it can’t be seen without a magnifying glass?

Who perfects an art like that?

When the doctor shows me the cross-section of my breasts, the grains inside, the microscopic tears that beckon my death, I think: Oh they’re pretty.