Under the Sign of Cancer

UNDER THE SIGN OF CANCER / Carolyne Wright Born under the sign of Cancer, I knew I'd die of it. Horoscopes were against me, and sky maps in the newspaper featured the Crab stars every Sunday. That was the hushed-up Fifties: after Bikini Atoll and the Big C, and they'd just found strontium90 in the milk. It smelled like weapons. I tried to figure out the tropics, running their 23V2 degree circles around the globe. The one up north would get me. I envied my father his Capricorn birthday. Later, I read Henry Miller for a clue, until my father came in one night, pulled back the bedsheets and snapped the flashlight off. I still seek that known latitude. I boycott Replogle products, wear Linus Pauling T-shirts, and teach my parrot to say Ban the Bomb. I telephone Madame Noor, my chartmaker, for a reading. She tunes in the celestial sphere, my stars line up. She shakes her head, warns me not to read the National Enquirer. for a cure. She says, "Think of the thing you're most afraid of, dream yourself 12 · The Missouri Review dying, healed of it forever." I imagine myself empty between collarbone and hip, sunlight falling in long arcs where an arm was. I say things about the nuclear family, buy mushrooms and make detonation noises as I slice them, never use words like metastasize and remission, even when I'm going through a change of subject, or trying to move out on sin. To date, I have no symptoms. I have nothing in common with children lying in their tents of pure breath at the Mayo Clinic, their charts fixed at the angles of declining stars, Three Mile Island glowing through their sleep. Carolyne Wright The Missouri Review · 13 ...