By the time I was six months old, she knew something was wrong with me.
I got looks on my face she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood.
My mother took me in to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel: Hub Long.
My mom did not tell him what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby,
and my mother said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has is called a sense of humor.
Ohhh, she said, and took me back to the house where that sense would be tested and found to be incurable.
"Diagnosis" by Sharon Olds, from One Secret Thing. © Random House, Inc., 2009.
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