Pelvis

The picture of a pelvis bone stuck to the wall of the doctor’s office was beautiful. A huge, calcified butterfly in monochrome. Jade pointed while the doctor’s back was turned, but her mother didn’t see the beauty in it. At sixteen, Jade didn’t know much about it yet, except that she loved its perfect shape and that everything wrong with her was happening inside it. Idiopathic primary ovarian insufficiency. The insufficiency part meant that her ovaries would probably never play their part in making a baby. The idiopathic part meant that nobody knew why.

It felt less like her own diagnosis than her mother’s, who pressed a tissue to her eyelids once, twice, before composing herself.