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| Issue 29: | August 2025 |
| Micro-CNF: | 216 words |
By Bella Mahaya Carter
Fallopian Tubes
On a cloudy morning in a quiet hospital, I change into a white paper gown with a thin plastic belt. A nurse escorts me into a room with heavy machinery hovering over a narrow table.
“Lie down and put your feet in the stirrups,” she says.
Here we go, galloping into the unknown with my bits hanging out...
The machine towers over my body like a metal skyscraper with gangly limbs, and then the doctor appears as if through a secret side window.
“Would you mind sliding down a bit farther?” he asks, tapping the edge of the table, his voice cocktail-party casual.
Would I mind?!
Shaky, sweaty, I scooch down.
“That’s good,” he says.
He enters me with his latex-gloved fingers, speculum, long, cotton-swabbed sticks, needles, and tubes. I try to be cooperative—and—likable. I compliment the nurse’s hair. Comment on the doctor’s gentle touch. My friend Sofia calls this recruiting behavior—getting the medical team to see you as a person as well as patient.
“It looks good so far,” the doctor says. I hear a smile in his voice. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I tell him, pretending I’m not fazed, squatting vulva up, a catheter protruding from my uterus, dye shot up my fallopian tubes to ferret out obstructions.
Bella Mahaya Carter
is an award-winning author of three books, most recently, Where Do You Hang Your Hammock? Finding Peace of Mind While You Write, Publish, and Promote Your Book (She Writes Press, 2021). A wordsmith and spiritual psychology practitioner, Bella facilitates online writing circles for writers, artists, healers, dreamers, and seekers. Her work has appeared in the Brevity blog, Calyx, The Dribble Drabble Review, Lilith, Literary Mama, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Sun Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on an intergenerational pregnancy memoir in micro and flash stories.
Author’s website: https://www.bellamahayacarter.com
More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond
⚡ Museum Muse, microfiction by Bella in Issue 21 of MacQueen’s Quinterly, aka MacQ-21 (January 2024)
⚡ A Couple of Queens, microfiction by Bella in MacQ-18 (April 2023)
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