The Nation, June 1st, 1985
Lydia Conscience, 11, pretends to be pregnant. In fact, she's got ovarian cancer--there's a forty-pound tumor aslosh in her womb--but better a slut than a terminal. Janet Order looks like a pretty child, but only in a black and white photograph. In fact, her skin is a dusky blue, dark as seawater, due to a hole in her boot-shaped heart. Benny Maxine's ailment, Gaucher's disease, causes sugar to accumulate in his cells, so he chews and sucks the sweetness from his flesh and nails. Little Tony Word has leukemia ("malginant cells buttering his marrow with contagion"); for Rena Morgan it's cysti...
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