My pendant whatnots had a fiery itch. I bashfully exposed them to the Dermatologist. “It’s excruciating,” I said. She cast her glance and looked up brightly. “Ah yes, I see what you mean,” she said.

I pressed for amplification. “It’s neuro-dermal,” she said. “I’m going to prescribe something to calm those nerves.”

She and I have a clinical past. She knows my sun-wrecked carapace, my sordid history of sleeveless, shorts-clad tennis played in ultraviolent radiation. Now she knows my whatnots. She has also twigged, over time, to my verbal pathology.

“Is it in the nature of a psycho-dermal epithelial conflagration, then?” I said. She nodded solemnly.

“And you’re going to prescribe a palliative tubal emollient with which to put down the revolution?”

Brisk nod again. She recited a regimen of application for the tube of goo, smiled expertly, and exited the examining room. Walking gingerly out of the clinic I felt better down there already. It helps to talk things out.

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