Join us in congratulating Michael Nagle, the winner of Indigo’s 2024 Author Diversity Scholarship. Michael will receive $1,200 toward Indigo services to use for writing projects.
Michael Nagle is a queer, Sri Lankan American writer. He is currently a year deep into treatment for having metastatic colon cancer in his hometown of Los Angeles, CA. He is deeply interested in art as a sanctuary and as a refuge, where we can build the rhizomatic networks of care and complexity to move through this fraught time in history and birth the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. He often pretends he is a cat.
Please read and enjoy this excerpt of Michael’s work:
Animals of Hope
We could have been pets on Instagram.
I the longhaired black cat. Beady eyes. Attitude. Tense, haughty, better-than you. Smacking the adorable border collie right in the nose on his first approach. He, the border collie. Sad when struck. Looks down. And then – the viral moment – he approaches again and just cuddles himself around the cat, no fucks given, a confidence far beyond what this kitty deserves, and that’s when it happens. The viral magic that makes Instagram a dopamine billionaire. The kitty’s hackles go down. Back flattens, claws unsheathe. She curls into him, mewling with the innocence of a kitten, relief visibly washing over her.
Just like that. Hearts aflutter. Like buttons smashed.
———
Except we weren’t pets. We were male human animals, sitting in City of Hope’s imaging waiting room. In about two hours I was going to be told that the chemotherapy wasn’t working. I must have felt it coming. It was a gale blowing through me, the impulse to start crying, to burst out loud, to drink my weird
contrast fluid drink, the one that tasted like the invention of plastic, and cry my sad, sad guts out.
But I felt shy. I was in a room full of strangers. And weren’t they having a hard enough time already, waiting for their own cancer imagery, without hearing the alarm call of my fractured heart?
And so I started shuddering – the accelerator pedal and the brakes of my distress smashing together – and I was consumed by a shaking I couldn’t control. Will, my ever faithful dog, he just held me. I shook, he held.
Animal level love.
No words needed.
——-
When the tech asked me if I knew how to deaccess my own port, it was like Will and I were teenagers in love again: that subterranean fiberoptic cable from his heart to mine opening itself, together again on our secret radio wavelength, subscriber count: two.
Will was standing about three feet behind the tech. He was no longer the lanky, gangly, long-haired youth of my dreams. His body was more filled out and his head balding or shaven. A dad with a dad bod. But he was still, like always, my ride or die co-conspirator.
We assigned ourselves our jobs without words. I would lie to the tech. Sure, of course I can deaccess my port! Do it all the time! And Will would figure out
With so many amazing applications this year, we had a difficult decision in choosing our winner. We wish we could fund them all!
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