The mind, a dormant stone

Chemorella , Ken Phillips and Katy Franco’s color-bound, 57 page bilingual journey catapults readers into the world of cancer and the afterward. This story captures the rawness of emotional evolution of someone diagnosed with cancer. In these pages we witness the first injections of devastation, denial, fear, and finally the climax of letting go and choosing life over grief or giving up to the disease.  Phillips and Franco address the severity of cancer in a way that is expressive and humorous; and also written in a way that is always accessible to the reader by means of adopting the Cinderella Fairy Tale to Franco’s testimony. Like Cinderella, Chemorella is a lovely and beautiful woman with a lot of good spirit to share. However, Chemorella becomes stricken with a tragedy that many people don’t come back from, that is far more serious than anything Cinderella had faced. Though with nudges of negativity from her three “famously awful roommates,” and guidance from her super ...

And then the door opened suddenly. Inside greeting me was a large smile and sparkling eyes, blue as the ocean he often peered at, in genuine appreciation for my return home. I was ultimately stunned that such a beautiful man could beam so full for me. Glowing eyes pulled me in, asked me for a taste of his love. I pulled the hair from my eyes, a veil of humility tugged by fortune. I reached out to him and he grabbed me in for the kiss. His Mother watched...and neither seemed to care. "I've missed you!"   I can see.          I'm taken, swept up if you believe in that. This was love; without lines, insecurities, yes but only imagined in my head . An unleashed passion; the merging of two artists' souls. Off to the room we went. Door shut, locked; not to emerge until the morning shower. Long arms and smiles, the bedside manners so appropriate and longed for. I hate being the first one up, leaving the love nest for the coldest world I know. But...