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Bob Explains Statistics to Me
By Claudia Grinnell

There is really no easier way to say this, I brush
my teeth twice daily, sometimes more often if needs
warrant. I thus have a 95 percent chance
of not getting a cavity. And the other five percent
I ask. That’s the price you have to pay for knowing
not truth, but something better—possibility.
I don’t like possibility. There’s always one
that will lose engine power at 30,000 feet, or one
that sends a tsunami my way, or one that collapses
the 30 story building while I ride the elevator
(possibly running with frayed cables) to the 15th
floor, the one where my ovaries are x-rayed, or
the one where nothing, absolutely nothing could
possibly happen because this is the floor of truth,
and we all know that truth is absolute, fixed, ex-
hausting. I get off on this floor, and a surgeon rushes
to amputate both of my legs. Truthfully, there was
no blood and nearly no pain. He explains to me
that a woman in Ecuador now has a 95 percent chance
of conceiving a baby the next time she sleeps
with the man who calls himself Jesus. What do
my legs have to do with anything, I scream.
We all have to make sacrifices for truth to work
out, he helpfully explains. Mostly, though,
it’s the money and how we like the taste of thighs.