Sarah, a woman with late stage breast cancer, lies in a hospital bed high on morphine and muses that death is a performance art. Sarah’s partner Philip takes care of her. Sarah recalls how Philip slowed his own research to a halt and followed her to the Midwest for her career. She thinks he has always been a little jealous of her career success and that he has a high “capacity for self-punishment.” Since her diagnosis, she has attempted to become a “better patient” for him, reading articles about her illness and briefly attending a support group, which she never told him she stopped attending, since the only real joy she finds is in Philip’s expression when he thinks she’s leaving for her support group. Instead, Sarah leaves to study anatomical portraits of women’s bodies in the medical school library, which she begins to draw. She finds drawing these makes her feel closer to death and thereby relieves her stress about it. At home, she draws classical sculpture so Philip won’t think her morbid. In one memory, in response to his joking suggestion that she draw him, she used her pen to draw abs onto his stomach. Sarah’s thoughts wander to Dr. Michaels, the Doctor who did her double mastectomy, who she now finds repulsive due to the invasive nature of the surgery and the sense that he took her breasts from her. When she draws the female anatomies, she feels as if she has the power to reclaim those bodies from the physicians who dissected them. Next, Sarah recalls the workshop of her grandfather, who carved picture frames, where, at 11 years old, she decided she was an artist. After her grandfather’s death she continued to pursue art until her second year of college “when it became clear: she lacked brilliance.” Instead of an artist, she became an academic. Since her diagnosis, she hasn’t been worried about her impending early death but is more upset that she never achieved artistic brilliance. She remembers the vacation when she found the cancerous lump in her breast. She kept working on her book project through the night until Philip mailed all her research materials home while she was asleep so she couldn’t work and made her see how her body was wasting away. Then, the two had sex. After the vacation, she saw how Philip had become absorbed in her intellectual life, helping with her research rather than working on his own. Now, in the hospital bed, she decides showing her own weakness as she dies is the only way to save him from loneliness. Sarah thinks about how she felt “an ironic wholeness” after her first surgery made her body look like “the fragment [she had] felt inside for so long.” She remembers how before the first surgery she insisted on keeping an X-ray of the breast with the tumor. At home, she taped it to a window so the light shone through and projected the image onto her naked body. After the surgery, after the symptoms of cancer came back following a brief remission, she projected the image of her breast on her wall, projected her silhouette overtop of it, and sketched the two reunited. She felt the drawing was “death’s image.” Then, in a semi-conscious dream Sarah sees repeated images of her own body throughout the stages of her life. She wakes in her hospital bed with the revelation that her body is her great work of art. Sarah feels suddenly and surprisingly happy, which “allow[s] her to give up.” She refuses treatment, her hair grows back, and she starts sketching interiors instead of anatomies, eventually sketching her own room. This unlocks a flood of disjointed memories. The story’s third-person point of view is interrupted by a stream-of-consciousness section narrated by Sarah in the first person. The section is one long, run-on sentence that has the hazy feel of a mind on morphine, flitting from one memory to the next. Sarah reflects on how she will be remembered and recalls moments from her childhood, including a scene in which her mother catches Sarah drawing female nudes as a young girl and becomes angry, thinking Sarah has been spying on her naked, when Sarah has actually based the nudes off polaroids taken by Sarah’s father. In this memory and others, Sarah explores a sense of shame and fear she felt around sexuality in her family and an erotic relationship she felt to art. The section ends with Sarah imagining having sex with Dontello’s sculpture of David come to life, then waking in a sweat with Philip and crying. Sarah recalls how she first wanted to show Philip the lump in her breast as a symbol for her reliance upon him in her career success. She worried then that “this could be the last time his touch would speak both sex and concern” —that as she fell ill, Philip would only be a concerned caretaker and no longer a passionate lover. Now she worries that in dying she will take from him his role of caretaker, which she sees as an essential part of his personality. The story ends with Sarah expressing a desire to Philip that she can’t articulate. “You have to promise me…,” she says, then, “I want you to…,” each time trailing off due to the morphine-induced haze. Not knowing what she is asking for, Philip answers, “Yes.” As Philip cradles her dying body, Sarah feels an ambiguous “triumph over her years of self doubt.”