"CELL Now look objectively. You have to admit the cancer cell is beautiful. If it were a flower, you'd say, with its mauve centre and pink petals of if a cover for a pulpy thirties sci-fi magazine. as an alien, a success, all purple eye and jelly tentacles and spines, or are they gills, creeping around on granular Martian dirt red as the inside of the body, while its tender walls expand and burst, its spores scatter elsewhere, take root, like money, drifting like a fiction or miasma in and out of people's brains, digging themselves industriously in. The lab technician says, But why remember? All it wants is more amnesia. More life, and more abundantly. to take more. to eat more. To replicate itself. To keep on