On My Way Home...

So, I leave tomorrow morning. That is 17 hours away. I will be home Thursday around 8 or 9pm. Yay. I don't really want to say goodbye to my friends here, but I am ready to come home and se everyone. So, I will update you all when I get to LA and hock their wireless airport internet. Hehe

All my love,

Jess

Bleeding Hearts...a story I am writing.

“Initial incision made over the sternum, starting at the top of the ribcage and descending to the level of rib number twelve.”

A nurse dabbed at the sweat on his brow as he cut into the ribs of a three year old boy named Isaiah whose parents were outside in the waiting room. He knew they were probably wringing their hands, and like all the parents in the waiting room before them, hoping he didn’t make a wrong slit with his scalpel and take their little boy away for good. They were lucky he was skilled with a scalpel. He sliced a straight line down skin over the sternum, blood oozing through the crack he’d made in the largest organ of the body. The slit pulled apart like the covering on a cut sausage, human magma spilling out over the iodine yellow organ that surrounded it.

“Retractors.”

He held out a latex covered hand, and without another word, two retractors came to his aid. He inserted the curved end of the instrument into the incision and with the help of another doctor, pried apart skin and muscle like he was preparing a piece of meat for stuffing. The sternum revealed itself with little effort on his part, and he was pleased at this because it meant things were going smoothly. The nurse dabbed at his forehead again. A loud cracking sound echoed in the operating room as he cut through the sternum and exposed pink lungs and pericardium.

He paused.

The average human heart beats seventy-two times per minute but the average child’s beats much faster. It was beautiful to him how the muscles clenched and relaxed projecting life through a body, small or large. To hold a beating heart in one’s hands is said to be one of the most amazing experiences a person can encounter. He knew this was true, in his mind at least, as he looked at the beating heart of the little boy, exposed and contracting, with a big effort for such a little person, a broken heart wrapped in cellophane. A little person who had no choice but to lay his life in a doctor’s hands.

He cut into the pericardial sack. Blood oozed. Too much blood for this simple cut. He flushed out the wound with sterile water.

“Shit.”

He moved his hands away to reach for sponges to soak up the spill, a jet of blood spurting out like hot lava forcing its way out of the mouth of a volcano. The body of a child holds about four liters of blood, and about of quarter of it was on it’s way to the floor.

~

“He what,” Mrs. Arangetti wailed.

“So, he’s…dead,” her husband asked. “You killed him?”

“I didn’t kill him,” Dr. Bouvier explained. “He suffered a bleed during the surgery, and we did everything we could to stop the bleeding, but I’m afraid…”

Mrs. Arangetti shoved her husband out of the way and took a swing at Dr. Bouvier, missing his face by millimeters.

“You are a murderer,” She hissed. “You killed my baby. He trusted you. We trusted you.”

The bright, blurry shape of the sun erased the look of agony on the woman’s face from his retinas, and when he looked down again, her necklace, a diamond heart that said Mommy, sent a ray of light directly into his eyes.

New Photos!!!

I got my underwater camera developed from the Great Barrier Reef and the photos are up!!!

Red By Ted Hughes

Red was your colour.
If not red, then white. But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood-red. Was it blood?
Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?
Haematite to make immortal
The precious heirloom bones, the family bones.

When you had your way finally
Our room was red. A judgement chamber.
Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood
Patterned with darkenings, congealments.
The curtains -- ruby corduroy blood,
Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.
The cushions the same. The same
Raw carmine along the window-seat.
A throbbing cell. Aztec altar -- temple.

Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness.

And outside the window
Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail
As the skin on blood,
Salvias, that your father named you after,
Like blood lobbing from the gash,
And roses, the heart's last gouts,
Catastrophic, arterial, doomed.

Your velvet long full skirt, a swathe of blood,
A lavish burgandy.
Your lips a dipped, deep crimson.

You revelled in red.
I felt it raw -- like crisp gauze edges
Of a stiffening wound. I could touch
The open vein in it, the crusted gleam.

Everything you painted you painted white
Then splashed it with roses, defeated it,
Leaned over it, dripping roses,
Weeping roses, and more roses,
Then sometimes, among them, a little blue
bird.

Blue was better for you. Blue was wings.
Kingfisher blue silks from San Francisco
Folded your pregnancy
In crucible caresses.
Blue was your kindly spirit -- not a ghoul
But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful.

In the pit of red
You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness.

But the jewel you lost was blue.