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.