'Imagine That' by Barbara Westwood Diehl

Frank has a hard time dying. It wasn't supposed to happen this way, though he should have expected it. His body is like an old house with the original plumbing. Corroded. The brochure in the examining room said that he'd get an aortic valve made out of pig tissue. He has a leaky heart. Imagine that. Leaks are something Frank can understand. Frank is a plumber. A replacement sleeve on a copper pipe, and you're good as new. The doctor laughed when Frank said that. 

But Frank is shutting down. Maybe the pig was a bad idea. He is anesthetized, his heart is cooled, and his blood is circulating through a heart-lung machine. He shouldn't see the surgeon's hands over him, but he does. Only the hands. Making shadow puppets against the wall. Imagine that. A curly-tailed pig from a Little Golden Book. His first wife on the kitchen floor with her hand to her cheek. A boy slamming a screen door closed and running into the woods. An old man unable to lift a pipe wrench.

Doves are loose in the operating room. Too many to be the work of the surgeon's hands. The nurses' blue surgical gloves flutter above him, and the shadows of mourning doves swarm the ceiling. Frank is dying, and the nurses are distracting him with shadow puppets. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. He thought his corrosion could be scraped clean with a wire brush, be hidden in a copper sleeve. The mourning doves coo and leave. A flying pig hovers in the surgical light. Imagine that. 

 

---

Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Free State Review, Ghost Parachute, Pithead Chapel, and New World Writing Quarterly.