My contributor’s copy of Blood and Thunder, a journal published by The University of Oklahoma College of Medicine, arrived in the mail this week. I had no idea until I opened it that my piece “My Husband The Heart Surgeon” had been awarded “2009 Best of Blood and Thunder for Short Stories, Essays, and Prose”.

To the editors of Blood and Thunder - thank you for the honor.

Read “My Husband The Heart Surgeon” after the break.

My Husband The Heart Surgeon

My husband the heart surgeon doesn’t talk to me anymore. On his nights off, we used to sit with a glass of wine after dinner and talk about newspaper headlines, his students and mine. I loved to watch him uncork the bottle with his all-knowing fingers. There was only the slightest pop, so perfect, so parallel. Now he prefers to sit at his workbench, alone in the garage. A lamp, bright and myopic, a circle of light lassoing his hands as he segments limes. Bowls and bowls, crates and crates of limes. By now he’s stopped pretending he’ll use them for some drink, maybe a cocktail one night instead of wine.

Sometimes I bring him a cup of tea, but never a word from him. I just stand in the doorway watching. His glasses slip on his nose, and his temples moisten. First, he takes his paring knife and slices each end, just enough to make it stand upright. Little green nipples. He does well with the paring knife, better than well. His fingers remember each curve they’ve ever made. Running his knife down the sides of the lime, the pity part falls away, not an ounce of juicy flesh wasted. Never a scar. Never and ugly bit. He does this ever since that little boy.

I try to imagine, how small that heart was. The size of a fist? A frozen little fist? That’s what I’ve been told. Neither of us will eat these segments like we would if they were from an orange. I’d call it wasteful if I didn’t know how important the exact weight in his palm is. He severs the connection between each chamber in the lime, and the membranes pile under his thumb, like the pages of a book.

The morning I found a scalpel in our drawer of forks and knives, I began to worry. I wondered how many times he’d used it in our own kitchen, pitting cherries and olives. No flesh wasted. How many times had he operated on the veins of celery stalks, fixing what’s not broken? If only my husband the heart surgeon would talk like he used to, maybe I could tell him he can dissect the smallest, the most fragile of things. Everything he can do, he can do: minutia. Everything he could do, he did.