Anthony begins to trace the scar lying just under his shirt with his fingers. This is his routine; he finds touching his scar, just a hello, helps him fall off to sleep quicker than anything else. He can feel bumps that recall someone’s frantic hemming; he likes to trap his centipede under a palm and watch it disappear.
What actually lies inside? His science books at school showed lungs as gray and dome-shaped as bells, except for their tongue-red arterial clappers. All those parts floating willy-nilly-free from any skeletal cage when he lifted transparencies off the pages.
Back when he’d been young, five, six, imagining his lungs after the surgery, he visualized them not gray but gold-bronze. Like some sparkling polished musical instrument, a bugle with finger valves, locked in a padded case. That case special too, a chest with velvet lining and brass locks where instruments could be laid after hours of brilliant symphonies.
In the weeks and months after the operation, he’d wake from sleep, sounds tooting up from his throat not so much snores as noisy requests for air. Any instrument would demand the same and just as greedily, “Give me air or I won’t give you music; give me air or I won’t share.”
And so, his parents offered up “The Instrument Story,” a most important tale for any child who’d received a lung transplant when barely three. Told in a way one so young might understand. He’d heard it for years and soon, like his mother, Anthony could recite every line at bedtime. He made it his own favorite lullaby.
As he’d grown though, he’d shifted the story, given all due credit to Dad’s preference: science.
In this version, parts fit within; someone else’s lungs had rescued him when he was a toddler. The helicopter flying in, some other child lost, gone, but none of this anyone’s fault, just horribly sad.
Also, his mother’s view: science fiction. She often said if not for the genre he probably wouldn’t be here because, before any real scientific discovery, people had to first imagine marrying the sick to the healthy, the proven to the incredible.
Only then did they dare connect manmade parts up with human parts, plastic threading and tubes to all that’s jellyfish slip-slosh inside.
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Michele Merens is a writer and playwright. Her novel Inside Our Days was published by Muriel Press in 2020, and her fiction and short plays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Third Wednesday, Plum Hamptons, Lilith, and Wisconsin Verse. She is a Puffin Grant winner, a Barnard College Senior Scholar in Creative Writing, and a member of the Dramatist Guild.
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Tim Fitts is a short story writer and photographer. His work has been published in the New England Review, Granta, Shenandoah, Boulevard, fugue, and the Baltimore Review, among others. His photographs have been shown in South Korea and the United States, most notably the Thomas Deans Gallery in Atlanta. His photographic works often combine color transparencies, as well as transparencies with black and white film.
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