The Meadow Literary and Art Journal 2011

A Routine Procedure by Gary Metras When they began to wheel you away, I said, “Wait,” took your hand gently, kissed your lips with the weight and air of forty-one years married. A hysterectomy, age and all that. “Not to worry,” the young surgeon says. But still, still the anxiety, the uncertainty. The great dark about to descend. The vast emptiness of anesthesia. What if our eyes had never locked across that dance floor when we were teens— No Spangdalem with first apartment in the cellar, lacking TV, radio, full of dark, German furniture we grew to love because that was where we loved. No Paris that Christmas, walking in cold rain to Midnight Mass at Notre Dame, no night spent dreaming our life in the hotel feather bed, such passion, the hopes. In the waiting room, I watch the electronic status board on the wall, patient initials, doctor, color bar to indicate the procedure’s level. I walk outside, smoke a cigarette, remember how invincible our flesh once was. The rising sun harsh with early summer heat humidity hazing the sky, waiting, waiting for your lips to return my kiss. 116 theMeadow

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