Short Story
Word Count: 2,693

2025

If I fall asleep with a cold. Or on a wet night with the space heater unplugged. Nights like the ones when little Ruth would share my bed. Splitting the covers, her head jammed into the warmth beneath my pillow. After those longest days by hours count, our two hairpin noses cawing like gulls. When I can still hear her sleeping and my body remembers:

The summer we spent between wings. When we watched them climb fifty feet high with clams hanging out of the curve of their beaks.

And the birds were a school because they flew through the water. Our barefeet on tip-toes, Ruth on the other side of the driveway. The asphalt covered in broken shells.

Back then. Where dreams are a memory and life is similar to mine.



Last Sunday, I laid until the air turned rusty and the dogs started screaming.

I had spent the day layering a wool blanket on top of the winter curtains we already put up. It doesn’t matter how thick I build the fabric, this season is cold from one side of my body straight to the other. The wind cuts through the window and carries all of the ice with it. Dead flies collect in between the glass and the screen.

When it came time for bed, my nose was someone else’s. It must’ve been three in the morning when I heard the coyotes bark. At first they bellowed against each other. Then some decision was made and each dog began howling the other. Altogether. Calling out at a pitch so high, the same sound as water. Like a faucet or a Dobro guitar, everything dark. Black.

Joan didn’t hear it.

No one in clothes could have made it make sense.

Exhausted and awake, I tried to match my breathing to hers while they sang like rain. Dripping on leaves in that tap-tap, I thought of the sog in our window. The whole frame like a felled log.

And me, thinking of the wet until I was back at Chocorua Falls watching from behind the bark. 

Until I was the bark. And Mal and I were together again on the day that I sent an uppercut into his ribs after he scared me stupid jumping out from behind that tree.

I was sitting in the five-minute memory for five hours, even though seconds seemed to pass real. Quick. I owe those dogs for finally bringing me through the alter. Dead to the world. I am indebted in my rest.



Thursday, the same.

Except an hour too late. I woke up at six on the day before Valentine’s. In our house, the northern half of southern Maine. No water runs warm enough to drip through the system, so we the pipes freeze and drink from gallon jugs.

Downstairs, Joan handed me a thermos of tea and the entire kettle she’d boiled.

“I thought you were already gone,” she said.

My girl. Though she did not yet think anything. Too early and too cold. Her eyes still soft from the sleep I tore her out of.

I muttered to myself before she spoke, Late, like a child.

“Wasn’t that wrong,” I said.

She frowned.

I shrugged it away and took the kettle into my glove-ed hands. No thank you allowed. 

The car was frozen shut. I poured water over the driver’s seat handle— seam of the door—and let the steam burn my cheeks. I pulled at the handle three times until it gave and handed the pot back to the woman watching me. 

She frowned a wanting, terrible face. 

“I can’t,” I said, and got into the car.



The gravel road was mine to gun.



The sun rose before I reached the interstate, making diamonds out of the salt that piled where the tires don’t touch. I spent the drive thinking about my first appointment. I knew then what I know now: it is both the more difficult to schedule and exhausting to undergo. It didn’t matter that I left two hours before the doctor was supposed to see me. The route ahead of me took nearly three. 

I tried to call early but the office was not open. So I drove south, from Parsonsfield to the city, waiting for the minutes and miles to pass. There was not even a turn until the Fruit Street Garage. Please take a ticket, hospital.

Doctors eyed my rush from the main entrance of Yawkey up to the fifth floor’s Corrigan Heart Center.



“Hi,” I said. At the front of the line, sliding my insurance card under the plastic divider that separated me from the receptionist beyond.

“Julie Linnell,” I continued, “Twelve, eleven, ninety-seven.”

The seated woman smiled.

“Hi Julie,” she said, looking up at me and blinking one long nod before she searched my information on the computer.

“I’m late,” I started. “But I spoke to someone and they told me to try and see if you could squeeze me in before my ECHO. Or after. I don’t know who—.”

My voice trailed as I looked down the line of rolling chairs—six or seven of them—searching for the other end of the phone call.

All too indistinct.  

Her face had relaxed while she typed on the keyboard, but beamed, again, when she looked up at me. 

“Let me get you pulled up and I’ll see what I can do,” she said. Nodding again. My hurry left to be my own. 

I tried to read something from the bite she took out of her cheek as she turned to reach for the printer.

“You’re right, you’re too late for the doctor. But here’s the number to call to reschedule the C-PET.” 

She underlined a phone number on the printout and handed it to me, “Try them. Maybe there’ll be a last-minute cancellation.”

I looked at her lame, while she spoke. From the corner of my eyes. 

“If you go back out the entrance you came in, and take a right, then Radiology is going to be the first door you see.”

I nodded so she nodded too. 

“Call the number while you’re waiting,” she added.

I said thank you and went back out the door.



Her name was Sheila, I thought when I was already halfway down the hall. The morning passed by me on a parallel road. One hour in the wrong direction.  



There were no issues with the next appointment.

“Just sit to the right,” my new receptionist said, gesturing me away. 



The waiting room for Cardiac Imaging was smaller because they only do M-R-I’s and ECHO’s there, despite the name. The C-PET is also a scan, but it has to be administered by a doctor.

Imaging is filled with radiologists, not doctors. Non-doctors in scrubs. They go to the same schools and take all of the pictures that the surgeons need, but they can’t give an opinion on what they see. 

Useless.  

While I waited, I called the number that Sheila gave me. They scheduled my C-PET in June.



“Julia Linnell,” I heard, after. From a person looking down at a clipboard.

“Julie,” I stood. “Yes.”

And I paused on the other side of a held-open door so the radiologist could step forward to lead us to the room.

He introduced himself. Ray, maybe. I didn’t read the name on a tag like Sheila’s so I forgot it almost instantly. We landed in a large closet with a metal bed and dimmed lights. No window. Too detrimental to the imaging, I thought. I could only see in front of me by the blue light of an old box computer that whirred in the corner.

“Here you go,” Ray said. “Open in the front, and you can keep your underwear on but no bra.”

I took the gown in my hands.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he continued, “You can lie down with the sheet over you once you’re changed.”  

I said my thanks as he walked out the door, stuck on the way he said can. 

I worked to settle myself onto the platform.


There are not many people who will understand the rage. The sweat and cold I was getting in the crease where my ears meet my skull and my jaw creases up into my neck. My teeth hurt, were hurting that day too. But hurt, now, everyday. Because I’ve trapped so much spite in the space between my molars that I try to chew it out. Or else I’d tell Ray, I’d yell is what I’d do. I’d yell at Ray that he is wasting my fucking time. And that I might’ve made a mistake but they make it so hard to do anything right. I come here to be told I’m wrong. To be told they might be able to right me. I want him to know that it’ll never be enough. 


I was barely horizontal by the time he knocked, entered, and asked me to confirm the series of numbers with which I am associated.

I answered his questions. My chin was tucked funny on the metal bed and it made talking hard. We began the process.

For each electrode, Ray opened my gown to have a clear sight of my corps. He worked to find eleven coordinates in the space between my ribs and then used the same right thumb and forefinger to place the stickers down—one long press. In between each placement, he replaced the gown back over my chest. Move and stick and cover.

I pretended to follow his movement with my eyes.

Once all of the electrodes were placed, he started a new cycle of assigning every sticker to its corresponding wire lead. Tethering me to the computer, at last. I was only half-bound to the machine when it started recognizing my heart. Three waves on the screen. Three chambers, one beep.

Ray muted the sound and printed a copy of the activity on pink graph paper. My gown rested open while I lay flat on my back. I beated in silence.

He told me to stack right hip over left and face the back wall.

“And turn your back towards my seat,” he said.

His mouse went click. Unclick. He dipped a joystick into cold gel. I was aware of what was about to happen but Ray warned anyway.

I could not see his hands but I felt him use two fingers to locate the bottom edge of my sternum before driving the metal probe in behind. He guided the machine as it took a picture from every corner of my ribcage. Each image, a sound too low for human ears. There was a hum sent into the cavity of my thorax and the probe recorded the dimension of the echoes that returned.

“The echocardiogram is a straightforward and noninvasive procedure,” they told me, before my first scan six years ago.

I think about that claim each time there is a man shoving a camera into the flesh below my breast.



On the wall in front of me, I counted thirty-seven sails, ten boats, and one sailor in a watercolor print. Ray pushed into the corner of my armpit. That tender. I inhaled quickly, so that even before he asked me to hold my breath, it was caught. All ready. Sat in my throat with nowhere to go.

I swallowed the old air.

“Okay, breathe,” he said, after listening through the absence.

That’s where it lies. I know. What they call stenosis and regurgitation. My saltless ocean. No longer hiding behind gush and gurgle, all that remains is an ebbing tide.



“If it gets uncomfortable, we can take a break,” he offered, at one point.

But we did not break, and soon it was over. Ray gave me time to change and rip off each electrode. He handed me a towel to wipe the gel.

“You can leave the door open when you are all set and then just follow the signs back to the lobby.”

I nodded.

“They’ll get you checked out and on the schedule with the doctor,” Ray finished.

I knew that when I said okay then I could be done.



My three-hour return passed in three seconds. Safe. I tried to scrub off the day and the itch of the adhesive while Joan sat on the toilet. I wanted her to have no part in this. I needed no witness. She should not know my body for its physics. Over-tired and out of frame.

A wreckage beyond.

I prayed to the God who decides when I sleep.



On nights when I don’t dream about Mal or Ruth, I dream that my six-inch railroad starts to stretch. It’s the one I wear in the oily space between my lungs. Running south from the dip of my collar to the flesh of my belly.

It’s ok in the beginning. That normal, scratchy thing. Soft purple. An arrow in a V-neck, but hidden—for the day—under my same sweater. I’m sitting right by the vent at the Wild Goose Tavern, me and all of the women. It doesn’t matter which ones they are, but all the aunts and friends of the aunts. Their salads and vodka-wines too. Someone’s brought me a bar of soap to try on my sensitive skin. Nancy returns a book she borrowed from Sue.



The stretching starts slow. Like a tug. Like a burn, or something. A sting on the bump of my highest wire.

If I let myself stay sleeping, that’s when I walk slow to the washroom. That’s when I feel a collapsing in. My white sutures darken this ugly grey. I can’t hear it in my breath but in my belly. Inside. A bubble. A crack. There is a brute and it’s done things to me. By me, within.

I strip my shirt to see it all.

From the mirror, I see my wires unwind from the bone and watch as the ribs pull apart. Below first, then the skin. No blood. Just a cave. A sternotomy from the inside, my second. That whole space. Dark.

I hollow out in minutes.

The hole is quiet while I dress but I can’t return to the table. In this dream, I need to find a way to Main Street. I hunch low and forward to flatten it. I follow heat to the door, the brick sidewalk. It is always summer and the road is steaming.

I am melting, I think.

The craving comes on when I get outside, all I really need for myself is some Rocky Road Fudge. I want to go through the park, the long way. But I walk in short steps.

I buy the chocolate and eat the chocolate. Then I realize that my hunger is lower.

Not a pit, but a mouth. God-fearing.

I know.

With knowing, my cage goes. It splits into a jaw until I hinge on the vertebrae. It twists open while I walk. Growing so wide. Too much. The people are looking and I do not blame them.

But I still open up. On these nights, wider still. I breathe in.

All it takes is one more look before I’m swallowing every woman in white capris. Buyers at Sundance or Puritans. The ones who gaze at my chest with their own kind of fear. I walked in front of them earlier when I could still keep it together. Before any splitting. They looked at my face and down at my scar. It was not prudish. There was no sex.

That would be better.

But they stared down in a look. Manicured behind sunglasses and long wraparound gossip. Croaking like the frogs by our pond. Only higher.

Pity, that’s what I’d call it.

When I find them on the street, I take them by the shoulders. Swallow them whole. One bite each, the whole lot chewed by the teeth of my jagged ribs. Each of their histories. Their dreams too. I give them a bloodless, bottomless death. I show them a young body destroyed.

My back is arched, my shoulders knit.

The chocolate goes soft in my hands.