Three Stories

The Moral of the Story Is

Many of medicine’s key breakthroughs in transplant surgery come from discoveries made by a Soviet doctor who experimented on stray dogs. One of his most frequently performed experiments involved removing the head of one dog and stitching it to the neck of another. These two-headed dogs lived anywhere from a few hours to a few days, but ultimately succumbed to complications stemming from their newly shared heart. You could say that the experiments were more than their hearts could handle. 

These experiments have inspired many other researchers, several of whom have attempted full head transplants. The monkeys have not done well, but a mouse once survived for six months.

It also occurs to me, though the connection may not be immediately obvious, that life never ends.



Dodged a Bullet

She said her biggest problem with it all wasn’t getting up on Sundays, the politics of most churches, or any of the impossibilities that the faith hinged on. Her problem was with the seriousness of the Savior.

“He doesn’t laugh at anything,” she told him. 

He said, “What about when he picks up that kid?”

“But that’s not a joke.” She swung her feet off the dock. “Like, I feel if Thomas or someone would make a joke, he would just give them a look and talk about how the wealthy laugh too, because they think their silver won’t—I don’t know. And wait, did he, actually? Laugh?”

The sea rocked below them. Tangles of bull kelp surfaced and twisted in the wake.

She said, “You know how they say God has a sense of humor?” 

“Sure.”

“Does He?”

They didn’t talk much more after this. It had been a brief and uneventful romance. A few coffee dates with a walk to the beach, usually before or after church. Nothing at night and no touching. He was glad she told him about her problems with seriousness. He was, he thought, serious too. He didn’t mind this about himself, but around her he started to. 

He married someone who didn’t mind the seriousness. They ran a Bible study from their living room, supported by their church. His wife owned a guitar and knew a few worship songs. She sat on the ottoman and strummed for their guests. Often during these get-togethers, he felt a sense that something powerful and terrible, like a bullet or a very fast train, had just barely passed by him, that if he were only a few inches to the right or the left, his life as he knew it would have been over.



What If

He sometimes found himself believing that knowledge was a hindrance to meaning. He thought that knowing too many things can prevent you from feeling the truth intuitively, maybe. And try to make a life out of a bunch of facts without something threading all those facts together.

He built an in-ground pool with his bare hands. It drained poorly. In the off-season, water bubbled back up into the bowl and he would ignore the problem until he took the cover off in the Spring. To fix it, he had to climb down in his underwear, pull heaps of algae and gunk off the drain and hoist it over the fence into the woods behind his yard, then plunge and snake the drain and throw that gunk over too. The only way he could bring himself to do this was by pretending he was playing himself in a video game, which was a technique he often used at work. The gunk wasn’t touching his skin, but that of the character he was playing. He wasn’t recording budget transfers in three separate spreadsheets, but someone else. He wasn’t holding a rodent carcass and it wasn’t really a rodent carcass. 

When the cleaning was over, and the pool filled again, he could finally enjoy it all, the yard. He loved the smell of the chlorine treatment and the way light dinged off the Weber’s chrome handle and the ring of the doorbell, its promise that people would soon be spilling out of the sliding glass doors behind him.

“Look what you’ve done,” his neighbors said as they took his hand and all the children ran for the water. He served them burgers, licked his thumbs after pushing the beef off the spatula. Screams of the children, like music, bounced off the pool’s surface and up to the patio where the adults sat nursing drinks.

They gave him a round of applause as he sat down after cleaning the grill. They sighed and the conversation lulled and the coals cracked and sputtered as they burned out. It was Sunday. His wife’s arm dangled limply from the arm of a pink lawn chair. His daughter shouted at him to, “Watch! This!”

He scanned the yard and stopped at the fence’s gate, which stood open. It must have been like that all day, ever since he brought the things in. Cars driving out on the street slipped across the gap. He found the padlock in his pocket and stood. As he walked, he wondered, what if? What if someone had come in earlier, or beat him to the gate now? Some desperate and unstable vagrant who couldn’t be reasoned with, though they all would try. They would ease themselves out of their lawn chairs and stand between the stranger and the children and offer one of the leftover burgers, watermelon slices, a ride somewhere, but this wouldn’t be enough. In fact, their offers to help might even become the reason the stranger would then do what he had come to do.

He started jogging.

____
Calvin Cummings lives in Baltimore, MD.