HUMOR
How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Show Thee My Surgery
“Wanna see?” she said, and we said, “Yes.”
The voice came from another room: “You kids wanna see my surgery?”
This was my Great-Aunt Corrin asking, addressing me and my little sister, Meg.
We would soon find out “my surgery” meant the aftermath of a surgical procedure, which had taken place on the starboard side of her stomach.
By the casual and confident way she asked, she seemed to think it was an awesome question for children.
Maybe all the children she’d ever bumped into rudely demanded to see surgeries, and she was just trying to get ahead of the disrespect.
Or maybe Meg and I looked like children who were soft and in need of encounters with extremes, things that would give our characters the callouses needed for living well in a brutal world.
Well, Aunt Corrin had just the thing.
Meg and I, standing in the kitchen close together and trembling as one, looked at the doorway through which the voice had drifted driftily.
We looked at each other.
Did we wanna see?
