Righteous Ones

Lovely bones and nerves — that’s what Abigail thought the first moment her father cut open the skin of an unconscious man. It was take your child to work day, and boy, was Abigail thrilled to see what her father’s been practising all this time.

He sliced an incision in the lower right abdomen of the volunteer: a once smartly dressed, middle-aged man until they took his clothes off and sedated him — and the blood gushed out like raspberry Kool-Aid that spilled on a summer’s pavement. Abigail gasped, her face morphing into a smile. Her father nudged her by the hip as a gesture of playful acknowledgment.

Dr. Phillip Price then separated the abdominal muscles to access the appendix, his hands tremoring by the second. The lights above them flickered, and her father angled the spotlight to the patient. Little Abigail stood on her tippy-toes, her knuckles nearly going white as she gripped the metal of the operating table to keep herself upright. She wasn’t keeping her eye off this, not even for one second.

After an hour or two and Abigail settled to sit on the file drawers, her father finally closing the incision with sutures and declared the operation to be finished with the stick of a bandage to the cut. Everybody in the auditorium applauded him, an echoing symphony of hoots and hollers. It was a show of his skill, of his expertise. His smug smile revealed itself as he stretched open his mask, and Abigail’s chest expanded with the thrill of it all; the attention, the praise, the money, the success. She held her father’s hand. He gripped hers tighter.It was both of them against the world — operating table, or no operating table, and she was sure there would never be any other way.

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