Adam Moorad

Adam Moorad

Patient #1

The surgeon and the patient spend an entire morning removing metal hunks from the patient’s bones. The hunks are grey and shaped like letters neither man can translate.

“What do they spell?” the patient asks.

“Nothing now,” the surgeon says. “The rest of the letters have already been sliced out. Besides, they spelled nothing together before. And the penmanship was weak.”

“Was the text print or cursive?” the patient asks.

“Cursive,” the surgeon replies. “But with a lot of mistakes.”

“What if the letters made a special code; one you couldn’t decipher. Maybe it could have been cracked, if you tried…”

“Those are your bones,” the surgeon says. A sigh escapes his lips. “It’s all your bones that are cracked.”

On the patient’s skin, the surgeon’s voice blows like an air conditioner.

Patient #2

“What do you see inside me?” the patient whispers. “What have you found out?”

An oil portrait of a man hangs before the surgeon. The canvas slits like a vas deferens seeking shade in the surgeon’s silhouette.

Patient #3

“At first it was yellow, and then it turned green. Maybe that’s because I held my eyes closed and blocked out all the light. I could hear it calling out from deep down, howling inside me like a dog for the sun. Later, the hound bawled letters and numbers, and then the names of different colors.”

The patient illustrates the effect his condition creates.

“When in a Starbucks, caffeinating, drinking something like strange water, it happens: the floor spreads out like shallow surf; the walls extend into frothy sea jaws. Tropical fish surround me; each one has its genus stitched into its gills.”

A murmur moves from the surgeon outward, touching every student in the class.

“He’s only talking about his soul,” the surgeon lectures.

Three students ask three questions:

1. “Is this a joke?”
2. “Is this some foreign infection?”
3. “Is there an effective meditation?”

The surgeon silences them all with a swift scalpel movement.

Patient #4

“The Statue of Liberty looks nothing like the original Statue of Liberty. It’s just a corroded reminder of what has passed.”

The patient has spent a fortune surgically altering her body to channel Lady Liberty.

“Make me just like the original,” she implores the surgeon, shaking her teary head.

It seems like this is always happening, the surgeon thinks. The clouds do their best float around all our different buildings. The commercials cue up for longer commercial breaks. Thirty-minute stories meander aimlessly without any discernable plot. People are sad but hopeful, thinking, behind the grey blinds of cloud, there is a world breathing heavenly breaths that only God has breathed before. Paris Hilton quickly falls out of love, and into a new love. Oil becomes energy; with this energy, we fight.

Patient #5

“My sex addiction has made all my relationships boring,” the patient says. “And now my prostate looks like this!”

His incision opens to the sound of Velcro. The surgeon carefully unfastens the strips with one hand, taking several minutes to complete. His arm is constant, steady, and even.

“Who was your first?” the surgeon asks.

“She was a Cancer by birth,” the patient muses. “And yours?”

Time swallows the surgeon in pause.

“I was just a boy,” he says, fastening two clamps to the patient’s pelvis. “And she was some drunken car wreck.”