FICTION
A Steady Hand by John Allison
Ahmad Khavil entered Recovery Room Seven after his second procedure of the morning to look in on the subject of his first, a kid of nineteen whose left shoulder had been drilled by a twelve-foot-long twoby-four propelled from the back of a lumber truck, which sliced through his windshield like a lance at eighty miles per hour when he rear-ended the truck on a freeway early the evening before. The kid’s blood-alcohol content had been 0.135, over half again the legal limit, probably explaining why he hadn’t noticed five lanes of glaring brake lights in front of his now-vaporized Corvette. More was wrong with him than the shoulder, of course, but piecing this part of the boy back together had been Ahmad’s only chore. Others had worked on the rest of him, and still others would have to. At some point, Ahmad was sure, the kid had a date with the Chicago PD. Seeing that the young man’s vitals were stable, the surgeon left to scrub down for another patient. This one was not going under the knife because of stupidity, instead being a thirty-three year old mother of three who had fallen from a step ladder in her utility room after working a full day as a data-entry clerk, preparing dinner, and rushing to find some sort of stuffed toy high on a closet shelf before she and her husband, newly arrived at home from twelve hours of writing trial briefs and meeting with clients at his law firm, bathed the kids and put them to bed. 80
MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 10