flashquake Fiction

Tugging the Heartstrings
by Michael A. Arnzen

When Dad came home from the hospital, he had little black knots and strings of suture left in his chest. They ran up his ribcage as if his flesh were a bodice that had been tightly bound to the bone. They were straining to hold him together.

I found out about this when I jumped into his arms upon his return from the hospital. As I dove up to him, he winced and almost fell before softening and holding me tight. Dad did everything tough, even going soft. I went limp and he clutched me like a flimsy pillow. Then I felt the lumps against my chest like hard buttons on a coat. Over his shoulder, I saw my mother's eyes scolding me.

He held me tight. He could die but he loved me more than that. He didn't let go until we both noticed the wetness seeping into my shirt. I pried myself away like a bandage. We both pretended not to notice the bloodstains or the hospital smells. But mother panicked, ushering him to the recovery bed she'd set up in their bedroom and scolding me with a familiar scrunched up look.

Mom put him in a bathrobe that became his uniform for the next two months of his recovery. During that time, he brought us all closer together. His heart surgery had the same effect on our family that my bicycle accident had at age six. I'd fallen into a ravine on my way home from school and broke my leg in two places. I would have died if a passer-by hadn't spotted me down there, writhing in pain. Mom and Dad fawned over me for weeks after that, as if spending more time with me after the accident would make up for not preventing it.

Despite the pain, those were good times for me. Mom took me to see a lot of movies, despite my chunky cast and the awkwardness of crutches. Dad spent an entire Saturday making a montage of images on my cast: butterflies fluttering around planets and stars inside of caves that opened up to mountain vistas towering over fields littered with flowers...and on and on. A hall-of-mirrors effect everywhere. It was the first time I'd really seen him draw and it was so good that I let him cover up the dumb graffiti my school friends had made. And I remember dying to see what he had drawn on the underside of my thigh, where I couldn't see.

He'd drawn butterflies and portraits of him and me.

I wanted to show him that I loved him just as much now. I read stories to him at night. He'd smile as he nodded off in his leather recliner.

But whenever I saw his exposed chest I was reminded that the damage was permanent. A tattoo of shiny pink tissue was branded on his torso in the shape of a huge capital letter H. It would show whenever the lapels of his flannel bathrobe loosened like some sort of superhero costume he'd been secretly wearing all along. He'd pour his coffee and the bathrobe would part and I'd hear a cartoon voice in my head saying, "The coffeepot is nearly empty! This looks like a job for Healingman!"

One night, though, I closely examined the scar as he slept in his recliner. He wasn't healing the way I'd assumed. There was still one knot of suture at the top right arm of that big H. It was disgustingly black beneath his hairy left nipple. Insectoid. Dad had gone in once to have them removed but somehow — bafflingly — they missed one of the thick black sutures.

One morning he walked into the kitchen in his bathrobe and the black knot peeked out at me with the audacity of a bloated tick. I wanted to pull it like a zipper. I summoned the courage to bring it up. "They missed a stitch, Dad."

He eyed me over his coffee cup. "Don't want to go back to the hospital."

"That's nuts," I said, eating a banana to slow down my mouth. "I know it hurts to get them removed, but you don't want to risk getting infected."

He pulled his flannel tight over his chest. Raised his stubbly chin. "I told the doctor to leave it in."

Slimy banana spilled out of my mouth like baby food: "What?"

He nodded as if affirming a commitment. "I wanted to remember what happened."

"You've gotta be kidding me. What doctor would do such a thing?" I made a father-son-and-holy-ghost gesture at his scar. "And isn't all of that enough of a walk down memory lane?"

He held up his hand. "No, not the surgery." His eyes turned warm and milky: like hot chocolate. "Afterward."

I didn't understand what any of it meant until the day I looked down at his casket two weeks later and saw that suture knot. It was black and hard as a nail's head beneath the white tuxedo shirt Mom had put on him. He wanted to remember the hug I'd given him. The one where I loved him so hard he bled and it didn't matter.

I reached down and teased the knot like a nipple before I pinched it beneath the fabric and pulled the suture free.

A stain of fluid oozed into a pattern that quickly found the ravines of his scar and eventually unfurled its color across his chest — a butterfly spreading its red wings wide.

Copyright 2002 by Michael A. Arnzen

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