Exit Wounds
It’s a lazy Sunday and I’m in a trauma bay watching an army of scrub-clad grunts go to work on a limp victim. The room is brightly lit, with fluorescent lamps making the star-shaped droplets of blood on the floor shine like patent leather. There is no music, no soundtrack to the madness; only the rustle of clothing and the deep baritone of the trauma surgeon as he stands, quarterback-like in the middle of the maelstrom, barking orders to his team.
I’m at the far end of the room behind a red line on the floor with the words “DO NOT CROSS” painted onto the tile in bold, fuck-off letters. Standing next to me is one of the vascular surgeon fellows - a tall basketball player of a woman wearing scrubs, surgical clogs and a physician’s coat so white that looks as though it just came back from the cleaners. She’s explaining the finer points of trauma medicine to me - the different stages of hypovolemic shock (a result of blood loss), how to tell a contact wound from a shot at a longer range (look for a star-shaped powder burn) and countless other small tidbits of information that I file away for a future cocktail party. Then, during a lull in the madness, she asks a question that catches me entirely off-guard.
“Do you know how the mafia used to execute traitors?” she whispers into my ear.
