The doctor with the serpentine stethoscope coiled around his neck shakes his head. He insists there’re some unusual murmurs in your mom’s heart, and I’m arguing with him it can’t be the heart. All she does is rant, scream, and swear. “Shouldn’t you look at her cerebrum?” I say, trying to be smart, “I read the left hemisphere is responsible for speech and the prefrontal cortex for emotions? She doesn’t know how to say ‘thank you’ or ‘sorry.’” I demand he prescribe her some happy pills to loosen her up, make her happy, make her laugh! He scratches his straw blond hair behind his ear, and cackles. Like mother like daughter, he mumbles. He doesn’t get it, keeps saying it’s the heart, not the brain. Fine, show me then, I grunt. I rip my mother’s shirt open, buttons flying off, my heart skips a beat as the shirt panels part revealing a chainmail vest underneath, and I’m trying to take it off too and my mother’s resisting, screeching “Leave me alone, curse you for being so disrespectful!” and holding her armor tight with both her hands, the doctor and I tug and tug it over her head, but there’s a scale mail shirt underneath it too, then a steel breastplate covering her torso. The doctor asks his assistant to bring in the anesthesiologist and another nurse to bring a plasma cutter, a hacksaw—scalpels are useless in such cases. When he opens my mother’s chest, he finds four chambers crammed with charred remains of grief from her youth, lost love calcified underneath an arranged marriage, expectations of me becoming a doctor crushed into dust on the walls of arteries, affections and afflictions locked up in her heart behind thick iron bars. Will you do the honor, he says, handing me a sterilized screwdriver. “I understand now,” I whisper. Removing each bar carefully, I hug her scarred heart hard onto mine, unleashing our manacled emotions.
