Marcus Cafagña
July 2002

Rat Anesthesiologist


She remembers a white rat
lifted from a cage to a towel spread on a card table
in the kitchen, where her nine-year-old hands
cupped ether over the whiskered nose and mouth
until each tiny pink foot
hung limp upon its tendon.
Her older brother, in his Beatle bangs and scrubs,
imagined himself a doctor, smuggled rodents
home from his late shift at the lab.
One night he opened an incision
down the throat to the sternum;
she dabbed up blood and kept
their patient sedated as his pen knife
sawed the quivering
cherry-shaped pituitary gland
from its stalk in the brain. She remembers wondering
if, like The Incredible Shrinking Man,
he thought the rat would disappear in his hands,
but only blanched when the ether
wafted to her nostrils
and the sewing needle's haphazard tail
of thread through skin
tugged the long wound shut.
She marveled at her brother like a god
as he peeled apart the dusty fur
to expose red and blue organs
in translucent sacs, and there
between the lungs
in electric thump, the systole
and diastole of her frantic heart.

From Roman Fever, Invisible Cities Press, 2001.