She worked with the daftness of a wild beast caught on the scent of blood, as she was: so pungently cold iron permeated her nostrils that she swore she could taste through her tightening grimace. Her hands were warmed by the blood pumped through torn flesh and exposed bone. The occasional shock of cold against the nurse’s skin, the brushing of her wrist against some limp limb—frostbite surely hiding on some extremity not yet uncovered from uniform— did the work of grounding her whenever she felt her composure deteriorating. The ball-turret gunner looked up to the nurse from the stretcher he planned to die on, with pitiful eyes, a reverentially still mouth.
A soldier had once told the nurse that gods required worship, that worship required blood and silence. But the military base had no silence: the no-man’s-lands which hugged the base from all sides, except for a bombed-down forest the nurse’s office overlooked, drowned in blood and lost viscera. A runway-hand, the boy who’d helped the nurse bring the gunner in while mechanics rushed to fix his craft, sniffled and pleaded for a god, the thought of which had long been washed away from the base.
“Grab some fucking gauze, morphine, whatever you can find!” she commanded, not looking up from the scene before her. The runway-hand, the bumbling fool, ran off, the sound of cabinets opening and closing like a heartbeat in the adjacent rooms. This was the first time the nurse raised her voice since she’d been shipped to the base. Since she’d resolved to be as strong as the tools she would use to excavate bullets and their shattered metal and the pus and rot and everything ungodly her textbooks could only dream of. Since she’d resolved to be stronger than the copper-lead that’d originally split the skin.
The ball-turret gunner was bleeding from everywhere: blood poured from his abdomen; his right thigh, skin torn so bad she could see his bone and marrow, the bullets which created the mess; and once again he bled from the abdomen, a perfectly symmetrical pair of bleeding dots. His hips twisted left and right like a worm digging for silent relief. His abdomen bled like crying eyes.
Catching the gunner’s eye, she scanned his face. His eyes were craters of brown, freckles dotted his cheeks like a minefield. His nose was wide, a hill carved out by two wide nostrils. Not a single wrinkle cracked the gunner’s skin, and his cheeks were shallow but tight, unsagging around his lips. And then his open mouth caught her eye: before he could muster the strength for a word, before even more blood could drain from his cheeks and forehead, the nurse saw his gums. His pink gums. As pink as chewing gum, the pink a kid would draw flowers with, as pink as pink could be, she thought.
The nurse, a commandant of seven years on-base experience, never believed a patient could die, that she might be their last sight. Of course many had died under her care, some lined up on cots arranged like graves, dying as they watched the nurse fail to save the man on the next cot over; others passing in contorted messes, torn to unsavable shreds in vehicles or on fields. Yet the nurse believed that just deeper than the shrapnel which tore, that with the end of every stitching, that at the bottom of every medical concoction, lay a patient’s survival. That it was her skill, her job, to find it, to get it, to make it if she had to. But she had to believe whatever was keeping the man alive to be divine. She feared for how long it would be righteous in its divinity.
Obliging the words which the gunner mouthed around his pink gums, the nurse talked to him. She worked, trying to find a story she could tell, something the gunner could chew on. The gunner had already living minutes, lifetimes, longer than he should have, the damage to his femoral artery a broken omen.
“When I was seventeen, I wanted so badly to travel, to get on a plane and boot shit from town,” the nurse began, grabbing a bottle of cleanser from the offerings of the returned runway-hand. It was something strong, stronger than the nurse would’ve picked, but it was something. She continued her story for the gunner. “I couldn’t ever understand why I wanted to get away so bad. My town was, stop squirming please, town was alright: my mom loved me as a parent should and the theater had new movies every week, but I couldn’t imagine living there all my life like my neighbors were. Born, raised, worked, raising, dying, all on the same streets.” She redirected herself to the runway hand: “get the medical sergeant major. Down the hall, room 17B. Leave everything you got me.” She ripped open a pack of emergency utensils and grabbed the scalpel.
The nurse continued telling her story as she worked through the gunner’s abdomen, fishing through the widened skin and muscle for the copper-lead bullets which infested the man’s chest. “‘Course, I couldn’t afford a plane ticket, I was only seventeen after all, so I began working. I was two years from finishing school, this is going to feel terrible, and had been taking every class we had for medicine and hospital training since I could. I landed an internship at a local clinic, giving kids their shots; diagnosing the, deep breath, the town’s flu season; stitching the occasional bad-fall or slipped knife-chop.” The medical sergeant major, a woman who’d arrived on the same plane as the nurse finally arrived, blood dried or drying on her uniform. The nurse commandant instructed the sergeant major: “Tourniquet the legs, hit him with morphine above the femoral or wherever on the mess you think it’ll work, grab the rake retractors and begin cleaning. I’m going to stitch the abdomen before some shit pours out of his guts.” The sergeant major pulled a suture kit from her uniform and handed it over, running to find what she’d need.
The nurse commandant looked back to the gunner, following his eyes as they scanned her leaning figure. She continued her story still, for herself now. “My mom didn’t know any of this, of my want to travel, barely even knew how much I worked. She came home one day, a few months before the end of my schooling, and told me about her coworker who’d fallen so bad his bones had split out of his skin. ‘Like a mountain digging itself out, something stabbing away from inside’ she’d described it.”
“I’d been promoted for how I handled him. ‘The first person to not pale at the sight of raw bone’ our APRN told me. I got an extra dollar-fifty for hourly and began packing a suitcase and purse in my room.” The gunner closed his eyes, and the nurse finished stitching his abdomen, knowing her work wasn’t right: the wound was unclean, too wide, too raw, to be sealed away like it were. A trauma too unfelt to be ashamed of. She knew, though, that it would help, would stabilize the man enough for her to turn around and grab something that’d really work.
The nurse turned her attention to the gunner’s thigh, already being cleaned by the sergeant major. The wound gaped like the mouth of a hungry beast, teeth of skin-flaps biting around a tenaculum forceps. The nurses worked in what they perceived as silence, the sound of surgery and dying so common they’d forgotten how to hear them. The gunner’s hips had grown still and soundless, dug deep into the stretcher. “You’re doing great.” The sergeant major assured the air, unsure who she meant to affirm.
The nurses worked in silence, the sound of surgery and dying too common for either of them to recognize. The nurse broke the perceived silence. “I kept my life in that suitcase during the final months of school: my clothes, besides the two uniforms and two scrubs I always wore, my savings, my books, the mismatched set of scalpels or forceps- thrown out for missing a piece or two.”
“Did you ever get to fly?” The sergeant major asked. The gunner’s eyes fled to the ceiling, searching the scaffolding and skylights like he might find the key to heaven in their grasps.
“They called the draft the same morning I got my bus ticket to the airport.” The gunner responded, for the first time, to the nurse’s story, a choked laugh escaping around his pink gums. The sound, something the nurses had to consider before realizing what it was, moved the gunner: his hips dug back into the stretcher as his back arched. He raised his head to watch the nurses work, ignoring his outburst. “My superiors recommended me for field service, but I was too young. It was decided I could be on base duty. It took less than a week for my paperwork to be filed.” The nurses finished their cleaning and stitch on the thigh, all they could do in the moment to try and stabilize the gunner, in silence. The gunner had grown still, quiet, his hands had unclenched and his head had fallen back onto the stretcher, his chest had risen and fallen and stayed down. “I hope when I’m flown out of here it’s in a transfer case.” The nurse commandant said, letting out the words absentmindedly, pulling her eyes away from the scene, and to the scaffolding and skylights above.
The sergeant major wiped her utensils and stuffed them into her apron. She answered the commandant quietly. “Lost in a dream of life.”
