the blueshift journal

How to Treat a Stab Wound by Megan Sims

 

1. Leave the stabbing object in the wound. Tell the victim to become familiar with this unfamiliar sensation of having a new guest inside her body. Stroke her hair, say “it will just bleed more if you remove it,” take deep breaths and try not to remember how easily this could happen to you. Try not to think about how thin human skin is. Try not imagine your skin ripping easily like dress seams or book pages off of spines—hold the victim’s shaking hand, tell her she makes a beautiful home for foreign objects.

 

2. Stop the bleeding with a clean shirt or towel. Remove one layer of yourself so she doesn’t feel quite so bad about the exposure. Wrap it around her, tell her you wish you could keep her inside of you and protect her from things like this. Don’t note that there is some beautiful contrast in the blue of her eyes and the red of her blood. Press your hands into her body, hard, and pray you can soak up her blood with your veins and pump your own back in. Hope you can suck out her devils in the process and fill her back with every time you wanted to tell her you loved her and never did.

 

3. If the wound is bleeding profusely, apply pressure to the major artery leading to the area. Whisper to her as she starts to slip from between your fingers that this will be ok. Hope you mean it. Hope your fingerprints leave permanent marks on her skin so the next time she looks down so curious to see what she looks like inside out she’ll see that she is made of you. Hope she loves you enough to never hurt even this fragment of you just as you would never hurt her. Hope you can control your heart long enough that it doesn’t shatter all over her bloodstained ribcage.

 

4. Reposition the person so the wound is above the level of the heart. Reach all the way into her and pull her spasming heart muscle out through her mouth. Carry it downstairs and perform CPR while blocking out the whimpers from the floor above. Kiss it, hard. Remember what her pulse direct against your lips feels like so you don’t have a chance to forget it. Grab a pen and start writing love letters on her left atrium and convince yourself a human heart knows how to beat in Morse Code so the very act of staying alive will fuel itself in perpetuity, be a reminder that it’s worth it.

 

5. Treat shock only after stopping or slowing the bleeding. Tell her not to cry. Say that blood doesn’t go well with salt. If she starts breathing just a little too quickly, turn on a metronome and run your fingers through her hair like hammers on piano strings. If she feels cool remind her of August and hips touching hips. If she tells you the room is spinning, tell her it’s supposed to do that. That this is a dream and right now you’re being hurtled through space straight to a planet whose atmosphere is so thick it drowns out the rest of the universe. Everything that exists here exists under this sky, the world is small. Tell her she will feel large here, like she could cup the sun in her palm. Pretend that when she cracks a smile like a chipped mug this means she will be ok. Ignore when her lips start to turn the color of her eyes you always thought looked like forget-me-nots. Forget you ever learned the word cyanosis and promise her she’ll make it out of this alive. Tell her you love her only when her eyes are shut so she will not see you crying. Realize that until today, you never really believed she was mortal.