Health

Health

Bud Smith


He’d been looking after his health. Every night just before bed he swung a mallet into his sternum until he broke through and then he poked his fingers into his flesh and snapped apart his rib cage and breast plate and leaned over far as he could and took a good close look at his heart.

Each night he concluded his heart was très bien.

Next came the inspection of his lungs. He slid his hand down a nostril and yanked the lungs out, slapped the wet and heaving lungs on the dresser, inspected each lung, top to bottom, inside and out, blew them up like balloons, deflated them with a stomp of a slippered foot, inhaled them back in where they belonged.

He moved onto the soup of his guts and entrails, dragging a claw knife across his belly till it all spilled out in an empty popcorn bowl fit for a king, and noting the soup was in good soupy order, and he wasn’t a doctor anyway, and had never even so much as suffered a tummy ache, he poured himself back inside, and sewed his stomach up with leather shoestring, and was thankful for his guts, if nothing else.

And life was long and mysterious or too short and you unearthed the emphatic point just as you could no longer use it, as you tipped back irreparably, with arms and legs wheeling, and stallion-sized mouth, buckteeth gnashing, tongue flailing, horror in the eyes gone blind, this revelation, sending one plummeting into a never-ending pit of regret and bye bye to earth, and yourself.

At least that’s what they tell me.

He went onto clearer pursuits, he ripped out his spine and was pleased to see how straight and strong and sharp his spine was even after all these neglectful years. Wielding his spine as a sword, he thrusted. He lunged. He parried imagined countermoves. He could, if he had to, or on some days wanted to, slay most of his problems with his spine, his sword. Any trespasser or interloper or chucklehead or generic adversary, and so this is why he didn’t bother owning a gun.

Occasionally the problem seemed not only to be ‘all in his head’ but also, maybe his head was the problem. Some desperate evenings, he even went as far as smashing his skull on the wall until his brain dumped out onto the floor and then he carefully scooped his brain up with a dustpan and took a look and always concluded, Nah. Muy magnifico! as he stuffed it back in its case and sealed the damage up with sleep.