The knife.

"This is just a caricature, this, the skeleton of experience-- I mean you know this is just one slivery, wafer-thin slice. To adequately relate even five minutes of internal thought-making would take forever-- It's maddening, actually, when you sit down, as I will . . . to try to render something like this, a time or place, and ending up with only this kind of feebleness-- one, two dimensions of twenty."

"When she went in again and they had 'opened her up'--a phrase they used--and had looked inside, it was staring out at them . . . a tiny city of cancer with an unruly, sprawling, environmentally careless citizenry with no zoning laws whatsoever . . . having one single eye, one blind evil eye in the middle which stared imperiously, as only a blind eye can do, out at the doctors . . . [who] sewed her back up, leaving the city as is, the colonists to their manifest destiny, their fossil fuels, their strip malls and suburban sprawl."

--Dave Eggars, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

I perfected my hand at surgery over the summer and today I got to experience its darker side. Despite the anesthesia I felt electrifying hysteria in my blood as my abdomen was carved like meat. The three-inch incision snakes across the bottom of my rib cage, comprising fourteen stitches, and after it heals I'll have a scar. Surgery--controlled trauma--is trauma no less.