Greg Bottoms
My father, without asking, has put his lungs on my coffee table. It’s not a nice coffee table, but still.
We’re the same age, twenty-two, could be brothers.
“This here,” he says, pointing at the black specks on his lungs, like ash barbed into the meat. “See that?” The lungs could be—maybe are—fat-laden pork loins. “Not much, really, when you look at it. I’m almost embarrassed.”
I look up. My father is glowing like a low-wattage light bulb, and a buzzing, some hard-to-locate buzzing, is here in this dark room with us. He opens his unbuttoned flannel shirt, shows his autopsy scar, neck to navel, armpit to armpit, a puckered, red-purple cross. This could all be about Jesus, but what kind of language is this light? How do you translate it?
I try to say I’m sorry, I didn’t want to let them cut him, I wanted his body to stay whole, to be lowered down into some afterlife, but the room is empty except for the scarred coffee table, my father’s lungs, and the buzzing coming out of my open mouth.