Dr. Merlin, my surgeon, leans over my wound,
sniffs, and sinks his hands down inside my abdomen.
Relax, he says, and squeezes his head in to look.
He pulls himself in until only his winged-tip shoes
gleam in the air, before they too, disappear.

I lie still. After rummaging among my organs,
he tosses out a toad from my visceral swamp.
It lands on my chest, croaks, and I remember then
killing one by stuffing a firecracker in its mouth.
He pitches out a diary, damp washcloth
that revived me from a faint at first communion,
the chipped tooth of a boy I once slugged.

There's more, he mumbles. Out pops
my dying sister's tangled rosary, beer bottle,
wet book of matches from Sleep-Easy Motel,
divorce papers, Mother's bottle of Valium,
and my uncle's suicide note. I grab the bed rail,
turn onto my side, and following his instructions
push down hard. A baseball rolls out onto the bed sheet.
A ball signed by Mickey Mantle that I stole
from a friend. "Am I finally free?" I ask.

No. Things leave impressions; they groove,
notch, and incise your interior. The flesh always
remembers, regrets. So, I take the baseball,
roll it gently, resolutely, down my belly,
back into the wound, its mitt.

Richard Solly, a professional writer and teacher, lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has received numerous grants and awards, including the Bush Artist Fellowship and several Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships. His most recent book (with Yvonne Pearson) is The Way Home: A Collective Memoir of the Hazelden Experience, (Hazelden, 1997). His essay "The World Inside" recently appeared in the anthology The Healing Circle: Authors Writing of Recovery (Penguin, New York, 1998).

Caleb Brown is an illustrator and biologist living in Montana. By day he drives a delivery van, and by night he draws pictures with his computer.

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