On the operating table, she makes a shutter out of me. She takes the hammer and the scalpel and makes micro-incisions along my chest plate. Her gown is white. My limbs are blue.

She inserts tubing and puts gauze around my cuts. I watch as she stitches-up the holes and she tells me stories about how I look like someone she used to know. She tells me I have nice veins and says my blood pressure is normal as she finishes mending a sock out of me.

“So many veins,” she tells me. “They wrap around your arms like grapevines. Good circulation is important.”

She pulls out all the tubes and wraps them around her fingers. Red milk drips from the hole at one end. She hunches over and examines the residue splashing on the floor.

“I’m keeping this,” she tells me and slips the tubing into her pocket. “For a few weeks, maybe more. Now you should get some rest.”

She washes my skin with warm, soapy water and I close my eyes. She rings out the yellow sponge in the sink and I feel like a dish.

When she towels my head, she tells me my hair is strong like wire.

I tell her, “Thank you.” I tell her, “Beautiful.”

After a few weeks, my stitches loosen. Little threads of plastic poke out from the pores in my neck, my back, my ribs, and chest. I feel tangled.

“Good morning,” she says and pulls on latex gloves.

I lay naked on the operating table and stare as she runs her fingers across my skin. She finds a thread and pulls it slowly, for miles and miles. Out runs the stitch, red and wet and long.

I struggle to remain still as the string slides out of my body. I feel that I’m losing nerves and vessels until thread snaps off around my nipple.

I try to breathe. I press my chest firmly and try to feel for blood or moisture on my skin. I look at my hands and pull them away.

“The hinge is on your heart,” I hear her say, just before she turns out the light.

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SUB-LIT is a now defunct literary journal. "Hinge" was published in Issue 3, Volume 2.