To leave this bullet inside this soldier's chest would be to kill him. You know this much to be true. You also know that to take it out--well, that would probably kill him too. Remember all those months of practicing, of opening the hearts of pigs to see if you could stitch them up again. Afterwards, even after you had removed your gloves and scrubbed your hands with a small brick of rough, flaky soap, you still smelled of blood, of meat. You were never able to approach breakfast in the same way, even now. When Anderson in the officers' mess asked offhandedly why you have an appetite for bacon but never for sausage, you smiled and made something up, even though you know it's because fried bacon reminds you least of flesh.

Flesh is what's on your mind, all the time. To be specific, it is the flesh surrounding and comprising the heart that you always think of. When you sleep, you hear Margaret's voice in your ear, whispering. It's coming to you from across an expansive continent and a heaving gray sea. It flows over these foreign hills, darts between the bullets tracing lines in the night sky, picks its way over the shattered bodies of men not younger than you. Her voice does this until it's found you, and when it does, this is what it says to you, kindly: serous pericardium, anterior interventricular sulcus, pulmonary semilunar valve.

Now you stand in what used to be the aisle of the village church, in the rough circle of space you created by pushing the scarred wooden pews away and into a haphazard pattern. Your hands were sure when you took your scalpel to the chest of a young private and cut a thin line. Again, you couldn't help but think of meat, as--until recently--the only flesh you had ever cut had been food, or already dead. The resistance a piece of meat offers under your blade is not dissimilar to that of living, human tissue. If anything, the only difference would be in temperature; it will always be strange to feel the warmth of human skin, and of blood, and to know that it is not Margaret generating that heat. As you press your finger against the jagged hole in the young soldier's left pulmonary artery, as you feel his heart beating against your hand, that heat creeps into your glove and up your arm. And all you can think is, Margaret.