Weekly Read: “What Is Buried Beneath” by Kati Eisenhuth
BLR’s Weekly Read brings you one outstanding story, poem, or essay from our archive. This week’s read is “What is Buried Beneath” by Kati Eisenhuth, which appeared in our theme issue on Taking Care and later received a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology.
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On my fifth day in theater, I stand in the OR at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, after another IED explosion. Two patients are laid out on surgical tables, each with a wound that gapes and gray skin tattooed by shrapnel. All the seared flesh smells like barbeque, and if I wasn’t already sick as hell, my mouth would water. Anesthesia drapes hide both patients’ faces, so all I see are two headless bodies. It’s the perfect scenario for a frigid meathead who only cares about bones.
Well-worn surgical drills and screws line the tables next to each patient. I don’t care that I used better equipment to dissect my cadaver in medical school; I’d be satisfied with a Dewalt drill and my grandmother’s sewing needle, which might actually work better. Anxious to feel the weight of the tools in my hand, I scramble into my sterile gown.
“Ready, Dawn,” says Patty, my scrub tech. I know as much about her as I know about the surgical drape: both are monochromatic and flat. I adore them.
I pull the tips of my gloves, smoothing wrinkles that might interfere with sensation. My ring finger is naked and uninhibited, the simple gold band tucked in a drawer back in Mississippi. I told my husband I was afraid it might get stolen if I left it in my living quarters. He chose to see this as a measure of preservation. Life was on hold until my return. We all make choices.
Why this story?
“Great war writing features sharp observation, visceral prose, and high stakes. What makes ‘What Is Buried Beneath’ even more compelling is its female protagonist—an orthopedic surgeon at Bagram Air Base who is a ‘frigid meathead who only cares about bones.’
She is also, it turns out, secretly pregnant. As she attempts to reattach the hand of a possible bomber, in an operating theater filled with blood and flies and the constant sound of alarms, she swallows her morning sickness and contemplates the prejudices she’s had to overcome, as a woman in male-dominated spheres, to pursue the work she loves.”
– Doris W. Cheng,
BLR Associate Fiction Editor
More from Kati
Kati Eisenhuth is a board-certified general pediatrician and a writer of short literary fiction and novel-length thrillers. Her work has been published in Bayou Magazine, failbetter, Into the Void, Ghost Parachute, and McSweeney’s.