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  • Dart
  • Ron Riekki (bio)

We go to a call.

That’s how it always starts.

Everything in this world, it seems.

Someone calls you.

You go there. You do things. You have sex. You kiss. You fight. You watch tv. You cook. You leave. You go home. You go to sleep.

You get another call.

For us, it’s not an uncle or wife or hot guy or neighbor.

It’s dispatch.

And dispatch only has bad calls.

That’s not true.

There are good calls. No calls. Empty calls. Weird calls. Every call you can imagine.

And every call goes differently. Like this one.

It’s for a gunshot victim.

We get there.

She’s been shot. In her car. While driving.

Except she hasn’t been shot. The person next to her has been shot. In the head. And my partner doesn’t want to deal with him. He looks dead.

I’ve been taught in emt school that just because someone looks dead, that doesn’t mean they actually are.

He went to paramedic school where he learned something I don’t see, something that says this guy is a corpse even though I’ve seen patients who have shot their jaws off and lived, been shot in the eye and lived, in the throat and lived.

But he says he’s dead and he outranks me. Although he doesn’t outrank me. But he acts like he outranks me and in this world that is enough.

OK, he’s dead, I say.

And he is. [End Page 161]

Now.

Since we’ve declared it.

Since we’re doing nothing to save him.

That’s brain, he says to me. If you see brain, don’t call a medic, call a coroner.

The woman is alive.

And she can hear us.

Of all the senses to go from anesthesia during surgery, the first one to come back is hearing.

That ancient senior citizen that you are sure is deaf—he’s not.

Patients hear and complain. They make a call to your boss and then you hear it. Loud and clear. Our lt, he loves to yell. He says yelling reminds us about hearing, that all patients can do it. And the deaf ones, they read lips. So everyone can hear. Especially the deaf.

My partner asks her if she’s been shot.

And she says yes, in the face.

And she has been shot, in the face. But not by a bullet. With shrapnel. I think that’s the word. Bits of her boyfriend or neighbor or whoever it was are embedded into her face, into her eyes. He was shot by a bullet. She was shot by the bits of skull that flew across the air, that blinded her right eye, that caused her to crash.

Oh, and she has a lawn dart in her back.

It’s on the upper right side, the lawn dart. Which is good. It’s not in her heart.

She does not know the lawn dart is in her back.

We tell her.

Or the paramedic tells her.

This is what happens if you drive with a set of lawn darts in the backseat of your car. You hit a tree and those same lawn darts are very quickly in the front seat. Very quickly in you.

At the news of this, she goes into shock.

Not real shock. Fake shock.

There are two types of shock. The shock that’s bs. The shock of characters on tv. The shock when someone is merely frightened. Or upset to find out that her back contains a lawn dart.

And then there is real shock. When you’re hypotensive, cold, clammy, hypoxic, lacking blood circulation. On your way to death.

The lawn dart in her back is a good thing.

If we took it out, that might kill her. But the lawn dart is keeping the [End Page 162] blood in. It’s like a massive cork. The finger holding back a dike full of blood.

It’s all in how you look at it.

We just tell her not to lean backward.

We ask about her neck, telling her to...

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