It’s been a year and a half, but your hands remember. Move from the shoulder and the elbow, not the wrist. Keep the knife straight; my kingdom, you think, for detachable blades. The cucumber’s pliable skin becomes an inked margin. If you’d cut prostates this precisely, no one would’ve complained.

Hallie Dolin is a pathology resident in Cleveland, Ohio and has been writing for fun for nearly three decades. Her work has previously been published in The Case Reserve Review and the now-defunct Flashes in the Dark. When she isn’t trying to discover novel cures for frightening microbes, she spends her time working on an actual novel.