“All we need is a night on Mercury!… All we need is a night on Mercury!” The late croaks of the peddler man rose above the crowing cacophony of the highway to ease Cora out of her hours-long slumber. Every afternoon, the sun presses its thumb against the world’s forehead, branding the day with an…

If my memory serves me right, it was nearing 11 p.m. when the paramedics rushed me to the emergency room.

What started as a simple stomach ache transmuted into something extravagantly worse. That pinch I shrugged off, after two hours of anesthetic preparations and two more hours of surgery, ended up on a steel plate and was later identified as the appendix that once inhabited my digestive tract.