My Sister’s Heart

A novel. Completed 2026. Currently seeking representation.

Set at an airport-adjacent clinic where aviation and medicine collide at every turn, My Sister’s Heart asks what it costs a man to keep obsessing over another person’s heart while refusing to examine his own.

Excerpts

“Growing up, she had the better bike. I had the better heart.”

—

“A strange feeling inside made me lag behind. It was the excitement of all this illness. Strange medicinal smells. Those rotten eggs. Airplane fumes.

‘Come on Victor, keep up with us.’

I saw my mother undo the top button of her blouse. I followed her into the office carrying the carton of Spasmax drug samples. There were crooked diplomas on the wall. Windows rattled when the planes took off.

Dr. Pick closed the door, took the samples and winked at me.”

—

“Dr. Low, are you claiming you finished medical school and never learned about the spleen?”

“That’s right. Most of our anatomy sections were performed on seals and polar bears. Things like that.”

“They’re mammals,” I say. “You really think seals and polar bears don’t have spleens?”

Low shrugs. “Maybe smaller ones? Look, maybe I don’t know too much about spleens, but I’m an expert on brown fat. Brown fat and whale blubber. And I know a lot about transplants and tolerance.”

—

“If you’re not going to leave the Hangar Clinic—let’s have the family here,” Sarah says.

I shake my head. “No. I can’t raise a child in this environment.”

“Why not?”

“Because I grew up here—and look what happened.”

“You’re a medical doctor,” she says, rubbing fragrant oil all over me.

“I can’t. I’m not capable.”

“You? Since when? You’re fine,” but she shrugs at my shrinking erection. “Sort of fine.”

—

“We always need to be mindful of the uterus. It rolls through phases like the moon, when full, usually wonderful—even fairy-tale things follow.

‘But a woman’s uterus is also capable of the unexpected. Can catch you off guard, sometimes gently like early menstrual flow or worse—like in wolf’s tales. Then things become ugly—not only for the womb itself, but for others around it.'”

—

“We make our own evening traipse across the tundra—thawing our permafrost. It releases sediment and disunion, and ancient carbon and our history of toxic interactions begins to bubble away in rising whiffs like departing methane.”

—

“There’s an ambulance in front my old family house, the lights bright, whirling fiercely. There’s a grayness in the sky and everything feels ominous.

Inside smells of sickness, of latex gloves and medical tape, of the aerosolized banana-flavored mist they spray into a dying patient’s throat.

The dying patient is my pregnant sister.”

—

Published Excerpts

Pieces of this novel have appeared individually in literary journals over nearly two decades:

“Pathology labs are always located in the basement, as if they want to ease your body parts into the ground even before they finish admiring your first tumor.”

—From “Is My Husband’s Autopsy Covered?” Forge, 2014

“The train descends farther into the volcanic depths, where the crisp and flowery smell of the island gives way to a more metallic and industrial scent. Within minutes it seems we’re descending so far down, I wonder if we’ll hit lava.”

—From “A Uterine Transfer (for America),” Eleven Eleven, 2009, 7:168-172

Additional excerpts appeared in Chaleur Magazine (2019), Briar Cliff Review (2007), and Dos Passos Review (2007).