The pain came through my middle like a wire that had been heated.

I made a sound and nearly went double.

It is not like other pain.

I had broken a wrist at nineteen and I had had a tooth out badly and I had assumed those had taught me the range.

What this was, was a line.

A single horizontal line about six inches long, roughly four inches below my navel, that went from cool and absent to white and absolute in the space of about a second and a half, and that had a quality of wrongness about it that the breaking of a bone does not have.

It is the body saying: you have been opened, and I am holding this together with eleven staples and a quantity of thread, and you have just asked the whole of it to take your weight.