Alyson Smith's "Swiss Cheese" is about a girl named Brett that is a surgical intern at a hospital. When a trauma patient comes in fromt the local prison, she gets assigned to work with him. This brings up terrible memories about her own mother's murder and leads to a confrontation with both the man that assigns her to the prisoner and the prisoner himself.
I enjoyed the general plot of the piece. It was nothing earth-shattering, but at the same time, I have to admit that it was more enjoyable than I thought it was going to be. I'm glad you didn't go for the plot-twist that I expected and have the prisoner be her mother's murderer. I also love the facts that you threw into the piece: the cows fall to relax them before they die, the way lethan injections worked, etc.
There was also a lot of language used that seemed completely unnecessary to tell this story. It's particularly bad at the beggining where you are describing the surgery of the banana. It almost sounds here like you are trying to be a Victorian author with lines such as, "She frowned in concentration, her hands, slippery with inner fluids, tried desperately to salvage the ripped, yellowed flesh that was coming apart even as she attempted to pus the squishy innard back inside the swollen cavity." It's just too much, and it detracts from the overall understanding of your work.
Second, while I'm not saying it's unbelievable because I have no idea, I'd find it hard for people to be willing to go through an expensive twelve-hour surgery to help a man destined to die in a week anyway. I understand that hospitals are supposed to do whatever possible to help a patient, but I'm curious if the prison would bother rushing the man to the hospital. The entire incident would likely cost a couple thousand dollars, and I'm not sure the general public would be all that happy about such things.
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