Excerpt: (Pending inspiration.)

Eyes as dark as midnight lend themselves to brooding as if brooding was part of their grand design. I stared into one particular pair, even though my presence didn't register to their owner. It couldn't. The task at hand was more important than the dreamy expression on my face.

I thought he looked dashing in white. His crisp collared shirt, oxford blue, and gray silk tie were nice enough. A handsome man in handsome clothing is just that much more attractive for it. But the white lab coat over it all crossed him over the line from handsome to dashing. Like a superhero with a stethoscope. With a thick mop of dark hair that spilled over into his eyes, giving him a boyish charm when smiling, but adding to the brooding during serious moments such as this.

The patient on the table before him was in mortal danger. It was Halloween, and the eight year old dressed as a cowboy had been shot in the chest while trick-or-treating. Bryce, the young buckaroo, had run up to the next house on his candy pandering route with plastic six-shooters blazing. The orange caps on the end let most people know that the revolvers were mere toys if the fact that they were being wielded by a child didn't calm all fears. However, the disheveled young man who answered the door was expecting his drug dealer, not an eight year old cowboy hoping for a Kit-Kat. And since he was coming off a high from his last available hit of crystal meth, the orange caps on the ends of the revolvers didn't mean anything to him. He shot Bryce point-blank in the chest with a gun that was very much real.

Now it was up to the handsome Croatian doctor to save Bryce. With a scalpel, he made a precise incision on the boy's chest. The bullet had grazed an artery, and they had to get the bleeding under control before the tiny heart stopped beating for good. A rib spreader made space between Bryce's ribs to allow the doctors access to the damaged area. Blood pooled in the chest cavity, making it almost impossible to see what needed to be done. The doctors and nurses were practically holding their breath as they worked. Bryce's father waited just outside the doors, white as a ghost, horrified at seeing the insides of his precious little boy's chest.

Two of the nurses looked up at Doctor Mikhail Rajkovic, attending pediatric physician in the emergency room at an inner-city Boston hospital. When they looked into his eyes, it was not because they found him dreamy. It was because they were waiting for him to perform the brilliant lifesaving maneuver that was expected of him. Unfortunately, the look the nurses got in return was completely, devastatingly blank. As the heart monitor wailed frantically, Doctor Rajkovic sighed, took off his gloves, tossed them aside, and left the room. The two nurses turned to each other and burst out laughing.

“Cut!” Shouted the sweatshirt-clad man standing a few feet away.

One nurse looked at the other and said, “I told you he was gonna blow it.” She turned to me and grinned. “He hasn't been able to remember his damn lines ever since you showed up.”