Bioflash: "Meeting in the Aisle"

Twenty-three years—that’s the last time he had seen Vera, her face flushed and skin glowing. Now, she pushed a cart with fruit loops and spaghettiOs. A girl of ten or eleven, platinum blonde just like her mom, trailed after Vera.

He noticed her face, hardened somehow, the skin tighter. Softness is what he remembered; smooth cheek, supple breast. This gaunt mother gave him—her past life—a brief glance, an old building long-since torn down and built anew.

He watched her move away, rubbed clammy hands on a pant leg, and emptied his basket at the self-service checkout.

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Bioflash archives

Bioflash: "The Life of Blood"

Arteries and veins—our fluid freeways—provide a direct line from the lungs to every living cell. One red blood cell shuttles a billion oxygen in its donut-shaped disc, stacking capillaries with the breath of life. No DNA guides this cell. Born in the bone marrow, he is slave to a merciless heart. One hundred days later, broken and beaten, the red blood cell disassembles. A new car is made from his old parts, this vital transport racing along dilated vessels. And so blood flows with every beat, carrying life from lung to tissue, artery to vein, heart to cell.

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Bioflash archives

Bioflash: "Broken"

The bus from Williams Lake was late.

Stu sat in the idling car, waiting for his son. They hadn’t spoken in over ten years. What could he say? What possible comfort could this old curmudgeon offer?

The bus finally pulled in. Tim was one of the last to get off. Stu saw it in his eyes, and held back tears last shed twenty-nine years ago. Tears for his son’s birth. But this time, birth had taken two lives.

Stu said nothing and hugged his son hard. He held him for a long time, but he did not cry.

Bioflash: "Microscope"

This crystal ball waits in the biology lab, ever-patient in her mounting curiosity. Through her glasses the world is clear: a beaming, unblemished full moon. Lenses and light make the invisible visible, the tiny titanic. One dot resolves into two, one cell a bustling city of constant construction, movement and repair. To an observer, looking through a window at the building blocks of life, the small appears infinite, like God staring down at his divine elements, mesmerized by the miracle of his makeup. Thus, this optical opus blesses the naked eye with the power to gaze into creation itself.

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