summary: "what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?”
*
The scalpel clatters on stainless steel. Sterile, it clatters, startling her. These are mistakes she doesn’t make. It clattered, slipped through her fingers, slick in the stringent light.
She feels for it, eyes scanning a naked body, fingers closing around the cold instrument.
Suddenly, sees: herself.
Her eyes close. Lids sandy, scratchy. The scalpel clatters on stainless steel. She presses “record”. It clicks on. “4:52 PM.” Strong, confident, secure. Recording a history, diving deep between a story that has no assured ending and one that does.
A y-incision, strategically placed to expose maximum internal surface area. She can’t simply slice through post-mortem flesh. Sawing, almost, sinewy and thick and little beads of sweat form on her skin. Would be scarring, if scarring were optional. Everything sounds painful.
Recently she welcomed silence.
The scalpel clattered on stainless steel, shattering -- silence, sterility, sanctity?
Now attuned to everything, she strains to hear her body on the brink of collapse, waiting for that second when things shift into serious – into metastasized, into higher stages, into progressed. Not progressing, spreading. Irises sustained by the skinniest of hopes.
Her focus has faded, instead thinks she can hear those treasonous cells multiplying, a staggering stampede. Rests her hands on the corners of the table. Her lungs heavy, she’s warm, suffocating.
The recorder hisses. Her head snaps up, face stricken, as if she’s been caught snoozing.
She falls into routine. Her disciplined shadow a short distance from the corpse at her fingers.
Slippery fingerprints on the scales, her heart squeezing blood at irregular speeds. Organs sloshing in metal baskets, intestines measured, arteries severed. She pulls at a kidney, resisting softly, seeking release. Anatomy as dissonance, at the conclusion of this story she will stitch each separate piece together, carefully.
Her nose leaks, blood slipping loose when she isn’t looking, a spigot that stubbornly sticks. Sluice-gates for t-cells sneaking through slivers in her veins. A drop splatters, spreads. She swipes the blood away, aside. It smears. Latex sticking briefly to her skin. The sloppy similarities scare her. Sighing for emphasis, she disappears into her sense of survival.
Returns to studying, deciphering, answers implicit between layers and cells. She dissects death, scavenging for answers in the solace of the usual, of work. Assaulted in spite of sanity, in spite of intelligence, she is not disabled.
Metal clatters against metal, her voice surprising her each time. Everything loud, louder, louder still. Attention spiraling toward her.
She recalls that she wishes she could sink into his presence, when he is absorbed with upset, subtracting her self from her cells. Always suspecting something other than respect, she straightens while soothing his fears. She suggests nothing but competence, signing papers and pulling weight. The scalpel clattered on stainless steel. He won’t miss that. He disappears on the outskirts of despair, but he won’t miss this.
She discovers marks, bruises, internal contusions so desperately clear: the body’s last chance effort to be useful. Assuring meaning, assuring a story. An answer. She strips the body clean of its secrets.
The gloves stretch, snap, crack. She throws them away. They fall silently, bloody, used. Stained. The scalpel clattered on stainless steel. She surrounds herself with death. There is no sorrow.
She turns the recorder off, preserving a specific history. Herself a historian, her own history recorded between death between horror between death. Silence floods her hearing. The scalpel clatters on stainless steel. It’s all cemented on tape, sound after sound. She will listen to it later, alone in her car, straining to hear blood, her blood, hitting sterile steel, her aortas struggling in their defiance, the split and sliced layers of dermatitis. She will only find safety, security. It will vanish into darkness.
She emerges from the autopsy room, scrubbed, aseptic. Escaping the unsung repeating chorus of the story yet to be shared. Walks slowly the short space between building and car, stark shapes silhouetted by streetlights against a starless sky.
Her breaths seem slurred, scattered and uneasy. She must stop. She doesn’t know what she has left to survive and so she spills into this disfigured future.
The scalpel clatters on stainless steel. It’s all she hears.
*