The Finger

"How's your finger?"

"I think it's going a little green."

Kyle left the kitchen, wet dishtowel still in hand, and joined Vanessa on the couch. He placed his palm beneath hers and inspected her finger, the towel a barrier between them. "I can't believe you still haven't taken care of this."

"It's just a bug bite."

"It's squishy. I don't think bug bites make your fingers squishy."

"What do you know about it? When did you become an entomologist?" Vanessa cupped the digit to her chest.

"Let me see it."

"No. It's mine. Miiiiine."

Kyle didn't like it when Vanessa spoke like a little kid, but she seemed to think it was cute. It was a habit he'd noticed only after they moved in together. "You should go to the doctor."

"They'll cut it off."

"That's ridiculous."

"You don't know. When did you become a doctor?"

"Cut it out, Ness."

"You want them to cut it off. You never liked that finger."

What the hell was she talking about? Kyle worried that it was worse than he'd thought; maybe there was some sort of venom oozing into her brain.

"You never liked that finger. You won't kiss it. You don't want it in your mouth."

"That's not true."

"Prove it." She held her hand forward regally, the questionable finger drooping slightly below the others.

Was it going green? Perhaps--the whitest of greens, the green of seedlings shoving their fragile stems through the dirt. At least he thought it was that kind of green. When did he become a botanist?

Vanessa moved her hand closer to his face, wiggled the finger as much as she could. "Prooove it. What are you, chicken?"

Though his stomach heaved, he jerked the finger to his lips, then into his mouth. He wrapped his tongue around it and licked and sucked and bit and all the while Vanessa squealed, "you're hurting me, you're hurting me."

Beard of Knowledge

I've been sitting here, trying to put off the moment when I'll have to prep the organs for today's dissections. Two sheep lungs and three sheep hearts, laid out clean and neat on little blue mats so museum visitors - I mean, guests, we're calling them guests now - can squawk and exclaim over how cool/gross/weird they are.

One of my coworkers tells people that instead of going "Eewww, gross!" they should just stroke their non-gender-specific Beard of Knowledge and say, "Hmmm, interesting," instead, because that's what you do when you're a scientist.

Ultimately, the whole process doesn't really bother me. Mostly it's just tedious. Pulling the organs out of the freezer the day before, thawing them in the fridge overnight, setting up the trays.

These sheep did not get out much; there is an alarming amount of fat stuck to their pericardia, and I have to pull it all off, leaving the resilient, translucent membrane intact. Leechy elastic black blood clots need to be picked off and discarded. There's jiggly tissue to be removed with increasingly dull dissection scissors so the trachea is nice and clean, rings of cartilage clearly visible. And then I need to rinse warm water down the trachea, removing most of the blood, mucus, and foam so the demonstrators can cut all the way down into the bronchial tubes, laying them open so guests can see the tiny branches heading off into the spongy lungs.

The worst part isn't the feel of the pink squishiness of the lungs through my gloves. It isn't even the smell, which is bloody and sweet at times and slow and sour at others. It isn't the soft, crackly, fizzy sound that the distressing pink foam makes when it hits the sink as it spouts out of the trachea.

The worst part is the two thymuses, one on the pericardium and one at the top of the trachea. They're part of the immune system, these little loose bags of fatty, runny tissue that are mottled greyish yellow and pink and feel like they're full of gravy and bits of crushed jello and those cotton balls that give dry squeaks when you pinch them. Whenever I can, I cut them off with the scissors, but sometimes they're situated in a way that requires me to grab them and pull them off. Those days, I finish prepping because I'm a professional, and then I go sit in the office and watch videos of baby sloths and anteaters and corgis on my phone until the ghost sensation is washed out of my hands and brain.

I always finish the lungs first, because the hearts are easy.

Three hearts, cut three different ways: one is laid open and pinned, showing off the valve dividing the left atrium from the left ventricle; one is sliced like a loaf of bread from top to tip; one is cut in half and stowed in plastic baggies so guests can pass them around.

The hearts are fun, in a macabre way, because rinsing them clean means sticking the end of the tubing attached to the faucet into one opening and shooting water out another. They're like water guns that are incidentally made out of muscle.

Sometimes when I'm running warm water through a heart to finish defrosting it and to rinse away blod clots, the water will catch in an atrium or will circle through the ventricle and push the valve closed, and the whole heart jumps in my hand. I know it's not actually beating, not actually an electrical process happening; I know it's just a mechanical coincidence of water pressure and angles. But it's a reminder that this isn't just a cut of steak - this was a heart. This, just a little bit ago, beat and pumped and kept something alive.

Most days I can just prep the organs and that's it. A job completed, moving on to the next task. But some days, like when a lung is very, very small, or when a heart shudders in my hand, it's suddenly more than that. It's suddenly horrifying, or suddenly sad, or suddenly mesmerizing in the complexity of its structure and the circuitousness of its function. Sometimes, when I find a lung that's half purple with bruises, all I can think about is the cruelty of how these sheep were raised and slaughtered. Sometimes all I can think about is how amazing it is that meat found a way to survive in the universe, and that I'm meat using my meat to understand and see my relationship to other meat. Sometimes all I can think about is how much I wish I could switch off my sense of smell because this lung is going a little green.

I get caught up in moral dilemmas. The sheep are being slaughtered for food, so we might as well use their organs to help people understand what a fascinating, complex machine their own bodies are. I think animals should be treated humanely, and that when they are slaughtered it should be quick and clean and painless. I think we should all learn to do with eating a little less meat and a few more grains and vegetables. I also understand the need for specimens in order to teach about biology. I think helping people see how similar we all are on the inside, how much evolution is a fact of life, how important it is to understand the functions of their own bodies, is always worthwhile. Are there alternative ways to demonstrate all this?

Dealing with so much death in order to teach about life starts to strain the cognitive-dissonance-muscles after a while.

Hmmm, interesting.

Callused

With each
prick
and gasp
and perfect
pearl
of blood

I think of Nana
threading a needle
without looking
at the eye

Never
slipping

No small
round
red stains
on her
stitches

Her fingers
refusing to
bleed

Protected by
years
of mistakes

To Be Reasonable

It was one of those mistakes, the kind your mother warns you against, the kind for which the internet ridicules you, and Amy knew it was one of those mistakes, but she did it anyway. She got his name tattooed along her collarbone because she wanted it to hurt as much as her desire. He always made smart observations in class, with a dazed look in his eyes and a half smile on his lips--sort of like he was high, but he didn't do that too often. Sometimes he held multiple pens between his teeth, so Amy thought it was love. He told her to be reasonable, so she got it tattooed in black ink, Times New Roman.

That summer he moved back to California.

Now Amy digs at the tattoo with a safety pin because she wants her insides to be as hard as scar tissue, and because she wants to remind herself how ugly mistakes can be. Don't worry: she ran a lighter over the pin first.

Tish & Leo (a second vignette)

Tish and Leo built nooks and hideaways into their home.

Some were simple - easy mysteries tucked into corners or between books, like the tiny portraits of strangers Tish painted and hid behind each of the laundry chute's little brass doors, or the old armchair Leo wrestled into a largish closet in the hall. He called it the smoking room and insisted on keeping a ratty old paisley bathrobe ("A smoking jacket!" he'd laughed when he spotted it at the thrift store) draped across the back of the chair. Whenever their dog, a retriever-something mutt named Cheesecake, would go missing, they invariably found him behind the winter coats, curled into a happy dog-doughnut on the worn leather seat.

Some of the nooks were projects they tackled slowly in stolen hours when they got home from work. Tish wanted a solar, a holdover wish from a childhood spent reading books about castles. Up in the attic, she scrubbed away dust and cobwebs, chasing out the shadows. She dug at the joins between floorboards with a pin and sanded the rough window sills, ancient desiccated grime kicking up into the air and settling softly on her hair.

Leo brought up a mess of extension cords and power tools and half price Ikea shelving. He divided the attic into a sitting room and a secret study with a hidden entrance, putting up bookshelves as walls. Sometimes Leo would stop mid-construction to sketch out improved plans for making one of the shelves into a hidden door. Whenever she heard the skritching of his pencil across his notebook, Tish would watch Leo out of the corner of her eye, falling in love with the look of concentration on his face (which was made slightly ridiculous by the forgotten nails and screws still sticking out of his mouth) and the careful, deliberate motions his hands made as he drew their secrets in bold charcoal strokes.

Playtime Again

I thought about
blankets draped over chairs

I thought between the counter
the couch,
the computer table,
the breakfast nook,
room upon room upon room

explore their labyrinth
get lost, giggling

I felt like playing

I thought about everything
that made me feel better.

Playtime

I thought about when I was a kid and what made me happy and I thought about blanket forts. Did you ever make those? Blankets draped over chairs and tables and all? Well I thought I'd do one better and knit them a fort. Knitted arches high over knitted carpets, long knitted hallways between the counter and the couch, the computer table and the breakfast nook. I knitted it green and yellow because red's my favorite color and I wanted to save that yarn for myself. It didn't take me as long as you'd think. I'm pretty fast. I learned it on my own, too, from an online tutorial. So I knit room upon room upon room for them to crawl around and explore, their own little labyrinth to get lost in--there were no entrances, of course. I knitted it shut right behind their tiny round butts and they were giggling and I felt like I could breathe for once. It didn't last long, though. Soon they got hungry or something, and their pink mini-fingers found their way through the holes and started tearing the walls apart. Their hands were grimy because I accidentally knitted the dog food inside and I guess they were playing with it. As they ruined all my hard work I thought about how you don't really have to love everything that comes out of your body, like poop or earwax, and that made me feel better.

the inside

1.
Your eyes leaf bright or
tired like moss and grey
Prairie gold or
thunder torn sky
The sharp cool change
like seasons
like seas
You say
The color on the inside
stays the same

2.
Veins thread through
the skin of
your hands
lines blue and green
Like ghosts like
knitted arches
twisted branches
like cathedral windows
Holiness
in the blood

3.
You twist like trees in wind
Soft cracks and soft
pops of pockets
of air and fluid
between
Your vertebrae
as they settle
gentle
into place
The sound of home