In The Flesh

Another day. Yet another loathsome day. We would go there. His office was fine. I loved his office, in all its cluttered glory and I never wanted to leave. But he wouldn’t let me stay, no. He shut the lights and locked the doorknob, and took me to that horrible place. Down the stale, sterile white halls with the dulled linoleum floor tiles. Closed classroom and office doors hid from a five-year-old the world of medical practice that I was too young to ever understand.

The walls whispered and muttered as we passed, glaring down on me. They laughed at me. They knew. The big metal double doors drew closer, beckoning. Always beckoning. They opened to me; they sucked me in.

And I couldn’t go back. There was no escape.

The stench of clean stung my nostrils. The rot of preservation hissed its rancid breath upon my living, untouched skin. I wanted to escape, to fly away. My only salvation was that cold metal table in the shadowed corner, with the chair that was too tall for me. A pencil and some paper was all I was given, and I was left to my own devices.

I was afraid. There were coffins… big, shiny, square coffins, on tables with wheels. They were lined up in stiff rows across the room. Menacing they were, housing a fear bigger to me than anything else.

Students would come in. Older students… adult students. They would open the coffins, and with scalpels, probes, and scissors, they would learn. I would sit, in the shadowed corner, with a pencil and paper. If I was lucky, they would give me a pincher to hold my nostrils closed. But most of the time, I wasn’t lucky.

My pencil and paper became my only hope. I would draw. They were happy pictures, pictures of people and houses, with the sun shining and faces smiling. Puppies would romp and children would play. Laughter rang out through the sweet springtime air and birds sung their sweet melodies. And I would wish I was there. I would wish I was anywhere but here. Here in this horrible morgue of science. I would pretend that maybe I was a princess, in my scraggly graphite tower, and I would pretend as hard as I could. Maybe if I pretended hard enough, the world would melt away, and I wouldn’t hear the snips and slices. I wouldn’t feel the gnashing of my teeth as whirring carving knives tore through bone and cartilage. I wouldn’t have to hold my nose, because I would smell fragrant flowers instead… if I pretended hard enough.

But the reek of formaldehyde is not one easily forgotten.

© Arwen M. Guerra