The towel felt heavy the first time I lifted it,
Weighed down,
Soaked.
I held in my breath while we grabbed the ends of the white damp cloth and peeled it back,
In part from the acrid smell of formaldehyde,
And in part because of,
The fear.
Its chin was jutting upwards to the ceiling,
The black buds of a sloppy row of stitches closed the deep fissure running along the clavicle and towards the midline.
This was where the blood was drained.
I braced myself,
The cold iron table sucked the life through my hands and from my body as I braced myself on the dissection table.
And then I saw it.
I felt nothing.
Just a floating,
Lightheaded feeling,
As I begun the ascent,
Levitating into the ethereal space that fills the gap between the world of the living and the world of,
The dead.
Like purgatory,
I was completely still.
Motionless.
Dissected from reality.
Cutting away,
Just naming—
The structures.
Then later,
The day was done.
We coated it with formaldehyde through a spray-bottle.
Like gardeners tending a plot,
As though the skin we just eviscerated would sprout back.
And then we covered it with the white towel and hosed that down too.
My foot was poised on the step-lever to hoist down the dissection table,
But I was disturbed.
There was the white towel in front of me.
What was underneath it?
Her body outlined a humanoid shape along the matted towel.
She was someone that was loved, and had loved.
Where was the gash where she bled?
She was someone’s daughter.
I could not dissociate dead from alive anymore.
The idea of what was underneath,
The idea of life,
I had touched a ghost.
The thin white veneer that wrapped the outside of her body,
It was a canvas.
Upon which you paint an image of an offshore breezy fishing town.
She lived there for a while, I’d like to think.
In that little idyllic village off the coast.
With her husband,
A hardworking man with a stout jaw,
A stern and powerful jaw.
He was an Irishman by blood,
And made a living off the boats.
Often he was away from home but he always brought her back a handful of daffodils on his way from the marina.
There wasn’t much pollution there,
If any it was from the tugboats wrangling along unwelcome fishing seiners.
This was evidenced by the lack of carbon pigment deposition on the lung tissue,
Seen on gross dissection and histological analysis.
The years weighed on and on like lead,
The grief of the love that passed on and along the waves more days than not.
No longer did love linger lightly on her like the tiara of trillium I always imagined she wore on her wedding day.
So her back bent and broke under the load of grief.
Specifically,
Anterior T12-L1 compression fractures secondary to osteomalacia,
Evidenced by post-mortem CT imaging.
When her neighbors asked when her old man would be back,
And joked of a love affair with a mermaid.
Her back started hurting again.
Tears welled in her eyes.
And the lump in her throat made it so hard to—
Speak.
That one we excised out.
The lump.
It was a thyroglossal duct cyst.
Characterized by the presence of parafollicular cells seen on an H+E stained tissue sample.
Through the many years she was still a good woman to him.
Though he died one day,
The way that things usually die.
Naturally.
According the literature women live longer than men.
Approximately by an average of 5 years.
She lived.
I had to slip underneath her right arm to cut open her neck,
In her icy embrace I swore I heard her speak to me in that moment.
After,
We had cleared the cobwebs from her throat.