Her body is rotting.
Allison knows this, just as she knows the four chambers of the heart—two atria, two ventricles—and how to stitch a simple continuous suture.
When she slices open the cadaver, y-shape, petals of flesh blooming underneath her fingers, her advisor praises her steady hands.
Beneath her mask, Allison smiles.
There was a certain strange arrogance that divided students at Allison’s undergrad. There were the athletes, and the non-athletes. Non Athletic Regular People, or NARPs, if you wanted to be a dickhead. They—the athletes—usually did. Blithe and narrow-eyed and strong, they walked campus like they owned it, which they did. They had the best dorms, the best parties, had the best people—if best meant most attractive, which in college it did.
They were also falling-apart people, and Allison watched with a strange vindictive pleasure as they dropped like flies around her. A torn ACL, a shattered patella, a strained shoulder that couldn’t knit itself back together like it had before.
These shiny happy people, breaking into vivid mirror bright pieces. Littering campus with their loose tendons and blood stained jerseys. They called them NARPs—ugly, ugly, ugly—and Allison and the rest of the regular people watched with a sort of schadenfreude as the thing that set them above failed them at the last.
Arrogant until they weren’t. And now she, two years out from undergrad, her first choice medical school, smug and pleased with the fact that two years ago, that had been their last hurrah, their last gasp of whatever the fuck thought made them so special. The mind doesn’t break like the body does, doesn’t snap under the pressure of catching a ball or a single step running wrong. She is above, and her mind will keep ticking, be useful much longer than some idiot volleyball player who God blessed with being a little taller than average.
The mind doesn’t break like the body does.
Except when it does.
Allison’s body is rotting from the inside out, except for how it isn’t.
She knows it isn’t, knows that she’s fine. She drew her own blood, ran it through tests. Volunteered to go under the MRI. Knows that there’s no way her body is actually decomposing, one vestigial organ at a time, her appendix putrefying to black slime in her abdominal cavity, her—
She’s not. She’s not.
But at the same time, there is a sort of bone deep truth, like her marrow has rotted out and replaced it with this axiom, that she is festering.
She split open that cadaver, with her perfect autopsy and perfect slices, revealing the body’s organs, wet with cancer and not yet congealed blood. And it got in her.
That’s all she has. That’s all she knows.
That it got in her.
It’s not cancer, she says, frustrated, asking for tests that she cannot justify. It’s not. She knows that the death itself, flecks and specks of it, has gotten into her, has taken root. Is liquifying her organs, like a potato sack left in the back of a dark cupboard. Her nerves clotting. Bones growing flowers of mold, the gray green spores digging into the calcium, feathering out in fractal structures in her femurs. She is rotting from the inside out. Except it’s not her body, it’s her mind, because that’s the only real explanation she has.
She is, at the end, just like those hated golden geese. Her brain is snapping under the strain.
Unless—of course.
Unless she is rotting.
She’s not. She’s not.
She leaves Anatomy and hacks into a tissue. Something wet and strangely cold lands in her palm and she folds the kleenex round it, doesn’t look at it, keeps it in her hand till it warms to her skin and she can find a trash can and drop it in. Her eyes averted the whole time.
It’s not real. It’s not real, except for how it is.
She hunches late over her textbooks, spinning a highlighter between her clumsy fingers, dropping it half the time. Her knuckles solidifying. Rigor mortis. She feels like she can’t get her shoulders from around her ears, feels like her bones might be calcifying into crawling craving hunchbacked submission.
“Do you think you have cancer?” her primary doctor says, tentatively. He’s an older man, veering towards just plain old, with white hair and a mustache and a gaze that says he doesn’t know what to do with Allison, with her neatly cut hair and ramrod posture and half a medical degree. Doesn’t know what to do with someone who swears they’re not ill, swears they’re not sick they’re decomposing except maybe slap them with Munchausen or hysteria, like she’s a Victorian woman whose uterus has gone wandering.
Allison stops going to the doctor.
Allison starts painting her nails again.
Layers and layers of black and red, alternating, so that she can’t tell whether it’s the endless polish that’s staining the keratin or something worse.
With the polish and rivers of acetone, she can pretend her fingernails are peeling, corroding, changing color like something gone to seed because of the chemicals.
“Your skin looks really good,” one of her—not friends, Allison doesn’t have friends, not exactly—classmates says, looking her over with an assessing eye. She’s a pretty, bouncy thing, someone Allison hates on principle, with her blonde ponytail and her legs sculpted by running endless miles. She’s extremely smart, and Allison sits behind her in both the classroom and rankings in biochemistry, and Allison hates her, hates her—
“Thank you,” Allison says, politely. Gives her a smile.
“What are you using?” the blonde says, returns the smile, something hopeful in her eyes. She shifts from one white sneakered foot to the other. “I’m breaking out like crazy, right now—I think it’s all the stress? And they tell you to drink more water, but like, I don’t want to have to pee every thirty seconds on the floor so—”
Allison imagines spitting in her mouth.
Imagines hacking up black putrefaction, like ink or ichor, out from the cavity that is her body and spitting it at her open, laughing mouth. Imagines the splatter of it across her high cheekbones, the way it would clump together in the blonde. The way it would never come out, never scrub away, would rot her away just the same it’s rotting Allison away.
Allison swallows, thickly. Her mouth tastes like mold. “I think it’s the rice toner,” she says. Smiles with her lips closed, so the blackness in between her teeth doesn’t show.
“I’ll try that!” Blonde says, smiles, genuinely, at her.
Allison goes home and rubs at the skin of her arms until her forearms are red and burning, like she’s been out under the sun for days and days. Till it’s pink and scaly and all the hair there has been abraded off, till she is a smooth glabrous thing, a creature that has never seen the sun or the warmth of day.
She’s not sick. She’s not ill. She’s not dying. You can’t be dying if you’re already dead. She’s just waiting for everything else to catch up. She’s a walking corpse, and Allison doesn’t understand how no one else can see that.
Understands suddenly, cold pang of dread, how no one else can see that.
Allison doesn’t imagine her mind. The mind is a thing she rarely thinks about. She eschewed as many philosophy classes and papers as she could get away with. So she does not imagine the mind coming apart.
Instead, when they pop the cranium off another cadaver, Allison looks and sees her own brain instead.
A lump of white meat, cracked open like a crab leg. She can almost see the final fatalistic sparks of electricity that could’ve bounced between the neurons as they fought for life, even at the end.
Sees her own brain, unraveling. Turning to soup in her skull. Pictures taking the wrinkly folded up mass and pulling it like taffy, stretching it, till it’s just long lengths of flat white tissue. Ironing out all the pesky things she doesn’t like about herself—her jealousy-fear of other women that manifests as a spitting hatred, her ingrained disdain of anyone she considers less than her, that poison that lives in her brain that she cannot get rid of, an abscess she refuses to lance, the surety that she’s right, that they are less, her childish fear of spiders crawling in her mouth in the night.
Her conviction that her body has died long ago, and she’s puppeting it around through sheer stubbornness.
When her left molar pops out of her aching gums, Allison touches the tip of her tongue to the gaping hole and calmly replaces it, held in place with a piece of sterile white gauze.
Psychology is a soft science, and Allison would never deign to lower her gaze down to it. Besides, she’s not crazy. Her brain chemistry is just out of balance.
She refused the referral her primary care doctor gave her, and the half-tilted question, the vague sense of pity inherent in therapist. She goes to a psychiatrist instead, gives a toneless, flat bulleted list of her delusions. Sits on a too-comfortable velvet couch, refusing to let her spine touch the back, no s-curve into something like submission.
“We can start you on a low dose of Chlorpromazine,” the doctor says, peering at her through coke bottle glasses. “I’d be interested in discussing—”
“I wouldn’t,” Allison says, and takes her script and her doctor’s furrowed brow with her to the pharmacy, even as her stomach bile arches its way up into her esophagus, burning away wafer thin layers of mucosa, muscularis mucosa, submucosa, and muscularis propria. She says their names like a prayer, in her head, an orison to the two to three cell thick stratum slowly dissolving in the ossified white husk of her throat.
Her nails are peeling.
Allison stands in line at Walgreens and peels them off in thin layers, sheaves of wheat, blood and bone pooling underneath these strange unfurling petals. She doesn’t look down at her busy, nervous hands. Stares straight ahead, is polite to the pharmacist (couldn’t even be a real doctor, had to settle for tossing round pills like some sort of Vegas dealer for pharmaceuticals—) and leaves.
When she walks through the automatic door, there’s a call for clean up in the pharmacy department—bio-hazardous material on the linoleum floor.
There is iron under her tongue all the time these days, perfumed with mildew.
Allison’s hair is complimented by an old woman at the grocery store. “Beautiful!” she says, admiring. “So thick and healthy. You’re lucky to have your youth—”
Allison stares at her, and wonders if the woman can see the bloody flakes coming off her scalp, like the devil’s own dandruff. Corpse hair doesn’t really grow, after all. It’s just the skin shrinking as the body—
She goes to class, writes notes in her strict up and down print. She’s fossilizing. Her outside become a shell. Something pretty and rigid and smooth like an oyster, like an eggshell, hiding the deformed chick beneath, her brain’s decaying oozing half hearted attempt to make sure the heart stays pumping.
It is extremely funny, in a way, that she cannot keep food down anymore. Or digest it, maybe, is the better term. It is extremely funny because she is losing weight by the hour, and everyone keeps asking what she’s doing, because she looks amazing, Allison, really.
Allison does not look amazing. She looks dead. She squeezes her dry eyes shut—she’s going through dry eye drops like crazy, now, about a bottle a day, as her eyes are refusing to hydrate on their own.
There’s something in her eyes. She rubs at it, instinctively, and then harder and harder and harder and harder until her eyelashes are stuck under the lid, until the eye itself seems liable to snap off the ocular nerve, rolling around in the socket like a cue ball, turning around to look into the back of her skull and see—
Nothing. Nothing there anymore. Just rot and ooze and empty, empty, empty.
Allison sighs, opens her eyes. Black before her. Gives a shake of her head, feels them resettle in her eye sockets. Vision returning, running through points of exposure, opening up the lens to the sky. Clicking like marbles. Like glass. Like stone.
Allison makes a decision.
Allison stays late, in the lab. Working on her cultures. Waits till she is the last one there, the last one in the building, the last one in the whole entire world, maybe.
She thinks it would be funny. To be the last one in the world. There wouldn’t be a single live person on planet earth.
She goes down to the morgue. She feels at home, there, and smiles at the thought. Her lips crack as she does so, at the corners. She can’t really feel how far things are supposed to stress. Or stretch. Doesn’t really get the natural limits of the body anymore, just what’s in and out of habit.
It doesn’t matter. It’s not like she’s bleeding.
She goes down to the morgue. Turns on the lights. Lays out her tools. Carefully, she scrubs in. Takes her time. Cleans her fingernails, what’s left of them, scrubs around her delicate wrist bone, goes up to the elbows. Across all that smooth skin, with no give, no warmth.
The last thing she does is turn on the recorder. Microphone hanging above the table like a noose, or a face coming out of the clouds. A vision. A saint. A hallucination.
When she puts herself on the table, she has to give a little hop, to reach. It’s a little too tall for her.
Allison clears her throat. “The patient is a 25 year old woman with no major personal or family history of medical issues. However, for the past seven months she had been suffering Cotard delusions, being convinced that her body, particularly her organs and the inner workings, were dead and decaying within the shell of herself. This, obviously, is untrue.”
She swallows. Picks up the scalpel. Her voice doesn’t waver as she says, “Beginning the autopsy with a y-shaped incision, starting underneath the left clavicle.” She has to push the scalpel hard against this hardened shell of her former skin, the angle wrong, her grip strange, the strange carapace she has formed around her inside fighting her, here, at the last, but even it splits under Alison’s single minded determination, her diamond sharp mind narrowed to this final point.
Underneath her steady hands, her corpse blooms.
Isabel Yacura is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, New York. She has been featured in Kelp Journal, Apricity Magazine, National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, and other publications. She’s currently represented by Haley Casey at CMA Literary, and can be found @isabelyacura on Twitter.
Euphony Journal 