LATTICE
Lindsey Noelle Nichols
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she sees herself wearing the surgeon’s scrubs, snapping gloves, bending over her own body. she peels her skin away, then lifts branches of artery and glossy myelinated curtains of nerve. she rolls up her sleeves and begins uncoiling the intestines, looping them around thumb and elbow like one would loop the cord of an upright vacuum cleaner. she becomes meditative at her task, and then irritated as she struggles with the weight of wound gut. her glasses slip down the bridge of her nose, and she must pause to push them up with the back of her hand. the front of her shirt becomes slick, and sticks to her torso; gradually the mysterious maroon of the liver is exposed, and the shy curve of the gallbladder behind it. her nose wrinkles at the meaty, metallic smell. but what bliss she feels when her slippery rope goes taut, when she dislodges the heavy cancerous colon with a gentle tug; she lets the armful of gut slip to the floor, she cradles the pale colon, grown hard and useless, in wondering hands
he is only sorry that no one will write the last word thick muscular walls press in, laced with purple veins and bright red spider webs. he was going to be a boy, but his hips are lodged between the bony crests of her pelvis, in a sinkhole too narrow for his passage. all is abrasive and stinging without the buoyancy of his amniotic bath. the walls press against his head, molding his soft bone into the shape of her, as one wedges clay against a board. there is nothing to regret, only a flicker in the plum-colored dark and the ache of asphyxiation from which he would rather wander
thank you the ripping pain of strychnine relaxing thank you like a steel hammer on meat, thank you darkness. silver flashing like a coin underwater. please don’t cry. (the scruffy terrier slides down on the steel table, pink tongue protruding from black lips. a pat on the rough head, a caress about the wracked shoulders, encourages the heart to lose
most likely they will not find him until the thaw, and by then an animal will have reduced him to his most irreducible parts: teeth, small thick bones, clumps of hair. the scattered down filling of his jacket will be integrated into bird nests and bear dens. he will have been recycled! stars wink through his frost-clumped lashes as the cold, somehow the hand of the stars overhead, tickles the pits of his lungs with glass feathers. he has only been a capsule for the energy contained within: the motion of muscles becoming metabolic heat, that heat becoming somehow the electrical charge which pumps the blood and fires the thoughts with whistling speed. now what clench and stillness grows up the lattice of his body! he had expected fear of the unknown, fear of bodily cessation, fear of pain - but instead he feels a limpid calm; he is not a hero, he is helpless to battle this dispersion of himself to snowshoe hares, melting ice, the stand of pines he has come to rest under. how can his thoughts remains so crystal while he freezes to death? perhaps it is a characteristic of the medium
the hour is a tunnel, distantly lit. always having been a believer, she feels
someone hits the switch
her left leg has gone numb under the quilts and her scalp feels stung and crawled upon by wasps; she felt them milling in her hair earlier, a needle prick behind her ear, above her forehead growing hot. the foreshadowing of creeping numbness has not escaped her. still, she had expected diminished mental clarity at this impressively infinite moment. there is a small bursting in her head, a popping like water sprinkled across a hot griddle. and behind her eyelids, it is like the cap of a telescope has been removed! and it is most interesting, how she merges with the old flannel sheets and the cotton batting below, how her cells become caught in the warp and weft of thread
she settles into the bucket seat and slams the door shut behind her. she brushes some hair from her face, exhales the stale breath of hunger, drives the key into the ignition and twists. the old beater engine coughs. total exhaustion. she kicks off her pumps in the foot well and slumps back in the seat, easing tight muscles in her lower back. blank like fuzz on the radio. her uniform reeks of stale smoke and spilled beer and squeaky popcorn. she can’t wait to be home, to peel herself out of these nylons and wash the grit out of her pores and eat a cold baked potato. chips of mica in the asphalt glitter. the coolness of the night seeps into her coarse clothes and she hugs herself before rolling up her window, before locking the doors. the motion-sensitive floodlight above her car flickers out. an uncoiling in the backseat behind her, a whoosh - her heart drops out of her body like an old elevator car, god she should have checked
the moment resonates, echoes like a still photograph, projected faster and faster before him until it becomes a continuous and unchanging image inside
two brothers swept out to sea, treading water until the accumulation of lactic acid turns their arms to lead. the younger one has lost his glasses, spits up salt water and cries, slipping beneath the pitching wavelets and not surfacing until his older brother yanks him back up. where are the search boats? the older brother turns himself in the water, scanning the horizon for a speck or a shape. his ribs ache from the effort - already they have lost their shoes, their belts and blue jackets to the dark beneath the waves. his head pounds and he imagines fish nipping at his toes, unseen monsters brushing past his legs with bodies long and serpentine. when his brother flails and sinks, he is too afraid to dive after him, but stays close and plunges an arm down to grab his brother by the scruff. he hauls him back up, shoulder socket popping with water weight and repetition. they float, both red in the face. as he drags the horizon once more with smarting eyes, his younger brother sinks again. no sound this time. he turns and plunges both arms into the sea, kicking his feet to keep his chin above the slap and pitch. he searches with a set jaw, about to cry himself because he is empty, he fears the brush of bony fins against his knuckles, and because his brother no longer struggles and without him he, the older brother, will be alone. his hands come up with nothing and the time passes in incredible increments, a single second stretched between loss and discovery like sugar in a taffy machine. still nothing. his mouth twists in a sob and he is angry with his own weakness - he dives, head-first like a porpoise, and blinks away underwater specks. he frog-kicks down into the cold and colder unseen, faltering with each stroke forward, swimming on despite the splintery-toothed jaws opening for his soft belly, the swiveling upward of glassy eyes alerted to his awkward currents. lungs throbbing for return to his atmosphere, he sees his brother’s pale hand glowing and growing smaller, already so far beneath