Before the corpse had been exhumed, preparations had been made. In every room the flowers, past their hour and purpose, stretched and yawned and were already gone--a famine rusting the petals--forty eight hours after the funeral. They were fading in the chilling whispers of mid-September.
In August, in heat, escaping, an adolescent girl had collapsed into something, the old forgotten mineshaft, toxins and tailings that haunted the world with another generation's greed. But Shelia, her name, couldn't care. She was hopeless, gazing up at the moonlight making its way through the rising dust and the debris. A cloud rolled like a stone away from the luminescent tomb and a brilliant white light illuminated the corners of the cave. Shelia looked down, her torn jeans, a dark stain as if she had soiled herself, the white-washed wood that pierced her thigh. The moon peeled the night back further; it was not wood at all (nor piss, nor shredded cotton). Her own bone, her broken femur, had torn a wide gash from which the blood discovered nothing. It was gushing from her own ragged skin. Instinctively, like doubting Thomas, she put her hands into the wound. Like warm water...
Shelia's eyes found again the disk of the moon. The effervescent gray of the storm poured over its artificial light. Soon Shelia had fainted. The rain started. The blood and dirt and tears made a thick mud at her feet. When they found her, her left shoe would be stuck there. It would be left behind.
There had been her epilogue, the concussion, the coma, the hope and hopelessness of waiting as the infections indentured her young body to the hospital bed. She was getting better. She was out of the woods. Everything would be okay. "Our prayers have been answered." Then, as if she had fallen through some other false landscape, into a new shivering pit, the fever came over her in the night and by the time her mother arrived to spoon feed her oatmeal for breakfast, she was dead.
Like witches, the coven of doctors convened in the hospital building adjacent to the cemetery. Thick curtains doused the suspicious light. Scapulas and speculum laid out among the slivered lands of the wooden table, eyes and papers fluttering with anticipation, curiosity and anticipation. Every twitching nerve like a candle flame, the forked tongues of snakes and superstitions, the sinister creatures that creep to the edge of the shadows, the dancing ledge, the frayed seam between knowledge and belief. Science ushered in a new era in which the most obscene act may be forgiven in the speculative probing of "knowledge".
Here is the problem. Before the dissection occurred, there had been opinions and ideas already in place that these learned men were expected (if only by themselves) to find in their method. The metaphors of the ancients, the biases of the church, the comforting simplifications that had been passed down by shaman and midwife...all of these were awaiting ratification. Undressing this girl--first of her funeral vestments, then of her skin, then of her muscles--revealed a pornographic expectation, pet suppositions that blurred the candlelight. There is a blindness with which Science tries to see.
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