Artwork by Yza Palangas
The preoperative evaluation reveals significant burning in the right atrium, a cracked distal phalanx, a buildup in the pharynx, and an abscess hanging like dead meat from a sliver of bone. Symptoms include shaking, ballet-esque movement, fingers and toes pointed straight up. Upon further inspection, I note butterflies—bent, torn, rotting—leaking with the spit, leaking. A comorbidity of roaches feasting on hair follicles, translucent, shimmery skin. A necessary invasion (1), then, seen plain as day.
The instruments are disinfected. They lie on metal trays. The heart beats a steady rhythm as I slice a careful incision through the integument‚—a clean line drawn straight, a birthday cake at the scalpel’s edge, crumbs on dirty lips. Layers of peach and red are pinched, pulled taut. The heartbeat continues. So does the machine’s beep, counting seconds. Precious, precious seconds. The scalpel meets a sliver of bone near the side of the tricep, shifted sideways like a ship consumed by coral. Beds of the foliage ebb and flow. They hum of electricity.
I excise the rapidly twirling stems—pink and red and white—a mound of gelatine gummies stuck orange-blue in a sunwashed cornfield. Above, clear skies: a carnival tent, a swirling canvas of rainbow, like a silly children’s song. The humming comes undone as well, uncoiling and unraveling. The tune dims. Metal scrapes nerves clean. The abscess is malignant (2): it feeds and begs for more. Heavy, stone-weighted, red and white and pink all over, soaking wet and made of blood. Made of cranberry juice and murky lakesides. At home only among the dead.
The phalanx has gone raw. Through the undergrowth, insects shiver in the black of a brilliant white light. The pipe opens—glow-up shoes leaking phlegm onto rusty yellow grass. Back and forth, back and forth. Fluid dripping, fluid dripping. Roaches and red dots and ants carrying crumbs swerve to avoid the sputum (3), mutating green on foreign ground. Bike tires roll over split airways, skin burnt red like blood. The butterflies are not butterflies—contrary to earlier observation—they are shaped like little wings, spinning sideways and eaten with salt-dusted dirt. Helicopter seeds, they used to call them. I scrape alphabet soup and pink box dye: an E and an R and an R emerge, soaked in glitter (4). A strong rinse in disinfectant, and they are divine.
Epidermis torn with calluses, a raised layer that begs picking. Through it, the shadow of a broken thing beyond sight—the unnatural bend of the finger, a blueish-purple tinge. Underneath: the shape of a doll’s head. Underneath, underneath: the core of the earth, the core of the sun. Planets arranged in order above a little blue bed, Mercury slightly crooked. Bone ridges lit by cheap LEDs (5), flashing blue and green and red and a white that is really hospital yellow. The cat that ate an ornament, dead by the next year, tail gone sideways. The unfinished mantle. The open flame. Hot, dirty water. A memory in dim light, bent at an impossible angle. A refraction of something real.
A contusion forms on the heart’s outermost layer, sucked clean and dry of moisture. No longer red, but a pale pink; no longer massive and beating and pulled tight with ventricles. The layers peel away, sticky. A corner store with a broken down sign, felt Valentines cards and dry-erase markers, the smell of an unfamiliar pool in a hotel off the side of a long, wide foreign road. The burning is scrubbed clear with heavy-duty soap, scented red apple. The warmth of school hallways after an extended recess in the snow. The sticky drag of dried gum. Taking apart an animal eraser—he extirpation of the ears, the body, the feet, the little stomach. The elective replantation of a paper heart and an excess of empathy. A merciful, albeit forgetful, god.
A final tapestry of sutures: translucent thread and glowing white. An empty jar. A vacant house. A frog with a line cut straight to its stomach.
It is a fact universally known that the act of cutting, twisting, repairing, removing—addressing blots, malformations, lesions, whether mediate or immediate—are considered invasive by none more than the body being modified: layers split, nerves twisted, ligaments repaired, joints removed. The being left behind. It is a fact universally known that in every child there is a buildup of helicopter seeds in the pharynx, an abscess of carnations hanging like dead meat off of a bent guitar string, a broken finger with a Milky Way bandaid, and a burnt heart (6). It is a fact universally known that in every place, there will at some point have been something dead. It is no shock, therefore, that one finds dead slices of the self—like bacon at Sunday brunch—in every place that they have ever been, and every world they have ever left. It is not a shock at all.
In the mid-mourning, the frogs leap from lilypad to lilypad, speckled backs shining in burnt sunlight. Slowing becoming younger, slowly remembering how to swim. They used to know; now they do not. I used to know; now I know not. Now we can only drown. So we begin the un-understanding, the sticky promise, the anastomosis (7).
A prescription: 10 ml a day, served in a little pink bottle. Phlegm glows burnt orange in firelight. Intravenous capillaries become veins. Becoming a beating that does not come from a machine. A finger slightly twisted, slightly sore, curled into the core of the palm. Telling fortunes on still-growing lines. In refracted light, I see my own eyes at an impossible angle. A scalpel. A lighter aflame. Bloodied carnations in a gaping chest, spinning red and white and pink all over.
(1) Surgery can be defined as the art of treating lesions and malformations of the human body by manual operations, mediate and immediate. Every surgical form is considered an invasive procedure.
(2) It is cancerous. It will last.
(3) Coughed up phlegm on an alphabet carpet, or the marble games at doctors offices, or the insects in corpses once the scalpel is put away.
(4) How very human.
(5) Nostalgic for a burning of a long-gone world, eating pieces of plastic for dinner. Sitting sickly in front of a glowing TV.
(6) All easily fixable. All easily removed.
(7) Like a Chinese finger trap. Like synthesis.
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