Rough Draft XF Fic!
Feb. 25th, 2003 04:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catch22girlSo, here it is.
Title: See It With Your Own Eyes
Author: FirePhile -- FirePhile@aol.com
Spoilers: None
Summary: After her first autopsy she didn't eat meat for a week.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Belong to 1013 and FOX.
Note: Inspired greatly by a video I saw a few weeks ago. Title is from the film by Stan Brakhage.
After her first autopsy she didn't eat meat for a week.
In theory, it had been easy. She had laughed along with her friends who whispered how they were going to name their corpse "Mr. Perkins.", after the professor.
Theory, however, could not prepare her for the feel and the smell - after a lifetime of observing she was participating and only fear of embarrassment kept her from gagging.
They were vagrants, homeless people, unwanted and unloved. Their bodies were donated to science, lent to science since there was no other recourse. They died in numerous ways; stabbed, shot, poisoned, drowned, burned alive, hung, diseased, suicide. A once clean blue dress lay draped over a metal table, dirty pants over another, shoes to one side, clothing in sad little piles, bodies covered only by stained white sheets.
She swore she would never forget the moment the sheet was pulled back and the teacher began speaking in an almost bored tone about the person who they were about to get to know all too well. The eyes were closed, the body flaccid, and she tried to remember that their soul was long gone.
Still, that first Y-incision she almost felt. The sight was both terrible and fascinating. She could not look away. Her own scalpel hovered over the whitening flesh and she tentatively made her first cut.
Later, under the skin, it was almost a relief, the body less human and more animal, parts to be labeled and organized - it was all meat, all muscle and the inside of a cow or another animal wasn't so different...this last thought terrified her and she tried to blink it away.
Too much distance, she realized, was a dangerous thing.
Lying in bed with her boyfriend, running her hands absently over his body, she thought that some day he too would be lying under a scalpel, his eyes forever closed. She could name the muscles under his skin, could almost see them, could imagine someone removing his vital organs and peeling back his skin. It was too easy to see the empty chest cavity, the machine like manner of doctor...and then she was imagining her own body on the table...her skin being cut away, her ribs cracked, her brain displayed like a trophy.... As she rolled away from him, she hugged herself deeply and looked at the alarm clock.
In her dream, she pulled back the sheet on the metal table and found herself, bloody but alive and trying to stop the scalpel.
Every night, the face changed but the dream remained the same. Her father, her mother, her brothers, her older sister, her best friend; each wound up under the sheet.
On the floor in front of the toilet trying not to cry at her weakness, but suddenly all to aware of everyone's mortality.
I couldn't do it, she thought, I could never let any of them be ripped apart, I could never allow an examination, they will be buried whole, no Y-incision, no bag of organs...just the way they died.
Later, however, she would eat dinner by her corpses and go out for steaks with friends.
Years later, she would sit by her dying sister's bedside and make a decision.
It is selfish and hypocritical, she thought, to protect my loved ones in death while asking people to give me theirs.
Holding onto her sister's hand she apologized for her choice, but when the alarms went off and it was all over she allowed them to wheel her sister down to the basement.
There were no boundaries after that, but she tried to treat each autopsy like there was a person in front of her; a dead person but one who she cut into with respect.
Even more years later, she would remember her original experiences while cutting into a mutilated and tortured body. Each slice, each finding, like a whip against her skin.
If he's found like this, she thought, I won't let anyone touch him. I will bury him without a medical exam, without any more marks...I couldn't live with the images. I know what it entails.
He was found and she refused access to his body.
As he was lowered into the ground she felt a strange sense of grim satisfaction under all the sorrow.
The promise she'd made years ago to herself was finally kept
Feedback! Tell me what you think -- because this was, to put it mildly, strange.
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no subject
Date: 2003-02-25 07:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-25 07:55 am (UTC)I mean, i kept making the mistake of getting into long fics while I was writing mine and yeaah... that can hurt the muse :)
Re:
Date: 2003-02-25 08:11 am (UTC):D i knew there was a reason i liked you. ;D
see! that's the thing. so there are times that i really want to read fic, and i have some other writer-friends who want me to read their stuff, but i just can't!! because....well, i don't want to interrupt the flow, and i don't want to accidentally copy something. and stuff. hehe. so no fic for me ::sigh::
no subject
Well, especially with fic. Since we each have our own view of the characters and especially with *LONG* fic. Like, you don't want to accidentally start channeling another author's view of the character. Plus, what you read can affect the way your story goes. If you're writing an MSR and start reading a lot of "apology" fic or something like that...it could totally change your view of the characters.
That's the one good thing about the show not being on anymore - don't have to worry about this week's episode ruining your own private theories! LOL!
I have the copying problem with papers...I'm always afraid that I've read some of the ideas I'm using elsewhere.
Re:
Date: 2003-02-25 04:01 pm (UTC)<--------always fascinated with this notion, so i'll just shut up now ;D