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In anatomy class they try to teach you the parts of the human body. The names of each specific bone, the function of the heart and its chambers and why it flutters backward like ripped-off butterfly wings when you're around her. Concepts of action potentials and homeostasis and labeling every damn highway intersection of the brain. The sad pathetic pitiful truth that your teacher doesn't want to hear is this: none of that shit actually matters in the big picture. In the long-term.
It's the skeletal muscle you have to focus on. That's the best part, the only part that really matters.
This is what you learn in your mother's arms. She doesn't have to say it. She kisses you on the lips your first day of sophomore year right in front of a bus carrying teens full of needling hunger and vitriol. It is a motherly kiss, of course---she does it while straightening your jacket and fixing your hair, sending the familial signals out to the rest of the world, out to the galaxy like she's trying to contact external life. External life looks down and says: it doesn't matter, does it, Callie?
You pull away from your mother instantly. You're embarrassing me, they're watching, come on mom, seriously, why do you hate me, and all of that, and all of this is happening while your body is puppeteering you forward with strings you just can't find a way to cut yet, forcing you to chase the contact just for a m o m e n t---
before running off, your hoodie tight over your head in shame. In the very very very back you take a seat and watch from the window as your mother bites her lip. She waves you goodbye with a hand covered in a red-stained oven mitt.
If aliens existed, they would probably say Callie! You objectively wanted her to kiss you, we can read it right here on your face with fancy futuristic expression-analysis technology we have because we are aliens, and we know your secret, we know you want your mother to love you and you're starting to blur the definitions in a way that would make even God vomit, and fuck him, so put your hands up and take me to your leader!
And if they were back in the wilderness, if Callie had been in the wilderness with her, if Callie had been born there instead of into loveless monotony, the wilderness would probably say Callie! Get off the bus and kiss your mother! She probably doesn't get kissed in the way you can kiss her, get touched in the way you are capable of touching her, very often, you've seen the way things are with your father, honey, you have to go for it! Bring her back to me, and you can truly be a family! We can be--
The skeletal muscle is the best part. Years later you truly understand this when your mother kills a man. A man who didn't deserve it. A man whose only crimes were not existing online and biting into Shauna a bit too hard —- any touching is biting and any biting is a slithering-in, and we all know how that goes —- not knowing that Shauna's teeth are sharpened, jagged, chipped. The skeletal muscle is the best part.
And God, you don't even know how to feel, grateful or horrified or disgusted or resigned—-the ache embeds itself into your skin like tiny bits of glass: she touched someone else besides dad, and it wasn't me? It wasn't even me?
It hits you now: you are the reason Adam Martin is dead. You put the suspicion in her mind. She ran with scissors.
You wonder how she took care of the body. Chop! There goes pectoralis major. Goodbye supraspinatus. Begone, subscapularis muscle! You picture what it must have looked like when she took care of the body, red dripping over her as she sliced in. You imagine your mother holding a boneblade to your chest, running it over your flesh and sliding her fingers inside like she's fucking someone, grasping her hands around the innards of you. Not even the muscle, just the organs; you're not good enough for that. You aren't good enough.
She killed someone, cut him apart, severed each limb and ran her fingers around the circle of the humerus's point. She killed someone, tore someone open and touched every part of them with a terrified frenzied passion that has never been thrust in your direction by anyone.
She opened someone up and it wasn't you. Silly you! Silly you, because you know the truth, the etched-in eleventh commandment: you are the one thing it will never be. She's just not capable of it. It doesn't click in right, and you're too thin, not fit enough, barely any muscle there.