How to See the Whole Monster

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

I’ve put a lot of time into making this creature.

Years went into shaping the clay, making a crude humanoid outline on the surgical table, building it into the shape of what I thought looked best.

Eventually, I had to throw it away. I had to start with the bones, all 203 of them. Exquisitely shaped, all, rounded out the edges and the cracks, smooth and flawless as I could make them.

Then came the viscera, the organs, the life-systems that keep the body going. Heart to pump, stomach to digest, bowels because we’re all full of shit sometimes. Kidneys and livers to filter out the poison. Blood cells: Iron red to carry oxygen around, white to fight off infections. Bone marrow to keep making blood — and lymph, and hydrochloric, and all of the hormones drips that send our messages, that order our bodies around. The great big pulsing brain, all the way down to the myelin sheaths and the potassium ion channels. Delicate systems, all, hand-stitched blood vessels, filigree capillaries and pulse and blood and flow. Tiny work, precision work, work that wears out your hands and your eyes. But it must be perfect.

Then came the musculature, cartilage, and tendons. A little more human-looking, now. The muscles give the skeleton a point; the tendons tie them down to the bones that they need to move: simple pulleys, diametrically…