The First Cut

The strangest thing about walking into a room of 50 dead people is how completely not strange it was. A bustling crowd of twenty-somethings enters the room, gathering four or five to a corpse and staring at the bulging sheets with a curiosity that can only be described (with a cringe) as morbid. We had heard talks, hours of talks. This is our first patient, they told us. Treat them with respect. We had listened seriously, reveled in the concept of receiving such a gift.

We remove the sheets, exposing the skin of the chest to our prying eyes. It was grey, with the consistency of cold wax, wrinkled and molded into sharp creases by the processing these donor's had endured in order to be with us on this bright and sunny day. We sit there, clinically eying the rubberized flesh of one of our former compatriots on this earth, wondering who was going to open up the newly purchased dissection kit and take the first whack at our patient.

I'll do it, I think, and as I open my mouth a small girl grabs the scalpel, and tentatively slices the congealed flesh under the nipple. She is trying to expose the pectoralis major, and with the imperfect confidence of a newly minted anatomist, she is being defeated by her care for the integrity of the structures. She sits there, delicately peeling back layers of fascia and fat, engrossed in the act of perfect invasion we have all conspired to create.

A proctor walks by, and laughs. At this rate, she says, we will be here all day. She grabs the knife, and slices deep. Reaching in with her tools, she roughly separates the skin and fascia from the chest muscles, and slices off the insertion point of the pec major. She holds up her prize, greasy and covered in bits of what had once been, as Mr. Heston said, People. She holds up the muscle from our first patient, for all the world to see.

Start skinning the arm, she says. So we do.