Braincase

I've got the chisel and hammer in my gloved hands, fidgeting with each out of boredom. The anatomy lab is sparkling and nauseating as usual, the gleam of light off chrome given the lie by the pervasive smell of preservatives and sanitized death. We've been here so often by now that the disturbing juxtaposition no longer offends or impacts. The brain is a marvelous thing, adjusting us to our surroundings no matter how strange or unpleasant.

One of my partners holds the saw, the miraculous vibrating serrated edge that somehow can only cut tough material. Another is perched over Snake's head, scraping off those last tenacious bits of fascia from the top of the skull. We had removed the skin the day before, the sterile impersonation of a scalping done quickly and imperfectly, a casualty of dull scalpel blades. We have to remove the leftover soft bits so that the miracle saw can do its work, chopping swiftly and precisely through the skull, yet leaving the internal brain and dura intact.

The girl with the saw moves up to Snake's head, and turns it on. A high pitched buzzing fills the room, and as she lowers the saw to the skull, a small burst of bone dust and smoke plumes upward, bits of burning hydroxyapatite creating another odor in a nostril already at standing room only capacity. She moves awkwardly around the dome of the skull, creating a continuous separation. Now its my turn, and I move in with the hammer and chisel. I place the chisel in newly generated space in the bone, and use it to lever the skull upwards. There is a pop, and the bone falls off, a ragged skull cap in the most literal sense.

The brain is not yet exposed, still wrapped in a covering of thick fibrous tissue. In a live person, the skull would be full of fluid, a protective cushioning and gravity negating layer designed to protect an organ nearly devoid of strong structural components from its own weight. With Snake, there is barely any drainage as we section the dura, revealing at last the former seat of his personality. I take my chisel and i move it down the front of the skull, moving it in a lazy arc to rupture all the attachment points, where his cranial nerves used to tell his face who it was. I use the chisel to sever the brainstem, and with another liquid pop, the brain comes loose.

I reach a hand into a human skull, ignoring the unreal implications of my action, and pull out his brain, a cacophony of most unseemly squishing noises serving in lieu of a drumroll. I am holding the seat of a man's being in my hands, inspecting it incredulously, wondering how this situation just came to pass. The contents of my hand seem such a small thing to loom so large. I remove the falx cerebri from between the cerebral hemispheres, and toss it aside into the debris bin. We set the brain aside, leaving it afloat in its own bath of chemicals, waiting patiently for a neurology lab months away. Turning back to the empty skull, a dissected face staring at us with an empty grin, we dive right back in, searching for the cranial nerves in a space that once held a man's soul.