Halvsies

The cadaver looked different today. The body shape was off, discontinuous, more lumpy than usual under the concealing shroud. The revelatory moment was a bit beyond surreal, a sheet pulled balk to reveal a dismembered body that had been, at some point in the day before, cut nearly precisely in half. A separated pair of legs stared longingly up at the trunk and upper body, intestines and spinal cords split asunder by a gap they had never known.

We hadn't performed the cut, a rare usurpation of our anatomists rights. We had left a body mostly intact, organs separated here and there, but with everything in its right place. We returned to find our work rudely ripped apart, the neat lines of our abdominal dissection shredded by the work of a gigantic saw. It was abrupt for us, a surprise.

Snake's final remaining touch of humanity had been taken, leaving only a disparate leg and torso combo, a value pack from the world's most disturbing store. It was done so we could study the legs and the pelvic girdle more completely, so we could understand the inside of our own hips. Someone had come into the lab, wielding the scientific equivalent of a chain-saw on fifty dead bodies. Someone does this every year.