Pieces of a Girl

Chapter One: The Lightbox

She has sandals on and as we walk I can see how they’re cutting into her feet in the heat. Later she will sit on the edge of her bed rubbing gently at the red stripe around her heel and making small ‘sss’ noises when she touches too hard on the broken skin.

The museum is cavernous with age and importance. Our footsteps echo in the entrance and voices become only sounds floating up between the columns, like the far-off barking of a dog at night.

We are going to see the skeleton. His name, it says on a small sign inside his glass case, is Max Bernmann, and although he was a poor man he gave to Science the most generous gift: his body. I look at the grooves in Max’s fingerbones and wonder at how he arranged his gift to Science. I wonder if I would like to give myself to Science. I see myself perched oddly on Max’s chair in a glass case, with people coming to look hard at the bones in my feet, and the little curling bits of paper stuck into all my bones with pins. Femur, they say. Scapula. Tibea. Vertebra. Like the names of jungle animals, or the gods who lived in Roman times who could drain oceans just by leaning down to drink.

My mother is beside me again, back from the Ladies’ where she has straightened her skirt and smoked a cigarette. The cigarette smell falls from her mouth with each new word she says into my year. “All right. Now –” and her voice moves slowly from the top of Max’s skull, crazed with tiny hairline cracks where the Scientists had to break it with a hammer to get the brain out, to the sad empty holes of his eyes, to his teeth, his neck, his spine.

Sometimes a person will stop and watch, and listen to me and my mother stepping down the vertebrae like stairs, climbing down the bones of a long-dead poor man on a stool in a glass case.