Suture Read online

  “You’ll notice I don’t cut deeply around the entire section of skin I plan to use. Some instructors might tell you differently, but I find that to be a messier, more painful way of lifting the material.” Using the scalpel, she pried up a few millimetres of skin from the short edge she’d jut into, then grabbed onto the skin firmly and pulled back the same way you peel a sticker from its backing. Pulling back with one hand, she used the other to drag the blade at a narrow angle from edge to edge underneath the lifted skin. A little at a time, the strip of skin in her hand lengthened as the seeping red-and-white rectangle on her arm grew. Her face never slipped from its mask of tight-lipped concentration. The initial surface-level incisions helped keep the rectangle controlled as she cut it off flick by flick. Finally, she arrived at the bottom end of the rectangle, where she pressed the blade deeply into the final edge and pulled the skin loose with a tug. She placed the rectangle blood down on the palette and wrapped the towel around her arm.

  “Okay, you guys who have worked with skin before, if you do it differently, that’s okay: go ahead and do it the way you know. Everyone else, please, try it the way I showed you.” She put two elastics around either end of the towel wrapped around her forearm to hold it in place, swiftly cleaning off her scalpel and putting her palette out of view. She walked over to the speakers to turn the music back up. “Given our time constraints, let’s keep it to three or four pieces of skin, max, and none of them much bigger than three-by-five. As always, ask for help if you need it.”

  Stephen and the rest of the class shifted once more in their seats, stirring their various jars of blood to keep them from thickening, pulling their faces into contemplative frowns, running their hands along the fleshiest parts of their bodies. Finn watched closely, only half-interested in her own creation. The easels for this class, unlike for the traditional painting class, held the canvases like a tabletop, and the students now danced their fingers lightly across the blank white surface, tracing outlines of a thought or a scene or perhaps nothing at all.

  Finally, one woman started to work. She placed her heart in the bottom right corner of the canvas, so close to the edge it threatened to topple, and briskly started painting dark unfiltered blood in uneven circles around the rest of the surface. Another woman was carefully preparing her palette, mixing toners and liquefiers into the little puddles of blood to create different colours and textures. Others had pulled aside their smocks and were starting to peel little rectangles of skin off the sides of their torsos. Deanne paced the room slowly, checking the students’ progress, handing out extra towels. The drop sheets underneath each workstation were mercifully dark, showing neither the spill from today’s projects nor the stains from last week’s.

  A quiet hum of conversation and inquiry gradually rose to match the volume of the music, Deanne flitting now from raised hand to raised hand, the atmosphere once again wet with the sound of blood sloshing and smearing and mixing, skin squelching into the canvas and readjusted noisily again, again, again, organs slapping into place. More advanced students started snapping out their ribs, texturizing their canvases with the various edges of the bone. After an hour of working time and with twenty minutes left in class, Deanne turned the music down to call out, “Just about time to clean up, folks. Put on your final touches, take your photographs, and then I’ll show you how to stitch the skin back in place.” Some of the students were already pale and sweating, and at the sound of Deanne’s voice they started. They rested themselves heavily in their seats. Their chests hung open.

  Deanne wandered over to where Finn sat, eyes wide and liquidy as she watched her father tidy his canvas and take out his camera. Finn smiled when Deanne knelt to look at her work.

  “This is beautiful, Finn!”

  “Thank you, Miss Deanne.” She blushed deeply and clutched at the boa still wrapped around her shoulders. “I really liked your class tonight. I liked being able to watch everyone make their art.”

  “I’m glad you liked it, hon. Maybe you can join one of my classes — talk to your dad about it sometime, okay?”

  “Really?” She swung the ends of the boa wildly, accidentally catching Deanne in the face as she stood up to help the students with their tidying.

  “Really really,” she said as she walked back to the front of the class. “I run some classes with kids not much older than you are, and you’d fit right in.”

  With renewed vigour, Finn jumped back into her chair to finish her work for the evening. After a few minutes, she grabbed a small Polaroid camera from her backpack and photographed the piece, shaking the picture so it would appear faster. Satisfied, she hurriedly stuffed all the materials back into her pack and set her eyes back on her father, curious to see how everything spread out on his canvas now went back where it belonged.

  In a corner near the speakers, Deanne unwrapped the towel around her arm and rinsed off the patch of exposed muscle underneath. She brought thread and a needle over to her table and sat down quietly, watching the artists tidy and photograph their pieces. Satisfied with his work, Stephen carefully snapped three pictures of it before grabbing his lung from the canvas. Finn watched keenly as he thrust the organ back under his ribcage. He used a strip of beige material to hold his reattached rib in place, breathed deeply a few times, and then pulled, pushed the skin from his chest back together. The music filled the room, overpowering even the distinct crunch of breastbones sliding back into place, the hiss or rush of sharp breathing. Stephen hunched his shoulders, his torso concave, and brought a threaded needle to the base of the gash down his chest, pulled it through his pale skin. The thread stuttered as he sewed. Even when he closed his eyes, briefly, to breathe hard and shallow, needle and thread in hand, Finn herself hardly blinked.

  With ten minutes left in class, Deanne started her second demo. She placed the loose rectangle of skin back onto her arm, pressing it flat, matching its pale edges to the now-pinkish edges she originally cut it from. The key, she explained, was to keep the sutures loose and spaced well apart, and allow the skin to do most of the reattaching, on its own terms. Otherwise it could morph and stretch as you stitched, leaving you with a wrinkled or mismatched patch of skin. Her face, breath, and tone never changed as she pulled the thick needle and thread through her spasming forearm. Once she had tied off the final edge, she set the needle aside and picked up a folded square of gauzy bandage, one of a dozen laid out on the table beside her. She set it on top of the newly sutured rectangle, then used butterfly bandages to fasten it tightly to her arm on each edge.

  “There’s enough gauze and bandages here for all of you — please make sure you don’t skip this step. This will help the skin heal flat and clean, with minimal scarring. If you need a bigger piece of gauze, or more butterfly bandages, let me know.” Deanne tidied her demo station, then walked from easel to easel to pass out gauze and bandages. Soon the artists were shedding their smocks, wiping down their reassembled torsos with sanitizing cloths, and easing their way back into strategically loose clothing. Bloodied smocks, towels, and drop sheets piled up in the industrial rolling laundry bin in the corner by the speakers. Unlike at the start of the class, not even a murmur materialized in the studio as workstations collapsed — no pleasantries, aside from a soft “Great class, Deanne, thanks,” from time to time.

  “You have a good class, Finn?” Stephen’s voice was soft and raspy as he collected his daughter.

  “It was the best! Can I come with you again next week? Deanne said she might even have a class I can join — do you think I could join a class, Dad?”

  “I don’t know, hon. Let’s talk to Mom about it. Did you say thanks?” Finn nodded vigorously. Stephen nodded slowly. He slipped the small backpack over her shoulders, took her hand, and they walked together into the oppressive August evening.

  Eva: the eyes

  rolling over her skin while she slid her fingers under his eyelids and pulled, felt his blood running over her knuckles,
felt him yell. Felt him bleed. She lowered her eyes and opened her notebook.

  After class, they walked together in silence to their usual coffee shop. He sat down at their usual table while she ordered their usual drinks, and he didn’t look up from his phone when she set the cups down on the table and settled into her chair. Eyes still down, he suddenly said, “You’ve been a bit of a bitch lately.”

  She was surprised by the directness of the accusation, a name-calling he hadn’t revisited since he’d started going to therapy before their engagement — before he learned how to call her a bitch without name-calling.

  “What?” But he rolled his eyes and laughed. As if you don’t know what I’m talking about, he said, but somehow he didn’t say it, and she wondered if he was right.

  “It’s a slippery slope, is all,” he said with a shrug. “You’re better than that.” And she agreed with him: she was better than that. She was about to ask for clarification when her phone rang. She turned it over to see who was calling, and she heard him sigh.

  “It’s my sister,” she said, holding the screen toward him, but he rolled his eyes again, stood abruptly. Whatever, he didn’t say, looking down at her impatiently.

  “I have to go.” Me or your sister? he didn’t say, and the phone eventually stopped ringing, and he sat back down. He looked at her expectantly. Her skin felt too small for her body, her lungs too small for air. She massaged her face into a small smile.

  “I love you,” she said, the words tight and painful in a hollow chest. “Sorry I didn’t wake you this morning.” He nodded and lifted his mug to his lips. She looked away.

  her way up from the mailroom, and almost no time at all to be proud because right away, his are you really thinking of going? as if the months of talk of her moving for her PhD had never even happened, I got in! and she shouldn’t have flinched when he put down the book he’d been reading but she did flinch, at the sound of it, the slam of it, the rattle of the tabletop, she did flinch and she shouldn’t have taken a step back when he rose from the couch but she did, I was going to give you a fucking hug, congratulations and oh sorry and the ice of his arms around her almost made her shudder. It lasted hours, days. It lasted the rest of their marriage, in slammed doors and hissed cruelties and damp apologies and ultimatums. She had gathered the rage-torn pieces of the letter in the early-late hours of a Thursday morning, of a Wednesday night, alone again with his exit ringing in her ears. She had gathered the pieces of the letter and begun to tidy, had begun again to inventory the his and hers of the apartment, each time relinquishing more and more to the his list until finally, that night, the only thing left on her list was her side of the closet and a small box of sentimental trinkets. It all fit easily into the trunk of a cab.

  A movie played at the front of the room:

  A woman sits in front of a mirror on a dark red towel. Behind her, two cameras sit on two tripods, each facing the mirror, one blinking red. The mirror is ornate, massive; it leans against a light-grey wall and reflects the scene: another light-grey wall behind the woman and the tripods. The woman looks directly into the reflection of the lens. She reaches her hands up to her face.

  She places the heel of her left hand against the top of her forehead and uses two fingers to pull her left eyelid up and away from the eyeball. Her right hand gently massages the lower lid and she swivels her eye calmly in its socket, pulling the upper eyelid farther and farther up. The pink interior of the upper lid glistens in the mirror. Once the lid is almost completely detached, the woman rolls her eye downward; her right eye closes involuntarily as it follows suit. The left iris disappears.

  Her left hand braces itself as she moves her right fingers up toward the space between her eye and the eyelid. She reaches her middle finger into the newly formed gap: it disappears two knuckles deep into her eye socket and a small amount of light, watery blood spills out onto her cheekbone, onto the bridge of her nose. The muscles in her jaw harden. Her teeth grind audibly. Her breath catches violently in her abdomen. Her right eyelid flutters.

  She brings her right palm in close to her face and tilts her head forward. There is a small pop. When she brings her hand away from her face, her eye sits in her palm, pinkish and slippery, and her left eyelid droops over the empty socket. It seeps. She places the eye beside her in a clear dish and repeats the process on her right eye. When she is finished, she feels beside herself for the dish and slowly rises to her feet. She turns away from the mirror and walks to the tripods, her eyes in one hand and the other hand extended in front of her, feeling for the camera not yet filming.

  She deftly slips her eyes into the battery section of the second camera, turns off the other. There is a moment of darkness and the sound of a camera turning on. The scene returns: vivid, bright, touchable in its new crispness. She stands behind the second camera, slick pink hands at her sides. Her eye sockets seep. She stares into the reflection of the lens.

  The screen at the front of the room showed Eva plucking out her eyes in gritty detail. In the audience, Eva watched herself, a lifetime ago, a shadow of herself in every way. Eva watched herself — her short, dyed hair, her sallow face, her sickly collarbones — she watched herself plucking out her eyes on the screen at the front of the room, watched her colleagues, students, and peers look on, or look away, or look at each other or their drinks. She felt someone move closer to her.

  “Kind of pretentious, isn’t it?” Eva didn’t turn her head to look at the woman who’d spoken, but could feel her long hair brushing against her arm. She couldn’t stop a crooked smile.

  “Is it?” she asked, eyes still watching the screen where her movie was playing. The woman’s soft body pressed into Eva’s side; Eva felt the woman tilt her head in, look up at her smile, decide whether shallow criticism might build or break a bond with this particular stranger, if this particular stranger was worth it.

  “I mean, the inattention to lighting and framing just seems so . . . simple. Wouldn’t it be more powerful to have something so gruesome be, like, exquisitely produced?” Eva’s smile cracked into a grin despite herself, and she turned toward her critic, a woman who seemed to be around her age, probably a student like her.

  “Interesting consideration. What brings you here tonight?” But she already knew she wouldn’t hear the answer: the woman’s eyes had brightened as soon as Eva had turned to look at her, and they shone, and she shimmered, and Eva was lost in the sharp line of her jaw, the soft curve of her neck, the clattering of her bracelets every time she gestured, in how often she gestured, in the way her long hair seemed ever at risk of getting caught up in the clattering bracelets, in how somehow this woman radiated chaos but embodied grace. It was the silence of the bracelets that drew her back to the woman’s expectant eyes, a question unheard and unanswered.

  “I’m so sorry,” and Eva lowered her head and looked back at the woman through her eyelashes, not sorry at all, “I was admiring your style and I’ve managed to miss everything you just said.” A miniscule flush curled up the woman’s cheeks, lifted the corners of her lips, scrunched the corners of her eyes. “Forgive me. Did you say your name?” and she extended her hand and ached to feel the woman’s hand in hers and was embarrassed by the want, its acceleration, her fickle gut. “I’m Eva.”

  “Dev,” she said, and her hand was even softer than Eva had imagined, and their shared grasp was firm and it lingered, and the shine in Dev’s eyes steeled into a dare, or a promise, or a threat, and Eva knew her own gaze was no match for it, knew the want was written all over her face. “Nice to meet you, Eva.” Their hands fell to each of their sides and Eva turned her body back toward the screen, where a new film was playing; her eyes
lingered on Dev.

  “Do you have something screening tonight?” Eva asked, and Dev laughed softly and shook her head, and Eva felt herself blush, rush to correct herself, but Dev’s hand had reached out again to rest lightly on Eva’s arm in that breathy laugh of denial, and in that breathy laugh there was nothing Eva didn’t want to capture, replay, and she was again lost.

  In that breathy laugh, “No, I’m no artist, just a big nerd that loves pretentious films,” and in that soft touch, “Do you?” and then it was Eva’s soft laugh, edged with embarrassment, a vague gesture toward the screen and the past,

  “Ah, well, yes.” And unsurprisingly, even embarrassment looked good on Dev.

  The next morning, Dev pulled one of her legs out from under Eva’s sheets and draped it over Eva’s hip while Eva ran her fingers over the curve of Dev’s hip. You look like a goddess, Eva didn’t say, not yet, not even when Dev’s beautiful smile spread slowly across her face, not even when her soft lips brushed against Eva’s arm, not even when she shifted and the sheet slipped further off her body. I think this is what happiness feels like, she didn’t say, not yet, not even when Dev reached up and pulled her face close for another kiss, not even when Eva’s cat surprised them both by jumping up into the bed, not even as their laughter cascaded over the mess of sheets.