The first dissection you ever saw, live, was on the way home one afternoon from school when you were eight.

Three stops before yours, you had laughed and laughed as kids from your class leaned out the windows dangerously, yelling their goodbyes and joking taunts to the year captain. When you clattered down the steps without saying thanks to the bus driver, you were thinking about stopping at the milk bar to buy a prince's sum of lollies - Redskins and those jelly frogs - and not about death. You always waited at the shop with a friend for his sister, who was intimidatingly older, she went to high school already, to walk you both home. That day, you chewed and pulled at the sugary snake in your hands, chattering as you paced up the hill slowly, one hand in hers. Then, up ahead, you all saw the cat before its victim, pausing at its vicious hiss as you came too close. Before its snarl lay its prize, a nondescript brown mynah, breast torn open and bloody. You hid your face in the older girl's side, and stayed silent as she edged the three of you onto the road - strictly forbidden, but now a necessity - to avoid walking near the corpse.

*

The first time you took a knife to yourself you were only five. It was an accident, of course. When you bled, red trails over tough orange peel still in your hand, you weren't disgusted, but watched amazed at the colour you hadn't realised was in you. Your grandmother squawked when she turned around to see why you were so silent, pulled knife and fruit from your frozen self and wiped away the blood, holding tight onto your finger below the wound. For a child you had surprising strength - you'd cut deep, almost to the bone, as the blade had slipped from the rind to your flesh. Afterwards, somewhere between the frantic half panicked wail half lecture from your parents and the soft wrinkled folds of your grandmother's hug, you'd cried an awful lot and realised it hurt.

When the bandage was finally removed you had an impossibly curved scar from a straight blade, now a yellow line on a white stripe where the sun had caressed around it. You came to remember the incident rather fondly, because it was your first memorable injury, and because you thought the scar looked like a rainbow. For the first few years, you would quietly make wishes on the crooked line, eyes squeezed shut and intent on making the impossible true.

*

Eight years later, you would hold a scalpel just as clumsily, and cut away at another piece of faded life. Year seven science lessons and they threw giggling groups of girls one fish each, floppy and grey. It smelt rank, and you discovered nothing interesting except pearl pink mush, an aversion to the dead look in its eyes, that blood became a dark brown sludge that oozed past probing metal when one of your friends cut too deeply into the long dead heart. Instead, you all carved your initials across its scales before you left, two small letters almost hidden under the flaps of its gills for you. Everyone rushed for the bathrooms after class to rid themselves of fish gut stink with pink floral soap, and that's what you took away from that first evisceration, the overpowering scent fake flowers on your skin for the rest of the day.

But you came to enjoy the experiments. In your senior year, a teacher sourced a pregnant rat for your class, though there was a sense of ungratefulness as one by one people refused to participate. But what you remembered of that day was your delight at the single mouse embryo that was removed from her sac. Your friend dropped it carefully into the jar of formaldehyde, and you both eyed its little curled up form proudly as it floated, from outside the curved glass, a tiny wonder.

The last dissection, you hadn't know it would be, just another biology laboratory session, glimpses of human life through dead animals. The week before, you had hacked uneven slices of an oxen's lung, and watched fascinated as it floated in a glass beaker, to understand the porous property that allowed air to be exchanged, life to continue. The week before that, you had read newsprint through a sheep's cornea, fingers still wet from its sclera as you removed it, wanting to wipe them against your freshly cleaned lab coat. But that last week, you watched sadly as the instructor pinned a frog to cheap board, watched its furious legs kicking nowhere when they were prodded with electrodes, a sign of life where there was none left.

Before the end, there was a fish to dissect again, bringing you full circle. But this time, you were now skilled in evisceration, you cut cleanly through its scaly side and learnt all about the insides as you should - the gills, the gut, the heart that you didn't pierce. No initials either, because you thought it would be childish.

You wished afterwards that you had done it though, something left of that fear and wonder inside.

END

September 03

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