During the dissection

During the dissection Jamie lost all of his humanity. From the moment the knife

cut into meat

he was only an object. Moment by moment the knife revealed the miraculous universe that had been inside him. Under the flayed chest white ribs curved down, vaulted, gothic, a cathedral: The navel opened onto a red nave; his bowels

the organ pipes, empty, silent, meaningless in disuse. Skin flaps

were peeled back from his thighs like petals. (His balls removed like cogs, his penis sliced up like a breakfast sausage.) He was an ancient tomb just discovered by archaeologists. The glowing red organs were lifted from him as from a jewel-box of treasures. His glands

made to decorate the necks of queens. The sheen of his kidneys luminous as the brush strokes of Watteau.

The network of veins ready for the shoulders of some long-dead maja. They took his heart like a rose, and the great chest, that had been like a church, or a jewelled Aztec grave robbed by conquistadors,

was empty now and silent as the tomb of a god.