8
Dissecting Your Dad Katie Danis
Prologue You don’t know him for the first five years. The kitchen door creaks at 3 a.m., a formaldehyde fog, a shadow. Years later, you’ll swear you heard him humming Backstreet Boys one night. He will deny it. Chapter 1 You will need: forceps, funhouse mirror At the county fair, you find him in the Hall of Mirrors. Your green eyes, ski-slope nose, piano hands, all stretched upward like a beanstalk. You call him the Jolly Green Giant when he wears his lime scrubs. He laughs and still makes you eat your beans. Chapter 2 You will need: bonesaw, biology textbooks from 1994 You find him in the margins. College anatomy textbooks, months-old volumes of The American Journal of Gastroenterology, covered in the same cramped scrawl as the notes in your lunchbox. You creep downstairs at 2 a.m. and find him combing through patient files in surgical lamplight. You count twenty streaks of silver hair for twenty years of practice, Twenty years of you stitching him together, Making Frankendad, Saturdays in your car seat wondering about the man clinging to Mom in a parking lot. This is how you come to know your dad through dissection. The scalpel becomes an extension of your arm. You reach for him with knife hands, Cover yourself in papercuts searching for him. Chapter 3 You will need: scissors, New York Times Sunday paper You carve every conversation, every half-done crossword, every coffee mug
