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 with the handle pointed to the left.

You gather scraps, hoard pieces no patient or pager can take away from you.

You have a 100 in math but still ask him for help with your homework.

Chapter 4

You will need: scalpel, surgical tape

Are you selfish for wanting a surgeon to heal something as trivial as your loneliness?

Are you naïve to think you need him more than anyone else?

His illegible scrawl is etched into your genes, on your face, in every eyebrow tug and neck jerk.

You stitch together scraps of the man in the mirror,

Waiting for a pair of lime green scrubs that you can wrap your arms around like an ace bandage.

Before some hospital comes for another part of him

Say,

“I’m sorry I need so much of you

When you already gave me your eyes

Your nose

Your hands.

You carve yourself up for public consumption, and I thought I could ration the pieces you gave me,

but I am not as selfless as you.

I am not cut out to be a surgeon.”

Epilogue

Intestines squirm through your fingers like cold ramen. Fetal pig strapped supine, chest open to the morning fog.

As you pause cutting, passing the scalpel to your lab partner, a familiar scrawl creeps in.

Rhomboid, trapezius, latissimus, names colonize the husk between your latex fingers.

Anatomy flashcards loop like the chorus to a Backstreet Boys song. Or the Green Giant jingle.

As your partner peels back the chest muscles, a familiar scent catches you.

“I’ve always liked the smell of formaldehyde.”

“You would.” He holds the scalpel out to you. “It’s in your blood.”

-Katie Danis is a sophomore from Greensboro, NC, pursuing a major in Global Studies and a minor in Chemistry.-