There is not enough room in any other part of Yinuo’s apartment, so they have no choice but to do it on her bed. It’s not where she would have preferred to be vivisected, what with how the cheap metal frame creaks and her mattress dips with the slightest ounce of pressure, but the kitchen table is too small and her counter too narrow. At least they’ve managed to get a plastic tarp to put over her faded blue sheets, which crinkles like a candy wrapper with every movement.
Bellamy hovers above, black, stringy hair hanging down like dried seaweed on a line, arms encircling her. Her face is flat and wide, sprinkled with pale freckles, and she is not pretty by any stretch of the imagination. Her bones are knobby and her limbs are long and unwieldy, and Bellamy moves as if she’s surprised she has a body at all.
What Yinuo likes best about Bellamy is her eyes, how she looks at her just like a stray dog she once fed as a child. It was mangy, wild, and desperate, with only a chunk of its tail left. It slunk in the alley outside her house and growled whenever it saw her, a feverish fear illuminating its eyes. It tried to bite her once when she stepped too close, and she could feel the ghost of its touch against her delicate fingers.
She left it a plate of leftovers on a whim, chunks of steamed fish and rice from her dinner. It lapped at the plate only after she was out of sight, and she watched it from her bedroom window, its low tail and matted fur, how greedy it was even for someone else’s unwanted scraps.
“Are you ready?” Yinuo says.
“Are you sure you want me to do it? Wouldn’t it be easier if you were to operate on me?” Bellamy asks. “I’m not going to be good at this.”
“You don’t need to be good at it. I’ll tell you what to do.”
“I’ve never done this before. You have.”
“Only on frogs and piglets. Not a living person.”
“But—”
“Are you saying you don’t trust me?” Yinuo presses one hand flat against Bellamy’s sternum, right under the clavicles and just above her breasts.
“I do! You know I do.”
“Then pick up the scalpel.”
Bellamy lets out a wavering, mournful note of a breath and sits back until she straddles Yinuo’s hips. The scalpel lies in a shallow metal pan right next to her alongside a pair of rib shears, lonely instruments that Yinuo swiped from the college’s lab. It would have been far easier to buy her own, but something about the idea of taking what didn’t belong to her had her slipping them in her pocket before she could think the better of it.
Bellamy cradles the scalpel with an amateur’s fear, the keen, thin blade glinting in the cold, white apartment lighting. There’s no anesthesia, no procedure, nothing but Bellamy’s touch and Yinuo’s guidance.
“Put it under my clavicle,” Yinuo says.
The blade is pressed delicately above her breast to the point she can’t feel anything at all, and it’s almost charming how hesitant Bellamy is, how careful. It’s a sort of sentimentality Yinuo hasn’t indulged in for a long time.
Bellamy has always been like this, ever since Yinuo first saw her in an introductory chemistry class at their local college: wide-eyed, timid, a tagger-on for a group of brash freshmen who barely included her in their conversation. It was only a coincidence that they ended up in the same group project, one that Yinuo took charge of and where she ended up doing the brunt of the work. Not that she minded; she could never trust anyone else’s guidance as much as her own. But Bellamy insisted on doing her fair share of work.
“It’s only fair,” she protested to bored freshmen, who only flicked their eyes at her freckles, lit by a bioluminescent glow from her blushing face, before looking back at their phones. “We can’t just let Yinuo do everything!”
Even Yinuo privately thought Bellamy’s earnest nature was a bit pathetic and out of place. Who cared so much about a simple assignment, a general education requirement? Even Yinuo only needed it for her pre-med track.
During the assignment, Bellamy always came to Yinuo for guidance, notes clutched to her chest like a protective charm, as if already resigned to the fact Yinuo would turn her away like everyone else. When Yinuo didn’t, Bellamy slunk her way over to her, again and again, for assistance and then coffee and finally just conversation and a shy hand covering hers.
“You can’t proceed if you don’t take off my shirt,” Yinuo says.
“I don’t want to tear it,” Bellamy whispers.
“I can always buy another one.”
Her face flushes petal-red. Yinuo waits, counting the slow beating of her heart, until Bellamy finally has the courage to raise trembling fingers to the buttons of her shirt, a plain, white, professional piece bought just so she doesn’t have to think about what to wear every day. Bellamy divests her shirt with tender care, careful not to touch skin, even though Yinuo can feel the slow, blistering heat emanating from every movement, the mere centimeters that separate their bodies. She lifts her back up slightly, just so Bellamy can unhook her bra with clumsy hands.
Cool air hits her skin. She is bare, all of her on display: the small mounds of her breasts, the stretch marks and moles and blemishes, the sallow skin and faded scars as a result of typical childhood clumsiness. Her veins are blue streets, sprawled out into an intricate map.
Bellamy lowers her gaze and then peers up through nubby eyelashes. When she’s eye level with Yinuo’s nipple, she looks away again, a strange little ritual.
“Bellamy,” Yinuo says, her voice the same as it is when she talks with the other students in her anatomy classes, professional and edged in ice, “Make the first incision under my clavicles and above my breasts. Cut the other side to match and then bring together along the sternum. Use more force than you did just now. You need to cut through flesh.”
Bellamy brings the scalpel under her collarbones, resting her hand lightly against the skin, just like a kiss. With every breath Yinuo takes, she can feel the edge of the knife rising and falling in tandem. Bellamy presses the blade down hard enough to break skin and for Yinuo to feel a dull sensation, like a flame under her skin, droplets of blood puddling onto the clear plastic beneath them. Two incisions, and then the scalpel is between the valley of her breasts.
Anyone else would be writhing in pain on the bedspread, but Yinuo holds herself with a preternatural stillness. She might have been capable of feeling pain a long time ago, but if she did, it must have been lost to childhood amnesia, a victim to the early years she can no longer remember. Her first true memory was one in which she stretched on her toes and placed a hand on a burning stove, watching her flesh bubble with a cool disinterest as her mother shrieked in Mandarin for her to stop.
“Draw it down,” she breathes. “Stop at my navel.”
Bellamy cleaves her flesh in two, her pace slow and her trail clumsy, nothing like the precision Yinuo would have wielded the blade with. She would have used the scalpel to part the top layer of skin, and then scissors and her own hands to pull apart the fat of the muscles. But Bellamy simply cuts in gorges past flesh, a pleasant burn as Yinuo’s body splits apart, revealing a tantalizing hint of intestine and lung.
She pulls herself up, elbows braced against the faded blue bedspread, and Bellamy squeaks at the sudden movement.
There it is, her body. Organs tucked snug against each other, packaged in an efficient arrangement, embraced by her ribs, the flaps of her intercostal muscles flayed away in a clumsy, hasty peel. It’s beautiful, in a way she finds all bodies to be. No matter what someone might look like outwardly, how they might act, or what they might believe in, if she cut them open, there would be no difference between them.
Bellamy slides back along Yinuo’s thighs, the scalpel, slick with blood, dropping to her side. Before she can pull herself off, Yinuo seizes her wrist, knuckles straining against her flesh.
“We’re not done.”
“Yinuo…”
“Pull the flesh back, Bellamy. You’re the only one who can do this. I need you.”
“Okay,” she whispers, hunger in her voice. “Just me.”
Yinuo guides Bellamy’s hands back to the incision. She ghosts her finger along the edge of the torn flesh, a light, incessant pressure, before she digs underneath the layer of muscle and skin and pulls. Yinuo’s thick flesh, pliant and elastic under her hand, stretches like angel wings. Rib cage like the smooth layers of new chalk packed together, cradling her lungs, her heart peeking through just between, a shy sister. Her liver and stomach pressed together, wet mush like bruised summer flowers on a wet day, and braids of intestines, thick and malleable.
Yinuo once gave the stray dog she cared for a hunk of liver, bloody and raw, stolen from her mother’s last grocery store trip. She watched as it ravaged the flesh, blood flecking its lips, and tongued at the plate, desperate for more, and wondered if it would bite into her hand with the same fervor.
“The rib shears,” Yinuo says. “You need to cut open my sternum and the ribs to open up access. It’ll be easier to cut through the ribs where they’re made of cartilage instead of bone.”
The rib shears are raised, nine inches and gleaming, one side curved to protect the soft tissue beneath during the incision. They are twin to sewing scissors, and Bellamy cuts as if she’s a child crafting paper snowflakes for a class project, careful, patient snips along the entire row of ribs, and then the thin line of cartilage along the top sternum, until the entire thing can be pulled away as easily as a grate over a window.
Bellamy’s gaze is so sharp it’s as if she can devour Yinuo with her eyes alone. “You’re pretty, Yinuo,” she says.
Yinuo threads gentle fingers through Bellamy’s hair, humming in response. Bellamy nuzzles into the touch, letting out a little sigh. There’s no resistance at all when Yinuo grabs a fistful of hair and yanks, drawing Bellamy down to her, until she can feel Bellamy’s hot breath on her lungs, nose brushing against her pericardium.
Bellamy’s lips have always been soft and hesitant. She’s never initiated a single kiss, but Yinuo has seen the way she digs her nails into her own palms, curling her desire within her fists as if she can hide it forever.
“If you think this is pretty, you can have it,” Yinuo says. “It’s all yours.”
Suspicion and greed war across Bellamy’s face, the same look as that of a starving dog being given access to a feast, fearing a cruel trick. “But…”
Yinuo tugs at Bellamy’s hair until her knuckles turn white, stark against the black strands, and Bellamy finally lets out a strangled moan. Bellamy’s hair is slick and oil-soft, light as gossamer. She could hold it like this forever. “Don’t you trust me when I tell you it’s okay? This is yours.”
“But why?” Bellamy says. “Why me?”
A long time ago, after raising that stray dog for weeks, when it finally began to eat in her presence and she stopped seeing the ribs under its skin, it stopped showing up. She found it several days later, flies already gathering around its corpse, nothing but a pile of meat, dead from a car crash or a wild animal or the simple indifference of fate. She had put her hands on its flank, the first and only time she could touch this creature she had thought of as hers.
“Because,” she says. “I know you’re lonely.”
“Really? I always thought you were the lonely one, Yinuo,” Bellmany murmurs. Yinuo yanks her hair until she whimpers again.
Another hot breath against her chest. And then Bellamy bites into her heart, gnashing against the tough, fibrous muscle and the pericardium that covers the organ. The smell is wet and sharp, like a butcher’s shop, and Bellamy is gluttonously scrabbling with her hands against lung to gain better access to the heart, crushing both the right and left ventricle with her teeth in a gush of blood. Yinuo can almost taste it, too, a rich, coppery tang, as Bellamy’s teeth scrape into the aortic valve and she tongues at the pulmonary veins.
Her heart collapses, nothing but meat and gristle under Bellamy’s famished attention. Yinuo feels each bite like a fist, a shock straight to her system, the bed creaking from the frenzy of their movement. If only Bellamy could pinch her sinus node to control the beat of her heart, aligning the rhythm with her own, a touch that she could feel forever.
~~~Grace Zhu received her BA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her MFA at Emerson College. She draws inspiration from horror, fairytales, and the Asian American literary tradition, and has a bad habit of spending her money on horror movies at her local movie theater.
