Finding insight: A fiction exercise

It was morning.

The woman woke up, looked at the dog sprawled across her feet with his head raised, staring at her. She walked to the mirror.

“Who am I?” she asked.

She cut open her skull, regarded the pulsing mass of her brain, chose a neuron to cut. Her vision focused to a pinpoint.

 

“Not good,” she said, and sewed the neuron and her skull back up again.

Then, she cut open her chest and watched her heart pulse. She poked it, felt the pain, felt the heartache so deep it encompassed the universe: all the stars, the black holes, and the atoms in the dust visible in the ray of sunlight shining through the window.

“Ouch,” she said, and sewed up her chest.

She sat down in a chair and cut the muscle and bone in her ankle, saw her foot dangle from the rest of her leg.

“So that’s connected,” she said, and sewed the muscle and bone back up again.

As she did so, she inadvertently hit a button on the machine in front of her. Music blared out.

 

 

 

She stomped her feet, swung her hips (discovering that it worked better if she did it to the beat), flailed her arms in the air, felt joy.

“I am someone who likes to dance, evidently,” she said.

She cut the vein in her wrist, and watched the blood flow out. But then she felt faint.

“Huh,” she said, and sewed the vein back up again.

She looked down at her body, at the recent stitches and scars, at her hips she’d been swinging around, at her breasts.

“Are those supposed to hang like that?” she asked the dog who sat on the floor, staring at her.

She found clothes, put them on, propped up the breasts with a bra.

She drove to a building where she tapped on a keyboard connected to a box lighted with kaleidoscoping colors. When everyone seemed to be leaving, she followed them out. She then went to a classroom where the people engaged in lengthy discussions about themselves. She decided not to share the recent scars. Instead she recounted a vague, mostly forgotten, mostly made up story about her childhood.

She went back to the first location, sighed at the dog, slumped on the couch. The dog jumped on her lap, staring at her. The dog tapped her hand, and in reflex, she raised it and started stroking it down the dog’s back. When she stopped, the dog tapped her hand again. She kept stroking this time. She felt her bones and her muscles, her brain and her neuron, her heart and her vein, even her breasts: right themselves, smooth out, relax.

“I guess I am also someone who likes to pet dogs,” the woman said, “But that’s enough for now. I’m exhausted.”

So she slept.