my writing

I like to write. I always have. I sarted journaling and writing stories from a really young age (basically, after I read Harriet the Spy LOL). I find it to be a really nice complement to my academic work, since writing skills and the construction of a narrative are so important in academia. I don't know if I'm very good or not, but at least my cyber stalkers will have something to write to the group chat about.

the image for the menu item for this page is from Lucia Biagi aka whenaworld on flickr. check out her page there are some awesome crochet sculptures on there!!!

the decapitation station

preface: this is hopefully going to be the worst thing I ever publish, as it's the first. please enjoy anyway and critiques are welcome, I'm new at this and could use some pointers. also, this is entirely fictional!!! i do not condone this kind of treatment of lab animals, i'm just expressing a nightmare. trigger warnings for animal gore and blood

It was a bright and sunny day. The technician got off of the bus, swiped into the university building, crossed the lobby, rode the elevator to the second floor, and walked into her office next to the lab. She sat down at the desk and checked her email. Nothing too special - reminders from the university about lectures going on, a request from a student lab assistant for a job reference, and a notice that power was still out in the library due to a recent summer storm. The technician wrote back to the undergrad with her phone number to give to hiring manager. Then she opened her notebook to the page containing her to-do list for that day, although she had been thinking about her responsibilities since she lay restless in bed the night before.

The mice in the latest cohort of experiments had just received their last injection of SFS34 peptide. It was time to take the mice upstairs to the lab and decapitate them so that their brains could be ground up and analyzed to determine the effects of the injections. Usually, a student would help the technician by completing the decapitation, then handing off the head so that she could extract and preserve the precious ball of gray and white matter. Despite the gruesome act, the company made it easier to bear. This time, the students were all home for the summer and her PI Dr. Feinberg was away on vacation, so there was no one to help. The technician had to do every part of the procedure by herself. She stood up from her desk and walked into the lab. It was a narrow, rectangular room with long lab benches on each wall. They were covered in whirring equipment, pipette tip boxes, labmates' notebooks, and nearly indecipherable calculations on scratch paper. Above them were cluttered shelves full of chemicals, supplies, and obsolete equipment gathering dust. She sat down at the bench and grabbed a bag of sterile plastic sample tubes. She put down a fresh puppy pad to contain spills. She counted out 11 tubes for 11 mice. She arranged the tubes in a rack in neat rows and labeled them carefully. She added a solution to each tube that would keep the tissue stable before it could be processed. She filled a foam bucket with ice to keep the samples cold. Under the fume hood, she set up her decapitation station. Like on the bench, she covered her work surface with a puppy pad. She turned on the vaporizer that would deliver the anesthetic isoflurane gas to the mice. She placed a scented trash bag to mask the smell of bodies to the left of the chamber and a stack of paper towels to the right. Finally, the technician opened the drawer labeled “dissection tools” and grabbed a small metal spatula, small curved scissors, and a larger pair of solid steel scissors with a considerable weight to them and a rounded point. After heating her equipment to sterilize it she put all of the smaller instruments onto her padded workspace on the bench and and the larger scissors under the hood next to the isoflurane chamber.

Now it was time to get the mice. She walked downstairs and across the long hallway to the animal facility. She swiped her ID card at the door and used her weight to pull the hefty barrier open. The technician walked down the facility hallway, a wide tunnel of gray cinderblocks, bright fluorescent lights, and a faded neon green floor. She entered the lab's animal room, donning blue booties over her shoes, a blue surgical gown, gloves, and a hairnet. She quickly checked on her breeding pairs, noting new litters that resembled soft pink jellybeans. Then the technician took the lab cart and collected the cages filled with precious data. She wheeled the cart out of the animal room, through the hallway, out through the heavy doors, down the 1st floor hallway, and onto the elevator. She imagined this to be a fun excursion for the mice who had been born and raised in the austere, windowless animal facility.

After arriving on the second floor the technician pushed the cart into the lab. She turned on the hood, wrote down the information from the cage tags in her notebook, and turned on the vaporizer. She picked up a mouse by the base of the tail and put it into the anesthesia chamber. The mouse began to stumble around on the paper towel. She placed a paper towel on the pad in front of her. When the mouse's breathing slowed, she took it out of the chamber and placed its head in the center of the towel. She pinched the hind foot and the mouse did not react, so she was confident the mouse was asleep. She pressed gently on the limp body, causing the spine to stretch out and the tiny head to be pushed forward. She took the large scissors and placed them around the neck, right behind the ears. Just as the mouse's breathing began to quicken she squeezed her fingers together. With a soft squelch, the scissors separated the head from the body. As it twitched, the technician placed the body in the garbage bag. The head was just a bit smaller than a ping pong ball with its tongue limply hanging out and its pinhead eyes looking emptily up at the technician. Blood seeped out of the wound where its body used to be. When she took the head out of the hood, holding the paper towel it rested on at each end, the lab filled with the smell of copper pennies.

There was a popular saying in the lab. "It's the smell that really gets to you." It was true – no matter how many times she did the dissections, the technician could never stop the instinctual panic the human body produces when it smells blood. She did her best to prevent letting the mice smell the blood of their littermates. But there wasn't much she could do for herself. Her strategy was generally to put on upbeat music and just try not to think about it. "After a while, you get used to it and stop being able to smell it as strongly," she would explain to nervous students.

The technician placed the head at the bench. She picked up the small scissors and began to cut the skin from the nape of the neck to the nose. Peeling the skin back, she could now cut through the skull, again slicing from back to front. The nosebridge made a distinctive cracking sound as she cut it after shoving one blade of the scissors into the righthand eye socket and out the left. She used the spatula to pry each half of the skull out to the sides, revealing the soft pink mass inside. She held the head upside down above the collection tube and used the spatula to gently push the brain out of the skull, starting at the back and carefully working her way forward. The brain fell into the tube she'd labeled for this animal. She put the empty head put in the trash bag. She closed the sample tube, put it into a bin of ice, and turned to get the next mouse.

The technician repeated this process 9 more times without incident. She alternated between injected and control mice and fell into the monotony of the violent and repetitive procedure. Donna Summer belted from her cell phone and she hummed along, an indulgence she would usually forgo when working alongside a lab mate. The smell of pennies grew milder over time to the technician, but people walking by the lab could smell it getting stronger as the hours stretched on. The bodies piled up in the garbage bag and their missing heads did the same a few feet away. The decapitation scissors became covered in bright red blood and matted fur, dulling their lethal blades. She rinsed them off.

As morning turned to midday turned to afternoon, the sun's powerful rays beat through the tall South-facing lab windows, making the lab become hot and sticky. The technician thought about the mice she was sacrificing and how the bright afternoon sun was the first and last time they' would see the glowing source of all life on Planet Earth. She used the sleeve of her coat to wipe the sweat dripping down her temples and into her eyes. She could feel herself sweating through her t-shirt and her socks growing moist in her black combat boots which she wore all year long. Through the walls she could hear the gossiping of graduate students and the shrill “beep beep beep” of an equipment timer calling in vain for someone who'd left for the day. Through the discomfort the technician worked. She entered notes on each mouse in her lab notebook as she went.

...

950 - control - bit of trouble falling asleep

933 - treated

951 - control

934 - treated - woke up on towel, put back in iso for a min

...

Finally. 945. Treated. Last one. After this 3 month old female mouse was sacrificed and dissected the technician could go home and finally eat something and sit in her bed and rest from the day. She thought about what she would eat for dinner. Most likely she would pick up some fried chicken and soda from the corner store on her way home. She would trample up the hill to her building and trudge up the stairs to her 2nd-floor apartment. She would use the bathroom and roll a joint and put on the TV. She would smoke and then shower and change and eat her dinner. She would then fall asleep. She couldn't wait.

945 was alone in its cage. The technician had to pick up one of the plastic hides from the cage to reveal the trembling mouse underneath. The technician could tell it knew what was about to happen. She wasn't the only one who'd been smelling blood, despite her efforts to mask it. She picked up 945 by the tail and shoved her face first into the anesthesia chamber. The technician's stomach gurgled and a fly buzzed past her ear. She swatted at it with her glove, gagging as the fur and blood on her hands met her cheek. She was almost done, though, she could clean herself up later. The mouse's breathing rate slowed and she picked it up by the scruff, as mothers do when their pups wander away from the nest. She forgot to check the toe pinch reflex.

The technician covered the mouse's body with the second paper towel and pressed down on its soft body. The hind leg twitched. She pretended not to notice, reluctant to delay her return home. She picked up the large scissors and drew them closer to 945. The mouse woke up, dazed, and saw the sparkling silver scissors covered in blood and fur. She squirmed violently but the technician held her down forcefully and she stayed in place. The technician brought the scissors to the neck, right behind the ears. The mouse continued to squirm as she squeezed the blades together, cutting through the skin and tendons, fresh red blood dripping down onto the paper towel. The scissors were almost at the center of the neck when 945 managed to turn and look directly at the technician, which caused her to hesitate. The two beings' eyes were locked, the mouse's begging for mercy and the technician's cold and remorseless. This moment lasted only a second. The mouse swung its head from side to side as the technician began to hack at its neck, making small and choppy cuts, creating a jagged edge of skin and a mangled flesh. Eventually, 945 stopped squirming. The technician let out a sigh. She moved the body to rest with its headless comrades. She carried the head to the bench, blood dripping down to the tile floor and seeping through to the edges of the paper towel. "That's weird," she thought. There wasn't usually this much blood. She put the head down, grabbed her smaller dissection scissors, and shrieked. An incredible flow of blood was leaving the wound, much more than could ever fit in the small head. It quickly covered the whole lab bench and began dripping onto the floor.

The technician stumbled back into the bench behind her. She became lightheaded and her vision began to be obscured by dark black dots and bright stars. She dropped her scissors to the floor and caught herself from falling down herself. Bile filled her mouth and she swallowed it back down. It stung her throat and left her mouth coated in burning acid. The blood continued to pool on the floor, eventually covering the whole lab. She frantically threw paper towels onto the ground to absorb the mess, but it was no use. There was an inch of blood covering the floor at this point. She walked over to the head and picked it up to inspect the bottom where the blood was coming out, only to be blasted in the face and chest by the strong stream. At this point, all she could do was scream. The blood came up to her knees now. She screamed and screamed as it rose higher and higher until it rose above her head. She drowned, gasping for air but only inhaling blood. She tried to swim towards the door, but she had never learned how and moved slowly and with great effort. Her vision darkened, her flailing arms gave out, and she sank to the floor, lifeless.

...

Fifteen minutes later the technician blinked her eyes open. As fluorescent light filled her field of view she felt a searing pain in her head and cool, dry linoleum tile below her. She was lying on the floor of the lab. She stood up slowly, assessing her surroundings. The head of mouse 945 sat neatly on the bench with only a small ring of blood surrounding it. She carefully extracted the brain and cleaned up her work station as her headache pounded. She was almost finished when she noticed the open bottle of isoflurane on the bench. "Oops," she thought as she put the lid back on. When she lifted it to put it away, she realized the bottle, which had been almost full when she started, had completely evaporated into the lab.

After locking up, washing her face in the women's bathroom, and meandering through the building, she arrived at the bus stop on the corner. As she stood waiting in the cool evening air she noticed tears streaming down her face. The bus pulled up and and she stepped on, paid her fare, and found a window seat near the back. She gazed outside at the green summer foliage and the yellowing sky as the bus pulled off towards home.