The Mouse
My fist is a mouse. I don’t mean this figuratively - I mean a conscious animal was literally cut and pasted onto the back of my left hand. Hold your awe and stifle your sighs; If you’d believe me, it’s shockingly mundane.
I was lucky enough to choose the details and the size of my procedure: Just one little rodent head and its accompanying paw. And if you knew what all the alternatives were, you’d realize this is undoubtedly the tamest. On my feeds I’ll see operations where other debtors host the large unsightly mass of a heifer and around the complex people whisper stories of full skin transplants and insect colony grafts. Those people, yeah, those are the real unlucky ones. Compared to those unlucky shmucks my procedure was more like prudent investment advice - a relatively small inconvenience to cleave off chunks from an ever-growing balance.
In fact, the first post-op hours were bliss. Half conscious I enjoyed the familiarly distant childhood fields and foreign freedom of dreams, sustained by an orgasmic cocktail of drugs and medication. Thus the transition to sharing my skin was bliss, pure bliss, and I wished I could stay there forever.
But the lab coats needed their check-ins and their charts and their readings. So my daily routine became structured around the reporting of heart rate, blood oxygen content, and neural activity. Once for me, and once, of course, for the mouse. Fair is fair I suppose. As for the rodent, it seemed to be content too. Its tiny head always remained inert, maybe confused, maybe doped up on the same collection of opiates I had been, and were it for the extra weight and the rhythmic rising and falling of remnant of lungs I mostly couldn’t tell you it was there at all. So yeah, once the bleeding stopped, the skin scabbed, and my check cleared, my initial hesitation had all but vanished.
But then one night I was trying to sleep. And the damn thing wouldn’t stop moving.
Its head started darting around, whatever was left of its neck flailed to try and break away from my - our - skin. A lone arm thrashed and clawed at empty air. But stitches are resilient things and medical glue is tenacious. In its eyes I recognized panic, and forgive me, please god, forgive me, but I laughed. Until the little beast turned its nails back on itself.
I could only look on in a mix of shock and horror. It pierced its own skin with remarkable brutality and tore away at its own flesh with a terrifying dedication. Fur was scraped away to reveal pulsating muscle, skin was cleaved to unveil muscle and tendon, and finally all were parted for a blood-soaked finale of stained pink bone. And then it stopped, because for all its gruesome effort, the skull simply wouldn’t budge.
So the fucking thing went through its eyes.
Keratin tunneled through gelatinous tissue to spew forth a pain-stricken river from the mouse’s side; Tears and blood and corneas all mixing together in a sepia-tinted death march to the bottom of its snout. In this, the mouse somehow found the resolve to remain still. I could not. I thrust my hand out of sight under a blanket. And I cried. I didn’t know why, but I bawled and I strained and I prayed for this horror to stop. And then just as abruptly as it began, it was over. Hesitantly, I lifted the covers. All that was left of the creature on my fist was a bleeding, still hole.
They insisted my next check-in come in person. My voice shook as I recounted the story, and I hesitated in expectation of punishment. And then I realized that the crowd of white coats around me kept growing. No, I was not brought here to be fined or chided. They loved every word. They said this finding was incredible, they asked if I would try again, and before I could even reply they offered me double, triple, a total damn jubilee. I heard them, but I did not listen. The only thing in the room that could hold my attention was the wall of rodents in cages lined up against the back well: future test subjects, cooped up in their little apartments, none the wiser of the horrors that await them. They saw rodents. I could only see future holes of crimson-soaked fur.
I stood up and went back to my apartment. But now all I could see around myself was a prison: the prepackaged meals I once savored looked like rations; endless channels of television at looked like sedatives; cups of water could find no form in my mind besides a feeding tube. I tore it all away. I ripped the drawers from my shelf and the shelf from the wall. I threw my television set in the gutter. And through I cried and asked myself what the point of this life was if I, too, could not find a way to offer this world something more than just my flesh.
My eyes found a blade, shined brand new, on the floor. Did I throw it there? Or was it placed by divinity? I do not have claws, but I do have this. With it I could deny my keepers the results and data they so desire. I could follow the daring example of my compatriot, who realized a life as an experiment is no life at all.
Would that be bravery?