Dissected

Dissected M. Stevenson (bio) The concrete path outside of the English department was the best place to shop for faces. In her free time, the bubbles between classes and her shifts at the club, Mara gravitated to a live oak that grew beside the low limestone wall and leaned against its rough bark. The tree cast the most beautiful dappled light on skin, Mara thought, as she imagined scraping her cheekbones to the exact points of the creatures that passed. Sometimes she picked at the tree's bark, wedging her fingers deep into its grooves, bloodying them, trying to tap it for wisdom. But even if she got it, a fingerful of pure knowledge, Mara would have traded it to be able to slice herself open, to take a knife to the beautiful people who walked past her, and construct a new face. Every morning, Mara studied herself in the mirror. She peeled back each layer, her papery skin and the meat of her cheeks and the spider's web of veins and nerves, until she could envision the white, uneven bone of her skull. That was the scaffolding. The foundation where the imperfections began. She daydreamed about walking into the art building, taking up a sander, and pressing it to the bone that decided the destiny of her nose until it was slender and smooth, the perfect bedrock for a more delicate central feature. It would have to be the bone that altered. As a child, she had tried Amy March's trick with the clothespin. She'd snuck into the kitchen while her mother nodded in front of the television, un-clipped a large, turquoise jaw from a bag of chips, and stolen back to her bedroom. Inserting a paper towel between the clip's teeth and the tender skin of her too-big nose, she'd pressed the clip's praying hands together and wished, desperately, for it to shape her like clay, remade and reborn, an object of beauty. The idea had first come to her in class. The comparative literature professor had kicked off the semester with a presentation that leapt from the Talking Heads to Oscar Wilde to Nine Inch Nails, punctuated by a flash-quick video of an eye being carved open, wet and shocking. Through her tangle of hair, the professor had posited that the simple act of getting ready in the morning was an exercise in something a little bit sinister. "Think of how we dissect our faces, " she'd said. "Think of how we parse and examine, how we cut ourselves to pieces in the mirror. " It was the first time that Mara had heard one of her own End Page 21 secret thoughts voiced, projected across an auditorium. She'd glanced around the dark rows, sure it was somehow apparent that she was guilty of these deviant thoughts, an aberration among the nice, normal collegiate spores. But no one had looked her way, or even particularly attentive. Mara's eyes had narrowed as she leaned forward in her chair, determined to suck every word from the woman's mouth into her own, a spider liquefying and ingesting a delicious, unexpected meal. Hearing her strange impulses contextualized in culture worthy of a syllabus, Mara had awarded herself a step up in her own estimation. The thoughts she had, which she hid and protected and tended with a quiet, nervous obsession, were perhaps intelligent. Perhaps, even, art. And so when the idea came to her, to sit outside the red-roofed, limestone building and construct a new face from the features of passersby, Mara had acted on it instantly. It made perfect sense. It made all the sense in the world. ________ Mara had an idea of what she liked, but she also allowed herself to be surprised. She may come to the wall with a hunger for a sharp jawline, but end the afternoon salivating over a smattering of dark freckles. Until the day she saw a girl with the neck of a swan, she'd thought she was satisfied with her own. The sidewalk current was full of fresh guppies. She consumed them greedily. When she was not on. . .