Formaldehyde smells just like pickles. After a month of the sour scent, the similarity still surprises Tracy. Sometimes it clings to her when she returns to her room, reminding her of pickled onion crisps until she slips into the warm shower spray. Reminding her of home.
The scent drifts out of the laboratory, welcoming Tracy in the doorway with cardigan-covered arms. As usual, she is early and there are only a handful of students sitting at their desks.
Normally when Tracy enters it is to people rolling their eyes, or pretending to pick their nose then eating it, before they laugh and turn away. But today the students don’t glance up from their notebooks saturated in looping letters. Diagrams with empty labels.
Tracy takes her place behind the middle desk; the one she has gravitated to since the first class. She had been the first to arrive that day, waking when the sun was a running yolk through her curtains. Unsure where to sit in a place so foreign, Tracy had opted for the middle. Not too close to look like a try-hard but not too far back to disappear. Tracy was fed up with being forced to the back.
Tracy shrugs on her lab coat, the long sleeves brushing her desk. She folds them until they fit, before tying back her split ends. The smell of formaldehyde is strong; it reminds her of grandmother.
Tracy’s grandmother is a small woman. The type of old that turns you into a shuffling, sighing bracket. Before Tracy had moved to Hereward University, it was just her and her grandmother in their small home. It might have had peeling wallpaper, a temperamental gas stove, and a leaking shower head, but it was their home. The same place she had recited her fractions, three quarters wobbling on the chipped dining-room table. The wood stank of mildew from where they had wiggled it free from under a wad of rotting wallpaper at the skip. Now her grandmother was alone with the drip, drip, drip.
This morning, Tracy’s grandmother would be waddling through the house in her favourite cigarette-burned slippers, her hand digging into a share-bag of pickled onion crisps. Pickles would be thick in the air, an attempt at closing the gap between them both. A pang shoots through Tracy’s heart, a sharpness that always comes whenever she thinks of her grandmother.
It had been on a late night over greasy pizza that her grandmother suggested she should apply to Hereward. Tracy had sent the application to make her grandmother happy; she knew that it was only ever going to be a few pixels, the confirmation ending at the sent tick. How much would it even cost to visit Hereward? A number Tracy had never seen before. One she would most likely never see in the future either.
The acceptance letter had been crumpled in the letterbox, trapped in a tilting limbo above the muddied doormat. Tracy had fainted.
When she woke up, groggy on her childhood bed, she pinched herself until her wrist bled. The birthmark there warped under her nails. Not even her dreams allowed her to step onto Hereward’s stone paths. To people like her it was just a flat brick building shining on glossy paper. The sun catching the window in a way that would forever darkened the halls.
The black letters told her that the Hereward science department had a scheme. That they were honoured to accept her. Was she really that gifted? Enough to leap from the muddy grass and into the darkened hall, through the shining glass? There was no point asking her grandmother; if it was up to her, Tracy would be prime minister, the lead scientist in every experiment, the head of Hereward. She would find the cure to everything.
Once the heavy feeling had sunk into her stomach, Tracy sobbed her grandmother’s arms. When she looked up, there were silent tears swimming in the wrinkles on her grandmother’s face. Her eyes had a faraway look, as if she was already miles away searching for Tracy in the stars.
Today Tracy had woken up before her alarm, the moon an uncracked egg behind her curtains. No more highlighting phrases and writing in blocky coloured letters. Today she would get her hands dirty.
The desk digs into the soft flesh just above Tracy’s hipbone, scratching against it like a saw. She shoves her hands in the pockets of her lab coat. Slime slips over her fingers.
A stretched latex glove flops out of the pocket, slapping the linoleum floor. In the excitement of the experiment, she had forgotten to wash her hands and slip into clean gloves.
Tracy pinches the shed silk skin from the floor, dropping it back into her pocket. Behind her someone giggles. The blonde girl and the one who wears her skirt too short. Tracy can’t make out what they are saying but it is about her. She knows it is about her. The laughter erupts into a shriek and Tracy’s body tenses up. She is fifteen and walking home again, not enough money for the bus that chugs past, and people wearing the same uniform as her are pointing. She is Holey Tracy. Frayed tights and leaking shoes.
Ignoring the whispers, Tracy walks to the sink and scrubs her hands red. A light brown splotch stays stubborn on her wrist. Tracy strokes the birthmark with the rough skin of her thumb.
In the fresh gloves, the birthmark looks misted like it is on the other side of a steamed window. It looks like a love heart.
Tracy’s stomach flips at the thought of telling her grandmother about the experiment tonight. It had crept into their most recent conversation; by the end of the call, Tracy had been unable to talk about anything else.
Tracy was always the one to call her grandmother, never the other way around. They would speak weekly so the phone bill wouldn’t stack up too much at home.
The first call had been full of questions: are you liking it love, made any friends before shifting to, I’m so proud of you, I miss you, I love you always Tracy.
The next conversation had been about the stray cat that sometimes got into their bin bags on rubbish day, the one with chunks of orange fur missing. Her grandmother had found it on the pavement, reaching its paws to their front door, its stomach flattened by a tire track.
But last week Tracy’s grandmother had been unusually quiet. The only sound at the end of the line was the rattling breaths of a woman in her eighties. Tracy had asked if the student down the street had botched up her grandmother's monthly cut and dye again. She hadn’t gone yet. So it had been left to Tracy to carry the conversation about the water fountains they had at Hereward University. Big glass containers with slices of lime and cucumber floating inside like shiny fishes. And then, I wonder what the first experiment is.
Beside the sink is a line of labelled metal trays. TRACEY is sellotaped to the tray at the end.
Tracy keeps her head down as she carries the tray of utensils back to her desk. In her rubber grip, the metal tray shakes. The knives jangle like loose change. Laughter stalks her.
Even though she had clawed her way through mock tests and every textbook the library had, she still came from hand-me-down pyjamas and an electricity card. Sometimes when she was laid in her bed, staring up at the clean ceiling she wondered how she had got here, to Hereward. Little, Holey Tracy. Why had they let her, and her squeaking suitcase through their doors? Had she really earned it?
The scent of pickles is stronger as if Tracy is back at home, the purple crisp packet held under her nose. An offering. Tracy leans into it with a smile.
Rattling metal follows the growing smell and Tracy itches her palms. She wants to crane her neck and watch the trolley, but the girls will laugh even more. It will probably earn her a new nickname; one she can’t shed, like a layer of mould on her skin. One that still lingers after she has returned the graduation robe.
In the morning sun, the trolley’s thin legs glint as they turn into the classroom. For a moment Tracy is blinded by whiteness. Her smile grows into a grin. This is what she has been waiting for.
Everything she has done, everything she has prayed for, has led her here. The first student in her family, and even better a doctor. At graduation, her grandmother will brush Tracy’s defiant baby hairs off her forehead and give her that necklace she always wears. The one with the small, blue pendant. Tracy will have finally earned it, no more waiting for the something blue of her wedding. Tracy will be a doctor.
Thick goggles materialise through the light, then two assistants. From their formless white suits and big boots, it is impossible to tell who they are. Next year that could be Tracy. Only those from the scheme get staff jobs. Tracy would need it; she may be on scholarship but how long would that money last? It was always good to be prepared, save as much as you could. Every day could be a rainy day.
Once the assistants have wheeled the trolley in front of the lecturer’s desk, they scurry out with their heads down, silent except for the squeak of their shoes.
The class falls quiet. Tracy stretches her back, head popping out of her shoulders like a turtle.
A long, white sheet covers the trolley, burying mountains beneath snow. Tracy huffs out a heavy breath.
Footfalls clink in the hallway. Dr Owen ducks under the door frame and strides towards the trolley, taking his place before the sheet. He readjusts his glasses and they catch the sun, stealing his eyes.
When his eyes appear through the haze, they land on Tracy. A scoff gets trapped in his wet throat.
‘Goggles on,’ he says.
Tracy fumbles for the goggles on the desk, slipping them over her face so quickly that she hears the snap of her ginger hair. She imagines the girls are smirking behind their hands.
‘Today is our first practical experiment. A simple one. One I am sure you have done before, but that doesn’t mean it is any less necessary,’ Dr Owen says.
His shoes clack throughout the laboratory as he walks into the small gap between his desk and the trolley. After shaking his hands into latex gloves, Dr Owen shifts the sheet on the trolley, revealing that it is actually three thin ones. With a rustle, he slides off the middle sheet and folds it into a small square.
Skin is peeled back from the chest cavity, leaving the inside exposed. There is no bleached ribcage. From her desk, Tracy can only make out the red wall of the body’s side. She can’t help the smile that trembles her hands.
‘A simple organ dissection,’ he says. ‘You will each come up and take an organ from this body, return to your station, and wait until I give further instruction.’
At secondary school, Tracy had only performed dissections on animals. A cow’s lungs between a group of five. Students crowded around a splayed open frog on the teacher’s desk.
From the outline under this sheet, it isn’t a cow or a frog. It is a human. A fully grown, once alive, human.
At that moment she knows. It is a sense. Just like the prickle of eyes on the back of her neck. She knows this is a woman. They have scooped the body out, but it is still a woman.
A knot forms in Tracy’s throat. She looks out the window at the thick tree trunks so close to them all. Just like how she can’t see the leaves, Tracy can’t see this body’s face, so it is just a body. A body of organs to be investigated.
What would she choose? The lungs? No, they were too boring, she’d already touched a pair. For a second, she wanted the gallbladder but the idea of carving through its tissue was too much, too real. There was no way she could pretend it wasn’t once part of a human. A functioning part.
She wants the kidneys. The organ that shrivelled and yellowed under abuse. Who had this person been? A drinker? A mother?
Tracy gulps. Sweat begins to slick her palms. The latex sticks to her skin.
‘First, Elizabeth.’
The blonde girl glides past Tracy. Roses suffocate the scent of pickles for a moment before the vinegar is wetting Tracy’s tongue again.
Elizabeth keeps her back straight as she ponders over which to take. The class is silent, air thick with body heat and thumping hearts.
When Elizabeth turns around, her face is blank, and she holds something long and pink in her hands. The pancreas. The organ is flat, stretching over both her palms. She walks back to her desk and this time it is only pickles that float past Tracy.
Next is the boy in front of Tracy. He chooses the liver. Yellow and small in his large hands.
Tracy imagines what her liver looks like. Maybe it would have hints of yellow and brown from the Bucks Fizz she has on Christmas and birthdays. The energy drinks she used to chug every day.
When she got accepted to Hereward, she shared a bottle of red wine with her grandmother. It had been the first time she had drank wine. Even though the bottle was only seven pounds, Tracy had never felt so elegant in her life.
Next is the spleen, then the stomach, the kidneys. Tracy chews the inside of her bottom lip, her nostrils flaring. Everyone has had the same idea as her: take the interesting and rarer organs. She wonders what they dissected at their schools. Human brains?
The girl who wears her skirt too short chooses the gallbladder. As she spins around to walk back to her desk, Tracy spots a glimpse of pink knickers. Tracy’s skirt brushes her knees. She can’t afford a glimpse of pink, or nail varnish, or even lip-gloss. They would throw her out without a chance to pack. She can’t leave Hereward unless it is with a first-class degree and her tassel switched. She has worked so hard, sacrificed everything. She has nothing else.
Seeing the gallbladder has reminded Tracy of her grandmother again. Of the pain she has endured over the past few years. The nights that leaked into dawn as she grunted, hunched over at the waist in her favourite chair or halfway up the stairs. The tears that burned Tracy’s throat as she watched. All Tracy could offer was a hand, a shoulder, and a half-empty hot-water bottle, the exposed red rubber carved like gills. The waitlist for gallbladder removal surgery was excruciatingly long. Her grandmother would have to suffer from gallstones for much, much longer.
Tracy’s heart aches at the thought of her grandmother trapped in her chair, alone. She wishes she had chosen the gallbladder now. That it was beneath her knife and critical eye.
Cradled in the next student’s arms are the deflated lungs. Thank God she didn’t get those.
‘Heavy smoker huh,’ someone whispers behind Tracy.
Heavy smoker is an understatement. The lungs have been consumed by smoke and ash. Maybe whoever had the stomach would peel the tissue back and find the last cigarette, eaten after being smoked to a nub.
Tracy had never smoked, the bitter tang that coated her tongue whenever she stood in the kitchen was enough to turn her off. So did her grandmother’s thin, yellow nails. She can still hear the scratch of them against thin skin. If it was possible to itch off a birthmark, her grandmother would have done it by now.
There are only a few organs left. Tracy hasn’t figured out what she wants. From here, she can’t see anything inside the hollowed-out torso. What is left over?
A skinny boy walks past her desk, a uterus in his large hands. She had forgotten about it.
The organ is shrivelled, the tubes thick and drooping over his fingers like slugs. An itch forms in her abdomen. That is inside her. Tracy cringes. The uterus slaps down on the desk behind her, or at least she imagines it does.
‘Tracy,’ Dr Owen says.
Tracy rubs her sweaty palms on the sides of her lab coat, and they slide around inside their second latex skin. She glimpses at the red lumps splattered on the other students’ desks. The air is cold and sharp in her lungs.
The last chosen, and for once it isn’t because of her grasshopper arms or nervous laugh. She knows exactly what it is. The same reason girls would never let her sleep over, or play, or even borrow a pen. It is because she is wearing the same socks she has worn since she was ten. Striped, with a hole stretched around her big toe. Holey Tracy. Would she ever escape it? Even when she had that degree, would she just go back to that small house with its pickles and smoke, sit on that dusty chair until she too was paralysed with gallstones?
The pang returns. How dare she think of her grandmother like that, as if she hadn’t given Tracy everything she could. Done everything she could. People like Tracy, like her grandmother, gave and gave until all they had left was their failing bodies.
Every identifying aspect of the body is covered, leaving only its cleaned innards exposed. The face is an outline, a tent pitched by its nose, the feet ski slopes. How did they die? When? How did they get here?
The goggles are steamed from Tracy’s breath; she wants to reach inside and rub them clean like a windshield wiper, but everyone would laugh at her.
Here, the pickles are smothering. Two sheets soaked in juice. Or is it her? Have the pickled onion crisps lingered on Tracy? Crumbs that have burrowed into the skin bending her elbow, the wrinkles when she smiles, a stain on her wrist that she is unable to hide beneath knock-off rose perfume.
Holding her breath, Tracy peers into the body. Into the unnatural spaces and shadows. This is all we are in the end. Empty and gaping. Alone. No designer shoes and heavy, diamond necklaces.
Tracy’s fingers float at her throat, the latex dry like a powdery kiss. No blue pendant waits for her there.
Only the heart is left inside the cavity. Thick and heavy in the centre. Boring. No wonder everyone had bent around it, their hands dodging and searching for something softer, something more interesting. But this is all that is left, all Tracy can afford.
Beneath her touch, the heart is freezing, and she presses the tough tissue. Who had this belonged to? Who had it breathed for, lived for, hugged against? Tracy gulps; she shouldn’t think of it like that. This body as a person. It is just a body.
With the heart in her hands, Tracy begins to turn. Her shaking hands knock the sheet, and it tumbles over the body’s arm, revealing saggy skin. Brown age marks and freckles dot the faded flesh, but it is the birthmark that catches Tracy’s attention. She freezes and leans in closer. Pickles clog her throat, forcing her to pant with her mouth open.
Just above the inner crease of the elbow is a birthmark. A pale brown splotch. But if she looks closer, tilts her head, the splotch curves and smooths into a love heart. Just like the one on Tracy’s wrist. The one she inherited from her grandmother.
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