Articulated

by Claire Cooper

My mom taught biology for a homeschool resource center after I graduated high school. She had a plastic skeleton with articulated joints that I named Ezekiel. I never actually saw Ezekiel because I was a six-hour drive away, listening through the keyhole of a door that had closed with gentle finality. I was vaguely aware of the emergence of myself as distinct from the family unit, and it confused me.

Mom said students liked to sneak into the supply closet to dress Ezekiel up and put him in poses for the teachers to find. Eventually, they accidentally broke the base he stood on. Mom and Dad brainstormed solutions for a while and decided to replace the broken base with a Christmas tree stand. Although Mom doesn’t teach biology anymore, Ezekiel and his tree stand are still used by the resource center and likely will be until everyone forgets why he was attached to a tree stand in the first place.

I named him Ezekiel after the prophet in the Bible who saw a vision of dry bones. The bones joined together and were covered with muscle and skin until they became a living crowd of soldiers. You’ve probably heard of this even if you didn’t realize it. “The head bone’s connected to the neck bone, the neck bone’s connected to the back bone, etc.” The vision was supposed to be one of hope and restoration, but I can’t help thinking that it must have been very disorienting for Ezekiel to be alone and then suddenly not. The bones went from generic to specific. As bones, they could have been anyone. The more they came together and became people, the less Ezekiel could hide from them.

In Shakespear’s tragedy, Hamlet picks up a skull and studies it before being told that it belonged to Yorick, a man he had known. It looked like any other skull. Hamlet laments:

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it.”

A pianist named Andre Tchaikowsky donated his skull to the Royal Shakespear Company after he died, asking that it be used for Yorick’s skull in productions of “Hamlet.” The company did eventually use it, but having a real human skull as a prop was deeply unsettling. In spite of this, or quite possibly because of it, actors claimed the scenes involving the skull took on a greater emotional intensity. Tchaikowsky became more famous for his skull than for his music.

My brother took trumpet lessons when I was in 3rd grade. I got dragged along and usually ended up playing with the teacher’s kids in the back yard during the lesson. One time we got there right as it was getting dark. I scampered out to the yard and found the other kids prodding at a patch of dirt with garden trowels.

“We buried a fish a while ago and now we’re digging up its skeleton,” explained the oldest boy cheerfully.

“Cool,” I said and grabbed a trowel.

With the smell of fresh dirt hanging in the humid air and the orange clay staining our hands and knees, we dug and called out things like “oooh, a rib,” and “this must be from the tail” in our innocent, bubbling voices. Much to my chagrin, I had to leave before the entirety of the skeleton was unearthed.

“Articulated” is a strange word. It means separate yet joined. In the case of a skeleton, the joining implies that it was broken apart first. In his guide to bone cleaning, Lee Post says,

  “There are many ways of removing the soft tissue from the bones, all of which have advantages and disadvantages. In spite of claims to the contrary, any of the methods can work to produce high-quality skeletons. These range from composting, to rotting (above or below the ground), to macerating (rotting in fresh or salt water), to simmering, to using chemicals, to using insect colonies.”

After the soft tissue is removed, the bones still need to be “degreased.” The outside is clean, but the inside oils still need to be removed.

“It can be done naturally with microbes in the soil or the water, or it can be done by soaking the bones in solvents or detergents. The time factor depends on how oily the bones are, how large the bones are, and what type of fats are in the bones. Small and not very oily animals may be degreased within a week or two and other bones may need to be processed for multiple rounds of a week each round, or with a combination of detergents, heat, or solvents. Some bones, depending on the method used for degreasing, can take months of soaking. They are clean enough when no more oils leach out.”

My mom broke her wrist while roller skating at my 13th birthday party. Well, actually, she wasn’t roller skating. She was taking her skates off while standing up, and her feet rolled out from under her. That cemented my belief in 13 being an unlucky number.

“It’s broken, I broke my wrist,” she kept saying.

My dad rushed over. “Are you sure?” he asked.

She just pointed at the wrist in question, which was bent in an unsettlingly fluid S shape.

“Let’s get to the car,” said my dad.

Some of my birthday guests went home. Others sat with me and my sister in the waiting room of the urgent care. When we finally drove home, snow was falling, which never happens in South Carolina. The next morning, snow was still on the ground.

The doctors couldn’t operate because her wrist was too swollen, so they put a cast on it and waited a week. Then they rebroke the bone and pieced it back together. She still has screws in that wrist. I don’t remember how many.

Abstract emotion or thought—that’s a little redundant. All thoughts and emotions are abstract. Even a grocery list has to be broken from a concept or picture into something defined by language. There always seems to be something lost in translation. It’s like the kerf—the part of a wooden board that gets eaten up by the saw when you cut it.

I’m building a chaise lounge for my industrial design studio class this semester and have been calculating how much wood I need to buy. Wood measurements are strange. A board in Lowes with a tag that says 1” x 4” x 8’ will actually be 0.75” x 3.5” x 8’. That’s because the measurement on the tag is how big the board was before it was dried and surfaced. It’s another part that gets lost in translation.

Most of the parts of my chaise lounge are 1.5” thick, but I’m buying 0.75” thick boards because they’re cheaper. I’ll make two of each part and glue one on top of the other. My teacher says to look for boards from the same tree. That way the grain will match up and you almost won’t be able to tell that the wood is glued instead of solid all the way through.

The chaise lounge design is inspired by Turkish art and architecture. My family lived in Turkey until I was two years old, doing mission and medical work. I don’t remember it at all, but my mom described pieces of the culture.

“They loved babies,” she would say. “I’d be pushing you or your brother in a stroller, and women would come up and scold me for not covering your feet with socks or a blanket. Even if it was the middle of summer with full sun beating down.”

“The wives would go to the market to buy just the food for that day. They saw me getting my weeks’ worth of groceries and asked what kind of party I was hosting to be buying so much food at one time.”

“They’re so kind and hospitable. We knew all our neighbors and could drop in unannounced just to chat or have tea. That’s not a thing so much in the US anymore. You can go years here without even meeting the people on your street.”

We went back to visit Turkey when I was seven. I remember bits of that trip—the vendors selling sesame seed bagels, the intricate designs on the ceiling of the Hagia Sophia, the swarms of cats living on the streets of Istanbul, the people I didn’t recognize exclaiming over how big I’d gotten.

It’s strange to think about how much of my life I won’t ever know about or remember. The years when I was young, the years when I’ll be old, the hours I spend asleep. Maybe parts of our lives end up as kerf. We see traces of sawdust on the blade and wonder. If no one else is there to see and tell you about it later, you’ll never know.

We break apart and piece together our histories. It’s funny how our lives aren’t a cohesive narrative but we still think of and speak about them as if they were. I’ve been reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The main character Billy gets abducted by aliens that see time differently than humans do. The aliens explain that they see their entire lives all at once, like a panoramic view of a mountain range. Humans only see one mountain at a time—the moment they are currently living in.

Billy can’t see time the way the aliens do but his way of seeing changes. He still lives in linear time, but he lives moments out of order, jumping from age 5 to age 60 to age 32 and back again. He knows everything that has happened and will happen in his life. The book isn’t clear on whether Billy would be able to change the future if he tried. He doesn’t try though, and he seems content to accept that the events of his life are already determined.

The aliens have a different sort of book from humans because they read the entire thing all at once. Instead of a linear narrative, the books are collections of isolated moments.

An alien explains, “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

Divisions of time don’t really exist, or at least not in the ways we usually think of them.  Day and night are different, but there isn’t any particular moment when one becomes the other. Fall and winter slide together. One day you wake up and realize it’s winter, but you don’t know when that happened.

I listen to a podcast where the hosts read and discuss Reddit stories. In one episode, a Redditor explained his unconventional system of living. Every three years, he has a goodbye party with his friends, packs up his stuff, and moves to a new part of the US. He considers his previous life completely over and no longer talks to anyone he knew during those three years. Sometimes he prepares a new persona to use for his next “life.” He has been doing this for twenty-seven years, which makes a total of nine distinct “lives.”

It's probably a relief in some ways. He can leave behind all the embarrassing things he did and all the mistakes he made. He also leaves behind all the wonderful things that happened, but that might be a relief, too. He’s speeding up the storytelling process by closing the book. It’s usually hard to tell stories about your own life because they’re still happening. This man has all the benefits of retrospect without the length of time. The rest of us tell our stories as best as we can or leave the telling to the people that come after.

I wonder how he thinks about his personality. Does he picture a core that stays the same despite the personas it wears, or does he see himself as a collection of disjointed people? There’s a graveyard in him and in the people who remember him, too. He’s scattering dead versions of himself like sawdust, like vertebrae, across the miles.

That’s not so different from the rest of us, although our graveyards are more like mass graves than neat rows of tombstones. We each have a mound of earth labeled “past self,” and we don’t care how many versions of us get piled in and melted together as long as the mound stays distinct from “present self.” Maybe someday I’ll take out all my past selves and string them up in a line like paper dolls. I’ll be whole, planks from the same tree with grain so similar that the seams are almost indistinct. For now, though, that distinction is very important. It feels hopeful.

BIO: Claire Cooper lives and writes in South Carolina. Her work has been published in Waymark Literary Magazine and Watershed Review. She enjoys writing on topics of psychology and human connection and is always in the mood for coffee.