Compound Fracture

I.

The day her girlfriend’s arm was ripped off, Virgil hand delivered a 14 pound 7 oz seashell-pink baby, whose parents swiftly named him Hank. Hank’s father, a portly man with a beard like burnt sawdust, suggested the name, and his mother, bathing in the exhaustion of her own ejected mortality, agreed. It was a stupid name, thought Virgil as she handed the little, wriggling thing to his mother. A stupid name for a baby who should’ve died. 
After her first few years as an obstetrician, Virgil pieced together that there was a curve for babies during childbirth. The ones who were too heavy fared as well as the ones who were too light. Only the ones in the middle really grew into anything consequential without constant hand-holding from the best OB/GYNs that money could buy. The rest turned to biowaste.
Hank had his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Only once. But even so, untangling the puzzle of human anatomy between a mother and her strangled son was quite the ordeal. But, with sweat like flower petals dripping down her face and sterile cobalt hospital gloves stained with the bleeding red of amniotic juice, Virgil had done it.
He was quite the cuddly infant. Ravenously reaching for his mother, his skin still littered with flushed fluids like spilled table salt. Not the kind you throw over your left shoulder to scare away the devil. The kind used in baking cakes.
He breathed deep. Relishing in the inflation of his lungs.
Virgil smiled and tried not to think of him as bones.

II.

That damn Tabby cat had broken into their garage and made a home out of the garden tomato boxes her mother saved for the farmer’s markets in the summers. Its opal grey fur lay flat and sticky, in the ethereal way that forest animals bear the markings of their past. At seven years old, all tufts of blonde pigtails and watery brown eyes, Virgil begged her parents to let her keep the muddy animal. ‘Bubbles,’ she had already named it, because that's what he was. Spherical and iridescent and light as all air could be. 
Even after her parents had said yes, Virgil kept the small creature clutched in her arms whenever she could. Gentle, but firm. As if some unseen rapture would take him, purring, straight away from her.
Bubbles took middle class life in stride. He grew taller and wider with each can of wet salmon tidbits. Menace, though he was— fighting mice and her father’s socks— he snuggled into Virgil’s side to sleep every night. Trying to catch the last bits of sunset in his yellow irises, he closed his eyes to sleep as slow as he could. Virgil held all her molecules still when he did that. She held the very world still so the lovely little cat could dream of, perhaps fish bones, in an undisturbed hush. When morning blushed, she woke him, petting behind his raspberry ears in the way he made it clear he liked. 
In the 17 years she had him, Bubbles never spoke once. He purred, a deep lucid sound naturally pulled from the hollow of his chest. But he never meowed. He never chirped. As if his voice was a gift reserved only for the grass and the trees and the stars. 

III.

Tibby Twayne was wearing an esophagus-red corduroy skirt with matching lipstick the first time Virgil ever kissed her. This was cemented into her memory because Tibby was wearing black lipstick the second time. Both instances left temporary coloured inflections on the edges of Virgil’s mouth, deep as bruise, like she was marked down to the tendon. They washed away easily with berry-blast body wash and scrubbing, but Virgil swore they stayed there forever. Red and Black and Red and Black in a pattern over her skin. Smouldering over and over again burning from hydrogen fusion into carbon dioxide and sticky saliva. 
On the skyfall of the fourth kiss, Virgil told her this. She wanted the bold-faced, heavy jawed, five-foot-seven luminary laying over top of her to know exactly the bone-deep lasting impression she left. She smiled so wide that the bones of her mouth practically distended from their sockets.
Salmon cotton sheets from Wal-Mart set the lining of their 312th kiss. They were cherry stems tied together. Grapes baked down into raisins. They were mitochondrial, spread over a mattress set on beige carpet. She drowned herself in Tibby. In the girl who told her she liked the powder puff pink pigment of her gums. 
A pineapple candle was lit on the wooden desk beside them and Virgil thought faintly that they were going to catch on fire and burn. Into cherry stem, grape-raisin skeletons. Cake-box-baked into the rubble of their first apartment together. 
They’d been together a while. Last October marked seven years since a fumbling exchange of phone numbers at the vet had turned into shopping for engagement rings. Being with her was like heartburn, but larger. Like her thermoregulation had shut off. 

II.

Bubbles only ate salmon-flavoured wet food. He didn’t have a preference for what brand, but any time Virgil tried to feed him gravy or shrimp or beef, he’d let the gelatinous splatter of food rot away. She never minded getting him the specific flavour. It made shopping easier, and the red tinged glob of brain matter salmon was the least she could do to keep him happy. 
Newly seventeen and quiet as ever, Bubbles stopped sinking his fangs into the pile in his porcelain food dish. He no longer licked his maw clean, in the predatory way, and swaggered over to her for praise. Instead he lulled his head at her when she walked by with a can. He slept. He didn’t drink water. 
On her second visit in a week, the vet said his insides were bone dry. She said the stress caused fractures in his left leg. She said the radius was scraping raw against his muscles. She said the only way to make him salmon-wet-food-happy again was a syringe filled to the brim with pentobarbital.
And Virgil lived to make Bubbles happy.

III.

She told Tibby, when she asked, that she loved her. 
She told Tibby, when she asked, that Tibby was short for Tabby in the way a beach is short for the ocean, and that Tabby was short for Tabitha in the way Freon was short for apocalypse. (What she didn’t tell her, was that Tibby was short for Tibia in the way that Virgil’s eyes were short for x-rays. What she didn’t tell her was that Virgil took in the world one bone at a time and the tibia was her second favourite, behind the femur and before the ulna. What she didn’t tell her was that in residency, when she delivered babies, they didn’t have patellas. Only slabs of cartilage where the bone should be). 
She told Tibby, when she asked, that the cat skeleton in their living room was the antithesis of taxidermy. Bone art. Cats have 24 more bones than humans, and one extra rib. And if the Bible states that Eve was made from the rib of Adam, and that’s why she has one more than him, then cat was formed from the rib of Eve. Tibby kissed her after that. A strand of brown hair stuck to her ligament pink lipstick. Her cheeks were flushed with acrylic paint and her eyes were cat fur grey.
She told Tibby, when she asked, that she planned on collecting more.

I.

Virgil hadn’t gotten the chance to check who her next patient was, when a young twenty-something boy with dark curls in his hair and panic in his eyes threw open the door, waking up both the sleeping mother and the baby. 
Hank screamed. He was deafening. He was fire crackling. He shot his sound waves into the atmosphere, as if his only instinct was to let the world know he was there. 
The man’s voice was pale when he spoke. The words were heavy with rotting peaches. He told her, in a voice the color of tapeworm, that Tabitha Twayne, riding her bike home from work just one foot too close to a city bus, was in the trauma section, getting the life stuffed back into her, and the sinuous thread still holding her left arm on, cut off. 

II.

A vet will let you keep the body of your pet, if you ask nicely. Body, Virgil thought, not corpse. Corpse was far too much of a dissociative word to describe the bundle of living, breathing cells that Bubbles had been. Corpse was not flesh and blood and bone and heart. Corpse was not skeletal, smooth, and cardiac muscles. Corpse was not organ systems and organelles and nervous systems and spines and brains and eyes and ears. And ears. And ears. And ears. 
Corpse was not raspberry ears.

I.

IV fluid dripped into the remaining arm of her girlfriend. Slowly. Steadily. The heart rate monitor pulsed in the unyielding stubbornness Virgil was used to hearing around the hospital. She wasn’t used to ones hooked up onto adults though. She wasn’t used to the full size. The full gravity of it. 
Tibby was reborn in bandages, face smeared with sunburn road rash and even redder lipstick.

II. 

  The best way to remove the animal from the bone is to skin it from ankle to scalp, remove the viscera inside, and bury it in a hole in direct sunlight for several months. Preferably near an anthill. When the bones are ripe, perhaps one summer morning when you go out to pick tomatoes from the garden, unbury them. Set them in hot, stagnant water and wait. Every two days change the water to remove the floating chunks. 
When they're clean, pat them dry with your best, fluffiest towel. Gentle, but firm.

I.

Changing the bandages of a wound was an intimate thing. Virgil, on the rare occasions she had to, did it with fingers grazing ruptured flesh so softly they could be mistaken for pale, white ghosts. Now she was going to have to get familiar with it again, return to shaking the hands of plaster and white cotton. The doctors had told Tibby how lucky she was that her girlfriend was a doctor. How lucky she was to have someone qualified to help her recover. Virgil felt like Argon when he said that. Like xenon. Like radon. Like any periodic chemical, except the ones that glow. 
Tibby asked the doctor, in that lilting song voice of hers, if she thought it would be heretical to wear her wedding ring on her right hand. The grin she sprouted when he said yes was helium.
The sky was cloudy that day. The pink kind.

I.

When she was in medical school, Virgil learned it takes eight weeks for an amputated limb to heal.

II.

Her favorite skeleton in the living room doesn’t meow. He doesn’t chirp or squeak or hiss or purr. He lulls his head and does not eat the can of salmon tidbits Virgil hides in the back of the supply cupboard. He sits in silence. In bone white. In spherical, and iridescent, and light as all air could be. 
It’s nearly enough to convince Virgil he’s still alive. 

II. 
When she was 24, Virgil learned it takes eight months for a tabby cat’s body to decompose entirely.

III.

She told Tibby, when she asked, driving down the interstate from the hospital to their house, that she loved her. That their love was a one-armed thing. No salt in the sea, no milk gone bad in the fridge, no songbirds flying off, no bone rot, no city bus could shake away the Red and Black.

I.
(What she didn’t tell her was, lying in a scarlet pool of biowaste soup in the back compartment of their blood-cell-white prius, sat the remnants of a left arm, severed at the shoulder and broken in eight places, perfectly ready to be stripped down to nothing but bone).