The Blood Is The Life.

[thorfinn]

the_christian asked for stories about blood. This is a story about the presence and absence of it. This is a true story. Probably not a good idea to read if you're even slightly squeamish about meat.

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The first thing you notice when you attend first year anatomy classes is the lack of blood. Chunks of carefully dissected human flesh lie on the table, looking strangely similar in texture (almost woodlike in grain, yet still soft and squishy) and in colour (a greying brown) to the roast beef slices you can get at the sandwich shop across the road. No blood oozes out, only a clear fluid. The second thing you notice is the smell of that clear fluid. Formaldehyde. Nothing quite smells like it. Don't lean over the table, they say. Don't breathe deeply. Good idea, your nose tells you. That stuff'll knock you out if you breathe too much of it. The third thing you notice is the cold. It's cold in those rooms, cold so the formaldehyde doesn't evaporate.

And so, you get on with today's class, on blood vessels. Poking and prodding at pieces of preserved meat. You almost forget that these pieces of flesh used to belong to someone alive. Someone whose blood used to pump through the cold white veins and arteries that you are peering at, trying to memorise the names of. These pieces of flesh had names, once. So and so's right hand. Such and such's upper left torso. But you don't get given those names. Instead, you get given names for the tiny things. Hepatic Portal Vein. Jugular Vein. Pulmonary Artery. Aorta, Aorta. You have these inside you, too, but you don't think about that. These squishy white tubes can't be the same as what's inside you. What's inside you is alive. Pulsing, pulsing.

You leave class three hours later. It's only when you notice that you've stopped that you realise that you've been shivering in the cold, burning energy to keep warm. Your chilled bloodstream tells your brain that you're hungry. Starving, in fact. For meat. Warm meat, cooked in its own blood. So, what to do? Go across the road, of course. Get a sandwich, of course. And have the roast beef, of course. Which probably didn't have a name, but still, it too, was once alive, filled with blood, just like you.

Yet you relish the taste, for the blood is the life.

Comments

[the-christian.livejournal.com]

Been meaning to thank you for this, Thorfinn. Cheers. An interesting look into how distance changes everything.

[thorfinn]

*nodnod* I side with the ethical point that if you can't stare an animal in the eye and kill it yourself, you shouldn't eat it. 'tis one of the reasons I like Vlado's cow mural... It's nice to see a big field full of cows watching you eat cow meat. None of this sanitised "it came off the supermarket shelf" thing.