Character Study

In a back hall of the social sciences building is a room with thirteen boxes. Three feet in length, a foot in width, a foot in height. Some are wooden and look like lovingly constructed but useless woodshop projects. Others are black, made from the same mottled plastic of instrument cases.

There's a warm drowsiness to the room, and I always leave beating chalky dust stripes out of my coat.

I have class here twice a week, but I visit about two times a week on my own, with a key borrowed from the main office. I pull out my box, flip up the hinges--the same tired type as my father's toolbox--and carefully move the drawer to reach the bones I need.

Each student in my class has a human skeleton, and we unpack them gently onto pads of dingy yellow foam when we enter. We line up the long bones parallel to one another, and array the bones of the hands and feet in starbursts. We never take the whole skeleton out at once. It's appendage by appendage we learn.

The person in my box only has only one foot, his left, and he's missing one of the bones of his ankle. Today I held up his tarsals and wrote detailed descriptions in my notebook, to be copied to notecards and committed to memory:

Talus
-Look for the rounded, smooth, saddle shaped bit. This is dorsal.
-Medially, there is an apostrophe whose tail points proximally.
-The triangle protruding from the saddle is lateral.

And this is what I do, for about six hours every week. I pull some man's feet and hands and ribs out of a box and I describe them to myself using a kindergarten picture book vocabulary. "Saddle, Triangle, Tail". The base of the middle finger looks, I tell myself, like a cow whose larger horn points toward the index finger.

Trying to figure out the sides of the bones, I hold his radius against my own, with my palms facing up. If the rest of his body was attached we would be dancing a strange folk dance, entwined.

Like having a capable but quiet lab partner, I hum to myself while I work and watch carefully, learning by example.