Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-05-12 20:03:00 |
|
|||
Human bodies were disgusting. It was a truth everybody knew on some level, but studying anatomy forced you to stare it direct in the face. They were disgusting. Yes, they were highly complex living organisms capable of immense adaptability and ingenuity, obviously, but also? They leaked. They oozed. They stank. They were stupidly breakable and vastly inefficient and filled with compartmentalised sacs of contaminated fluids and wastes and bacteria. Forget the fossil record and DNA and fruit flies, if you were looking for a surefire argument against intelligent design, try sitting through a semester of anatomy class. Maybe that was the reason anatomy labs turned Rosario’s stomach so much: the messiness, the illogicality of what lay beneath the skin. She’d thought she could power through the queasiness, same as she’d powered through every reading and test and exam, but one year into preclinical, the sight of a cadaver split open sent a nauseating wave of heat flooding over her, leaving her sweat-soaked and light-headed. The profs said it was normal, a reflexive human response that could be brought to heel with time and patience. Start small, they said. Work your way up. Don’t be afraid to step out when you need to. Rosario, whose typical study strategy was to throw herself against a problem like a bull at a gate till it caved beneath the force of her will, hadn’t liked that. At the start, she’d gone hard in the other direction and made herself binge hour after hour graphic surgery videos on YouTube. The idea was rapid desensitisation. All she’d got out of it was multiple bouts of heaving into the toilet and weeks of vivid nightmares. So okay, fine: Time and patience. She was retraining her body’s monkey-brain reactions. The body was stupid and illogical, ergo, it was a process. Like an untrained muscle, each time she practiced, it got a little easier. That was a lie. The truth was, she still emptied her guts in a bathroom stall after every lab. The truth was, it was all she could do to stay upright and pretend she was fine, and she had to study twice as hard because she sure as hell never heard a thing the instructor was saying. The truth was, she was going to fail this anatomy practical. Fuck. Rosario pressed her hands to her temples and groaned. Her concentration was failing her tonight, and she couldn’t even blame it on her family. Abuela was at her cards night, Camino was… somewhere, and Ma had been roped into a double shift at the last minute, so it was just her and Chicky. Her youngest sister, to be fair, could make enough noise for all five of them when she was in charge of dinner, as she was tonight. Even Cam had to admit that Chicky wasn’t a bad cook, provided you were prepared for her sometimes bizarre food experiments, but she was a terrifyingly enthusiastic one, her cooking process invariably punctuated by a symphony of clangs and clashes. Just hearing it sent jolts of tension into Rosario’s shoulders. Watching it was like waiting for a car crash to happen. But that was what earphones and pounding salsa metal were for. She should probably go out there in a couple minutes. It was better for both of their sanity that Chicky was left to her own devices, but Ma had asked her to keep an eye, so… Gastrointestinal system. Fuck. Her second-hand copy of Rohen’s Colour Atlas of Anatomy was fringed in a rainbow of post-its, each annotated in tiny script. Her notes ran for pages, detailed summaries accompanied by careful diagrams, studied over and over till she knew them by rote. And none of that mattered, because when she stepped into that goddamn lab, her mind went blank. How the hell was she supposed to identify any structures if she couldn’t look at them straight without needing to hurl? Maybe she needed to give rapid desensitisation another try. Fourteen hours, that’d be the definition of rapid. Rosario winced, stretched and pulled her earbuds free— at which moment all thought of anatomy fled her. What she heard, without the blare of music in her ears, wasn’t the expected crashes of pots and pans. It was a piercing alarm tone, high-pitched and repeating. Chicky. Panic spiked sharp and sudden in her chest, and she was through the door before she was even fully aware of standing. Her teenage sister was standing beneath the smoke alarm, flapping a damp tea-towel ineffectually at it. The sight of Rosario made her fan it all the harder. “I got it!” she insisted shrilly. “It’s okay, I got it!” It looked anything but okay. Rosario scanned the kitchen for disaster, finding the expected mess of bowls and food packets and chopping boards, but no— wait. Shit. A streak of black soot stood out starkly on the tiles behind the stovetop. She swept past Chicky in an urgent rush. Gas was off. Nothing on fire? “Charo, it’s okay! I got it!” No fire. Just a frying pan, covered, stinking of smoke— she grabbed an oven mitt before lifting the lid to find the insides black and burnt. Grease fire. Fuck, fuck, fuck! She hadn’t even noticed! “Move outta the way, Chicky.” Turning her back on the chaos of the kitchen, Rosario seized hold of the nearest dining chair and dragged it over to where Chicky was still struggling desperately to placate the smoke alarm. It was a matter of seconds to climb up onto the chair, pluck the device from the ceiling and rip out the battery. Silence descended swift and stark. All of a sudden, Rosario’s heartbeat was loud in her ears. Adrenaline, she thought distantly. Stimulates the heart. Expands air passages. Stupid monkey brain again. Chicky was twisting the dishtowel between her hands anxiously. “…I didn’t think of that.” Rosario sighed. “Chicky.” That one word was laden with such consternation, her sister actually cringed. “I know! I’m sorry, okay! I’ll fix it, I’ll clean it up. You go study.” “What were you doing?” “Nothing!” Rosario raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “I was… I wanted to make tostones. To go with the mac and cheese. I only looked away for a minute.” Rosario could picture it happening. Chicky’s attention flitted freely from place to place. She would have set oil on to heat, turned away to slice the plantains or something. Before long she’d have gotten distracted again by the mac and cheese and forgotten all about the pan of boiling goddamn oil on the stove, for god’s sake. “Chicky, you can’t get distracted with an open flame on! Do you even know how lucky you are?! You could have burned this whole place down!” She’d raised her voice, frustration (and maybe that pesky adrenaline) working its way out, and Chicky shrank even further in on herself, deeply miserable. “I messed up.” Even the words sounded small. I messed up, Rosario realised, with a clench of her stomach. Chicky got distracted, but Chicky was still a kid. She was the adult who’d holed herself up and blocked her ears to what was happening in the kitchen. “Well,” she said, attempting a reassuring smile, “at least we’ve still got the mac and cheese.” Chicky gave a pained wince, and following the line of her gaze, Rosario saw the trail of squidgy footprints leading from the stove and ending at her own shoes. “I… knocked over the casserole dish when I saw the pan on fire.” Well… fuck. Wasn’t that just brilliant. Chicky was looking at her as though bracing for an explosion. Rosario grimaced, swallowed down the frustration, and began composing a new list in her head. Item one: Clean up this mess. “Okay, Banana. Go open the windows, we gotta air this place out. Then you’re on floor duty.” While her sister hopped to it, Rosario turned her focus to item two: figure out dinner. The fridge offered slim pickings, but they had bread and the fixings of some sandwiches, which was good enough. There were also the plantains, neatly sliced and ready for the frying pan. Once the wreckage had been cleared away and the kitchen bench tidied, Chicky had perked up again, wondering aloud whether tostones would work in sandwiches. Then her eyes had lit up with inspiration – why just use them in sandwiches? – and that was how the pair of them ended up sitting in front of the TV eating ham and cheese and tomato squidged between slices of twice-fried plantain. Rosario had even allowed herself to be convinced into eating a PB&J tostone concoction, which, because it was Chicky’s, tasted far better than it had any right to. In the end, the major only casualty of the night was the frying pan. Not such a huge disaster. If only all of her problems were so easily solved. |