Elizabeth Rosen fiction short story Thirteen Dogs

Title image by Pam McKnight, Hard Guy, Acrylic on Paper, 8″ x 8″, 2024.

Thirteen Dogs

by Elizabeth Rosen

1. White Angel 1945 -1960

Peter watches from the bedroom window as his wife pulls her rain jacket closed around her neck and adjusts her hood against the mist. Thinking him asleep, she has slipped out the back gate, careful not to let it make a noise as it shuts. A few steps down the road and she is gone from his sight. He is a little surprised that she isn’t frightened, walking alone at night, surrounded by dense fog. It’s a bad trope of bad stories. But ever since the surgery, not only have her days and nights been inverted, but her fear has subsided. It is a strange thing. He wonders if she never feels alone now that someone else’s heart beats in her chest. 

2. Emily 1945-1960

Jesse has been thinking about Peggy Guggenheim lately. And the dogs, of course. The heiress had fourteen of them eventually, all Lhaso Apsos, all buried next to the plot where she herself was planted after her death. Their grave stone reads “Here Lie My Beloved Babies.” The sixth dog was Madam Butterfly. The ninth was White Angel, and the tenth, Sir Herbert. Otherwise, most of the names were ordinary dog names. Guggenheim collected dogs like she collected art and lovers, but only the dogs were buried with her.

If Peter knew where she had been going on her nightly hikes, he’d almost certainly be suggesting therapy. More therapy. But the cemetery isn’t morbid. She finds it beautiful in the way of decaying things. She runs her fingers over the springy moss growing on the north side of the tombstones and feels the delight of a child discovering a new sensation. Sitting on a marble bench, moonlight streaming through yew branches, she feels – really feels – the hard, smooth stone against the backs of her thighs. Sometimes she stops to lift a fallen marker that has been pushed over by roots, or teenagers. None of it makes her sad. She walks the rows of graves, shining her flashlight on the names of the people here. There are some family names she recognizes from town. Others are unfamiliar to her. None of them are hers.

She is acutely aware that one of them might have been, if not for the transplant. Knows that if she walks far enough into the cemetery, up the hill, and through the wrought-iron gates there, she will find a grave that does bear her surname among the infant-sized headstones, teddy bears, and Gone Too Soon banners. The marker is a formality; she had barely had time to adjust to the fact that she was going to be a mother before the baby was lost, but she doesn’t tell anyone, doesn’t tell Peter even, that the loss she is most concerned with is not this wisp of a child, but her heart.

3. Cappucino 1949-1953

Even though it is partially open, Peter knocks gently on the door of the home office before entering. Jesse’s eyes lift from the computer screen where she is face-timing about a shipping problem the museum is having with one of the anatomical wax figures coming from Italy. Her eyebrow raises even as she keeps talking to whoever is on the other side of the screen. Peter lifts the bowl of nuts he has brought her. Below the sightline of her computer camera, she joins her hands palm-to-palm in the gesture that has come to signal thank you in emoji-speak.

As he closes the door behind him, he thinks how strange it is that this same gesture of prayer has also come to signify thanks. He has never associated prayer with thankfulness. For him, prayer has always been about need. Please give me strength, Lord. Please heal my wife’s body, Lord. 

Their Bernese Mountain Dog trots up to him, leash in mouth. Time for Auggie’s midday walk. Peter clips the lead to the dog’s collar, even though he’ll let him off when they reach the wooded path they take daily up to and through the cemetery.

Peter’s two-month stint of working at home is almost up. Soon, he will be returning to work at the Braintree office. He feels a little guilty that he is looking forward to it. He considered having his mother-in-law come for a couple of weeks, just so someone is here with Jesse, but seeing how Jesse has immersed herself back in her curatorial work and spends most of her time at her desk, Peter has let go of the idea. Even with her occasional night perambulations, Jesse is doing well. She faithfully attends her transplant support group to help her navigate the big emotions. He has gotten her one of those medical alert wristbands, and she has promised to wear it.

Auggie tugs Peter toward the entrance to the wooded path. A few yards in, Peter unclips the leash and the dog goes bounding away. Peter follows after but doesn’t call him back. 

It is Peter’s favorite time of year. The crowns of the trees are starting to change color. It won’t be long before the skies gray and the temperature drops. The leaves will brown and curl into themselves before falling to the earth. It is a laying-by time. A time of storing things: food, energy, thought. Grief. 

This is another thing that he associates with prayer: apology. Please, Lord, forgive me for my selfishness. Please help me be a better man, Lord. I know I should love all your children equally, but I love one above all the rest. Forgive me, Lord.

Up ahead, bits of broken twigs and burrs now tangled in his black-and-tan coat, Auggie waits panting at the fork for a decision. Peter often finds himself diverting from the main path to go up into the children’s cemetery. It is one reason he is glad to be returning to work; it cannot be good to continually return there. He would never have bought a plot at all, but Jesse needed it. If it had been only him, he wouldn’t have bothered to have a full service and grave. He had looked at photos of fetuses the same age as the one they had lost and just couldn’t make himself think of it as a baby, couldn’t recognize himself or Jesse in that alien, swollen head and shrunken body. The miscarriage had happened so early that Jesse had looked more like she had a bad case of bloat than a baby inside her, and any hormonal effects had been subsumed by the news of the cardiomyopathy and then the whirlwind of the transplant itself. Still, Peter had read that having a grave to visit was helpful for almost-mothers, so he had dutifully made the arrangements. He came now and again on his walks with Augie to leave a stone.

He stopped in front of the grave bearing his surname. There was a single date under Baby Sienkiewicz. Peter sometimes felt bad about the lack of first name, like the marker named an item rather than a child, but he and Jesse had decided it would be more painful to name the baby, and so the death marker indicated only that the Sienkiewiczs had once had a baby. 

Auggie was tearing along the fence of the children’s section, barking wildly at a fleeing rabbit. Peter took from his pocket a small stone he had picked up on their way here and placed it on top of the marker, trying to feel the grief he knew he should, trying to feel that he was at the grave of his child, but as usual, feeling only relief that Jesse had not died. Relief that they were not trying to care for a newborn in the midst of a heart transplant and recovery. Guilt washed through him like dirty floodwater. In response, he silently said a prayer for the dead. If he could not actually feel grief, at least he could go through the motions.

On the way home, Auggie leaped into the air, snapping at a huge maple leaf spiraling down from one of the trees. Peter picked it up from the ground, holding it out for the dog to sniff. The leaf was bigger than his hand, yellow and green, marred by a few black spots. Peter didn’t believe in signs. Wouldn’t know how to interpret this even if it were one. Even so, he carefully folded the leaf in half, then half again, and again. He took his wallet from his back pocket and slipped the leaf behind the clear plastic where a photo would usually go.

4. Pegeen 1951-1953

Peggy Guggenheim’s second dog and daughter share a name. Jesse isn’t sure whether the dog was named for the daughter, or the daughter was named for the dog, but she does wonder if having a mother who names a dog after you, or you after a dog, might have been a contributing factor in Pegeen’s suicide. The Guggenheims had put it round that it was an overdose on medicine, but poor Pegeen had had none of her mother’s resiliency or ability to ignore gossip, and there’d been numerous attempts before she succeeded. 

On her computer, Jesse clicked through images of Pegeen’s paintings, her curatorial eye noting the carnivalesque colors and formal isolation of the two-dimensional figures with their striking, elongated heads. The paintings were good in their own right, though Pegeen had never become as well-known as the other Surrealist painters. 

Jesse made note. Perhaps an exhibit of Pegeen’s work sometime down the road? What a relief it would be to work on an exhibit in which the owners of the works actually wanted the work shown, rather than this most recent one with all the endless requirements from the Italian government about shipping the fragile wax figures, about how to display them, how to secure them. What an interesting contrast it would be between Pegeen’s flat, cartoonish women with their exaggerated beehives of hair, and Clemente Susini’s life-like anatomical models wearing pearls and little else, who could be “dissected” layer by layer to show the female body inside and out.

Jesse clicked through more paintings. None of the people in Pegeen’s work were touching, even though they stood next to one another and sometimes even invaded each other’s space. One image in particular caught her eye. Enlarging it, she saw it was called “Intimate Conversation,” but no conversation was happening in it. A woman, bare-breasted but wearing a long dress that completely covered her otherwise, reclined on a bed, her gaze and hand stretched out toward the male figure sitting across the room. The fully-dressed male figure wasn’t responding to her, wasn’t even looking at her. Instead, he stared out at the viewer, ignoring the woman on the bed. The room itself was a riot of color and patterns. The flowers in the vase became one with the wallpaper of the background. The striped pattern of the man’s trousers clashed with the stripes of the tablecloth and bedsheets and rugs. The eye didn’t know where to go. The conflicting patterns and colors created a sense of confusion and unease, made the man’s disregard of the woman on the bed even more harsh and upsetting. Jesse wondered what pain had been in Pegeen’s mind when she’d named the piece “Intimate Conversation.”

Jesse heard Auggie padding down the hall to check in on her. His enormous head peered around her half-opened office door. “Hi, baby,” Jesse said to him, closing the computer and rising. “Tell dad I’m coming.” Auggie’s head disappeared. She heard him retreating back down the hallway to the kitchen where Peter would be making a health-conscious lunch for her. 

5. Peacock 1952-1953

After Peter locates a can of WD-40 in Walmart’s automotive section, he goes to find Jesse in homewares. He finds her crying silently in the greeting card aisle instead, a card held loosely in her fingers. Mystified, he rubs her back, shields her from the curious glances of other shoppers. 

“Jess?” he says. “What is it?”  He takes the card from her gently. Flipping it over, he sees a bright red heart on the front of it. Nothing else. Just a heart.

Jesse is crying so hard, trying so hard to be quiet that she can’t catch her breath and begins to hyperventilate. Her grip on his wrist is iron. She stares at him with wild, panicked eyes and he cannot tell if it is the hyperventilating or her thoughts causing it. 

“What did they do with it?” she gasps, sucking wildly at the air. “My heart. Did they just throw it away?” 

6. Sir Herbert 1952-1965

When the weather permitted, Peggy liked to sunbathe nude on the roof of her Venice palazzo. She called her dogs her “beloved babies.” Grandma-the-Dogs was what her grandchildren called her. She had two husbands. Two children. She began collecting at the age of forty. Her father went down with the Titanic. She counted among her lovers Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy, John Gage, Constantin Brancusi, Laurence Vail, and 994 others. 

7. Toro 1954-1957

Jesse is in the closet buttoning her blouse. Peter hovers in the doorway, still in his boxers, and clearly uncertain how to proceed after last night’s debacle. 

She hates this reappraising of every quotidian thing that happens: when she trips, or hiccups, lifts a laundry basket, or stares out the window. Each item checked for quality before it can be moved to the basket of “normal” things one does a hundred times a day. It has been the most exhausting part of the whole recovery. 

She knows she should feel grateful that Peter cares for her so well, but the constant taking of her temperature is irritating. So many months after the fact, Jesse is torn between reassuring and scolding him. She sighs as she slips on her wedding band and medical bracelet. Peter immediately interprets it as trouble, of course.

“I can ask for more time off,” he says. “If you don’t want to wear it.”

“What?” she asks, confused, then realizes he thinks she doesn’t want to wear the alert. “No, no. I want you to go back to work. I need you to go back to work.” She steps toward him and wraps her arms around his bare waist. “We’ll never get back to normal if we don’t start living normal lives again.”

Peter nuzzles her, holds her clothed body against his mostly naked one. Before the surgery, this quiet, intense contact between them would have resulted in an erection, particularly first thing in the morning like this, but there is no sign of arousal from him. The failed attempt to have sex the previous night is a second layer of invisible fabric separating them.

“I still think you’re sexy,” Peter says. 

“I believe you. But you can’t keep being afraid you’re going to break me.” She does not admit to him that his fear is only part of the problem, that when his hand tentatively moved up her ribcage to her breast, she could only think about the fact that the heart inside her was not her own any longer. She had gone numb with the knowledge.

“I’m trying,” Peter says.

Jesse disentangles from him, places a hand on either side of his face and stares hard into his eyes. “I know. Go to work. I will be here when you get back, ok?” 

For a second, Jesse feels this deep looking is the equivalent of making love, but then Peter blinks and nods. She sees that he has broken eye contact with her because he isn’t sure that he can give her what she wants yet and doesn’t want her to see it in his face. She forces herself not to react to this knowledge, kisses him instead and leaves the bedroom, Peter still in the closet.

Peggy Guggenheim claimed to have slept with over a thousand men. Jesse can’t determine whether she admires this or condemns it. She isn’t even able to sleep with the one.

8. Madam Butterfly 1954-1958

“I’m angry all the time.”

Around the circle, several of the men nod their heads when the new woman, Sharon, says this. A few of them look a little surprised, too, as if an angry woman isn’t something that is supposed to happen. So typical of the support group where she and Mary have been the only women before Sharon joined last week. This new woman isn’t cowed either by the surgical experience, or by being a woman in this largely male group.

“Anyone else feel like that?” Sharon asks, glancing around the circle. She is an imposing woman, big-boned, broad-faced. New England fisherman stock, Jesse thought when Sharon first arrived in her dingy cable knit sweater and loose mom jeans. “I’m furious half the time, don’t want to get out of bed the other half,” Sharon says.

“Ok, let’s talk about that.” Angela, the facilitator, crosses her thick legs and rebalances her clipboard on top of them. “Anyone else feeling depressed or angry?” Almost all the hands go up around the circle. “David?”

David leans forward in his seat. “My wife says she can’t understand why I’m so down. She says I’ve been given a second chance, what’s to be upset over? But I can’t stop thinking that I’ve only been given an extension. Even if this thing works, I still won’t see my sons graduate from college, won’t see them get married, won’t meet my grandchildren.” He begins to cry. 

A sour taste fills Jesse’s mouth. Like her, David has had a heart transplant. Only two of them in the room have, but all of them in the group know the survival numbers for their various transplants. Even if she managed to get pregnant next year, her child would still be in grade school when this new heart gave out. Jesse was lucky to be in the right place at the right time to get this heart so quickly. She won’t be so lucky again.

“That’s right,” Sharon says to David. “Like, let’s say I survive this next year with the new liver. I’ll still only get five or ten years at most.”

Mary speaks up. “Does anyone feel guilty for even thinking in these terms?” 

Heads nod around the circle. 

Sharon crosses her arms and leans back hard against her chairback. “Ok, yeah, I get it,” she says. “Second chances and all. More time than we would have had otherwise. But it’s only finite.”

Jesse looks Sharon steadily in the eye. “Isn’t all life?” 

Sharon glares at her in the silence that follows. 

Angela speaks up. “Nobody knows how long they really have. Would it help to think about it in those terms and say to yourself, ‘Well, most people don’t know how long their lives will be, but I have some idea and that lets me think about what things I want to prioritize as important?’” 

The room is dense with unspoken responses. It stays that way until Sharon can’t hold it in anymore. “I’m just so fucking angry,” she says.

Jesse gazes out the window. They are on the 18^th floor. Off in the distance, she can see the white tip of the Old North Church steeple, and the Charlestown Naval yards beyond. The steeple looks like a skeletal finger accusing the sky.

9. Foglia 1956-1958

The nut aisle is overwhelming. Jesse has never noticed the abundance. There are pumpkin seeds and Brazilian nuts. Pecans, flax seed, Macadamia nuts, cashews and almonds. Some roasted, some raw. They come in packets with banners reading Organic and Unsalted. There are walnuts and peanuts and pitted cherries. Figs from Turkey. Medjool dates and freeze-dried strawberry slices. Sunflower kernels and acai berries. Caramelized. Chocolate-covered. 

Jesse stands in front of the pistachios, her mouth inexplicably watering. A terrifying craving for them has gripped her, a craving that makes no sense since she has never liked the taste of pistachios. She remembers feeling disturbed by the can of fluorescent green pistachio ice cream inside a Baskin & Robbins freezer as a child. Since then, she has avoided anything flavored or sprinkled with pistachio. She is tempted to pull out her cell phone and call her mother to verify the memory.

The desire is so unsettling that Jesse walks out of the store without buying the items she had stopped to pick up before the doctor’s appointment. She drives to the cardiologist’s office only half paying attention. Jesse’s hand drifts to the top of her sternum. She fingers the notch in the collarbone there. It’s a habit she developed post-surgery, perhaps because the top of the incision was unbearably itchy as it healed, but she has noticed that the gesture accompanies her worrying about the borrowing of someone’s heart.

She understands that the heart isn’t on loan. It will never go back to its original owner, like some library book with the oil of another reader’s fingers on the corners of its pages. This is exactly the problem: the new heart didn’t come as a blank slate. She has likes and dislikes that she didn’t have before the transplant. She cannot stand the smell of lavender anymore, for instance. The smell of onions cooking brings on a wave of sadness that is unrelated to anything that is happening. And now there is this craving for pistachios.

At the cardiologist’s office, the doctor breezes into the examination room thirty minutes late. She is a serious woman and the smile she gives Jesse as she checks her ankles for swelling is a practiced one, but not genuine. Her doctor says that if all is well during this visit, Jesse can start coming once every two months instead of monthly. She also says they can reduce the medications Jesse is taking to stave off rejection, but fear squeezes the air from Jesse’s lungs whenever she imagines walking among the living without a mask.

The doctor goes to the computer in the room to look at the results of Jesse’s latest echocardiogram and bloodwork. Jesse lies on the uncomfortable examination table staring at the ceiling as she waits. How can she want pistachios so badly? The white-walled examination room, its windows tinted gray to keep out curious glances from outside, seems designed to amplify her worry.

The cardiologist smiles at her, the first wholly genuine smile Jesse has seen. She tells Jesse that her heart is fine, but Jesse finds herself wondering. Is it?

10. Sable 1958-1973

Jesse awakens with a start. She has gone from sleep to consciousness with none of the usual slow ascent. Peeling the covers away from her body so as not to disturb Peter, she slips out of bed. Inside the bathroom, she closes the door and flips on the lights above the mirror. In it is a woman gripping the edge of the vanity as if her life depended on it. 

Her mind is still in the dream where Peggy Guggenheim was leading her from her private gondola into the Palazzo to show Jesse her latest acquisition. She had followed Peggy through the two-story wrought iron gates and down the marble hallway, two of the dogs dancing at her heels like crazed mops from Fantasia. 

Everywhere she looked, Jesse had seen the paintings of great Modernists hanging on the sleek walls of the villa. They pass a Jackson Pollock, an Alexander Calder, a Cy Twombly that her waking mind knows hasn’t been on view in the collection for decades. 

Off in a room by itself, visible through one of the many arched doorways, Jesse spotted Magritte’s Empire of Light, its lonely streetlamp a beacon in the midst of its illogic. She goes to stand in front of it. The house is surrounded by night, its plain white face illuminated by the single streetlight in front of it, while the sky above the silhouetted trees shows a brilliant cloud-filled daylight. The painting makes her want to weep.

In another corner of the room sits Jean Arp’s nub-like Amphora-Fruit on a dais.  The bronze has a green patina just below the brown of the surface and the imperfections of the pour have not been polished out. There are tiny pockmarks on the side that remind Jesse of the fossilized tracks of insects caught in sandstone. In the dream, Jesse feels a sense of possessiveness as she gazes at the statue. She is reaching out to put her hands on it when she spots the Lhasa-Apsos sitting in the doorway to the room, watching her with cocked heads as if they have heard her covetous thoughts.

Peggy finds her there in front of the Arp, staring back at the dogs. 

“Here,” she says to Jesse in excitement. She holds out a rectangular case about six inches long with a peaked top on it. Jesse takes the case from Peggy. The whole thing is made of beveled glass. Through the top, Jesse can see the red velvet padding at the bottom of the case but cannot understand what is slotted into it. The dogs wind around Peggy’s legs. 

Jesse lifts the clasp on the side and tips back the top. The object inside, Jesse now sees, is her heart. Her former heart. It is shriveled to the size and texture of a walnut, and it is nestled grotesquely into the rich, red velvet. 

“We must put it on display immediately,” Peggy tells her and the dogs begin barking, which is when Jesse wakes from the dream.

Jesse pulls her t-shirt down to examine her red surgical scar in the bathroom mirror. She touches the raised, uneven flesh that runs the length of her sternum. The cross-hatching where the staples had been is still visible, an angry, ugly ladder up the main scar. Peter says the scar will fade eventually. Jesse is not so sure. 

She sits on the side of the bathtub. Peter will hate her if he knows that it is the loss of her heart and not the baby that takes up space in her brain. He would be right to. She feels some of that hatred herself. How can she explain the longing for that glass box with her old heart inside it? 

11. Gypsy 1961-1975

Peter has done the thing that his father told him never to do: go to bed angry with his wife. He has done nothing to fix it because the anger feels good, like accidentally meeting a childhood friend years later. It has been so long since he let himself feel anger. Desperate worry, yes. Sickening fear, yes. But not anger. 

He knows it isn’t right to be angry at a woman who has lost a baby and had a transplant on top of it, but she is insisting on meeting the father of the donor, has made plans for him to come to their house. This is her—their—safe haven, a place that Peter wants desperately to keep for themselves and return to normal. Normal from before the pregnancy, before the heart. How can they do that if she invites in a man whose grief is based on the thing that has made her whole? How is it possible that this father will not begrudge her survival?

 “This is a terrible idea,” Peter had said in bed the night after the social worker called. “You think it’s going to go one way, but what if it doesn’t?”

“What way would that be?” Jesse had said to him with a coolness he could only remember hearing her use in her phone calls with the irascible Italian museum authorities.

Peter hadn’t answered immediately. He thought of the countless ways it could go wrong, could impede and not help her – their – recovery. “What if he’s angry?” he says. “What if he has a total breakdown? What if doing this seems to him to be a good thing, but only prolongs his pain?”

“Yours, you mean?” Jesse’s blue eyes were like frozen winter lakes. He saw by the set of her jaw that there was no point in objecting.

He flailed helplessly. “Yours. Yes, and ours, too.”

Hearing their tone, Auggie had risen from between them on the bed and jumped down to the floor. He curled himself into a bundle, his eyebrows twitched as he listened to the arguing. 

 “You don’t think he has the right to be angry?” Jesse asked. 

“Of course, he does,” Peter replied, “but that doesn’t mean it’s something you need to put yourself in front of. It’s not your fault you needed a new heart. Our luck – yours – is his misfortune, his grief, Jesse. I would think you would understand that grief.”

Peter’s teeth clicked shut, too late to stop the last words that had escaped. He felt a surge of nausea rising in his throat. My god, had he really said that? Did he really think that?

He reached for her. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

But she had rolled away from him and left the bed. Her bare feet padded away on the polished wooden floorboards, Auggie following after her. Misery swelled in him as it always did when they argued. They argued about so little. Normally, they would have reached for one another and made love, but the thought of having sex still fills Peter with anxiety. He cannot stop the thought that shrivels his desire: what if she gets pregnant again and he loses her?

12. Hong Kong 1964-1978

Wanting to find a copy of Peggy’s memoir, Jesse had stopped at the library in Copley Square before her support group meeting. She was unsurprised to see that the cover photo showed Peggy sitting in a queenly throne, two of her beloved dogs in her lap. Reading how Peggy swept out her cousin’s bookshop wearing pearls and a costly coat, Jesse wants to laugh at the woman’s audacity, her tone-deafness. Here is a woman who ignored all expectations of her, who challenged the Louvre about which art was worth saving as the Nazis invaded Paris, and when the elitist curators refused to help save her collection -– what would become one of the greatest collections of Modernist paintings to exist – she simply labeled the art “household goods” and shipped the whole thing to the United States for safe-keeping.

Leaving the library, Jesse slips the book into her shoulder bag and heads for the T. Copley Plaza is bright with winter sunlight, the leftover, hard-packed piles of snow from three weeks ago pushed to the far edges, dirty now with car exhaust. The icy gnome-sized mountains will remain frozen in place until the temperatures warm. 

In the T, the car swaying and squealing as it goes around corners, Jesse opens the book. Not all of Peggy’s history is so laughable, she thinks. Her first husband had held her under water in the bathtub, and beat her in public. Jesse reads about the visit from the Titanic steward to the St. Regis Hotel where Guggenheim’s mother received news of her husband being lost at sea, the note with her father’s last words to them – “tell my wife in New York that I’ve done my best in doing my duty” – as if it would ameliorate their public humiliation that he’d taken his mistress on the great ship. As if it could make up for his profligacy and philandering. 

Still, Jesse thinks, settling into a chair in the meeting room, here was something to be proud of, too. Benjamin had insisted on the women and children being loaded into the lifeboats first. The steward told them that the mogul and his male secretary had changed into evening clothes so that they could “go down as gentlemen.” What a father to live up to. Is it any wonder that Peggy, only thirteen when her father died, would spend all her life looking for a man of similar stature? 

Jesse politely returns her attention to the group shifting in their chairs as Sharon begins her weekly screed. They have stopped trying to talk her through her anger, having each privately come to the conclusion that the woman was furious even before the life-saving surgery. 

Mary sits across from Jesse, turning and turning her Starbucks cup in her hands while Sharon speaks. Mary looks up and catches Jesse watching her, gives a slow, exaggerated blink, the corner of her mouth twitching upwards. Jesse takes it to mean the same thing as an exasperated sigh. Jesse looks down at her lap, smiling, and has a moment of appreciation for the ways in which women communicate their feelings.

And then an idea comes to her.

13. Cellida 1964-1979

Jesse waits outside the delivery entrance, next to one of the exhibit posters exhorting museum visitors to “See the divine architecture of the human body.” When Mary and Sharon turn into the alley, she feels slightly relieved that they have shown up as planned. Now she shields the security pad from their view and punches in the code that unlocks the door.

“What are we doing here?” Sharon complains, gathering the edges of her sweater close around her stocky torso.

“You’re not very good at staying quiet, are you?” It is unlike Mary to speak so directly, so tactlessly. The effect of this observation from a woman who barely speaks in group and always ends her statements with a question mark is immediate. Sharon recoils as if touched with a cattle prod. It is disorienting for Jesse to see the women from the support group outside the sterile walls of the meeting room. They know each other in the most intimate, interior ways, and yet know each other not at all, she realizes. 

Inside, at the security desk, the guard is reading a magazine, light from a desk lamp reflecting off the glossy pages. Jesse raises her hand in greeting as they enter. The guard rises, adjusting his belt around his waist as he appraises the visitors. 

“Evening, Dr. Sienkiewicz,” he says. 

Jesse feels the shift between the two women behind her, how the title, which she has never revealed in group, changes the way they look at her. 

“Hello, Jim. How’s the family?” They exchange a few words as she signs in. She notes the time – 9:27 – adds it to the sign-in sheet. At home, Peter will be catching up on the Australian Open matches played earlier in the day. He wasn’t happy that she was going to the city tonight, but she’d pacified him by telling him that she needed to be at the museum for a face-time call with her counterparts in Florence to go over the numerous details about shipping the anatomical models back now that the exhibit had ended.

Jesse indicates the sign-in sheet to the other women. “You can leave your coats and purses with Jim,” she tells them. “He’s going to wave you down with a wand, too.” 

Sharon starts to say something, but Mary, already handing her purse to Jim, glances over at her, and Sharon shuts her mouth, bends over the sheet to sign her name instead. While Jim does his security check, Jesse goes into the next room and re-emerges, holding out a pair of cloth gloves to both women. “Put these on,” she tells them. 

Jesse leads them through several doors into the main preparation room. The night dimmers are on and the room is filled with a yellow light the color of antique papyrus. The room is hushed with the weight of the history it holds within its walls. Three of the five anatomical figures have already been packed, their wooden crates nailed shut. The two others lay within their own crates, nestled into foam supports with the lids still waiting to be placed atop. 

Jesse leads the women to one of the crates, indicating they should look inside.

Mary gasps. 

“What the fuck…,” Sharon says.

Jesse remembers the astonishment she, too, had felt upon first seeing one of Susini’s wax women. The beautiful verisimilitude of it: the unblemished alabaster of young skin, the real hair used for the lashes and brows, the sheen of buffed nails, finely-bumped aureole, even the conjured gravity tugging at its life-like flesh as it lay on its satin-covered dais. 

She remembers the shock, too, of seeing the model’s interior landscape exposed to the gaze. Jesse’s staff have done as she asked, leaving the top two removable layers of the body –skin and muscle – on the nearby table, so that what Sharon and Mary are now seeing as they peer into the crate is the reclining naked body of a life-like woman, her torso a gaping hole exposing her inner organs. All the mysteries of female biology laid out for study in meticulous detail.

“They were created to teach medical students,” Jesse tells them. “They were the height of technology during the late 1700s.”  

She climbs on the stepstool next to the wooden crate, leans in and gently lifts the intestine layer free of the torso, placing it at the feet of the model where it rests like a battle shield. Jesse refuses to let her eyes stray below the exposed pelvis where she knows that there is a pale wax fetus curled like a tiny miracle into the model’s uterus, doesn’t let herself think too hard about what it took to sculpt this little figure, this uterus, so realistically. She lets the others stare into the box for a moment, gives them time to absorb the craftsmanship: the delicate blue threading of blood vessels over intestines, the bloody honeycomb of the womb walls, the fleshy pink lacrimal caruncle. The very idea of the anatomical angel. 

Leaning over a second time, Jesse lifts the brownish wings of the lungs free, steps down from her stool. “Mary,” she says softly as if the organ is a baby who might awaken if she speaks too loudly. “Put your hands out.” 

Obediently, Mary steps closer, offers her two gloved palms to Jesse, who lowers the wax lungs into them gently. Mary accepts them reverently, appears to be holding her breath. Jesse watches carefully. There is no excuse for what she is doing. The waxwork is over two hundred years old. No one should be handling them but trained professionals, but Jesse feels sure that the Museo della Specola has nothing to fear from these women, not even the brash, unschooled Sharon. 

Jesse climbs the stool a second time, leans in and slips the liver free from its perfect puzzle slot among the other organs. Climbing down, she turns to Sharon expectantly. All brashness is gone from the woman. She looks horrified as Mary turns the wax lungs this way and that, examining every side of them in fascination. When Sharon sees Jesse holding out the mollusk-like liver for her to take, she blanches, shaking her head. 

Mary looks up from her examination. Her eyes shine. “Sharon,” she whispers. Sharon’s eyes slide toward Mary, horror metamorphosing into terror.

“I can’t,” she says, shaking her head again. 

Jesse approaches the woman. “Give me your hands, Sharon,” Jesse says gently. 

Sharon swallows hard, visibly trying to not flee. She raises her chin in defiance, “Fuck you,” she says.

Mary carefully places the lungs on the table. She comes to Sharon, whose eyes widen.

 “It’s ok,” Mary tells her as she reaches for Sharon’s hands, joins them in a cupping shape, her own hands underneath. She nods at Sharon encouragingly. “It’s ok.” Mary’s eyes move to Jesse.

Jesse slowly, carefully, places the reddish-brown liver into the woman’s palms, ready to snatch the piece back if Sharon looks like she is going to bolt. But she doesn’t. She freezes as the weight of the wax organ settles into her hands. She cannot take her eyes from the thing she holds, and she begins to tremble. “Don’t let go,” she whispers to Mary. 

Mary’s fingers wrap around Sharon’s. “I won’t,” she assures the shaking woman. “I’ve got you. Look how beautiful it is,” Mary says, admiring it.

Sharon begins to weep. Ugly, loud sobs so strong that Jesse reaches to take the liver back to keep it safe. Jim peeps into the room when he hears the crying. Jesse waves him off to let him know he need investigate no further. They need no male witnesses. 

Later, after Mary and Sharon have quieted, Jesse will take out the anatomical angel’s heart, will also take the baby out of its uterus. She, too, may shake or cry uncontrollably as she holds one in each of her own trembling hands, measuring their equal weight.

Colorwise, Elizabeth Rosen is an autumn. She mourns the loss of Tab, and is convinced that Carl Sagan, Kurt Vonnegut, and Mr. Rogers were modern-day prophets. Her stories have appeared in places such as North American Review, Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, and New Flash Fiction Review. She still wants her MTV. Find more of her work at www.thewritelifeliz.com.