No rhinos were injured in the making
- Dec 8, 2021
- 2 min read
by Salena Casha
To maximize facial harmony, they ask from where you’d prefer to take the cartilage. Conservation of matter has a different look when it gleams in the surgeon’s scalpel. It strikes you as strange that your nose, which looked as bulbous and beaked as ever in the bus windows on your trip over, does not contain enough.
Your hands touch your tank top just beneath your left breast. You recall, not fondly, the twinge of rib pressed into a yoga mat. Underneath, the heart.
Perhaps, they say, watching you carefully, you’d prefer the inside of your ear.
The offer reminds you of that time when you were five and a spider twisted, trapped, in your canal, so you choose the rib because maybe it’ll thin your waist. Carpenter knife whittling wood.
A cap sits low on your forehead and vinyl foam groans beneath you on the operating table. You don’t realize you’re holding your breath until the room spins and you let it out, air escaping a balloon. The doctor’s white face surfaces about you and suddenly, you want to ask them, even though you have no expertise in matter being snapped and cut and stuck and propped up in different shapes, if your glasses will settle the same or if it’ll change the way you see cat’s eyes when you drive. Experience has told you that it always hurts so you don’t ask.
They have you count backwards from ten and for weeks and then months, you count exhales and inhales through your teeth and miss the crisp smell of bonfires.
They never told you that when you went under, half a world away the last white rhino died.
They never told you that, when you walk down a rain-kissed sidewalk on your lunch break, a stranger in red will stop you and say, “Catherine? How long’s it been?” and you’ll find yourself saying, “Too long” and hearing about his new place outside the city.
They never told you that when they split bone, a way back to a place you only recall in the scent of your mother’s Dior snapped.
Still, it’s nothing compared to the years where you’ll wake in the middle of the night hearing bridges break.
Salena Casha’s work has appeared in over fifty publications in the last decade. Her most recent work was published in Levitate Magazine, Cerasus Magazine, and Reflex Fiction. She survives New England winters with good beer and black coffee. Follow her on twitter @salaylay_c
