Venus in CVS
- Apr 8, 2022
- 2 min read
by Alice Rogers
I set an eBay alert. Trephine; Trepanning Tool; Terebra Serrata; Circular Bone Drill. I browse Etsy. I browse Craigslist. I browse Facebook Marketplace. I browse Google, and all the weird antique auction sites that pop up on it. Last I saw a real antique trephine it was laid on moldy old red velvet in an oddity store that’s long since closed its doors. It was $200. At the time I was living off plain tofu fried hard and those bags of mixed vegetables you cook in the microwave; a significant portion of the wage from my library job put aside for plastic-jug vodka. Now, with a little money under me, I dream of the day it comes back to me.
I read stories about hippies drilling holes in their heads to make their acid high hit harder. I slide through my days thinking about having a neat circle of my skull resting cool against my clavicle on the end of a loop of twine. Touching it, fingering it, knowing that it was once inside of me, and that it being outside is doing me better than it ever could inside. I think about brain blood volume. I clip my fingernails over the trash. I scroll various online marketplaces until my head hurts from the blue light, laid sideways in bed with my wrist aching from the weight of my phone. I study my hairline in the mirror where my roots are growing through my home dye job, and I think about peeling back the scalp to reveal the bloody bone underneath. The pink pulsing brain under that. If I were alive in Paleolithic times they would’ve drilled my skull out of pity. Or just to shut me up.
It’s the oldest surgical procedure. People have needed a hole in their head before language was invented. Me, I’m shopping for iodine and gauze bandages, the guy behind the counter in the drugstore giving me a long, measured look as I shovel papery individual packets of wound pads at him. They found a cow with its skull trepanned. They found a baby. The cashier says something I don’t hear.
“I just had surgery,” I tell him. Gesture vaguely to my ribs. “Appendix.”
Back before modern medicine was invented, most people survived their trepanations. Even the hippies in the sixties cutting their scalps in dirty Greenwich studios. In pre-Christian Hungary, over ten percent of them had a hole in their heads. The key is to not cut the membrane between skull and brain. I practice peeling a navel orange without digging up the pith. Then I graduate to blood oranges, tangerines, clementines. I cut my hair close to my scalp. I scrub the grout in my bathroom with toothbrushes and bicarbonate soda. I slosh vodka into half-empty cans of Pepsi. I rattle around my apartment. I touch the hollow of my throat, where bone should lie. I press fingertips to my scalp, where a dip should be.
My phone chimes. My phone chimes. eBay alert, lighting up the room.
Alice Rogers is a writer and artist from West Wales. They frequently find themselves identifying with George Costanza. Find them on Twitter @dimecharm.
