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is said that our Christ, in passion on the cross, faced the loss of His Father with eyes open, looking straight through the gates of Hell and beyond, all the way through into his boudoir in the Kingdom of Heaven.
    In school, we had to dissect rats. Mangy things with wet fur, their original white turned so muddy with sewer goop that they elicited no ounce of pity, even as their filthy rat-lungs squeaked and collapsed, as we pushed large pins into their crunchy paws, impaling them onto a tray of wax, preparing to slice through from neck to anus. No pity even as we grew up, weaned on cute singing mice and heroic rats in cartoons and animated movies, rodents intelligent enough to outwit cats and dogs and humans. The dissection lesson went routinely except for one incident. A young classmate, upon cutting into her assigned rat, found that the rat was cancerous; the stink emanating from the decayed insides of the rodent caused the student to scream out in sheer disgust, disrupting the class. Upon assignment of another rodent, the student dutifully cut into the animal only to be assailed with that familiar stench and the familiar sight of green-blackened guts. Two more rats were dug out of their cages, chloroformed, and assigned, but both were cancerous, too. Both reeking of that same foul stench that was judiciously taking over the classroom. An air freshener, supposedly Spring Linen, was employed to fight the whiffs of decay. By this time, the teacher was losing patience and ordered that the next rat was to be the last one assigned. Sobbing and shaking, the student held her scalpel and nervously brought the sharp edge to the final rat’s flesh. The surgical-precise blade only had to prick the second dermis of the rat, and that stench, now so familiar to all in the classroom, seeped out of the rat. Cancerous, again; but determined to maintain discipline and order, the teacher ordered the student to proceed; and sobbing and shivering even more, the student pushed on, picking out the necessary organs and stretching them out on the wax tray, sketching them in her workbook, documenting their color, texture, and what was partially digested in its rotting intestines.
    Later in the semester I saw that student’s workbook and the sketches of the cancered guts were the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I do not know whether that was testament to her artistic genius or if it was really what was found in the insides of that cursed fifth rodent. It was as if the slicing into the low, and lower still, in disease and rot; there, in the leak of failed organs and foul blood and stink, there in the face of a corpse or a suitor without eyelids, his holes perpetually pus-infected, one might witness a vision where angels of every order kiss one another secretly to their God’s displeasure.
    3.
    I came into the charms of this husband by way of the fantastic promises he whispered into my ear and my arse-crack when I was a mere innocent teenage virgin.
    I now hate his flaky peeling lips and the smell of his gums, but what choice do I have; poor poor pitiful me, forced to live with my equally poor poor pitiful sibling, my parasitic twin, attached to my coccyx, barely alive and breathing shallow like salamanders. I keep my twin hidden in the folds of my clothes; a task especially hard in the summer when everyone is wearing capri pants and espadrilles; there is nothing fashionable, off-the-racks that can properly hide a parasitic twin.
    But this was my destiny, fate, if you believe that sort of thing. At that tender age, I was rendered despondent, depressed by way of terrifying nightmares. In the dream, I saw a land of trees and greenery burning in flames, airplanes dashed overhead spewing orange plumes, the trees shrivel, and the landscape turns an unflinching sausage-brown. In the brown streets unshaded by these wilted bunch of branch and twigs, all manner of beast and child, naked, with open sores, pus and fluids running down their