Nervous System by Lina Meruane

Author:Lina Meruane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

stardust

* between times *

He was tall skinny brittle. Fragile, like the mother he had lost.

He’d been broken so many times, as if he weren’t broken already. Shattered.

And there were so many fissured bones that people lost count or simply stopped counting. Somersaults on roller skates, bicycle accidents. That plunge into the sea after the tide had receded. Cracks during the long training sessions for the marathons the Firstborn ran every year, in spite of the pain in his bones.

To have rolled from a hilltop. To have splintered a clavicle.

* * *

Bone portrait. Living tissue composed of calcium chalk phosphate stardust rendered into being on the x-ray plates. That grayish tissue that hardens over the years, gradually goes numb, becomes fragile like an eggshell with its marrow yolk inside.

* * *

The Father’s battery had died. His car was an old model, clunky and noisy, and his son was lightweight and taciturn. And although Ella was not strong, she pushed as hard as she could beside the Father while the Firstborn stationed himself beside the driver’s window, open so he could turn the steering wheel. The space narrowed between the trees in the driveway and there was a dip in the gravel that the teenage brother didn’t know how to navigate: the car, already picking up speed, swerved and hit him. Hit the bone of his hip. The grinding sound of his pelvis as the car crushed his body against the trunk, and her brother collapsed.

The last bone to be named. The one that joined the two halves of the pelvis. The innominate bone. The Father didn’t remember anyone ever explaining the origin of that name that refused itself, he could say only that it must have come from the ancients. After ilium ischium acetabulum sacrum, they must have run out of steam because they didn’t write pubis or coccyx. The Father dragged his finger over the anatomical map and pointed to the exact spot of that latecomer bone the Firstborn had fractured.

In that bit of skeleton: screws rivets bone graft.

* * *

If they had taken stock they would have realized that with or without accidents crashes falls from wobbly ladders, the number was excessive. It was the Mother who separated the breaks from the accidents that had caused them in order to examine the case. A left wrist, and in the right arm, the radius and ulna. An exposed fracture in the elbow that had to be filled with screws. The rib that was caved in by a training buddy who’d given him a shake that was supposed to fix his back pain, but left him breathless for several weeks. And the clavicle in the fall. And an ankle, the finger shattered in a doorway that the Firstborn didn’t even bother to wrap. Four metatarsals of the instep. The calcaneus. The screw in the hip. To have vegetated for months in a bed with a torso in plaster. To have torn the same meniscus twice.

And of course, added the Mother, the front teeth, which were also bones.

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