The Death of Small Creatures by Trisha Cull Read Free Book Online

evoked a sense of water running slowly through rusty pipes, a sense of copper on the tongue. The lino was white with gold flecks, like my grandma’s kitchen floor when I was a kid. All old lino reminds me of my grandma’s kitchen floor.
    Sometimes Grandma, who worked as an X-ray technician, gave my brother and me sheets of blank X-ray film. The films were about the same size as paper, but plastic, flimsy and dark. Grandma showed us how to draw on the film using our fingers or a tongue depressor, pressing down, creating white lines. You then held the film up against the light to see your picture glow. Your lines became illuminated against the light.
    My brother placed his hand on one of the films and traced it, all his fingers, carefully around each one, and I wished I had been the first to think of doing that. I traced my hand too. Then my brother and I held up our X-ray hands to the light and compared hands in a way that connected us to each other as brother and sister, as boy and girl, as two kids with the same mother and two absent dads.
    A nice Asian girl named Alicia, who was young and cheerful and had red streaks in her black hair, performed my EEG. She ran her fingers through my hair. That felt good. Alicia divided pieces of my hair, rubbed a cotton ball with solution in it on my scalp, rubbed little places clean where the electrodes would go. She did this in twenty-eight places over my scalp, my temples and a couple lower almost on my neck. As she placed each electrode on my skin, securing it with some kind of gel or cool paste, my skin tingled with pleasure.
    I didn’t want Alicia to stop.
    I didn’t want Alicia to stop touching me, dividing my hair, dabbing solution-soaked cotton balls on my scalp and rubbing the skin clean, placing those twenty-eight electrodes on the cleaned spaces. I wanted it to go on forever, but it never does; that pleasure, the simplest most unassuming touches, they never last long enough, always leave you wanting more.
    I lay down in a bed. Alicia dimmed the lights and covered me with a blanket. She sat at a monitor and keyboard and made a lot of typing sounds on the keyboard,
tap, tap, tap
. I couldn’t imagine what she was typing about my electrical brain activity. She made me open and close my eyes, sometimes flashing a strobe light at intervals, sometimes with my eyes closed and sometimes with my eyes open. Then I had to flood my brain with oxygen, breathing very deeply for three solid minutes. This is harder than you might think. I got dizzy and cold.
    I wish I could have seen what my brain electricity looks like on TV. I imagine blue lightning bolts, electrical static, white noise, the sound a radio makes between frequencies: my Darth Vader brain.

Three
    Becoming Vegetarian (April 2006)
    I am a meat-eater at heart, but today is the last day.
    The chicken vein lies on the surface; as my fork lifts it up, a thought detaches from the surface of my cerebrum, flits away from the grey matter of my brain into the grey matter of the cosmos.
    The breast is breaded and split open to expose the juicy white flesh. The skin is crisp and brown on the outside and slippery and pale on the underside; it’s parted now, its edges curling away from the wound it has become, like the two sides of the Red Sea, creating a passageway, a new geography of absence through which one might travel safely to the other side.
    I must come to some kind of conclusion, must bridge the gap between my body and my mind.
    Death has become a viable option.

    I wish I could say it was strictly an ethical issue, something to do with the pamphlet that guy gave me; all those pictures of chickens crammed into wire cages with their wings hinged at right angles; piglets whose tails are clipped without anaesthetic; cows stunned but not yet dead, being skinned alive; the deterioration of rainforests to make room for grazing; hormones in the meat.
    But my motives are more self-centred. I see it for what it is,