Jordan Davidson (18)
How to Get to Know a Stranger
Preparation:
A car crash. The kind that sends multiple vehicles tip, tip, toppling over the ledge of a canyon, somewhere on a forgotten mountain highway in the winter time; ice has always been deadly to those who take the road of their life so fast they forget to watch for the bumpers, back windows, and collapsing engines of others. One by one, the police have fished your strangers from the river in various states of disarray. They will do the initial clean up; they gather these last ingredients for you. By the time your strangers reach you, they will be wrapped nicely in body bags, packaged for your convenience, consumption, and company. Treat them kindly–even the cruel must be gentle when being the first to touch what grows only inside the deepest cavity of a person.
Time:
3-4 days, depending on the thoroughness of your investigation.
Ingredients:
1 coroner’s lab
4 sets of tools – to be sterilized
4 strangers (to be delivered)
2 district attorneys asking questions (the reason for this recipe, this project).
1 coroner (you).
The taste of death still crawling over metal freezers, never to be settled or washed away. It lingers like cigarette smoke in a lung or calcium in a bone textured heart.
Steps:
1) Disinfect. Scrub down the tables with amoxicillin and bleach, torch the surfaces to burn away the midnight creepy-crawlers that will snake unbidden to your bloodstream—that will poison you, breed cancer in your bones, leave your clothes smelling of formaldehyde and fermentation. Strap latex gloves—silicon if you find yourself allergic—over your nimble, frozen fingers.
2) Isolate the mechanisms; pick your tools with care and precision. Not all will go through human skin without a trace. You must prepare yourself. Bloody balloons will burst in billowing bubbles across your hands if you fail to use syringes to extract the distilled human liquid from your strangers with disorganized abdomens. And bones? Ribs will not break themselves.
3) Line your microscopes against the freezers, one by one by one by one by one. One for each stranger.
4) Sterilize the slides, now clear, but to be filled with all sorts of dripping tissues and flesh.
5) Straighten your certificate in the art of pathology.
6) Intercept the strangers as they are wheeled in. In truth, this is the easiest part of the process, when no one will accompany you to the freezers that smell of rotting flesh despite the ice and vanilla. Now you know the true face of hell lies in vanilla beans. When it is your birthday, you
will always make the cake chocolate because celebrations cannot smell of vanilla—vanilla, the moratorium and mortuary of human life. Your nightmare and your truth: we will all be buried in vats of extra strength syrup, the kind you use to block out the smell of frozen no-longer-strangers.
7) Bring this new stranger to the bowels of your castle; unzip the black body bag.
8) Make external observations. Sex. Race. Bruises. Lacerations. Age. Remove their jewelry, their clothing; observe it. Number one was a neat dresser with pinstriped pants. Number three has a stained skirt. Braces and gum disease. Gold ear piercings (newly done). Place each article in separate containers (to be examined later). Write a story of their skin— that is the burn scar from a cookie tray at ten years old, this one here came from a nasty schoolyard fall, this one from their first boyfriend, and so on and so forth.
9) Wrench your stranger open. Start the incision; mind the collar bones. Trace your sanitized scalpel along the insides of your stranger’s skin; cut down the center until you peel apart their ribs and open them like a giant, bleeding, forbidden fruit. Carve wings from their chest. The shape is, and yet can no longer be, human.
10) Remove the organs one by one until you hold a stalk of them: the beating Poe’s heart, undulating intestines still filled with their last meal (leftover Thanksgiving turkey and rice, maybe the remnants of an ice cream cone), mottled kidneys, a decomposing liver.
11) Make internal observations. A smoker’s lungs. Decalcifying bones. Chronic conditions they have buried under medical records, diseases they have kept hidden from family circles. Not even your stranger knew of their own deformed heart, which sat in secret silence until the final betrayal. (It is not up to you to decide the results of this case, but perhaps this was the inciting incident of the crash–a heart attack at the wheel, the tailgaters behind, the thin barrier inviting the cars over the ledge ahead).
12) Cut away tissue samples.
13) Analyze blood. Determine alcohol levels and intoxication; identify medications and anomalies. Diagnose their drug dependencies and their unhealthy habits. Number Two drank away the ache before the car trip—Number Four died with a heroin needle in hand (in the backseat of the car, you assume).
14) Make final observations. Examine the feet, the brain, the gonads. Record your findings. Take note of their virginity, or lack thereof. Isolate no evidence of rape.
15) Recover them. Return your stranger from corpse to human. Close their eyes. Restitch the chest. Lighten graying skin. Reinvent your stranger from the nameless to the named and christen them with their cause of death at the end of your report: natural, accident, accident, accident, accident.
16) Smile when the district attorneys and the sheriff bring grieving family members into your hollow. Offer them condolences. Meet those who raised your stranger, those who loved them. As if you can ease their suffering with wisdom that will only bring them tears. Print a fresh copy of your report. Relinquish care of the body who is no longer a stranger.
Jordan Davidson is a student at Yale University who majors in procrastinating via writing. That major is particularly applicable to her calculus class. It’s worked out alright for her so far: she’s been published in Corvid Queen, the Common Tongue, and Youth Imagination among others. She’s also won YoungArts Writing awards in 2020 and 2021.
How to Get to Know a Stranger
Preparation:
A car crash. The kind that sends multiple vehicles tip, tip, toppling over the ledge of a canyon, somewhere on a forgotten mountain highway in the winter time; ice has always been deadly to those who take the road of their life so fast they forget to watch for the bumpers, back windows, and collapsing engines of others. One by one, the police have fished your strangers from the river in various states of disarray. They will do the initial clean up; they gather these last ingredients for you. By the time your strangers reach you, they will be wrapped nicely in body bags, packaged for your convenience, consumption, and company. Treat them kindly–even the cruel must be gentle when being the first to touch what grows only inside the deepest cavity of a person.
Time:
3-4 days, depending on the thoroughness of your investigation.
Ingredients:
1 coroner’s lab
4 sets of tools – to be sterilized
4 strangers (to be delivered)
2 district attorneys asking questions (the reason for this recipe, this project).
1 coroner (you).
The taste of death still crawling over metal freezers, never to be settled or washed away. It lingers like cigarette smoke in a lung or calcium in a bone textured heart.
Steps:
1) Disinfect. Scrub down the tables with amoxicillin and bleach, torch the surfaces to burn away the midnight creepy-crawlers that will snake unbidden to your bloodstream—that will poison you, breed cancer in your bones, leave your clothes smelling of formaldehyde and fermentation. Strap latex gloves—silicon if you find yourself allergic—over your nimble, frozen fingers.
2) Isolate the mechanisms; pick your tools with care and precision. Not all will go through human skin without a trace. You must prepare yourself. Bloody balloons will burst in billowing bubbles across your hands if you fail to use syringes to extract the distilled human liquid from your strangers with disorganized abdomens. And bones? Ribs will not break themselves.
3) Line your microscopes against the freezers, one by one by one by one by one. One for each stranger.
4) Sterilize the slides, now clear, but to be filled with all sorts of dripping tissues and flesh.
5) Straighten your certificate in the art of pathology.
6) Intercept the strangers as they are wheeled in. In truth, this is the easiest part of the process, when no one will accompany you to the freezers that smell of rotting flesh despite the ice and vanilla. Now you know the true face of hell lies in vanilla beans. When it is your birthday, you
will always make the cake chocolate because celebrations cannot smell of vanilla—vanilla, the moratorium and mortuary of human life. Your nightmare and your truth: we will all be buried in vats of extra strength syrup, the kind you use to block out the smell of frozen no-longer-strangers.
7) Bring this new stranger to the bowels of your castle; unzip the black body bag.
8) Make external observations. Sex. Race. Bruises. Lacerations. Age. Remove their jewelry, their clothing; observe it. Number one was a neat dresser with pinstriped pants. Number three has a stained skirt. Braces and gum disease. Gold ear piercings (newly done). Place each article in separate containers (to be examined later). Write a story of their skin— that is the burn scar from a cookie tray at ten years old, this one here came from a nasty schoolyard fall, this one from their first boyfriend, and so on and so forth.
9) Wrench your stranger open. Start the incision; mind the collar bones. Trace your sanitized scalpel along the insides of your stranger’s skin; cut down the center until you peel apart their ribs and open them like a giant, bleeding, forbidden fruit. Carve wings from their chest. The shape is, and yet can no longer be, human.
10) Remove the organs one by one until you hold a stalk of them: the beating Poe’s heart, undulating intestines still filled with their last meal (leftover Thanksgiving turkey and rice, maybe the remnants of an ice cream cone), mottled kidneys, a decomposing liver.
11) Make internal observations. A smoker’s lungs. Decalcifying bones. Chronic conditions they have buried under medical records, diseases they have kept hidden from family circles. Not even your stranger knew of their own deformed heart, which sat in secret silence until the final betrayal. (It is not up to you to decide the results of this case, but perhaps this was the inciting incident of the crash–a heart attack at the wheel, the tailgaters behind, the thin barrier inviting the cars over the ledge ahead).
12) Cut away tissue samples.
13) Analyze blood. Determine alcohol levels and intoxication; identify medications and anomalies. Diagnose their drug dependencies and their unhealthy habits. Number Two drank away the ache before the car trip—Number Four died with a heroin needle in hand (in the backseat of the car, you assume).
14) Make final observations. Examine the feet, the brain, the gonads. Record your findings. Take note of their virginity, or lack thereof. Isolate no evidence of rape.
15) Recover them. Return your stranger from corpse to human. Close their eyes. Restitch the chest. Lighten graying skin. Reinvent your stranger from the nameless to the named and christen them with their cause of death at the end of your report: natural, accident, accident, accident, accident.
16) Smile when the district attorneys and the sheriff bring grieving family members into your hollow. Offer them condolences. Meet those who raised your stranger, those who loved them. As if you can ease their suffering with wisdom that will only bring them tears. Print a fresh copy of your report. Relinquish care of the body who is no longer a stranger.
Jordan Davidson is a student at Yale University who majors in procrastinating via writing. That major is particularly applicable to her calculus class. It’s worked out alright for her so far: she’s been published in Corvid Queen, the Common Tongue, and Youth Imagination among others. She’s also won YoungArts Writing awards in 2020 and 2021.
