You raised yourself up on your knees, swaying a little, and you pictured her for what she really was: an exquisite conglomeration of bone beneath skin and meat, pocketed in the middle with soft treasures of parenchyma and muscle. When you placed your hands upon her ribs you were able to see her skeleton as though she had shyly undressed herself for you, as though in the orange hues of the daytime light she’d sloughed capillaries and glands off the budding rose of her scapula. You saw the curve of her clavicle, bowed softly as the line of some drooping bellflower.

It was so easy. Now that you had slept, everything was easy. It was as though you had been walking in a lead casing, and now you were free. As before any difficult work, you prayed out loud: prayed for the rock to go unrolled and for the closed eye and the stilled brain; prayed for a woman you loved to assist you in disrobing a woman you did not, but whose bones you would sacramentally adore. You kneeled on her thighs and unsheathed a great shank of bone from your knuckles—Ianthe bucked, just the once—and you sharpened the edge to a translucent, liquid thinness.

With one cut you took the arm: you scythed through the knob of ligament and scapula and removed the humerus. Ianthe screamed through her mouthful of lace. The blood came like a spring tide over your front, and you felt it soak through your clothes and trickle down your navel. You cauterized the meat all at once, pinching the vessels closed, reaching down to press your fingers against where the humeral head had been. Then you covered over the gap with spongiform bone—to give you a platform to work on—and you spun her shoulder beneath your fingers, and it squirmed at your touch. Ianthe’s screams had subsided to ravenous whimpers.

Her arm had to be her own. That was no difficulty. You coaxed fine webby strands of red marrow from the wing of bone that girdled her shoulder, and from that—from minute osteoblastic grit—from the mazelike netting of the bone that swaddled the sponge and the marrow—you remade her. The humerus was child’s play, and you took genuine pleasure in socketing it into the lovely cup of the radius, the forked embrace of the ulna. Her trochlea you sculpted while holding your breath, easing it into its wet white housing.