She closes the box and turns back around. On the table she notices a sizeable block of gray. She steps over to it and sees the form of a lollipop engraved into the metal; the form is mirrored on a conjoined slab, as if the lollipop were split down the middle and separated into exposed halves. Next to the block are lollipop stems—but these are not stained at the ends with candy to chew and savor every last bit of flavor. She plucks one between her fingers, staring curiously at the pure whiteness of it, then sticks it in her mouth.

The blandness makes her grimace and she places the stem back down on the table.

Farther down she finds a row of three flat rectangular glasses stacked in doubles like something should be slipped between them. Each one is labeled by a piece of laminated paper taped above. Letters are scrawled on each label—V, C, and E respectively—and upon further inspection, she sees that the label’s edges are stained pink and the glasses are not fully clear, but rather cloudy with lines of red. She leans down to take a whiff; an acrid toxicity burns her nostrils.

She walks over to the bookshelf and stares at the leather spines. Each spine has faded lines of silver forming unfamiliar symbols, and one is cracked, exposing the brown paper layers beneath. She chooses and removes this one, a black leather book with a spine of tangled cracks and deep grooves. Its weight catches her by surprise and dust floats from the cover, making her sneeze. She carries it to an empty space on a table, shoving aside some papers to make room, and lays it open. Across the pages that creak as she flips through them are hundreds of tiny words she does not understand. Words she recognizes from photographs that contained signs in their backgrounds but that she never learned how to read.

“Because there is so much more to learn, Vanilla.”

Shuffling through the pages, she sees sketches of bodies—his sketches in graphite—and sepia photographs of these bodies surgically cut open, flaps of skin nailed down to their sides like wings of gore revealing a cage of bone. Beneath that cage: insides that beat to make the body work. She sees photographs of different knives, clamps like jagged mouths, curved spikes and syringes like her own. In one photograph, a body is covered with hundreds of needles so that surely every fiber of flesh is pierced through. Even the skull.

The pages slip from her fingertips and open on their own to a monstrous image. A body composed of unproportionate parts, parts of different skin tones, puzzled back together with thick black stitches. The arms and the legs could be that of an adult except for the face. That face . . . it’s the face of a young girl. A young and innocent girl who looks nothing like a creature. Who looks peaceful, at rest, but will surely wake up screaming at the deformity of her body. A body that is not her own.