She takes another whiff and cringes.

She needs to get it out of here.

She wiggles her arms beneath the body and struggles to cradle it. The act is possible, but not subtle. What kind of attention would she draw out there in the Outside with a body in her arms?

Her mind shifts to the photographs of surgical knives from the black book downstairs. Quickly, she gets up and runs down to the sterile room. She finds drawers under the tables, pulls them open. Most are filled with stacks of paper, but eventually she finds one filled with metal tools. She searches through them until she finds a small knife and runs back upstairs.

She stands over the body, tapping the knife rhythmically against her chin, deciding what to separate. She remembers the lines of stitching across limbs in the photographs—a morbid guide to where to cut. But will it be the same for a creature?

Do we look the same underneath?

She pulls off its shoes, strips its pants, and cuts away at what remains of its jacket and shirt. She slides the knife beneath the white fabric covering its pelvis, hesitates, then slices it off. Her eyes scan across the body—so surprisingly similar to hers—and maps out the invisible lines, taking note of every dent and curve the muscles make, visualizing the dissections.

And then she begins.

She gets on top of the body, straddling its waist. She leans into its chest and takes the knife, pressing it into the soft underside of its shoulder. The blade slides easily into the skin. A few drops of blood spill from the wound, but otherwise there is not much blood left. She cuts away, dragging the blade back and forth. She digs deeper and deeper through fibers of muscle, feeling the slime of exposed flesh on her wrists until she hits bone. She tries to slice through but the knife is too small and although sharp, not nearly sharp enough. The harder she tries, the more the knife slips in her hand and nearly cuts her.

She growls and sets the knife down, the blade gummed up with red, shreds of skin caught between its teeth. She sticks her fingers into the gash of the shoulder and touches the bone. It has a shallow groove she drags her fingertips across. When she pulls her fingers out, they are covered in bits of muscle; she flicks them off, only to splat onto the body’s chest.

She holds the body’s left elbow with one hand and leverages her other hand against its ribs. With one quick and powerful tug, she amputates its arm, the joint popping out of the socket like a broken toy. The arm slumps in her hand, wrists and fingers pointing toward the ground so that the limb looks to be expressing its grief.

“Daddy, I get sad when you’re away.”

She wiggles the arm and the fingers dance happily, like they’re presenting a live puppet show.