The room reeked of formaldehyde. The preserved carcasses lay in their metal trays, as if they were serving as their coffins. I crouched in
my lab stool, squished in between the table and my dissecting group.

Awkward was how the air felt. To my left was a boy I didn’t particularly like, and I knew he only felt cold and disdain towards me. The corner of the peculiarly angled table kind of divided us, yet our sides and legs remained crushed together. Yuck. To my right was a girl, friendly yet not welcome in my book.

She was able to get the most room out of all of us. But, our knees continuously knocked against each other, along with the bottom of the
desk. She grinned at me and I smirked back at her, and we steadied our Using my free, gloved hand, I pinned the soggy rat down with
numerous needles. It was somehow reminiscent of stretched canvas, the way his matted loincloth stretched out.

My partner attempted to induce an incision. As she poked at him in different angles she finally paused and reached for the shears. She cut
away through the dermis of his belly and two door-like flaps were the outcome.

“Am I doing this right?” she asked me.

I shrugged in reply.

I concentrated on his insides and reached for the tweezers. I moved his intestines, a couple breaking because he was so fragile, while the girl prodded away other vital organs. Completely still, I calmly lifted my scalpel and sliced through his stomach.

“There’s no food,” I told my partner. She peered over and opened

it wider, proving my statement.

“Huh.”

“Wait.” I set down the scalpel and pointed at the torn intestines.

“Oh,” I broke out loudly. The light brown substance that was oozing out

stank horridly. It was food, once.

“Euugh, that’s so nasty!” my partner yelped. I glanced up, realizing she wasn’t talking to me.

Suddenly she whirled around. A boy was provoking her by wiping his rat’s chemicals all over the back of her lab scrubs. She was screaming
and hollering about “being bullied”, and the two slapped each other’s hands continuously. The boy was having much more fun than she was.

I sighed and returned to studying other parts of the rat’s body systems. That was the objective- to find evolutionary differences from this little guy and this week’s previously poor creatures: the worm, crayfish, and frog. From what I’ve conceived, all of them had been heavily mutilated for fun by my fellow freshmen. Great.

After investigating the lungs, I discovered that this body was proportioned just like a doll. It apparently contained all of my own body parts, save my female crotch and my gallbladder. It was cute in a horrifying way. The firm, yet damp texture of the rat was a bit unsettling, though.

Soon, my gaze shifted to my left. The guy next to me was deeply engrossed with his lab partner. Our eyes accidentally locked for a split second. He immediately twisted his skull the opposite direction and blabbed on with his friend. He was now even more deeply engrossed
with her.

My own lab partner had calmed down now; the boy had gone to obliterate his already mangled-up rodent corpse. Using the scissors, the girl unhinged his jaw by chopping through the bone. It pained me to hear those awful crunching sounds.

“So this, this is the inside of his mouth,” she declared, jabbing at

his four long teeth.

“Yes,” I murmured, weary of her antics.

She ogled at the golden chompers. “They’re so yellow!”

Now, my classmate wasn’t an idiot; she was merely immature.

What I meant was she was ignorant of life’s morals and only listened to her impulses; such as completely eradicating the remains of our pitiful rat’s innards.

The entrails were greatly displayed, a bountiful showcase at this horror story bakery. I must admit, it was a grand array. However the stench and sight was beginning to get to me. I was not a serial killer, nor was I a surgeon. I would have never imagined experiencing this kind of
dissection.

I stared at the classroom ceiling and counted the ventilation holes overhead to distract myself from this calamity of science. My pathetic
rat was the object of my mourning! His feeble body was supposed to be used for scientific study, not to act as a cow in its slaughterhouse. I
specifically did not want this to happen; his carcass has gone to waste.

Out of nowhere, my lab partner shrieked.

“Aaugh! I got its juice in my eyes!”

Well, maybe he hadn’t gone completely to waste. I was dumbfounded at how she actually managed to make the preservatives shoot that high up to her face and completely curve over her astronomical goggles; the thick plastic stuck on her face the entire time.

I felt a little pitiful of her, because she was scarlet-eyed and teary, but I quickly reconsidered. This girl completely demolished the little guy. If she wanted to destroy, then she deserved to feel the bloodshed.

“Cleanup time,” announced our biology teacher. Man, I was sure glad she didn’t see what had happened to our animal. My partner, obviously relieved now, rapidly pumped out a long paper towel from the dispenser. I plucked out all the needles from the rat. The girl lifted the hollow body by the tip of its tail like it was a loaded diaper. I snatched the small sealable bag lying on the far end of the table. She plopped it onto the brown sheet and began to roll it up.


“Um, no, hold on.” She was horrible! I sighed. “You forgot…” My voice trailed off as I swept the guts from the tray. Swiftly, I unveiled the
paper towel and neatly poured it back into his system. Those innards were either going to stay in the science lab or they would go back into
its original owner. I chose the latter. I repackaged the rat, now in his clear body bag. I looked up and searched the table. The lab participants at my table had gone to return their scrubs. My partner hastily flung the needles and tools into their supply box. I figured it was fine, but disgusting, since my teacher instructed nothing about cleaning the instruments.

“Hey…uh…can you put away my rat for me?” a voice called out.

I spun around to the table behind me and saw my classmate. I

realized it was the boy who teased my partner. I blinked at him.

He continued. “Uh, yeah, well, I threw away my gloves before I got

to clean. So…”

I was about to retort to him that he was just being lazy, and to do it himself, but it flashed across my mind that he actually enjoyed touching the dead thing. So I agreed to. As I unhinged the deeply-embedded pins from the rat, my partner noticed me picking up from his table.

“Hey! Don’t make Stephanie do all the work! You do it!”

“Uh, she agreed to do it, Stupid.”

They feuded while I wrapped up the last of our class’s dissection lab. The bell jangled, releasing the students in a rush while I took my
sweet time.