Fiction
Bones. Muscles. Vessels. Nerves.
Rachel tried her best to think of the cadavers this way: a collection of body parts, not someone’s deceased loved one.
Maybe it was insensitive, but Rachel had to keep her wits about her. These body donors had nothing to gain by giving their remains to a medical school—nothing but the hope that future physicians might learn something from them.
Rachel couldn’t let their generosity be in vain. She couldn’t shrink, couldn’t vomit, couldn’t pass out.
Bones. Muscles. Vessels. Nerves.
Death could’ve overtaken the room. The professor was too serious, and her classmates were too timid to break through it. The only people breathing any life into that lab were the teaching assistants—third-year med students who, for some reason, felt comfortable enough to smile and whisper and giggle.
It was understood that the anatomy TAs were the cream of the crop. Only two years of didactic coursework separated them from Rachel’s class, but they carried themselves like seasoned warriors among a sea of recruits. Rachel thought her classmates were silly for idolizing the TAs, competing for their attention like bridesmaids over a tossed bouquet.
Besides, in Rachel’s eyes, only one of the TAs was worth any fuss. Her name was Casey. Casey was the one who Rachel often saw chewing gum before lab, leaning against the brick exterior of the anatomy building. She was the one with the tan, freckly face and green eyes that could bore a hole through metal. The one who was always biting or licking or otherwise moving her thin lips, like they couldn’t stand not to be talking.
She wasn’t pretty, strictly speaking, with her squarish jaw and oversized hands and straight, athletic build. She was something else entirely, something much better than pretty.
These are normal things to notice about another girl, Rachel decided.
Just to be safe, she tried not to look at Casey anymore.
Early in the semester, when the class was lost and confused, the professor asked Casey to demonstrate how she dissected the anterior compartment of the forearm.
Casey, who’d been posted up against the wall with her arms crossed, swaggered over to Table One, motioning for all the students to follow. Rachel obeyed quickly, finding a spot directly across the table from Casey, nothing but a corpse separating them.
Bones. Muscles. Vessels. Nerves.
Rachel felt the other students piling in behind her, pushing her forward, closer to the cold, gray flesh. She tried not to look down, but had to watch if she was going to learn.
Casey freed a bandlike muscle from its connective-tissue cocoon, then curled a gloved finger underneath it, pulling it up.
“Do you guys know this one? Yeah, this one’s our flexor carpi radialis. Pay attention to the name, guys. Flexor. So what’s gonna be its action on the wrist?” She placed her opposite hand on the body donor’s elbow, stabilizing it, then she yanked the muscle up and away from the arm, causing the wrist to flex in response like a marionette. When she dropped it, the dead hand flopped back into a neutral position.
As Casey talked, she ran her fingers up and down the underside of that muscle belly. Playing with it absentmindedly, like it was nothing more sacred than a guitar string. Was she being disrespectful? The professor looked pleased enough, so it must have been fine.
Rachel could do nothing but stare at Casey’s fingers, her gloves coated in something more gruesome than blood. Yellow blebs of fat, stringy bits of fascia, the chemicals that trapped this poor body on the brink of decomposition. Cadaver juice.
Disgust. It had to be disgust that caused her skin to prickle and heart to race as she watched those lazy movements of Casey’s fingers. Fingers that didn’t tremble, didn’t hesitate or question.
It’s like how you can’t look away from a car crash, Rachel told herself.
Bones. Muscles. Vessels. Nerves.
Casey was the only TA who threw her weight around the lab like the middle-aged, balding owner of a homey Italian restaurant. She would drop by each table and say charismatic things like: “How are we doing over here?” and “Ya holding down the fort?”
Whether by her voice or her laugh or the cadence of her footsteps, Casey’s precise location was always at the forefront of Rachel’s mind. On the days that Casey stuck to the opposite side of the lab, Rachel became irrationally frustrated, snapping easily at her stupid labmates. On the days that Casey stayed closer to Rachel’s table, she felt noticeably lighter, almost relieved. Like Casey was the cure to a headache she’d grown so used to, she’d forgotten what it was to feel good.
Rachel wasn’t a lesbian. She didn’t think there was anything wrong with being a lesbian, of course, but it wasn’t for her. She didn’t have a crush on Casey; she just wanted her to stop being so far away all the time. She just wanted her to be closer.
That doesn’t make me a lesbian, she assured herself.
But she still found herself thinking about Casey every night—her mental reward for getting through another day.
In the dark, under the covers, with her atmospheric instrumental playlist on, she would think. Most of the time, she would simply relive her latest memories of Casey. A daily replay of overheard words, laughs, hand gestures, postures, and facial expressions, all in a place where Rachel could simply watch and enjoy in peace.
When a more romantic, sweeping song came on, Rachel might allow the tip of her toe to cross into fantasy territory. She imagined touching Casey’s face, connecting her freckles, tracing the hard angle of her jaw. She imagined Casey cupping her chin; a gentle touch from a powerful hand. She had seen Casey’s naked hands a few times, her strong, tanned fingers and unpainted square fingernails, so short she had to have bitten them as a child.
When the music descended into a sweet, tinkling piano, she might imagine Casey feeling the pounding beat of Rachel’s pulse, which would make her chuckle softly and whisper something like, “It’s okay, it’s just me.”
I wish you would, Rachel thought, over and over again.
What did she wish Casey would do? Rachel, herself, couldn’t answer that.
I want you to, she thought. I wish you would. I want you to.
Rachel wasn’t sure why she loved thinking about Casey so much, but she did know that no one could ever find out about it. So she tried to ignore her sixth sense, the one that was excruciatingly aware of Casey at all times.
She soon learned that Casey had her favorite tables in the lab, ones she visited the most frequently and lingered at longer than the others.
Rachel’s table was not one of them.
So Rachel would stand there, blood boiling, foot tapping, wishing that one of her labmates was charming or funny or outgoing enough to make them, as a group, worth Casey’s while.
Then she would get snippy with them again, because why were they all such duds?
Near the end of lower limb day, Rachel’s Casey-senses tingled so brightly and wonderfully, the pleasure almost cut her knees out from under her. Sure enough, Casey was approaching her table, and she stopped right next to Rachel. She stood close enough that Rachel could feel the warmth radiating from Casey’s arm.
I wish you would. I want you to.
Rachel’s throat tightened. Maybe her nervous system was attempting to close her airways and knock her out, so that when she collapsed, Casey would have to catch her. Or even better, maybe she would implode there, forcing Casey to forever remember her as that one girl who died in her face.
“You good over here?” Casey said.
A full-body shudder of pure, visceral bliss.
I wish you would. I want you to.
Rachel took an embarrassingly shaky breath and turned to Casey, who was watching her intently. All Rachel could manage was a helpless, doe-eyed nod.
Casey’s head tipped slightly to the side, and a muscle in her jaw tightened. Her eyes narrowed slightly on Rachel, drifting down to her neck, then darting back up to her eyes. A tiny smirk formed on Casey’s face, and she raked her squarish teeth over her bottom lip.
“Which one are you on?” Casey muttered the question like it was their little secret. She angled closer to Rachel to look at her list, brushing Rachel’s shoulder with her chest.
I want you to. I wish you would.
Rachel cleared her throat. “Deep peroneal nerve.”
“Yeahhh, I know. That’s a tricky little rascal,” Casey said, her voice still low and private. “You got your anterior tibialis artery, right?” She looked at Rachel encouragingly, expectantly, and Rachel felt the overwhelming and ridiculous urge to make her proud.
Rachel pointed to the anterior tibialis.
“Okay, okay,” Casey said knowingly, nodding and widening her stance. “Now your next step is gonna be to dissect that sucker out. Here, hand me your scissors.”
An open, gloved, filthy hand was thrust in front of her. The same hand from Rachel’s sweetest, most treasured daydreams.
Rachel placed her scissors in that hand, careful not to let herself enjoy the touch. Casey got to work, still talking.
“You need to get in there and really separate ’em. Like alllll this needs to go,” Casey was saying. “Here, you try it.”
Rachel swallowed.
Bones. Muscles. Vessels. Nerves.
Casey passed her the scissors, then backed away enough to let Rachel in between herself and the table. She reached around Rachel to retract a muscle, which was so juicy with spray-on wetting solution, it made a squishing sound against her glove.
Rachel tried to do as Casey had done, jamming the closed scissors into a piece of fascia, then opening them to break it up. Blunt dissection.
“Yeah, now you’re talkin’,” Casey murmured.
Rachel blushed and beamed.
A boy at the table behind them hollered Casey’s name. Rachel panicked, terrified Casey would go to him. She wanted to whirl around and kill him by blunt dissection.
Casey raised her eyebrows and turned her head toward the boy, but didn’t move her hands or her planted feet. That twist of her body brought parts of her even closer to Rachel, pinning her against the table with her hip.
Did Casey know what she was doing to her?
She was talking to the guy about something—answering a question. Then, she let out a full, hearty laugh, and her belly shook against Rachel’s side.
Rachel closed her eyes and winced. She was in heaven, of course. But at the same time, and for the same reason, a starved, strangled truth was clawing its way out of her subconscious, demanding to be acknowledged.
Fine, I’m a lesbian, Rachel silently, begrudgingly admitted.
She felt exposed, as if she’d shouted the words across the lab. Again, Rachel didn’t think there was anything wrong with being gay. Still, admitting it confirmed that these feelings were indeed the romantic kind, which was horrifying in its own right. Having such intense romantic feelings toward any person made her feel like a sleazy salesman, like every move she made toward Casey had some sexual ulterior motive. She wished that someone would lock her in a cage, protect everyone from her excessive lust. Surely, this wasn’t normal. She had to be an alien, not a human girl.
Casey’s talents as a teacher didn’t go unnoticed by Rachel’s classmates, and it wasn’t long before Casey amassed a following of students who had her lab “office hours” schedule memorized. If you wanted to be taught by the most popular TA, you had to show up at 6 a.m. to fight for a coveted spot around a cold cadaver.
Rachel couldn’t knowingly attend Casey’s office hours without feeling some amount of guilt. It was too forward, too brazen, too conspicuous—like letting the door to her cage stand wide open when she should be securely locked inside.
Some mornings, when she felt greedy and shameless, she went anyway.
She studied obsessively the night before, hoping to be the first to answer all of Casey’s questions. This could earn Rachel a precious second of Casey’s attention, usually a quick half-smile and a proud, “Yeah, you got it.”
There were never any boys at Casey’s office hours, even though the class was forty percent male. At one point or another, Rachel had caught each of the attendees staring at Casey’s hands as they casually plucked at nerves and arteries. But these were normal girls, not aliens like Rachel, so it was okay when they did it.
Casey seemed to enjoy the attention, sometimes referring to the office-hours regulars as “her girls.” Rachel didn’t consider herself one of them because, from what she could tell, she didn’t go as religiously as the others.
Rachel wanted to attend religiously—she had never felt so devout about anything in her life—but she wouldn’t allow herself to do it. Even on mornings when she had planned to go, studying and setting her alarm the night before and everything, she might decide at the last minute that going would reveal her as a disgusting, creepy stalker. So she’d force herself to stay in bed.
She’s gonna figure out something is wrong with you if you keep popping up places, you desperate freak, she’d scold herself.
And she wouldn’t sleep a lick after that. She would wallow miserably over every inch that separated her from Casey. She would long to be the disintegrating piece of chewing gum in Casey’s mouth, or the backpack slung over her shoulders.
The other girls at office hours were much more charming, funny, and outgoing than Rachel. The worst part was that they seemed to be friends with Casey outside of anatomy. Some of them knew what kind of doctor she planned to become: a general surgeon. Others knew where she went to undergrad, who her parents were.
But Rachel was different. She couldn’t just chat with Casey, because that would be flirting. She couldn’t try to catch her in the hall after class, because that would be chasing. She couldn’t add her on Instagram, because that would be stalking.
Casey kept on favoring her go-to tables. Rachel kept on hating them. Other TAs came to help Rachel’s table. And Rachel hated them, too.
I wish you would. I want you to.
She screamed it in her head, staring, pathetically waiting for Casey to somehow hear it.
But she never did.
Rachel’s worst fear was that Casey kept her distance because she saw Rachel for what she was: a dangerous predator and a sexual deviant.
But there was an alternate theory …
Rachel wasn’t delusional. She didn’t think so, at least.
But maybe, just maybe, Casey avoided Rachel not because she was repulsed by her, but because she felt the same way, and she didn’t know how to express it.
There was evidence to support this alternate theory, if one knew where to look.
Sometimes it was a knowing little smirk on Casey’s lips. Or a long, intense moment of eye contact. She might get closer to Rachel than was necessary as she walked past, letting their arms brush. Or she’d look at Rachel’s mouth or her neck when she should have been looking somewhere else.
Rachel memorized every signal, replaying them each night as a romantic montage, building and releasing with swells of music. Then came the desires. Tracing her freckles. Caressing her jaw. Desperate, bellowing echoes of her soul’s never-ending refrain: I wish you would. I want you to. The line between fantasy and prophecy slipped further into decay with every lingering glance, every half-bitten lip.
The summer semester was coming to an end, but Casey never said Rachel’s name, and never spoke to her about anything but anatomy.
Rachel understood why. This was the fate of two aliens trapped in a human world, peeking around their masks at one another, but never fully taking them off. They would both be sentenced to a life of mutual pining.
Their professor made an announcement on the last day of lecture: “I know you all are excited to get out of here, but I can’t let you leave without wishing a happy birthday to a very special person.”
Rachel physically recoiled. It was her birthday, but the class was enormous, and the professor had never announced a student’s birthday like this before. Also, Rachel didn’t think the professor knew her name.
But soon it all made sense, because a group of girls, the religious office-hours attendees, began chanting Casey’s name.
“Yeah, okay, I guess everyone already knows,” laughed the professor.
Rachel and Casey shared a birthday. What a sick, cosmic joke. What a slap in the face from the universe. What an unwelcome confirmation that they were, indeed, soulmates; that the magnetic pull between them was real, not just a figment of Rachel’s imagination.
Casey pushed out of her chair with fake reluctance, even though absolutely no one had asked her to. As the professor led the class in singing “Happy Birthday,” Casey ran around the room, high-fiving every single student like a pop star graciously greeting her adoring fans.
Rachel tried not to feel like a loser while everyone celebrated someone else on her birthday. And not just anyone else, but her person, which somehow made it all worse.
She plastered on a fake smile and waited patiently for her turn to touch Casey’s hand, expecting Casey to barely brush it with her own, knowing that alone would have been enough to reset the rhythm of her heart.
When Casey reached Rachel’s seat, she hesitated, and when she touched Rachel’s hand, she didn’t let go.
Rachel startled, trying to keep her soul attached to her body as she adjusted to reality. Her hand was wrapped in Casey’s long fingers, her rough palm, the steady pressure of her grip. Not at all restrained and gentle like it was in her dreams. Rachel went limp as the rest of the auditorium faded to a blur. In complete disbelief, she looked up at Casey, who was already staring at her.
“They told me it’s your birthday too,” she said, jerking her head toward “her girls,” with a slight eye roll. “Happy birthday, twin,” she said.
She winked, but then she let go and moved on.
* * *
When anatomy ended, things changed for Rachel. Without Casey around, she didn’t feel like an alien anymore. Her irritability faded. Her ability to socialize returned. She looked through the bars and decided it was safe to unlock her cage.
Two years went by, and Rachel was a third-year med student. Casey was hundreds of miles away doing her surgery residency.
She still thought about Casey, especially when she heard one of those songs from her old bedtime playlist. The intensity of the feelings that flooded back always amazed her. Sometimes, she even laughed at herself. What had gotten into her that summer?
Rachel was walking the greenway with Julia, a classmate and friend who somehow managed to be close with everyone in their class.
Their topic of conversation was a popular one at the time: “Hear me out.” The girls went back and forth, naming unlikely crushes who were strange enough to warrant the disclaimer: “Hear me out.”
It was Rachel’s turn. “All right, all right. I got one. Hear me out. Remember Casey, our anatomy TA?” she said, testing the waters. She’d never told anyone about this before, but Julia felt safe.
Julia rolled her eyes. “That’s not a hear me out. That’s just a girl.”
Rachel considered this—and she supposed Julia was right. There was nothing wrong with being a lesbian, after all.
“Yeah. I guess the weird part isn’t liking her. It’s, like, the deep, soulful yearning I felt toward her. She was kind of my sexual awakening,” Rachel chuckled.
“Well, yeah, she was everyone’s sexual awakening,” Julia said dismissively. “She had our whole class in a chokehold. It was a collective lesbian panic.”
“What?” Rachel squeaked. She stopped walking. “Was she a lesbian?”
“Oh my god, are you kidding? Have you met her?” Julia said loudly. She lowered her eyebrows and gave Rachel a pointed, if not disbelieving, look. “Of course she’s a lesbian.”
“Well, I would never assume,” Rachel lied. She had assumed Casey was gay, but only for her, of course.
“Well, you wouldn’t have to. She was out, and she was a menace, dude. She was tearing through the girls in our class,” Julia said.
This was news to Rachel, who remembered Casey as the subject of her own emotional lesbian period piece, not a prowling womanizer.
“How do you know this?” she asked. “Is our class just … full of lesbians?”
Julia snorted at the second question, then told Rachel she didn’t know who in their class was bi and who was lesbian, but it didn’t matter, because it was okay for people to explore their sexuality without labeling it.
This was also news to Rachel.
Julia, who was perhaps not as safe a confidant as Rachel had thought, went on to rattle off the list of Casey’s conquests. They were the same girls whom Rachel had caught staring at those fingers during office hours, the same girls who mysteriously knew personal things about Casey, the same girls who were more charming and funny and outgoing than Rachel.
Julia’s explanation ended with a casual, “She hit on me one night, you know, but then I got too drunk, so nothing happened. It was at this house party for her birthday.”
Years had passed, and she shouldn’t have cared. But Rachel could have cried. She felt her mouth curve into an involuntary frown.
“You okay, dude? Oh my god, did I upset you?”
Rachel shook her head, letting out a humorless laugh. Then Julia extracted the story about the prolonged birthday high-five, the wink.
Julia’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, Rachel. She was definitely trying to hit. She always liked the smart girls. You just … never wanted to go out or do anything with us.”
Yes, because Rachel was always in her dorm, studying to impress Casey, thinking about Casey, wishing she was with Casey.
The cadaver-juice smeared glass through which Rachel had always seen that summer shattered, and at once, everything clicked into place.
The effortless swagger. The smirks. The gum. The arm brushes. The nails. The fingers. Her “girls.”
The woman would bite her lip and stare at Rachel’s neck, for god’s sake.
I wish you would. I want you to.
She’d missed out. She’d wasted time, hiding instead of testing her theories of fate. What if she had been right all along? What if this player reputation Julia spoke of was Casey’s version of a mask, and the only person who could’ve seen through it was Rachel?
Stupid, oblivious girl.
No. She was better off this way. Especially since Rachel’s most explicit fantasies involved feeling Casey’s breath on her cheek or her hand in her hair.
She couldn’t have handled the real Casey. She would have tried, desperately so. She would have gladly taken the bone saw to her own sternum and hacked her bloody, beating heart out for that girl. And Casey would have eaten it for lunch.
Still, Rachel would have smiled. Whatever was left of her, that is.
Bones. Muscles. Vessels. Nerves.
Natalie Goodwinn is a medical professional and writer from Atlanta. She enjoys science, musicals, and costume parties. Her short fiction has been published in Half and One. Her debut novel, Catch Snakes, Not Feelings, is forthcoming in March 2027 from Orange Blossom Publishing. Follow her on Instagram at @natalie.goodwinn or on her website www.nataliegoodwinn.com.