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Index of Body Parts by Kim Magowan

Image is a color photograph of sketched body parts; title card for the new flash creative nonfiction essay, "Index of Body Parts," by Kim Magowan.

In her hermit crab essay, “Index of Body Parts,” Kim Magowan blends memoir, literary analysis, and thrilling turns of phrase to uproot commonplace impressions of the human body and achieve emotional resonance. Using the familiar form of an index, she examines the body from multiple perspectives: the mythological, the cultural, the political, and the personal. Magowan’s approach allows ample space, as she writes, to close “the gap between metaphor and reality.” The eyeball, for example, is formally listed as “the soft plug that corks the head” and “the corridor to desire,” as well as the body part on which Oedipus acts out his self-punishment. Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, in their craft book Tell It Slant, describe the hermit crab as “an essay that deals with material that seems born without its own carapace—material that is soft, exposed, and tender, and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it.” Magowan’s entry for liver, the essay’s final and most moving entry, outlines her father’s death from liver failure. “Liver” is the only entry out of alphabetical order. “It made sense for ‘Liver’ to be an uncomfortable inclusion,” she writes in her author’s note—“a misfit.” Her treatment of the subject displays the hermit crab’s potential for mining material that is difficult to write about. “Define ‘failure,’” Magowan writes, urging readers to consider the tragedy through their own contributions to her index.  —CRAFT

 

Elbow

  1. The so-called “funny bone,” the most sensitive bone in the body. A tap here feels excruciating.
  2. The hardest point of the body, according to the scary mass email my mother-in-law sends (subject heading: FOR WOMEN!). “If assaulted, attack the perpetrator with the point of your elbow, aiming for his soft parts” (throat; see also eyeball, testicle).
  3. How to reconcile vulnerability to pain with effectiveness as a weapon?

 

Eyeball

  1. The soft plug that corks the head.
  2. In her seminal book on gender and horror, Carol Clover describes the eye as the orifice open to penetration (of knives, of terrifying images). She quotes Stephen King, who points out that eyes are “the most vulnerable of our sensory organs…and they are (ick!) soft.” The eyeball is the chink in the body’s fortress (see also heel, testicle).
  3. The eye is the corridor to desire, e.g., “love at first sight.”
  4. “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.”
  5. Consequently, Oedipus punishes his illicit, oblivious desire and his blindness by, literally, blinding himself. He closes the gap between metaphor and reality.

 

Hair

  1. Hair is the source of strength, e.g., Samson, emasculated when Delilah shears his hair.
  2. Hair is a metonym for sexuality, the rope Rapunzel’s prince climbs.
  3. In patriarchal cultures, women’s hair must be contained, if not altogether covered.
  4. Along with fingernails, hair is the dead element that adheres to our living bodies and grows after our bodies die. Hair is the posthumous twitch.
  5. Walt Whitman called grass “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”

 

Head

  1. In one of my favorite books as a child, Ozma of Oz, a headless character owns a massive cabinet of heads. Every morning she puts on a head, as if it were a garment. Her most beautiful head is vicious.
  2. My favorite goddess, Athena, was born by crashing forth from her father Zeus’s head.

 

Heel

  1. Another site of the body noted for its vulnerability (see also eyeball, testicle), as dramatized by the story of Achilles. The heel is the target to attack.
  2. “A contemptible person; a person who is self-centered or untrustworthy.”

 

Ribs

  1. The cage of bones that holds those fragile birds, the heart and lungs.
  2. God snapped Adam’s rib in two to make Eve, whose body therefore belonged to Adam (proprietary ownership). The rib was the cracked hunting horn that blasted her into being.

 

Tooth

  1. Edgar Allan Poe, nearly as obsessed with teeth as with premature burial, in his story “Berenice” describes teeth as ideas: “toutes ses dents etaient des idées.” Ideas of what?
  2. Teeth are our only visible bones, the skeleton peeking through the window of the mouth. Teeth are memento mori.
  3. Teeth fence the border of the mouth, and are the means of taking the outside in. Teeth incorporate, convert the other into the self.
  4. The most common anxiety dream is losing one’s teeth (see also testicle).

 

Testicle

  1. Testicles are colloquially a metonym for courage and fortitude, as in “to have balls.”
  2. This is ironic, given the notorious vulnerability of testicles to injury, pain, and attack (see also elbow and eyeball).
  3. Testicles are associated with truth-telling. The root of “testify” is testis.
  4. Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, was born when Cronos castrated his father Uranus and flung his severed genitals into the sea. Aphrodite emerged from the consequent foam. This myth may be the origin of the beautiful woman as “ball-breaker.”

 

Tongue

  1. The tongue is the strongest muscle in the body.
  2. After raping his sister-in-law Philomela, Tereus cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling on him. She wove a tapestry that illustrated his violation, showed it to her sister, and they took appalling revenge.

 

Uterus

  1. The uterus, in Greek hyster, is the root of hysteria, mental illness to which women are reputedly biologically susceptible.
  2. “Hysterical” means to be funny or to be overcome by extreme emotion.
  3. Patriarchal cultures pathologize and control the uterus, that interesting eggplant.

 

Vagina

  1. An alarming Lorrie Moore short story characterizes the vagina as the meaty inside of a puppet.
  2. Colloquial terms for the vagina characterize either its alleged weakness (pussy) or malevolence (cunt).
  3. Only a culture given to telling itself elaborate lies would see a vagina as weak and a testicle as a metonym for bravery and strength (see testicle).

 

Liver

  1. After stealing fire from the gods to give to humans, Prometheus was eternally chained to a rock, and an eagle (emblem of Zeus) ate his liver every day. Overnight, it would regenerate, only to be reconsumed.
  2. The liver is the “flush” organ that cleans the blood and consequently, spongelike, soaks up contaminants.
  3. My father transplanted his broken (malignant) liver for a new, fresh one. Prior to the transplant, he felt fine and had no cancer symptoms. His doctors gave him this analogy: he had to leap from the forty-fifth floor of one building to the adjoining building before his own building (body) collapsed.
  4. Life after transplant is an ongoing balancing act: taking enough immune suppressants to avoid rejecting the liver, but not enough to kill the recipient via whatever opportunistic virus or germ comes his way.
  5. Because the liver is a “flush” organ, one should not drink alcohol with even mild medication (for reference, consult your Ibuprofen bottle).
  6. The recipient of a liver transplant must consume upwards of sixteen pills a day, to suppress the immune system.
  7. Less than a year after his transplant, my father resumed drinking.
  8. A transplant is deemed successful if the recipient survives five years.
  9. My father died four years and four months after his transplant, of liver failure.
  10. Define “failure.”

 

KIM MAGOWAN lives in San Francisco and teaches in the English Department of Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the author of the short story collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, coauthored with Michelle Ross, forthcoming from EastOver Press; the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the editor in chief and fiction editor of Pithead Chapel. Find her on Twitter at @kimmagowan.

 

Featured image by Joyce Hankins, courtesy of Unsplash.

 

By | Flash CNF, CNF | January 10, 2024

Tagged: , , ,

Author’s Note

This past summer, I took eight- to ten-mile walks. So many writers are runners. I hate running, but I love walking. Moving my body moves my mind. I’ve always composed while I walk, pausing to email myself notes for stories.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about bodies. Good friends and family members have sickened and died. I move my body through space and think about moving it through time. I consider all the different ways, as a cis female, I’ve experienced my body: objectified, desiring, strong, fragile, diseased, healthy, hungover, gestational, nauseated, aging, wanting, found wanting. Our bodies have such strange relationships with our selves. They both belong to us and are us, the cracked houses we inhabit. My favorite Yeats poem describes the heart “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal.” So many of my stories are about bodies, their unruly appetites, their vulnerability to time.

This particular day in July, I was thinking about the body in parts. I’d been working on my new short story collection, rearranging stories, trying to determine what did and did not belong. I pictured the WIP as a body of work.

Walking, I thought about how prominently body parts figured in stories and myths. Noses grew when one lied; body parts generated—not just sex organs, but stranger parts, like heads and ribs. I emailed myself representative body parts: eyeball, elbow, tongue. I emailed notes about how they manifested. Which body parts were metonyms for weakness and fragility, for instance, chinks or holes in the body’s fortress. No doubt because I’d been thinking so much about organization and sequence, how to arrange the parts, I imagined this “essay” (essay: to try) as a glossary or index.

I was participating in A SmokeLong Summer, and every week, I wrote a couple of drafts to workshop. My first draft of my index was alphabetical. But one section stuck out: the liver. It was more personal than the other entries, not just about myth (Prometheus), but also about my father, who had died a few years after receiving a new liver. One workshop member suggested I cut it; he called it the weakest section. Others said no, it was the strongest. I agreed with that more enthusiastic assessment, but I also knew it didn’t fit where it was, under L, uneasily in the middle. My first reader, Michelle Ross, said, “It belongs at the end.” The entry was about postscripts, about endings and aftermaths. I saw her point. But wouldn’t that mean breaking the rules I’d set myself with my index?

I realized that the “Liver” entry was about things being out of place. Organ transplants, things eaten and regenerated. It was about both the life-saving and toxic things put into our bodies, incorporated. It made sense for “Liver” to be an uncomfortable inclusion, a misfit. Many of the body parts on my list were similarly paradoxical. Something violently severed, generates: Uranus’s castrated testicles produce, on the sea foam, the goddess of love and beauty. Blood on the water. “Liver” was both detour and culmination, the right ending, the sad ending.

 

KIM MAGOWAN lives in San Francisco and teaches in the English Department of Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the author of the short story collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, coauthored with Michelle Ross, forthcoming from EastOver Press; the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the editor in chief and fiction editor of Pithead Chapel. Find her on Twitter at @kimmagowan.