The Body Farm
Scientists watch the body farm in accelerated time. The research facility’s cameras play back at warp speed: bodies break open, the skin marbled red and yellow, a reflection of the sinking Texas sun. My cousin is one of these scientists. He studies forensic anthropology, observing what happens when a body is given back to the earth. He shows up to the bigger family gatherings—kid birthdays, first weddings, funerals that skew younger. Last weekend I intercepted him at his daughter’s birthday in front of the “adult” punch bowl and asked him how they decide when it’s time to return remains to the family, what they do when there’s no family left. At first I thought he hadn’t heard me, his silence measured as he meticulously ladled red drink into his cup. But then a thin lipped smile, a Glad y’all could make it today.
My husband has asked me to stop talking about the body farm, to stop running by the body farm. He says people will think I’m some sort of female Jeffrey Dahmer, that the police will think I’m trespassing—even if the body farm abuts our property and I’m legally allowed to run through our fields. He asks me not to tell him about the blooming and the bloating, the puddles leaking out of flesh cracks, the maggots busily building on newfound terra. He says we should talk about anything else, that neither of us is dying. I wait until he is snoring to slip my phone off the nightstand, screen brightness dimmed, my fingers sprinting from one article to the next about missing women, about girls with gashes in their skulls, ditches and forest floors teeming with dead bodies.
My therapist calls this an obsession. She’s given me a diagnosis: existential isolation. A newer brain disease, not something my gran would have been diagnosed with. But my therapist says it’s becoming more common, women sent to her office who scroll through Instagram to make themselves feel less lonely and more disconnected simultaneously. The pictures of other people’s babies, other people’s newly-grouted kitchens, other people’s pedicured toes wiggling in the sand—she believes this is how the modern woman faces her mortality. A neo-techno ennui. In my case, I am curating a feed of other people’s deaths so that I will feel ready for my own ending.
I don’t tell my therapist that I name the corpses on the body farm. Right now there are two. Zelda arrived at the facility a month ago and her skin—peppered with botanical tattoos, a sprig of parsley above her elbow, a magnolia sprouting from her kneecap—has browned, the flesh draping across her bones like a wet raincoat. Before, you could see a tiny elfin Link bursting out of the foliage near her ankle, his sword slicing up her fibula.
Betty is new, someone’s grandmother, her pendulous breasts falling to either side of her body. When they first laid her in the enclosure, her eyes refused to stay closed, the lids rolling up like window shades. I asked my cousin about this, but he said he couldn’t talk about any of the bodies currently under observation.
It’s a common line, an easy way to get someone off your case: say you can’t discuss an event in progress. It’s what I told my cousin after our second round of punch when he asked whether my husband and I are trying. We don’t want to jinx it. My cousin nodded as we leaned our hips into the brick wall of his carport and watched his daughter swing a bat blindly, trying to break the piñata dangling above her. I wanted to ask my cousin why the body farm always displays its corpses naked, as if bodies are only disposed of in the wilderness without clothes. What about the teenage girl found face down in her prom dress between rows of a Grand Prairie wheat field last week? Do one of the five other body farms in the country study what happens to dead bodies discarded in ball gowns so police will know the effects of tulle on disintegrating skin?
Specialization is key in the workforce. The task of building a family falls on the woman, even if today’s parlance requires you to say WE’RE having a baby. When my period stopped a year ago I felt sure I’d done it this time, but the pregnancy test came back with a single line. I drove to Circle K every day for a week, certain I was just too early, that this next ClearBlue would give it up. Shuffling to my car, I would imagine a soon-to-be carseat tucked into the back, a peaceful drive. But then my mind conceived of rush hour traffic, of a semi-truck running a light, the crunch of metal and the empty air that should be filled with a baby’s wailing.
After my gynecologist confirmed I wasn’t pregnant, she said I needed to consume more calories or give my body a break from running if I wanted to become a mom. By then I’d imagined my baby’s body broken on the I-10 pavement too often to chance a pregnancy. I started running until my legs felt unattached, until pulling breath into my lungs wasn’t possible. I took longer routes, finding myself miles away from home standing on the gravel drive leading to Gran’s old house. Leaning against the mailbox to catch my breath, I waited to see the movement of little legs, the owners of the tricycles in the front yard alive and well in the living room I remembered. The new family got rid of Gran’s chicken coop, put up an above ground pool. I tried not to think about her grass dying beneath the weight of other people’s pleasure.
My husband didn’t ask about my missing period, didn’t notice the tampon box untouched. I didn’t tell him about the gynecologist visit, took those pregnancy tests in the Wendy’s where only the security cameras could catch me unearthing the package from my purse as I pushed open the bathroom door.
But my husband noticed me rolling away from him at night. He suggested I go to a general practitioner for a tune-up as he called it. The GP also told me to eat more, run less. He walked his knuckles up my spine and said, This isn’t the back of a healthy woman. I promised him I’d buy a burger on the way home and then took the long route, purposefully avoiding fast food row. My car raced away from the GP’s dry hands scratching against the paper on his clipboard, down winding service roads where there are only gas stations and fields, cows lowing in flatland that runs to the end of the world.
Now I wait for my husband to drive away to the gun range before I tie double knots in my sneakers and take off out the back door. I leave it unlocked so I can run free of keys, nothing in the hideaway pockets of my shorts to beat against my hip bone.
Grasses whip my shins as I sprint along the neighbor’s cattle enclosure. The beasts are huddled together today, a sign that the sun is proving too hot. I feel them track me, their eyes catching hold of my body flying outside of their world. If they all charged at me the fence couldn’t hold. Unlikely, but there is always the chance.
Always a chance is what my cousin said after he pressed me at the party and I admitted kids felt far away for me. He spat a brown line of chew into an empty Gatorade bottle. A rust-colored swamp slithered around the clear bottom, the color of forgotten period blood inside underwear. I asked him whether he ever got to take people with him to the body farm the way cops give ride-alongs. He said, There’s nothing to see if you don’t know what to look for.
I see something different each time I come to the body farm’s fence. Today one of Zelda’s legs has a snake curled alongside it, a temporary home in the shadow of her bone. Betty is catty-corner to where she started. The vultures do this—pick at flesh and reorganize a body’s placement, twisting it as they pull meat. I’ve seen photos online of other facilities, how they cage their corpses to stop birds of prey from swooping down. I like that my body farm is au naturel.
My mother was offering to help out with in vitro, my husband said, turning from another conversation to the one I was having with my cousin. My husband is good at parties, keeping an ear out for where he can insert himself, making the rounds of the room like an affable tumbleweed. He ladled spiked punch into a Solo cup with Dora the Explorer’s face, her eyes blank as he filled her head with the metallic-tasting liquid. Nothing wrong with needing a little help now and again. He rubbed his thumb against my arm as he settled in beside me.
My cousin moved the conversation to football and I pulled out my phone, single-handedly scrolling through a story about dead pig carcasses placed at the border. Photos showed their back legs shoved into jeans, barrel chests stretching the fabric of polo shirts, trucker hats covering triangular ears. Scientists wanted to see what would happen to these pigs as a way to understand what was happening to the bodies of migrants who died in the desert between Mexico and America. The problem, reportedly, was that local predators kept carrying off the pig carcases, unaware they were disrupting important work. I interrupted my cousin to ask why the scientists used pigs instead of human bodies, but he pretended not to hear me or couldn’t hear me over the squeals of his daughter as her piñata burst open, the ground a candy graveyard.
Now, I lace my fingers through the body farm’s fence as I catch my breath. The chain link creaks and bends beneath my weight. Cicadas vibrate in the grasses nearby, their song crescendoing as I press my foot into the fence’s bottom. My calf stretch becomes a step as my foot pushes through, the chain link moving aside to reveal an open seam in the corner of the enclosure. Someone with bolt cutters has lacerated a passage. The metal peels away like an opened can.
You can choose to read an article or not, my therapist reminded me. Knowing what’s coming for you doesn’t stop it. She says this when I show her the folder of burial silhouettes I’ve saved in my phone. Square after square of green grass, each of them holding a ring of brown where a body decomposed. Nitrogen leaks out of the carcass, staining the grass and rendering it dead. My therapist doesn’t ask why I keep this folder, only why I labeled it “Pinterest Pics”—because I know my husband won’t open it—and whether I’ve thought more about the psychiatrist referral she made last week—I say I have, even though I lost the folded square with contact info.
I can choose at this moment, standing at the broken fence of the body farm, not to press the hole wider with my foot, not to drop to my hands and knees and crawl through the gaping maw. I can choose not to stand on the other side, fully in sight of the scientists’ cameras.
My strides are long, the muscles in my legs warm from the run, but I stop a yard away from Betty because of the smell. There are maggots at this stage, any soft angle an intersection teeming with life. Her eye sockets have been cleaned out. The darkness of her skull is like the ultrasound the gynecologist ordered just to be sure there was nothing growing inside of me that would stop a baby from taking root. White flecks flitted around the screen as the technician slid her wand across my stomach, the corners of her mouth inching up when she said, Nothing to see.
On the other side of the enclosure, Zelda resembles a weathered umbrella, the skin beaten black and tattered by the elements. There are no insects feasting here; she’s already given everything she has. Soon her bones will be carted away to the lab inside, calipers used to take a final assessment.
What happens when science is finished with the people on the body farm? I asked my cousin a second time, pretending to be looking at the bookshelf in the hall so I could catch him alone coming out of the bathroom. The books were mostly Grishams and Graftons, and he took The Pelican Brief out of my hand, returned it to the shelf, guided me by the elbow into his daughter’s bedroom decorated in the same Dora the Explorer from the party. When you’re young, people encourage your obsessions because it makes them think they know you. I stared at a larger-than-life drawing of the monkey from the show over my cousin’s shoulder as he said I had to stop focusing on the body farm, that the way I talked about it constantly was freaking people out. We’re at a party after all.
I’m already in the body farm now, so I might as well enjoy it. I walk closer to the building that makes up one side of the enclosure, nearing the place where Gran used to be. She came here a year ago, and I watched through the fence as her skin peeled away, as birds swooped down to pluck out her eyes and her tongue. I held vigil, running to the body farm every day for half a year until the scientists were finally done with her, until they ground her bones into dust and gave them to my mother. She clucked her tongue as she placed Gran’s remains on the mantel, hugged tightly in a powder blue urn. As if we wouldn’t have paid for her funeral. Child of the Great Depression. Donating her body to science because she can’t stand to waste a thing.
The grass is higher where Gran was. This is a thing that happens, the cycle of the burial stain eating away at the land and the land coming back stronger after time. I squat, place both hands into Gran’s open grave. It’s the same stance she took at the pig enclosure when she brought me to look at the bleary eyed newborns with their tender pink skin. The grass caresses my arms, and I feel her finger hook around my wrist like the last time I saw her. So frail in the oversized hospice bed that was her whole living room, her entire world. She couldn’t lift her head, but the strength, as if her life force was stored in that solitary finger. On my final visit, I sat holding her hand, feeling blood pulsing beneath her paper thin skin. She was too weak to talk, so we watched game shows give way to early afternoon cartoons. Anthropomorphic animals raced across the screen. I lost the thread of the story, who was good and who we were supposed to hate. Outside was silent. All of the animals Gran raised were sold off when she was diagnosed with cancer. I lowered the volume on the television, talked to fill the silence, told Gran how I was trying to create a baby, how if she could hang in there she could meet her great-granddaughter. Her body lay limp, air rattling in her chest as she gathered the breath to murmur, I’ve already met your baby. I leaned closer, made her repeat to be sure I hadn’t misheard. I gathered her knuckles in my fist and whispered that this was impossible. She smiled, twisted her head to peer over my shoulder at the empty yard beyond the window.
You think when you have a baby you made something. A deep intake, trying to sustain more voice even after I told her it’s alright, she doesn’t need to explain. We don’t make or unmake anything, she insisted, that finger hooked around my wrist, pulling me into the muddy waters of her eyes. Life force just gets shifted around. Runty pig gets sick and dies, turns into grass which turns into food which turns into an animal maybe. They trick you into thinking you’re making something new when you’re just bringing back something old, something you’ll never understand. Her eyes shut. I watched her chest, waiting for a new breath, holding my own breath until I heard her shaky inhalation.
When we were leaving the birthday party, my cousin caught me and leaned in for a hug. Do you know about the deer? he asked as we broke apart. I didn’t know. A body farm in Tennessee found deer in their enclosure eating the bodies. Herbivores turned hunters. There’s articles online.
We have a deer head mounted over the fireplace. It was a proud conquest my husband made the winter after our wedding when I spent my spare time by Gran’s bed and he had to find a way to fill his weekends. He brought the taxidermied head home and I touched the blackened sheen of its nose, expecting my hand to come away wet. But the deer was dry, stiff, its back stretched on a rack in the yard behind our house. I made venison stew for dinner. The gristle scraped against my teeth, Gran’s recipe too greasy for me to swallow.
We have to fatten you up so those babies have a good home to grow in, the GP said, patting my knee on his way out. The heat from his meaty palm still radiated as I removed the hospital gown, slid my legs into jeans and strode out of his office. The weight of his hand made my foot heavy on the gas, careening home and away from the eyes of people who wanted me to create a house of my body.
I plant my knees on the ground and roll. On the body farm camera it probably looks like I’ve fallen, but I meant to end up here, on my back. The sky is unapologetically blue, the nest of grass bending around me. The blades lick the sweat from my arms. I lie here, a living reclamation of the bodies we’ve littered, trying to learn how to get ahead.
Zelda, Betty, and I hold our own wake as the sun runs uninterrupted across the sky. I close my eyes, warmth growing under my lashes, the view behind my eyelids a mottled red and yellow. I sink into the earth and sleep—or something like it—takes hold of my body until I hear the grumble of tires on pavement: the keepers of the body farm arriving for work. Someone will want to know what I think I’m doing here.
Ashley Lopez (@a_la_ash) received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She works in publishing and is a founder and the managing editor of Pigeon Pages Literary Journal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Cosmonauts Avenue, Columbia College Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.