"He was a medical tinker and no longer wore his half face in the fishbowl light of the amphitheater. He put his hands to the hot stove. If there was one last operation to perform, he thought, what would it be, since he had spread anatomy across a table like a net and crumpled a pair of deflated lungs into a ball. There was none he knew. If a single body could bear all marks of his blade and if it carried only the organs of his dissection, his life work would seesaw across the floor under tresses of arms and ventricles hung from the shoulders, would turn the other emasculated cheek. Slowly he rolled his sleeves and reaching around the stove dropped celluloid cuffs on the bunk tumbled with newspapers and a khaki blanket"
From: "The Beetle Leg" by John Hawkes NDP239, 1951.
