Read Online The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon - Free Book Online Page A

the wrong place?”
    “Certainly,” my father said.
    “But we are all the same inside.” I tried to approach what I wanted to say without sounding unfeeling, or blasphemous. “I mean, men are the same as men and women are the same as women. The organs are in the same places, aren’t they?”
    “Yes, more or less. I think so. The size can vary. You know a field slave has bigger muscles than a lady like your mother. Similarly, the organs can vary in size depending on use. The stomach of a fat man and the stomach of a starving man will not look the same.”
    “Still, the location will be roughly the same.”
    My father looked uncertain.
    “You don’t know?”
    Now he looked displeased, but I was too close to my thought to keep it in my mouth.
    “If you could cut open a person’s body,” I said, “a dead person, to see inside, you could make a drawing of all the parts, and then know. You could refer to it when you had to perform a surgery on a live patient, and reduce the risk of mistake.”
    “No.” My father was looking at me the way he did sometimes, as though black birds had flown out of my mouth. “We don’t treat the dead that way.”
    I knew we didn’t treat the dead that way. I thought of the girl whose baby my father had delivered that day, who would die, or was dead, and the map of her all sealed up in her skin. We had killed her by breaking that seal.
    “She would have died either way,” my father said, responding to something I was not aware of showing, and then he called for my mother, whose face puckered into concern when she saw me.
    The next day I was excused from accompanying my father on his rounds, and spent the day swimming while my mother and her woman watched me oh-so-casually from the picnic site they had set up on my favourite beach.
    “It’s not fair,” my sister Arimneste said. She was eight to my ten, and had recently been forbidden to swim; she had reached the age when she must keep her clothes on. She walked barefoot at the edge of the surf, skirts held up sloppily and often trailing in the water, purposely, to show her disappointment. I paddled a few feet farther out. “I want to come watch, too.”
    “You’d puke.”
    “I didn’t when Ajax and Achilles were born.” Her kittens. “I think it’s interesting.”
    Tall for her age, like me, and my eyes. Her twin, Arimnestus, had taken to rampaging around with a gang of village boys, setting fires, torturing livestock, and pretending he and Arimneste hadn’t once been inseparable. A tomboy, she disdained the village girls and would have gone with him if she could. My father had come to an understanding with a colleague of his, a promising young physician named Proxenus, but the wedding was still a few years away. I knew she was lonely.
    “You’re the one who puked, anyway,” she said. “You should have seen yourself last night. You were green.”
    “People don’t turn green,” I said.
    “Green right here.” She touched her cheek.
    I was more curious than tender, though, and it was not long before I was back to carrying my father’s kit for him.
    Despite his disapproval, small animals were not safe from me. I had already dissected numerous crustaceans, fish, mice, and once a dog I found lying dead on the beach. I hid my drawings, wrapped in an oilcloth, in a hole under a rock above the high-water line. The dog had been the best: there had been food in the gut still and shit in the bowels. I burnt the carcass when I was done so no one would find it mutilated and know it had been me.
    The last surgery my father performed before our move to the capital was on a man who suffered headaches and seizures preceded by intensely heightened vision. At the highest pitch of the sickness he would fall to the floor, kick his legs, flail his hands, clench his teeth, and foam at the mouth. Afterwards he would have no memory of the attack. His family had tried the conventional treatments: ritual purifications, chants invoking the