Death comes for the --

This morning, I rest my face against the glass of the cage on the counter, staring in at the tiny black mouse. She peeps out of the sawdust every so often, snuggling her silky paws into the fibers and curling softly against her swollen stomach. I imagine her nursing the almost-formed babies she holds so deeply inside, their dark, warm kind of alive obvious only by soft kicks against her viscera. She walks heavy and slow, like an old queen with all the purpose of royal motherhood, and I stare at her because I know she is going to die. I know she has only a few more minutes to exist, a few more minutes to feel her perfect children roll over in fluid contentment before the end. Worst of all, I know there will be pain. In the back of my mind hangs the sudden and half-humane snap, followed by the chaotic jerks of a spinal cord in violent torque, so for that last while I watch her burrow quietly in the sawdust, oblivious.

Soon, the professor bustles in with trays and tools, and next to the cage I ready the sharp and gleaming instruments: forceps, scalpels, tiny scissors and razor blades. I label my tubes and bathe them in the cell lysis solution and enzymes that will soon be digesting clipped babies' tails. Tissue, I call my samples, but that does not change the fact that they will come only when the life on the table before me has been severed and apportioned. The tails are mine; the knees, Jason's; the temporomandibular joints, Melissa's; the sternums, the doctor's.

He lifts the mother from her cage, pinching the scruff of her neck, and her belly balloons under the weight. It doesn't matter now. Twenty seconds. "Have you ever seen a cervical dislocation before?" he inquires casually, and I shake my head. Before I can absorb the implications of his words, his thumb and forefinger slam into her neck, and her vertebrae crunch together sickeningly. Terrified, I expect a quick end after the shock, a nice and painless relaxation, but instead my eyes widen as I watch her body writhe in freakish contortions, every second more painful than the next. The scene is sickening; dark blood flows from her nose and mouth, and disgust radiates through to shake even my most distant synapses, but I can't remove my eyes. Now? I plead in my mind. Is it over? Each desperate jerk brings a shudder from us both, and I listen to her nearly-soundless shrieks as she slowly expires.

Agony.

Ten seconds, I know, can last longer than forever.

Without bothering to wait for the twitching to end, the doctor lays her supine on a paper towel, deftly slicing in a place below her neck. He tugs with just the right force, and I am surprised and horrified to watch her belly split open like a seam, exposing her still-churning internal organs. The swollen uterus moves and twists; I realize her babies are alive--real. It's strangely easier, though, to watch the vivisection once she's open; with familiar organs falling to her sides, she resembles a biology experiment, and as long as I block the memory of her death, it is simpler to be dispassionate. With swift precision I can't help but admire, the doctor snips out the uterus, separating it onto its own tray. A pang of sadness hits me as the mother's mutilated remains are pushed aside; she gave life to these soft babies, and we can't even leave her with the promise that we'll care for them, because we don't intend to. Slitting open the uterus is like opening Christmas presents; each fetus is confined in its own muscular sac, separated from the others like sausages on a chain. We dissect into the sacs for phenotypical surprises; we're breeding for a mutation, so will it be this fetus with no elbow joint, or the next? The babies are separated out onto the tray, poor, red, helpless things, one inch long and smooth like melted plastic. What strikes me most severely, though, is that they're still moving. They'd be viable in just about a week, but even now they have musculature and nerve function, and I can't help but wish they didn't. With hungry scalpels, we slice them into pieces, and I hear their hoarse, soundless cries and can only imagine their pain; at least this time, I can take comfort in knowing it will be short-lived. Soon, the tissues lie quietly in pools of solution, life snatched from them in the ice cold name of empirical science.

With forceps, I am given a series of tiny tails, which my quivering hands place tenderly into the solutions that I know will devour them. Later, I will mince them with surgical scissors, homogenizing my solutions and preparing them to be centrifuged out for genotyping that must be finished by Friday. I realize that I've spent five hours in the lab, and so I prepare to leave. On the way out, though, I sneak a glance at the mother, glass-eyed on the table as everyone else's blades taste her babies' severed parts, and I can't suppress a shudder.