Anatomy of Failure
Chapter 2: The Fluffy Solution
The classroom smelled sharply of bleach and industrial soap, a sterile scent that lingered beneath the dull buzz of flickering fluorescent lights. The air felt heavy and slightly stale, thick with the scent of cleaning chemicals and a faint underlying hint of something organic, sour and unsettling. The linoleum floors had been scrubbed clean but still showed faint, sticky footprints that told of earlier chaos. Metal trays sat at each station, gleaming cold and empty except for the faint outline of shapes beneath damp paper towels. The overhead lights hummed, their flicker casting brief shadows that danced across the walls lined with faded anatomical charts and smudged whiteboards. Everything felt too clean, too quiet, as if the room itself was holding its breath.
Students began filtering in, still rubbing sleep from their eyes or adjusting earbuds that barely muffled the sounds of restless whispers and shuffling backpacks. It was first period, and the usual mix of teenage lethargy and low-key excitement was thick in the air. Phones appeared almost before the last few had taken their seats, glowing faintly in the dim light as students tapped and swiped. Some gathered in clusters, whispering and stealing glances at the trays laid out on the tables. A few girls, their makeup and hair perfect despite the early hour, stopped short and exchanged uneasy looks when they caught sight of the limp, pale forms wrapped in paper towels. The room buzzed quietly with curiosity and apprehension, the usual teenage energy mixing uneasily with a vague sense of dread.
A few students stopped cold when they saw the trays. One girl whispered, “Oh my God,” her voice barely more than a breath as she clutched her friend’s arm, eyes wide with a mix of shock and something close to horror. Another stood frozen, mouth half open, caught between amusement and unease, as if uncertain whether to laugh or look away. Slowly, more hands peeled back the damp paper towels, revealing the soft pastel bodies beneath.
At each lab table, the foals lay limp and pale sprawled on sheets of wax paper, their tiny limbs splayed out flaccidly in front of them. Their colorful hides, dulled and blotched by the cold, were slick with moisture and glistening under the harsh classroom lights. Fur was stiff and clumped from the cold, flattened in patches where it had pressed against metal. Some of the little creatures’ eyes were shut tight, while others stared sightlessly upward, glassy and dull.
Time had already taken its toll. Each specimen was seemingly lifeless yet grotesquely preserved, a futile trophy of biology gone wrong. Some bore the telltale collapse of their ribs, others the bloated swell of post-mortem gases trapped inside delicate bodies not quite dead enough. The faint, sour scent of decay drifted up as the towels lifted, mingling with the sterility of the room. One student coughed, another gagged into their hoodie sleeve. No one left.
“Phones in the drawer,” I reminded them, gesturing to the plastic bins near the door. “I don’t want a single screen out during this lab unless it’s got a dissection diagram pulled up. That includes your Apple Vision crap, by the way. Mr. Kenner, don’t test me.”
Groans. Shuffling. The sound of backpacks unzipping and drawers clattering shut.
I turned back to the whiteboard and clicked to the first slide. A simple title card blinked into focus, the text slightly misaligned from a rushed edit.
Dissection: Internal Systems Survey
Objectives: Identify major organs. Document abnormalities. Maintain sterile technique.
The projector hummed overhead, casting the room in a cold, washed-out glow. The slide template was still green and yellow from last year’s frog dissection unit. I hadn’t bothered to change the theme. The word “frog” had been hastily scrubbed from the slides, replaced in text boxes with “foal” wherever I remembered to do it. A few slides still had pictures of frogs. One had a labeled diagram of a human kidney. None of it mattered.
I began my instructions as the students settled in, adjusting gloves, leaning in toward the trays, already shifting in their seats with a mix of nerves, dread, and morbid curiosity.
“Each station has a tray. Each tray contains a specimen. These are unreleased Hasbio foals; nonviable, canned, and culled. Designated for disposal. For the purposes of this lesson, you will treat them as you would any standard biological sample. Approach the task with observation, not emotion. If you are unable to do so, you may excuse yourself and accept a zero for the assignment.”
I took my place at the front of the classroom, lifting one of the foals from a tray with gloved hands and laying it on a sterile mat under the document camera. The pale, limp body offered no resistance. I moved with a hollow precision, voice calm and measured as I began the demonstration. “Turn the specimen on its back,” I said, tracing a scalpel gently along the sternum line. “Make a shallow incision from here down to the abdomen. Do not force it. This is a dissection, not destruction.” A few students exchanged glances. Some sneered. Others simply nodded. The occasional scratch of a blade against fragile skin echoed in the room, joined by the soft rustle of gloves and the creak of bodies leaning in over their work.
The texture beneath the scalpel was unsettling. The fur came away in damp clumps, greasy and tacky to the touch, clinging to the latex with every movement. What might have once been soft now felt sodden and unnatural, pressed flat from hours spent packed in ice. The blade met the skin with almost no resistance. It parted like wet tissue, thin and translucent, splitting open to reveal the pale flesh beneath. The muscle was swollen and limp, webbed with faint blue veins and threaded with translucent fat. A slow, gelatinous seep of fluid welled up from the incision, thick and cloudy, the color of watered-down blood left to sit too long. It spread across the wax paper in sluggish, irregular shapes, pooling beneath the specimen’s spine. A faint pop sounded as a pocket of internal gas escaped, followed by a curling thread of warmth that carried the scent upward. It was sour and bitter, thick with ammonia and the sharp reek of rotting meat. The smell lodged in the back of the throat and turned the stomach with every breath.
Several students faltered. One girl gagged, pressing her fist to her mouth as she turned away. A boy beside her rolled his eyes and muttered, “Grow up.” The girl shot him a glare, but kept her gaze firmly averted.
The soft, wet sounds of tissue parting, sinew stretching, and air escaping from broken lungs filled the air like a dissonant symphony. At one table, a student’s blade slipped. A faint gurgle burst from the foal’s punctured chest. The student froze, eyes wide and breath shallow.
“Post-mortem gases,” I said quietly, stepping over. “It’s normal. Carry on.”
I stepped away from my station at the front of the classroom and began moving between the rows of desks. I strolled among the students with a hollow precision, voice calm and measured as I delivered instructions. The faint scrape of scalpel blades against fragile skin filled the room, punctuated by whispered curses or nervous breaths. At some tables, fingers trembled as students struggled to lift the damp, fragile bodies, their movements tentative and awkward. Others worked with practiced efficiency, slicing deliberately as if dissecting the life out of the specimens were routine. A boy near the back grinned too wide, eyes gleaming with a cruel sort of enjoyment as he tugged at a limb, stretching it until the joints popped like brittle twigs. I caught his smirk and stepped closer, voice steady but sharp. “Focus. This is biology, not a wrestling match.”
At Lab Table Three, Emma Halberd leaned over her tray like a priest before an altar. Her blonde hair was coiled into a perfect braid, and she had tucked her school ID badge into her front pocket like a scalpel. Her nitrile gloves were already on before I even reached her, stretched tight over her fingers with practiced efficiency. She stared down into the tray without blinking, eyes narrowed behind clear safety goggles. The filly lay belly-up beneath the overhead light, her legs splayed stiffly, skin faintly puckered with cold. Her fur was a faded lavender, patchy and matted in places, with a limp tangle of butter-yellow mane fanned across the wax paper like wilted ribbon."
“This one’s got an umbilical remnant,” she said flatly, already reaching for her dissection scissors. “Can I snip it and start the midline?”
I paused beside her station, noting the meticulous arrangement of tools, the open worksheet already half-filled with anatomical notations. I nodded. “Yes. Make the cut just above the base. Then begin the ventral line from the sternum down. Shallow angle. Keep the blade level.”
Without hesitation, she pinched the shriveled stump with her forceps and snipped it clean. A soft click of metal on cartilage. She adjusted the specimen with gloved hands, pressing it gently into the wax sheet to steady it, then lined her scalpel to the chest. Her first incision was slow and precise, the blade parting the fur and skin in one clean motion. No wince. No comment. Just cold focus.
“Midline opened,” she murmured, almost to herself. “No visible bruising. Tissue integrity’s good.”
I moved on without another word. She had already forgotten I was there.
At Table Seven, Marcus Lin sat rigid and pale. His glasses fogged slightly as he leaned closer, brow furrowed. His fingers trembled as he lightly traced the curved ribcage with the tip of his scalpel, careful not to cut too deep. He whispered anatomical terms to himself, each word barely audible but precise: bronchi, diaphragm, esophagus. Every so often, he glanced up at the projected slides as if silently quizzing himself. His was the look of a student who needed the facts to stay in control, holding back the rising queasiness with sheer concentration as he cut into a lime green colt.
Near the back, Table Fifteen was a different story. Jonah Reyes and his two usual shadows, Tyler Vance and Malik Johnson, had already gone off script. The scalpel sat in Jonah’s hand like it belonged there, balanced on his fingers with a familiarity that made me uneasy. They had not waited for instructions. The specimen was already opened, its sickly orange pelt flayed too deeply and too fast, its chest cavity a jagged wound glistening with congealed fluid.
Jonah grinned with too much delight, his eyes lit with something sharp and private. He pinched the foal’s hind leg between two fingers and gave it a casual jerk. The pop was wet and soft. He held the severed limb up triumphantly, rotating it beneath the overhead lights as if admiring a rare find. “Look at this,” he sneered, his voice too loud. “Like a little puppet.”
Tyler snorted and leaned in, poking the foal’s limp flank with the blunt end of his forceps. “Dude, pull the eyes out next,” he muttered. “Bet they’re all gooey.”
Malik mimed a retching noise but he was grinning too. “You should squeeze the guts out like a tube of toothpaste.”
Jonah chuckled low in his throat and lowered the limb, nudging it against the foal’s cheek like a mock caress. His gloves were already streaked in pink and yellowish smear. The wax paper under their tray was soaked through in spots, the flesh below torn more than dissected.
None of them wrote anything down. There were no worksheets in sight. Only the flayed open remains of the specimen, the soft slop of tissue scraped away for the fun of it, and that look in Jonah’s eyes. It was calculated, performative, but a little too convincing.
I lingered near their table longer than necessary, saying nothing. They quieted slightly but did not stop. I made a mental note to flag Jonah in the post lab report. Not for punishment. For pattern.
He was enjoying himself far too much.
At Table One, quiet Sophie Mendel cradled her foal with the care of a mother bird. Her dark curls hung like a curtain around her face, which was flushed and drawn tight with emotion. She handled the specimen gently with both hands, as if afraid the slightest pressure might hurt it. Sophie’s eyes welled with tears that she blinked away without wiping. One escaped, trailing down her cheek and disappearing into the collar of her lab coat.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice barely above a breath.
Her lab partner, a boy with earbuds still half-in, shifted uncomfortably but didn’t speak. He kept his eyes on the worksheet while Sophie’s gloved hands moved with aching tenderness, tracing the faint blue webbing of veins beneath the thin, pale skin. Her fingers hovered above the foal’s chest like she expected it to breathe. She hadn’t made a single incision yet.
Despite the sterile instructions, she treated the specimen with a fragile reverence, as if the cold body before her might somehow understand her sorrow. The absurdity of it was almost touching.
Almost.
Across the room at Table Nine, nervous Lucas Reed shifted uncomfortably, sweat dampening the collar of his shirt. His eyes flicked constantly between the foal and the girl next to him, who whispered softly about how wrong this all felt. Lucas nodded without words, his hands clenching into fists as the sour scent grew heavier in the air. The gravity of the task settled over him like a weight, his usual teenage bravado stripped away in the clinical light.
At Table Eight, Caleb Patterson had gone completely off script. While most of the class hovered somewhere between reluctant fascination and queasy detachment, Caleb treated the foal like a prop in a skit. He had not made a single incision. The colt, a sky blue pegasus with a patchy lemon yellow mane, lay untouched except for the way Caleb had posed him like a stuffed toy. He had propped it up on its stomach, bent its stiff forelegs into a mock begging pose, and was busy trying to balance a chewed mechanical pencil between its ears. The foal’s head lolled to one side, its neck unable to support even that meager weight.
“Check it out,” he whispered to the girl beside him. “He wan’ nummies,” he added in a mock fluffy voice.
She grimaced, recoiling slightly in her stool as the foal slouched in her direction.
I stepped up behind him. “Patterson,” I said, voice level. “If you want to pose for Instagram, I will make you do a full lab report on the rectal structure instead.”
He snorted, more amused than chastened, but he put the pencil down. The colt slumped forward, limp and sticky. Its face made a soft squelch against the tray. A glistening trail of mucus dragged behind one nostril as its head settled into the wax paper.
I moved silently between the tables, observing each student with a hollow precision. My voice remained calm and measured as I delivered instructions. The quiet scrape of scalpels against fragile skin echoed in the room, punctuated by whispered curses or startled breaths. The classroom was a patchwork of unease, fascination, cruelty, and sorrow, all simmering just beneath the surface. I circled back toward the front, hands folded neatly before me, every step deliberate as I prepared to guide them through the next stage.
The room was a low buzz of focused energy, only occasionally broken by a gasp or a burst of laughter quickly stifled. That all changed halfway through the block.
It started as a sound.
Not the mechanical scrape of a scalpel. Not the soft wet tear of fascia parting under tension. This was a sound that did not belong in a science lab.
“…mummah…? Chirp. Hab huwties. Nee’ huggies…"