Cell Division

by Carrie O’Brien

As we drive past, I force myself to look at every piece of roadkill, ensuring that I get a glimpse of the mangled limbs or blood or organs spilling out onto the shoulder of Route 80.

None of the carcasses disturb me because they all disturb me. The animals have no evolutionary ability to avoid being hit by a car. I envision each death as I drive – a moment of fear, the instinct to flee, only to be met with sudden and violent metal of a car, a being they don’t understand. Their lives ended in a painful instant. I drive and drive. There is only one way to go – straight. I take no exits; I need no directions. Escape is easy that way.

Oof! My grandmother exclaims from the passenger seat as we pass a ruined deer carcass. Must’ve been a semi.

We call those 18-wheelers now, I remind her.

She sighs. My husband was a truck driver, you know.

I smile. I’d forgotten she was there, forgotten that I’d summoned her to the car at the last minute. She appeared in the passenger seat in her blue dress and white Keds – not really Keds, the knockoff version from Kmart, though we all called them her Keds out of respect.

A semi, or 18-wheeler, was the only explanation for that deer’s body, the way its neck had twisted around, its limbs had exploded at their joints and left trails of blood. The way its body had been ripped open in the center and pulverized, no longer a deer but the parts of a deer, the pulpy meat I identified because I was so used to seeing their bodies on the side of Route 80. Their fur, their noses, their still-open soft brown eyes were a stark and unbearable contrast to the pavement.

Two months before my high school graduation, a boy in my class had fallen off his motorcycle and was hit by a truck. When it happened, I imagined his body gliding smoothly under the wheels, coming out intact but no longer breathing.

That’s not how it works, my grandmother whispers.

I know, I say. I know. I steer us in and out of the curves in the road, my eyes trained on the shoulder for our next arrival.

Before the illness took over my body, before it dug itself into my bones and my organs, I had gone to my sister’s ultrasound appointment. The anatomy scan, they said. The big one.

We watched my nephew stretch and twist. We admired his hands and feet, his nose. His organs looked good; his body was sound. He was here.

His spine was the thing that did it. I watched him in grainy black and white and could see his spine as if I were looking at a photo or a fossil or my own x-ray. I was afraid; how could he have simply grown a spine like it was nothing? Like his body hadn’t been produced by millions of years of struggle and loss and pain? By this miracle of cell division, he’d already begun.

In 20 more weeks, I’d run my fingers over his tiny spine as he slept in my arms. I’d touch each little knot, marveling at how it connected to another and to his brain and nerves.

It was everything. I was him.

I excused myself and went outside. I dry heaved into the bushes. Something was wrong in my body. My cells knew it. My nephew was my cells, my blood, and he knew it too. He screamed at me from inside my sister’s body, safe, still being molded into what would come after.

I refocus on the task ahead, the now. We are in the car, my dead grandmother and I – a ghost or apparition, it doesn’t matter, she is here and she’s what I need. We keep driving. We’re almost out of Pennsylvania now. Back home, my sister is in her last month of pregnancy, and it’s me she thinks about. Her joy, my parents’ joy, over welcoming my nephew will be overshadowed by the pain and grief of another stupid death. My death. They’ll mourn me, they’ll name him after me. They’ll carry on without me and I’ll just be a legacy, a name on their lips that’s no longer able to define who I want to be.

They say I can fight it, but I may not win. My life has since been coated by a narrative I don’t recognize; I am a warrior, I am strong. People I don’t know or don’t care about believe in me. They know me, now. They see me. But only if I live.

If not? Was I not strong enough? I’ll be like the roadkill, a tragic result of a necessary world. Pity the broken bodies, pray for the souls, but always, always look away before you think “it could have been me.”

I’ve seen too many mangled deer bodies.

Inside me is blood and meat. Inside me is the past and future. The cells of the Earth have already bound me, and so I don’t wish to be a warrior. I don’t wish to believe. I only want to make one more mad dash across the highway, hoping for another second, another minute, another day before the metal screams and it all turns black.

Cells dividing and dividing again, hoping against all odds to make it to that last division. Compared to that, death looks stupid. Exiting another body, taking your first breaths. Now that’s a fight. It’s always been that way – every cell and every being that ever lived has been in battle, in chaos, in screaming determination, declaring its right to exist because everything else has already done so.

Maybe even the cells that have betrayed me have screamed in this way.

Death is instantaneous, even when it’s drawn out. A body, a self, a story, taken away in a violent end.

I want to scream, I say.

Do it, my grandmother says. You must.

And I do, an animal cry from deep in my gut, the part of me that knows I’m dying and has always known, long before the ultrasound appointment. Death had been in my cells since I was born, dormant and all mine. We all live with death, always, but mine, at 22, had been close, prescient, aware. While other kids played on the monkey bars, I thought about all the dead kids in the world that day and wondered why I wasn’t one of them. I wondered what I had done better to deserve another day.

Roadkill are mostly prey animals. They don’t wonder why they’re alive. Their chief instincts are to save themselves. They just keep running. Our mistake is thinking that we’re not prey animals, too.

We pull off the highway right inside Ohio to get a hotel. The major ones that will offer a clean bed are all booked.

Go out of the parking lot, the Hilton manager says, and go right for about two miles. There’s a motel.

We drive again, this time on the backroad. It seems like much more than two miles. It’s so long that my grandmother brings her knitting back up to her lap from where she’d let it rest on the floor.

It’s a baby blanket, she says. I’m nearly finished. When I don’t say anything, she adds, bringing a new life into the world is serious business.

What about life ending? I ask.

It’s sort of all the same, she replies. I think you know that.

We drive and drive. There’s no motel in sight. I have plenty of gas, so I accept our fate, accept that this motel never existed or we passed it miles ago. Huge trees surround us, just beginning to get their spring buds. Somehow, it’s still light out, and I keep going. Eventually, we must all get somewhere. It feels like days pass – long ago, I would’ve thought that impossible. But now I know that everything happens all the time. Our being. Our whole everything is here.

My grandmother is still knitting. The periwinkle yarn is the same as the baby blanket, but the shape is different.

It’s a hat for you, she says before I ask. You will probably lose your hair.

I hit the brakes. I don’t bother to pull over. Instead, I sob, letting my head fall to the steering wheel, pounding it so hard with my fists that my hands are sore. My throat aches and my chest feels tight, but I don’t stop sobbing and screaming, expecting to feel a hand on my back or my arm, but there’s nothing.

When I look up, she looks up. She meets my eyes. She is clear, she is sure.

It’s all going to be okay, you know.

I look at her for a long time, and she looks back.

I inhale. I exhale. The knitting needles click over and over again and with each tap I imagine her lightweight steps in her keds, walking down the deserted highway followed by a parade of sleek, shining, deer. Coats untorn, stomachs still churning with food and life. Turning to nuzzle their babies. The cars that roar beside them have no bearing because they just run, and run, and live until they don’t.

Her footsteps fade and I know the truth. I’d made up my mind before this drive, before the pain, before the division. I knew it on the playground.

Even in the chaos, we must keep running.

I turn the car around and head back toward the highway, toward home, toward the roadkill, toward everything.