Stomach

If all our inner organs hung outside the body like cured meat dangling from the ceiling---and children do exist who are born with organs turned out---and all our limbs and outer organs were folded within the sac of our thorax and abdomen, what would we look like?

Would we push along on the lub-dub of our heart? If so, we would scarcely move: I imagine the intestine dragging behind like an extraordinary tail. Perhaps the lungs would inflate and lift this strange form a few inches off the ground; I can see how the ribs would scuttle along like the agile legs of a spider. I imagine the feet kicking from within, trampling the food like grapes beneath a winepress. The eye, nose and ear are crushed inside the skull, washed over with the dizzy traffic of the blood and the flood of excretion, nauseated, clotted. Lastly, the entirety of the nerve system and the veins would unravel and reach out into the air like the tendrils of a vine, whiskers.

Without the thick barrier of the skin, we would feel the wind and the sun as they are, as when we feel hot water on a cut. The oxygen would pierce our veins directly--we would be intoxicated, heady. And the stomach?




It would be like the starfish stomach: inside out, the stomach pushing itself into the narrow opening that the starfish has drilled. Once inside the mollusc, the stomach excretes its bile, dissolves and digests the tender muscle then withdraws back into through the mouth of the starfish. How fragile the starfish must feel to have its stomach caught outside its spiny exterior. But then I think that we men carry our sex in soft pouches at our waist and hardly think anything of depositing it in another body whereas our stomachs, permanently encased like the mollusc, may become ulcerous without producing pearls of any sort.
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