Mary

I wrote this to be part of a collaborative writing project with Polybe + Seats, for their show Alice or the Scottish Gravediggers. It was a great piece to work on, and in the early stages I even got to butcher a duck as part of a recreation of a Renaissance Anatomy Lesson. 

In the story (and in real life), Mary was abducted by a guy named Burke and his accomplices, killed, and sold to a medical student for purposes of dissection. This is how students and doctors learned the inner workings of the human form.

Mary was played by Elaine O'Brien.

"Mary Patterson"

MARY

(with a big, conspiratorial smile)

I'm Mary.

(and a big eyed laugh)

I'm dead.

(and a wave of the hand, pshaw)

They try to romanticize it, but really dead is dead. At least I know where all my parts is now, they all got pointed out, each one. Them doctors, they knew where to find everything, though I reckon a few things surprised them.

(enjoying this)

The way the nudged each other to look, little tiny passages filled with blood spreading like spider webs out into my hands. Old Mary's still got something to show the world, even laid out cold and dead on a laboratory table. Whichever way you look at it I was dissected.

(don't feel bad, here's an upside)

That's how I come to know all my parts.

(pointing out each one, maybe pulling aside her gown to show them flapping out of her)

Here behind my ribs is my heart. Lungs here and here. Stomach, containing the last bit of food I ate that fateful day. Some says I'd had a whiskey breakfast, and in truth I may have, but the details are all a bit muddy.

(emphatically)

Either I was killed or someone else was.

(I'm smart! Pointing them out.)

Brains.

(long coils of intestine spilling out, does she let them spill or try to contain them?)

Down here we have a small intestine, and over here's a bigger one!

(in my defense)

I'm not the only one as has two, turns out most people is built the same as I am.

(see that you pretentious arrogant fucks?)

Me Mary Patterson is built the same as any of you, so when you go around thinking up all the ways you're better than me, you just remember we's the same on the inside. You an me an every other lonely heart as ever lived.

Truth is nobody really knows about me save for I'm the same as alot of other girls. I might not be Mary Patterson, I might be Mary Mitchell for all I know, hardly matters which one.

(defiantly)

I'm either me or someone else very much like me.

(a little coy, a little proud)

Maybe I had a bit more spirit, a bit more daring, a bit more whiskey. Maybe I'm guilty of selling my body, but I'm not the only one, and them others got a much better price for it than I did. I only sold a little piece here and there, never occurred to me to sell the whole damn thing! But them doctors, they're smart ones, they are, putting the chance to learn something real and true above everything else. I admire a man knows his priorities, always have.

(laughs at her own joke)

My story's the same story as the story of other spirited girls lost their souls to them we called grave robbers. We all had life one time or another, and in the end we all of us got by one way or another without it.