Jessica’s Reviews > Wreck > Status Update

Now that she's finished her paleontology PhD she's been promoted to director of ocean life, and she works long hours. She's putting together a huge exhibit of the five-hundred-million-year-long evolution of the octopus, which Nick has suggested she name "Squid Marks".

"It is what it is," [her father] says. "But my temperature is 80 degrees, which seems low. "

"Indeed," I say. I make a mental note to replace his thermometer, which is doubtless from the 1960s and the mercury all leaked out into somebody's butthole decades ago. Probably my own! That might explain a lot, actually.

"--its own blood supply."

"Mom, oh my god. Please stop, " Willa says. She's laughing. "I was just spacing out. But are you trying to say cis man? You don't actually know that's what he is. But feel free to cut his penis and check."

"I fucking might," I say, and she laughs.

"And of course it's a fucking man."

Willa opens her eyes, narrows them at me.

"Sorry, sorry, " I say. I'm trying not to be stuck a gender essentialist. "I just mean someone with a penis," I clarify. No, no, no. "An anatomically attached penis," I add, apologetically. "The kind that would bleed if you cut it." What is wrong with me? "I mean, you wouldn't cut it? But it, you know,--" (cont'd)

"The first biopsy I ever did was under my girlfriend's jaw and it scarred terribly."

"...I'm not sure that's a story for sharing with your patients, just FYI. I mean disfiguring your girlfriend and all."

"My ex-girlfriend," he says. "Did I already say that?"

"You didn't," I say. "But maybe it was implied."