Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

She wasn’t any different from you or me, he said, not as far as her organs were concerned. When we love people, they seem different from all the people that we don’t love, but everyone is the same. Everyone is made of the same stuff, and everyone reaches the same conclusion.

At the morgue they weighed her body, measured it, measured each limb, weighed each organ, determined the cause of death. They gave me a document that described her body in the most discrete terms, as if we could ever say for certain where she ended and where the world began.