I worked my way up the spine.
Each vertebra was a farmhouse of bone, and each one came apart under my pen. The marrow-light poured out of every break, wet and screaming, and the bones that had already been shattered kept trying to pull themselves back together, the fragments crawling across the glass towards each other with a patience that was almost admirable. I wrote Sever on the spaces between them and they stopped, and then I moved on.
The ribs were next. I walked along the curving rows of them, and I placed the nib against each rib in turn. Break. Splinter. Shatter. The words came faster now, my hand moving on its own, and the ribs came down around me like a forest being felled.
Some of them were so long that when they fell, they took a full breath to hit the ground.
