"It was in the combinations," my dad would say. "It was in knowing that the sea is not the same place here, here, or here."
My mother and father preserved their pigs the longest, and after a tie was declared, they began to see and to learn from each other. They married and had me, and we lived together in the cottage by the sea, preserving things for people.
I remember that when I went away to medical school, the only thing I missed was the smell of home. In the student quarters we breathed in drugs and sweat and sometimes piss. The operating theaters, the halls, the cadaver rooms all smelled of bitter chemicals. Babies in bottles. Dolphin fetuses. All had the milky-white look of the exsanguinated - not dreaming or asleep but truly dead.
At home, the smells were different. My father wen
