The average person has five sphincters, a cervix or two, and possibly a soul. These are just some of the things we carry.
I didn’t even know about my cervix until Christmas morning last year, when my wife gave me a special pillow for it. My neck hurt all the time, a relentless yammering of pain on the fleshy isthmus between my head and body. So, Greta gifted me a postmodern pillow. It came in a box, which was covered in bubbled boasts. Resting on the pillow inside—quite comfortably, I assume— was a piece of paper covered with guidelines for use.
“This pillow comes with instructions,” I said, my voice bright with confusion and its cousin, wonder.
I held them up and read aloud. They said the pillow was ergonomically designed to eliminate cervical pain.
“So, I’m supposed to put it in my uterus?” I asked, not without some hesitation.
She laughed, or rather, did the exact opposite of laughing, which is to say, “That’s funny,” in a tone of voice as flat as the topography in rural Nebraska.
“Your neck region is called your ‘cervix’ too.”
So, all this time, I’d been suffering from cervical pain.
“Wow,” I said, rubbing my aching cervix. “I had no idea.”
It’s confusing, giving two different body parts the same name. Apparently, some doctors refer to one as the “cervix of the uterus” to distinguish it from the cervix “of the neck.” The word is of Latin origin, and it has something to do with a head, or a horn. It was a complicated and multitudinous Internet rabbit hole down which the etymology lay.
Was this a common practice? Did other, completely different body parts also share names?
Was there a “testicle of the elbow”?
“Sorry, I’ve been out of sorts,” you’d say to your co-worker while massaging your ankle. “I twisted my anus while I was jogging this morning.”
This is why my search engine history contains the phrase: “How many sphincters do people have?” The answer is five. One between the mouth and the esophagus, a few in the stomach area, and the famous one.
We even have two hearts, one that pumps blood and looks meaty and asymmetrical. The other is where our most potent emotions dwell, and while it has no solid form, we represent it in pictures with a tidy, cloven-spade shape, like the one my five-year-old daughter draws on the edges of every piece of paper she comes in contact with.
What else is inside us? I wonder if someday researchers will finally locate the biological soul, nestled snug inside the gallbladder. Maybe in the future, people will get their souls removed if doctors find cancerous tumors on them, and those who do will have to take synthetic supplements to replicate what their missing souls once did.
You never know. Life is full of surprises, and we often do not see the things we have.
The pillow itself had two different sets of wings. It was made from material both soft and eerily unrelenting. It was a plush nocturnal paradox on which to rest your head.
On the outside of the box was a picture of a slumbering woman. I inspected her carefully, hoping to ferret out sublime peace on her face. I wanted to know how much bliss I should expect when sleeping on it. She was smiling, but uncannily, because people don’t often smile when sound asleep. Was she even really sleeping?
Of course not.
She was acting. She was wide awake, and when someone gave her the cue, she closed her eyes, smiling under the hot, bright lights, and pretended to be dreaming those deep, gratifying, wholesome dreams that can only be achieved by good people free from chronic neck pain. The alternative, that the company selling special pillows obtained a photo of someone who was actually asleep, couldn’t be true. No one could ever rest under such an unrelenting cascade of illumination.
Imagine being so pure of heart that you can fall asleep surrounded by noisy people, showered in light.
Tonight, our five-year-old daughter fell asleep on the rambling wooden floor of a friend’s house. It’s winter, and we had stayed late, drinking beer and eating tikka masala from a kitchen island, laughing and telling stories. As she slept, one of their dogs walked by, noticed her, and stopped to give a few exploratory licks of her face. She rolled onto her side, seeming oddly naked in only clothes and no blanket, her head rocking on the floor, but did not wake. Eventually, I gathered her up in my arms, draped my sheepskin coat over her, and carried her to the car. At home, I placed her over my shoulder like a sack of extraordinarily delicate, snoring grain, and carried her to bed, my breathing and bootsteps muffled by care.
I guess some people actually can fall asleep surrounded by noise and showered in light.
And when she wakes up in the morning, she will think nothing of it. She won’t see anything that happened after she closed her eyes. Not being picked up, nor covered, nor cradled, nor carried. Not being told “I love you” as she was placed in her bed, despite the fact that all those things are real. She’ll just remember the world falling away under bright lights, surrounded by people. Then she will wake up snug in her own bed, as she always does, transported there by some invisible hand, because she has more than she knows, as do I.
Matt Geiger is a Midwest Book Award Winner, a national American Book Fest Finalist, and an international Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist. He is also the winner of numerous journalism awards. His books include Astonishing Tales!* (Your Astonishment May Vary) and Raised by Wolves & Other Stories.