The "Editor's Corner" features work created by the Morning Glory's editorial staff.
Featured here: "Vestigial" by Riley Civerolo Douglas, "Real Slow" by Riley Civerolo Douglas, "Audrey" by Isabella DePhillipo, "This Must be the Place" by Caroline Lopez, "ode to the Birds i found in the dumpster" by Tenchi Wells, "The Cupboard dropped my childhood cup" by Tenchi Wells
Vestigial
by Riley Civerolo Douglas
by Riley Civerolo Douglas
Meredith Dubois broke her hip last Tuesday afternoon.
When the doctors asked her why she threw herself down the stairs at an angle that she knew would shatter her fragile pelvic bones when they hit the hardwood floor at the bottom of it, she replied:
It’s vestigial. Like the whales.
Meredith Dubois explained to the doctors and the nurses and the other patients and to anyone else who would listen that whales had remnants of pelvic bones floating in their massive bodies—evolutionary memories of the time that they had spent on land.
She drew unrefined renditions of these whale dogs on the hospital napkins, their elongated snouts and four legs outlined in ballpoint pen and stained with red dye from that evening’s jello. She often spoke in her sleep about how they must have run, paws hitting the wet earth beside the sea before eventually heeding its call once more and returning to their original home. The primordial birthing pool where we and the whales and the dogs and everything else on the planet started. (Meredith always put extra emphasis on the primordial birthing pool where we and the whales and the dogs and everything else on the planet started.)
On the day that Meredith Dubois died, about two weeks after the Tuesday afternoon that saw the eradication of her hip and all its functions, Meredith said to the nurse present that she was just like them—the whales. That’s why she broke her pelvic bone, she said. Because she knew she didn’t need them, that they were just reminders left behind from when she was a dog that ran and ran and ran and ran and she didn’t need to run anymore. She was a whale and she had never liked running.
Aren’t I just like those whales, Jackie?
Jackie, the undergraduate trainee who had been asked to sit with Meredith while she rambled her final thoughts, nodded. Meredith Dubois smiled and got a happy, glassy look in her eyes. Wet, Jackie thought, like the ocean. Then she figured that was a rather stupid and cliche thought and simply squeezed Meredith’s hand as the woman died.
A week later, the Smithsonian Institution released an issue of its magazine containing an article detailing the groundbreaking discovery that the pelvic bones found in whales were not, in fact, vestigial, and were instead evolutionarily selected to increase maneuverability during reproduction. They were, simply put and stripped to their barest essentials, fucking bones.
Jackie read this article and thought of Meredith Dubois. She couldn’t help but laugh, and then cry, and then down an entire bottle of Merlot and buy a ticket to a whale watching boat tour that she would promptly forget about in the morning. The Whale Tours confirmation email would sit unread in her inbox for months—vestigially.
Real Slow
by Riley Civerolo Douglas
by Riley Civerolo Douglas
Audrey
by Isabella DePhillipo
by Isabella DePhillipo
This Must be the Place
by Caroline Lopez
by Caroline Lopez
ode to Birds i found in the dumpster
by Tenchi Wells
by Tenchi Wells
The Cupboard dropped my childhood cup
by Tenchi Wells
by Tenchi Wells