Olivia Martinez

Flex your wrist for me. Turn your tendons upward. Extend the radiocarpal, pull the lunate back. Move them in synovial fluid and push, push, push until you can feel the heat notched between hand and forearm and the tingling in your fingertips and stretch of your palm. Until the palmar radiocarpal ligament is begging you to stop. Good.

Now take the distal phalanx of your right little finger and pull it toward your heart. Do you feel your skin stretching? If you look at the whitening insides between the proximal and middle phalanxes, your veins have disappeared. Look how pink the creases are. They twist like the threads of yarn.

Spread your fingers apart. All the way. Do you feel it in your wrist? Look at the bones popping from your skin. Metacarpals, all of them. See the joints of your fingers? They look like the knolls of trees.

Flex your wrist again. Softly. Look at the inside. Your veins look green in this light. They slide over your oblique cord and stretch out of sight. They are the roots and your skin is the soil. Put your finger about half an inch below the base of your palm on the thumb side. You don’t feel anything? Try the base of your throat. Good. Your blood is pumping up through your carotid arteries as they split. The one on the right stems from the innominate artery. The left branches from the aorta.

The aorta is the middle root. It pumps blood from the left ventricle of your heart down the center of your body. So much blood. It arches over and behind the heart. Ascending, then descending to the kidneys and iliac arteries, to the femoral artery at your hip, and down, down, down. The blood will make it back up to your heart eventually.

Your heart is a fist-sized seed in the center of your chest. It pumps blood through valves in right and left atriums and ventricles. In the diagrams, they are crimson red and periwinkle blue. Right, left. Out the aorta, in the superior and inferior vena cavas, back out the pulmonary artery, and in the pulmonary vein. Body, body, lungs, lungs. If the rhythm is too irregular, the heart stops pumping. It might happen to you one day.