Skull of unknown Leontiasis Ossea sufferer; Harry Brookes Allen Museum
by Pamela Swanborough
Perspective: Skull of unknown Leontiasis Ossea sufferer; Harry Brookes Allen Museum
Get directions: 37°47’57.6″S 144°57’32.9″E
I know of touch. Not directly, not the warmth, no. But I have held the materials that knew touch, and I knew they were feeding me. I grew.
Mother’s blood, first; then later mother’s milk soaked into me, formed me, tasted of love and softness. I grew. Then the bread, soft as could be afforded, and cow’s milk: greasy and rich and feeding me as I grew strong. My gobby teeth caught fat from mother’s soup; it fell from her spoon while I sat on her lap, lolling my big dome head against her, the ribs of her beside my skull, the bones of her arm caging me just as I caged my own wheezy airbags, my fluttering heart, my poor stomach… I scoffed all down, a chomp and a chew. Harmony of teeth and jaws and swallow-bone in throat.
But then they didn’t want me to grow any more. The softness I housed – nerves and muscles and organs – ha! Too soft. Didn’t fight back when I grew, did it. Mother, she pushed ugly me and my wet cargo of blood and body into a corner. And the red mouth cried, and the grey nerves ached. And they took away the milk, fed me thin gruel. Didn’t they try to stop me growing… ? Ha and again ha! Grow I must and grow I would, and if it meant I supped my necessaries out of grey nerves and left that red blood thinner, what of it. Grow I did.
The money came in, though she tried to hide me for her own shame. They put me and my blood-soft body on a table, didn’t they just? And strangers came to gawk, and gawp, and laugh or scream. Mother hid her face under a shawl.
But she took the money.
And gave me the good food, for the money. So grew the flaming ache of joint and bone. The long leg bones of me bending against the strictures of muscle and tendon: fighting, always fighting, ropey tissue against calcium. I wanted to chew those tendons I did, with my gnashy teeth bones and my bulging jaw bones, grind my own softness to ease the pains.
The money, oh, didn’t the pennies roll in? I was propped and displayed, I was jabbed and poked. I felt their own finger bones, modest white sticks inside the flesh inside the gloves, poking and pressing from the outside even as I grew and pressed on my own soggy insides. I grew until the eyes in me were crushed by my growing skull, and the mouth was locked by my growing jaws… and the food stopped. And the soft passenger of me, body and blood, fell away.
And you will say it was a different time, to put a freak on display. A hard time. A cruel time.
Yet here I am now: wired to a frame in a glass case. And there you are: gawping at me.
Fancy responding to the skeleton?
One response to “Skull of unknown Leontiasis Ossea sufferer”
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Skilfully evocative – painfully so.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pam Swanborough lives in rural Victoria and is working on two major writing projects while renovating a small comfortable ruin. Taking up writing in 2019, she explores imbalance, fragility, memory, and the fluid nature of identity. She works in literary/speculative fiction and non-fiction genres and has had short stories published in Australia and the USA. Winner of the Best Regional Writer/ runner-up Best Fiction, GMW Emerging Writers’ Competition, Writers Victoria 2019. She published her first novel in 2024, and samples of her work can be seen at https://pamswanborough.com/
Words from PAMela
I saw this object, an antique skeleton deformed by bone growth, when taken on a tour of the medical building as part of my staff induction in 2017. The imagined life of the owner distressed me so much at the time that I had to leave the tour, and has stayed with me ever since. I understand the teaching of medicine benefits from such objects, but… haunting…
FIND OUT MORE
Browse the collection at The Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology, Australia’s largest collection of human tissue specimens.
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