…there it was, reflected back at him: the inside of his belly, etched in blocks and lines of black against the fluoro­scope screen’s sickly calcium-white, suspended in a void that detached it from anything and everything. Organs, tubes and bones quivered and oscil­lated against each other awkwardly, like animals — reptiles, molluscs, nether-dwelling creatures — who, crammed together in a space too small for them, bristle with aggression towards one another yet under­stand, through some vermi­cular, primordial instinct, that the survival of each depends on that of its unwanted neighbours.

C by Tom McCarthy