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"Heart..."

Wynn sat cross legged on the floor of his dorm room, leaning over his legs as he rested his elbows on the ground. To battle the cold, Wynn was snuggled underneath his polar bear fur blanket, and within his arm's reach was a ceramic mug of, unsurprisingly, hot cocoa. Before him, was a sheet of poster paper, some definitions already inscribed on their appropriate planes according to the picture he had drawn of a human body. While there were other options to get this done, Wynn preferred something that he could do with his hands. That was the way he learned after all. He learned without technology, and, as curious as Wynn was about the bright shiny screens and ten million buttons and combination, the young Inuk chose the poster for his Anatomy project.

To be quite honest, Wynn really enjoyed the premise of this project and was actually quite eager to get it done. He had learned about anatomy hands on in the icy tundra of his home...quite literally. He had his arms elbow deep buried in anatomy!

Studying the anatomy of a human was one thing, though, when one had previously waded through the anatomy of animals, but somehow it retained a level of new information. While all the parts had similar functions and similar shapes and placement, Wynn had a hard time distinguishing his own Inuit beliefs from the logical and scientific interpretation offered by the study books he had laid out before him on the floor. He glanced at the text offhandedly, leaning over his legs as he wrote his own translation of the facts onto a poster board he had acquired from the stores in the Chikami mall. It wasn't so much that he had difficulty accepting the new detailed and very informative information, (he didn't mistrust the textbooks at all or found them misleading), rather, he very much fought with his own beliefs. He refused to let them go. One of the things he had the most difficulty with was the bladder.

Wynn leaned up from the poster board and tilted his head to the side, judging its layout and his awkward handwriting in different varying hues of blue, red, and orange marker. Reaching over to his ceramic mug of hot cocoa, the young Inuk took a long sip.

The bladder, to Wynn, was foremost taught as the place where the soul resides. He recalled the time that he was out on the ice with Mr. Bentley after having successfully killed a large adult seal near its breathing hole. Shivering, he looked on as Mr. Bentley sliced open the seal's belly from the bottom of its jaw all the way to the tip of its tail. Red spilled out of the hollow, staining the ice and Wynn's nostrils flared as he caught the distinct bitter stench of the seal's insides. Demonstrating to Wynn each step needed, Mr. Bentley hunched his barrel-chested figure over the seal's body and rolled up his sleeves after taking off his gloves. His exposed hands and forearms weren't stung by the cold for long, because in the next moment Mr. Bentley plunged his hands into the flap he had created and started pulling out and cutting the few things that the Inuit wouldn't use. Of course, he didn't pull out much. The Inuit prided themselves on being crafty and ingenious when it came to finding uses for as much of their kill as possible. Using his heavy forearms to wedge open the seal's long torso, Mr. Bentley gestured to the bladder and beckoned Wynn to crouch near. The little Inuk hunched himself down on the flanks of his legs and peered in deep into the seal's innards, watching and learning as the older man gestured and explained in thick Inuit language the parts and pieces that worked inside the seal. The heart pumped the blood from the lungs, through the body of flesh and layers of fat, to distribute life (what Wynn later learned to be oxygen); the intestines and the stomach is where the fish, what the seal ate and fed upon, was digested (broken down to their smallest pieces by acids provided by the stomach and absorbed into the blood stream to feed the cells); and through the rectum where all the undigested and used material was released from the body. A labyrinthine machine of tissue that kept the body running and hungering for more.

Wynn glanced again at the poster. Facts...Just facts, no "heart" at all. No belief.

So, despite his better judgment as a student, Wynn completed the assignment as an Inuit, placing in different colored marker underneath the scientific facts, the beliefs that he had been taught by his heritage.

Bladder - Where the soul is.