Thirty-four, "pervert" anatomy class teacher

  "Liao Shan, come and demonstrate the specimen to your classmates!" Chen Xiaoping's tone was very calm, as if she were saying something extremely ordinary.

  The fourteen people sitting around the long dissecting table, who had just lowered their heads, quietly raised them and turned to Liao Shan, who was sitting next to Teacher Chen.

  Liao Shan cried, her face gloomy, and slowly got up from her seat. Her hands slowly reached out to the glass container on the table. When her hand was about to touch the mouth of the container, she hesitated for a moment, but her eyes turned to Teacher Chen, with a look of fear and pleading in them.

  Chen Xiaoping's face was expressionless: "Take out the specimen!" The slanted sunlight in the afternoon shone on her glasses, reflecting a glare that made it impossible to see her eyes.

  Liao Shan still wouldn't give up: "Teacher, must we use our hands?" Her underlying implication was, couldn't they wear gloves?

  Chen Xiaoping's voice was as cold as the basement of the dissecting house: "Must use hands!" A little later, he added another sentence: "Everyone has to do so!"

  Liao Shan couldn't help it, she closed her eyes and quickly inserted her hands into the vat, pulling out the left foot specimen that had been soaking in formalin. The leathery texture in her hand made her skin crawl. When she opened her eyes again, she saw that water was still dripping down from the specimen. Due to being close by, the strange smell of formalin liquid was extremely nauseating and made one want to vomit.

  "Then Chen Xiaoping said: 'You show everyone where the plantar fascia is!'"

  Liao Shan's face turned pale, her left hand trembling as she flipped over the foot of the specimen to expose it to everyone. The skin on the sole of that foot had been stripped away, revealing a patch of yellowish-white muscle and tendon tissue underneath. She looked at it, hesitated, and pointed to one place with her right hand, saying: "This is the plantar long ligament!"

  Chen Xiaoping looked at other students: "Is she right?" Most of them nodded in agreement, while a few remained silent.

  Chen Xiaoping asked again: "Take a closer look, did she point correctly?" Everyone was suddenly confused and no one spoke up.

  Lin Fanghua hesitated for a moment and raised her right hand. Chen Xiaoping nodded at her.

  She just stood up and said: "Teacher, what she's pointing at seems to be the peroneal longus tendon. The long ligament should be on its inner side."

  Chen Xiaoping's expression, which had been frozen for thousands of years, slightly relaxed: "Hmm, correct! Alright, Liao Shan sit down, the next one will be demonstrated by Lin Fanghua!"

  Liao Shan hastily put the specimen back into the tank, as if she didn't want to touch it for another second. However, her wet hands dared not wipe themselves in front of Teacher Chen, so they just hung there, suspended in mid-air with her elbows resting on her knees.

  Lin Fanghua looked at the specimen jar in front of her.

  There is a human head inside.

  From the start of this anatomy class, everyone sat around the dissection table as usual. Teacher Chen Xiao Ping placed a specimen jar in front of each person. The lids were removed from the jars, revealing various human specimens soaking in preservative fluid. There were hands, feet, arms, calves, spines, pelvises, some with skin and flesh intact, others stripped clean to just bones.

  Lin Fanghua thought the head in front of her was the most terrifying. The hair was shaved clean, but judging from the facial features, it should be a man. Half of the face's skin had been peeled off, revealing the facial expression muscles, which looked a bit frightening. The other half of the face still had skin on it, with the eyelids closed as if asleep. A face with such strong contrast was staring at her, and thinking that this once belonged to a living being, Lin Fanghua felt somewhat uncomfortable in her heart, although she wasn't afraid.

  At this moment, she suppressed the strange feeling in her heart and slowly inserted both hands into the vat.

  It's very cool, this is her feeling about formalin.

  When she held her head in both hands, she suddenly thought of the scene from a TV movie where the Qing cavalry was galloping across the Central Plains, killing people like hemp, and hanging strings of Han people's heads on horseback to show off their merits.

  At this point, the head in her hand seemed to sink a bit. She quickly cleared away the distracting thoughts of that day and focused her attention, slowly lifting the specimen out of the liquid surface. When the staining was almost done, she exchanged the positions of her hands, making the front face of the head turn towards everyone.

  "Show everyone the location and function of each major facial expression muscle!"

  Lin Fanghua silently recited the mnemonic she saw in the seven-year curriculum - "Masseter muscle bites, temporal muscle lifts, outer wing opens and inner wing closes; orbicularis oculi closes eye slit, expands lacrimal sac and benefits tear flow……", then according to this, one by one pointed out the position and function of each muscle.

  Chen Xiaoping was slightly surprised that the student could remember what had been roughly taught in class so accurately, and his facial expression thawed out a bit more.

  She gently let Lin Fanghua sit down and continued to torment the next classmate.

  Everyone went back to their dormitories after class, not rushing to the cafeteria as usual, but instead doing the same thing - washing their hands. Although there were faucets in the anatomy building, there was no soap, and just rinsing their hands like that wouldn't put anyone at ease before eating.

  After washing her hands twice, she still seemed to smell a hint of formalin on them. However, Lin Fanghua went to the cafeteria with Wang Ju and others anyway.

  When they finished dinner and returned to their dormitory, they found that Liao Shan had already taken off her shoes and was lying on the bed.

  Wang Ju, who lived in the upper bunk, asked her: "Why didn't you go eat?"

  Liao Shan said weakly: "I don't want to eat. I always smell a formalin flavor. Alas, don't get so close to me. When I smell that garlic stir-fry meat flavor, I think of the smelly feet I held in my hands today. It's disgusting."

  Wang Ju took a few steps back and persuaded her: "How can you not eat anything? Otherwise, I'll help you go to the cafeteria to get a portion of vegetarian food!"

  "I still don't want to eat, I have no appetite at all. Never mind, you guys don't need to bother with me. I'll just lie down for a bit, maybe I'll feel better."

  "Hmm, okay then!" Wang Ju also had no choice but to give up.

  Zhou Yu said beside her, "Liao Shan, don't be too delicate. From now on, you'll have to touch specimens every day and dissect corpses in a few days. This won't do!"

  Sitting by the window, Guo Ling, who didn't go to the cafeteria for lunch and was instant noodle soup, said: "It's not that we can blame Liao Shan! I think Chen Xiaoping is just intentionally doing this to us, she especially likes to make everyone uncomfortable."

  Yang Qian also said: "Exactly, I feel like the more uncomfortable we are, the happier she becomes."

  Huang Lixia, who rarely speaks, also said: "I also think that Teacher Chen is a bit off. She's much nicer to the boys and much colder to the girls."

  Lin Fanghua chimed in, "I think she's just a bit biased towards boys. I mean, isn't it strange that all the specimens in front of the boys are normal-looking, while ours are either human heads or foot fetuses - all these weird and disturbing things."

  Guo Ling indignantly said: "I think she's just a pervert, mentally unbalanced! She herself is short and ugly, but especially likes to bully pretty girls, making us look bad!"

  Yang Qian also shouted: "Building one's own happiness on others' suffering, what kind of person is this?!"

  Everyone took turns accusing our anatomy teacher.

  Lin Fanghua couldn't help but sweat, these young people are too easily led astray. In fact, Teacher Chen is a bit eccentric, but not to the point of being psychologically abnormal.

  "Everyone, don't get excited, calm down! It's probably not that serious! I think Teacher Chen looks at the girls differently because they're more delicate. She's afraid everyone won't pass the psychological test, so she's using strong medicine to fight poison with poison! If she didn't demand so much from them, maybe some of the girls would slack off and not work hard, then they wouldn't learn anatomy well!"

  Guo Ling still felt puzzled: "Even if that's the case, there's no need to bully us and make us hold stinky feet! Moreover, making the youngest one of you hold a dead man's head, aren't you afraid of scaring the country's flower buds out of their wits? It's simply ruining young sprouts!"

  Others couldn't help but laugh. Lin Fanghua shrugged, because she was indeed the youngest and wouldn't turn seventeen until June, so she was used to being teased by everyone all the time.

  However, from the teacher's standpoint, she thinks there is some understanding of Chen Xiaoping. So in the end, she said: "Anyway, I think that no matter what Teacher Chen is like, we should do our part as students and not be perfunctory! Liao Shan, you also give us 203 girls a chance to show off, don't let her look down on us!"

  Liao Shan, although lying down, still responded with a "yes". Later on, she was uncomfortable for just one night and the next day she returned to normal eating. For someone who usually had a bit of a spoiled temper, this was already quite an accomplishment.

  A person's growth is like this: one must always pay a price and cannot follow their own nature to stubbornly resist the outside world.