I have never seen wounds like these, so clean and perfect. This is like a dissection—necropsy being strictly forbidden in Carthage, one is performed annually in the cellar of the butcher’s shop close by the university—if one could do the thing without releasing the fluids within. Around the edges of the bone, I look for drags and splinters, and find none. Something very sharp and very swift, like a barber’s razor through the stalk of a flower.