Literature / You Feel It Just Below the Ribs

I have known death all my life. I fear it, of course. But it is familiar. Death is a stray dog I have taken in and fed — not because I love it but because I don't want it biting me out of hunger.

You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a novel by Janina Matthewson and Jeffrey Cranor, set in The Society of their Within the Wires podcast. As with the podcast, it is presented as found media, in this case the memoirs of Dr. Miriam Gregory, found next to her dead body. They are published with (allegedly) minor editing.

Miri grew up during the Great Reckoning, a worldwide apocalyptic war that lasted almost 40 years and killed over half the world's population. She joined up with various groups while struggling to survive alone in the ruins of Europe. After being sent to prison for spying, she learned a memory-alteration technique she calls "The Watercolor Quiet" from a girl she met there. After she escaped the prison during a riot, she met up with another farm group that would end up being some of the founders of the New Society.

Her "Watercolor Quiet" became the basis for the Society's memory-modification techniques, used on children at age 10 to prevent them from carrying familial bonds that were felt to be a primary cause of the Great Reckoning. She then went on to become one of the founders of the Institute before vanishing.

Because this book uses the Unreliable Narrator trope heavily, all tropes listed have an implicit assumption that they are based on the text as given, and the reality of the situation may be very different.

Many tropes about the setting in general are on the Within the Wires page; this page specifically is about tropes called out within the book.

Tropes found in You Feel It Just Below the Ribs include:

• After the End: The memoir starts with Miri's childhood during the Great Reckoning as the world falls apart.
• Ambiguous Ending: The document states that no cassettes or other evidence was found with the body and manuscript. Is this true, or was the evidence removed first to make Miri look like a crank? Also, who is this subversive publisher, and how did they obtain this manuscript that the Council decided not to publish?
• Apocalyptic Log: The story is the memoirs of Miriam Gregory, and the final entry is written with basically her last breaths.
• Arc Symbol: The Damselfly from the podcast returns, with the story that Indra mentioned in Season 5 showing up. A conflict in one boy's memory of the story leads to treatment escalations that end up forcing Miri out of the orphanage.
• The Atoner: Miri, at the end. She's horrified by what the Institute has become and wants to bring it down.
• Black Site: The Institute is a cross between the Secret Lab type and the Secret Prison type. Miri's side of it is there to help people recover from the trauma of losing their children. Rosemary's side of it is much, much darker.
• Brainwashing for the Greater Good: The Watercolor Quiet gets used to wipe the memories of children at age 10 to ensure they do not remember any family bonds. The Institute is set up, in part, to help parents cope with losing their children to the Society.
• The Bully: Helen, in the prison, bullies Elsa and (to a lesser extent) Miri.
• Cassandra Truth: Miri's warnings about the Institute do not impress the editors, who claim that such a thing clearly could not exist. Their research finds some vague hints about its existence, but nothing they'd consider solid evidence.
• Call-Back: Hilda describes the implant in terms very similar to Hester's, comparing it to a centipede.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Miri comes across as this at the end, and the editors certainly feel she was.
• Continuity Nod: Since the fourth part of the book involves the creation of the Institute, there are many nods to Season 1, including the creation of individual relaxation tapes, the waterfall, and carpentry.
• Culture Blind: Miri is oblivious to what the Society is doing to people, especially to what Rosemary is doing with the Institute, and doesn't realize the horrors involved. Potentially justified, in that she is a particularly Unreliable Narrator - it's possible that she knew but just didn't want to admit it, or that she knew and has since modified her own memories to forget that.
• Deadpan Snarker: The editors often snark in the footnotes.
  I must have sounded crazy. [Footnote: Indeed.]
• Empty Shell: Hilda, after time in the Intensive Studies labs.
• Enigmatic Institute: The Institute, especially Rosemary's section of it.
• Footnote Fever: The editors provide commentary in footnotes. Sometimes they identify locations or people mentioned; sometimes they mention that their research disagrees with the statements made. Sometimes they note that they edited some text for clarity, or that a piece of the manuscript was hard to read. Sometimes they just take the opportunity to snark about the manuscript.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Angelica, the evil security nurse, smokes cigarettes.
• I Did What I Had to Do: How Miri justifies sending Hilda down to the Intensive Studies labs.
• Information Wants to Be Free: The publisher's justification for publishing the book despite the Society Council's decision not to.
• Instant Sedation: Justified; Miri injects Angelica with a large dose of morphine. It's entirely possible that Angelica was killed instead of just sedated.
• Ironic Echo:
  • When Miri starts discussing the secret funding the Institute was getting from corporations connected to people in the Society government, the footnote echoes her comment about how conspiracy theories are "micro-religious beliefs to help us find comfort in the unknown."
  • Miri's codename for the research she was doing into exactly what Rosemary was doing at the Institute was "carpentry". It's implied that Rosemary adopted the name ironically.
• Lured into a Trap:
  • Averted; a scheduled meeting between Miri and Rosemary is implied to be a trap for Miri, but Rosemary's secretary secretly warns Miri not to come.
  • Played straight: Miri lures Angelica over to the window to inject her with morphine and disable (or possibly kill) her.
• The Men in Black: The IID sends people in to remove Miri from the orphanage she had been working at after an incident where a child resisted the treatment, escaped, and was (allegedly) killed by animals.
• Multiple Identity IDs: During the early days of the New Society, when there were no good ways of confirming people's identities, Miri created a false persona of Ewa Keith and kept it active. She used that to go into hiding from Rosemary and the Institute.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Miri's reaction on realizing the truth about the Institute.
• Pariah Prisoner: Elsa is detested by Helen and her gang, and is very likely murdered by them during the riot.
• Phony Degree: Miri refers to herself as Dr. Gregory, but there are no records that she ever obtained a degree of any sort.
• Prison Riot: Miri escapes from prison during one.
• A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: Rosemary. She was one of Miri's most promising students, murders a child because his remembering of his parents is causing complications, and goes on to found the Institute.
• Romantic Candlelit Dinner: The 'unexpectedly working late' version, where Teresa makes a lovely dinner the night that Miri attempts to enter the secure area of the Institute.
• Rule-Abiding Rebel: Yuriatin Press, the underground publisher of the memoir, does so against the wishes of the Societal Council, but because they believe the truth is more important. Despite breaking the Society's rules, they refuse to believe anything about the Institute, its secret funding by government officials, or those officials arming militias.
• The Stool Pigeon: Naija tells the military commander who captures them that Miri was spying for the enemy, probably to save her own skin.
• Title Drop: Not word-for-word, but Hilda's comment on the implant put into her.
  "I can feel it just below my ribs."
• Unreliable Narrator: The fundamental trope of this book, found at three levels:
  • Miri's memoirs are colored by her own opinions and experiences, along with a lifetime of memories and possibly a desire to pass blame for her actions to others.
  • Miri's specialty is changing people's memories; who's to say she didn't modify her own?
  • On top of that, the editing is also unreliable, including statements that things from the podcast (such as the Institute) could not possibly exist.
• Wham Line:
  • Teresa saying she'd never wanted to use the name Moses for anything but a dog. It was the name she'd given her second baby; clearly Miri used the Watercolor Quiet to help her forget this.
  • Rosemary saying she'd stopped by Miri's house, and asking about her interest in carpentry.
• World Half Empty: At one point, it is estimated that 30% of the world population has been killed, and that by the time the Reckoning was over the number would be closer to 60%.
• You Do Not Want To Know: Rosemary's response when Miri asks about exactly what Rosemary's research is.
  "I don't think you really want to know any more than that."