I was young foolish and just out of the cookie cutter medical school at the community college.
I work in the mortuary much better than watching the old women who die from cancer
I've spent hours pumping radiation into their frail bodies
"Fighting Cancer"
I watched some die with terrible gasps of blood in the emergency rooms during a long internship
A sheet thrown over
As if we are already trying to forget it happened
Death seemed to touch everything in my life
Regrettably, it has yet to touch my life itself
I am exhausted with the process of death
But... I was both discomposed and
...aroused by its product
The dead were just that
Silent cold white
And we covered their private areas with a white cloth
If not under examination
She was not dead though
The mortician
Warm with long black hair
But almost just as white
She leans over a cadaver before me
Her voice echoing in the sterile
Rubber scented universe of the examination rooms
Her voice settling into the running tape recorder on the table
I check off endless boxes on the clipboard I hold
Only half paying attention
Her scent lulls me
I swear I smell her hair
As if I were at the nape of her neck
Seeping through the pungent and intoxicating scent of formalin
A spark of life in the void
She seems to realize all at once
The gravity of my gazes
She chides
Please Stay Focused
Countless hours we work together beneath the bright examination lights
Sometimes working late into the night
If a terrible car accident were to happen on the interstate

Once
On a dark night on just such an occasion
She enters the examination room in a rush
Approaching a corpse I had already cleaned and undressed on the table
A male somewhere in his early twenties with an unnatural ark in a few of his ribs. I was looking forward to photographing the anomaly for my


Most secret collection

She holds a 20 gauge syringe prepare with an odd violet colored solution
She injects it into a dark black vein in the hand

I remain silent
She stares at the injection sight intently
Bead of crystal sweat falling down her forehead
"We are never to speak of what we may see her tonight."

Her hair pulled into a tight bun
A serious gaze in her dark eyes constrict me
Somewhere far in the dark basement in the back of my mind
A flare of something strange to my soul
fear
I am flooded with adrenaline and she seems satisfied with the dilation
of my pupils and a smile stretched across my face

The corpse
The skin begins to brighten
Oxygenated blood running through starving veins
Then
A sigh
A breath
My hand pressed to the neck
An arterial pulse
Weak beneath warm flesh
The thing breaths its breaths ragged at first
Then faster
She holds a cold stethoscope above the heart
Each beat of it seems to reverberate in her eyes
She stares at me
Both terror and elation on her face
She looked terrifying and beautiful
Her face seemed chiseled of marble
A shadow falling perfectly on her face
Beneath the fluorescent glow
It sits up at a back breaking speed
Its eyes shooting wide open revealing
A massive black pupil in a sea of jaundiced yellow eyes
It's mouth opens wide
And a deafening scream tears through his throat
Reverberating through the two of us for eternity
And echoing among the dull fluorescent halls of the mortuary only for a moment
It's final word
*fate