Handle With Care

You often work with the tenderness of a brain surgeon as your scalpel parts flesh from bone in long elegant lines. Still, these bloodless bodies are oblivious to your care and their torsos burst open like week-old fruit. The last one is badly bruised and its intestines are riddled with cancer. Death was inevitable. Yet we both know cancer wasn’t the cause. You have sent the congealed blood for toxicological screening. The suspicion is clear-this is a mercy killing.

Speaking into the microphone, I listen to your becalming voice recording vital statistics; brain mass, liver weight, hear size; the usual data. You are the actuary of broken hearts and what is this, your one-hundredth or two-hundredth autopsy? I see the tiredness reflected in your fluorescent skin and marvel at your dedication.

Have I really worked for you these last five years? You never seem to change. There is a pride in the way your fingers work. Yes, I remember the drowned woman. Her husband was devastated, but no, you weren’t falling for his amateur dramatics. In the end, you found remnants of rayon fibre in her throat and oesophagus. Peering above your bifocals with that enigmatic smile - or is it whimsy - you beamed.

Got him, you said. And indeed the woman had drowned, but only because he had wrapped her inside an expensive satin sheet. How desperate she must have been? Her teeth must have ripped at the sheet in a vain attempt to free herself. The husband had been smart; he’d taped her hands together. Yet, still you managed to find microscopic traces of the adhesive around her wrists. The lake had been too cold to remove all signs of his crime.

Although, the husband never confessed, the circumstantial evidence put him away for five years. A minor victory, but I was so proud of your efforts.

*

I arrived early this morning.

Overnight, two nasty automobile accidents forced the attendant-on-call to work overtime to clear up the backlog. It had taken me ninety minutes to clean up the mess and scrub down the tables in preparation for your first clients.

I opened the stainless-steel door and wheeled out the first body.

A woman, young, twenty-two. Her black hair was pasted back against her skull by a mixture of dried blood, fire-foam, and engine oils. Her left eye was black and swollen shut.

I almost cried, but forced myself to get a grip. The rest of her face was free from injury, however her torso had undergone extreme trauma. Metal from the wreck had pierced the abdomen; one breast hung loose-a seven-inch gash revealing the fibrous interior. Her legs were a mass of cuts and contusions. Blood had gathered in her right hip and thigh turning the skin dark, suggesting that the car she’d driven had ended on its side. Death had been instantaneous otherwise, not enough time would have elapsed for the skin to have reached its current stage of discolouration. And the woman had only been dead a few short hours. So, while I waited for you I asked old Ralph to help me put her on the table. It was 7.50 am. You should be arriving any minute now.

I felt betrayed. You were twenty minutes late. Dark rings circled your brown eyes and you looked angry. Tentatively, I’d whispered hello, but you ignored me. You yelled at Ralph to get you black coffee. Turning away, I furiously tried to compose my thoughts. I had no right to be upset because you’d spent another night on the sauce. You’d always done your job properly. What more could I ask?