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Vague sense of uneasiness as I shuffled my feet half-heartedly across the sterile lime-green tile. Everything had that crystal clear quality that just borderlines on the surreal. I saw things in sharper focus than I ever had before. It seems like senses can only be stronger if you sacrifice another; I could barely hear anything at all. My dad was saying something, but I couldn’t figure it out. He was muffled, like he was trying to talk with a pillow pressed over his face.
“What did you say?” “Its through this door.” “Oh.”
He held open the door for my mother, and I shuffled in, followed by my brother. The room smelled…wrong. Like a bad mix of chemistry class and…death. It didn’t smell like anything could live in for an extended period of time. When I looked at the mortician for the first time, I saw that I was right. Death. He had seen too much of it, been around it too much; like a pet and its owner, he was beginning to resemble his work. My brother slinked off into the corner, where he would remain for the majority of the procedure.
The mortician walked over to the table, where a nondescript navy body bag lay motionless on top of it. He grabbed a manila folder from off the table, and handed it to us. It contained all of the facts related to the death of the man we were about to slice open.
“He was 81 years old, and lived with his granddaughter. She is in her mid 20’s. He was a veteran of WWII, and was very highly decorated. In the end, he didn’t want to be a burden on his granddaughter; she was supporting him, and he considered himself useless. So, he sent her out of the house to get some milk, and when she came back there was a note on the door: ‘Call 911. Don’t go into the house. I love you.’ When the police came, they found him lying on the ground with a bullet through his head and his Colt 1911 pistol that he had used in the war. They found the bullet lodged in the ceiling above him. It went straight up out of his skull, through the roof of his mouth.”
The mortician handed me a small Ziploc bag with a deceptively tiny piece of metal. For the first time in my life, I was holding something that actually ended a person’s life. My eyes lost their focus, and someone turned the audio back to full volume.
“Lets have a look, shall we?”
And with that, he walked over to the bag and unzipped it. I was expecting something horrifying, something rancid and disturbing; a bloody mess of brains and giblets and guts. Instead, I saw what looked like a wax sculpture of an old man. He had a gray tint to his skin, but otherwise, he looked pretty normal to me. Well, except that he was completely naked, and had a .45 inch hole through the top of his head.
The mortician’s assistant walked in at this time, and he fit every stereotype for the mad Frankensteinian doctor that I’ve ever heard of. He had wild gray hair, thick glasses, and a crazed look in his eye. The wild doctor walked up to the body, grabbed a 3 inch long scalpel, and made a long cut up his abdomen. He then picked up a pair of bolt cutters, the same kind I saw at Home Depot, and started cutting through the dead man’s ribcage. Once he was through, he removed the ribs and placed it on the table.
After having been practically hypnotized by this madness, I realized that the mortician was still talking.
“…and that’s pretty much the procedure that we will be doing. Lets go over and see what my colleague is up to, shall we?”
We looked, and there he was, arm-deep inside this cadaver’s stomach. When he pulled his hands out, he was holding a kidney. It was the first human organ I’d ever seen in person, and it had almost no effect on me. It was just there. My love of all things science and biology started to kick in, and I had to get a closer look. After the mortician weighed the kidney, he started to slice it with a large knife, and he put the cross-sections into a small baggy for analysis. As the autopsy went on, the frightening assistant continued handing the mortician various organs; the liver, the other kidney, and the stomach all received the same treatment as the first kidney.
After about half an hour of this, the mortician took us to the side to talk for a while, and honestly it wasn’t that interesting. I spaced out for what seemed like 10 minutes or so, when I happened to have glanced at the body. The madman was arm-deep again, and he was digging around for a good minute or so. When he finally pulled his arms out, it made the most ridiculous *SCHLURP* I’ve ever heard, and he had in his hands all of the dead man’s intestines. The image of a crazed doctor schlurping 20 feet of intestines out of a dead veteran was permanently burned into my brain, and I doubt that I will ever forget it. It wasn’t even disturbing, really. It was just…unreal. He took the intestines and threw them into an orange biohazard bag, tied it off, and threw it back into the body.
The assistant took a scalpel and started to cut the back of the cadaver’s scalp. When he had cut halfway around his head, the doctor took the skin in his hands, and folded it over the dead man’s face, exposing his skull and the hole that was created the day before. Taking another Home Depot tool, the madman took a circular saw and began to cut around the exposed skull. When he was done, he pulled the top of the cadaver’s skull off, and we could see his brain. After more fiddling around inside his head, the mortician’s assistant grabbed hold of the brain and gave it a hard pull. Another schlurping sound ensued, and the brain was freed from its home. It was surprisingly small. He handed it to the mortician, who placed it on the cutting board. When he cut it in half, we could see the bullet hole that was right through the middle of the frontal lobe. The expanding gasses from the explosion created a tunnel through the brain that was much larger in diameter than the bullet; the tissue around the tunnel was completely pulverized.
And with that, the autopsy was officially over. We thanked the morticians for their time, and walked out the way we came. The halls weren’t as cold as they had been, but they still felt like death. The thing is, death didn’t feel the same as it did before.
Posts: 93 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
Actually, that's based on an actual experience of mine. I don't really say that I can write well, but I do enjoy it quite a lot.
Posts: 93 | Registered: Mar 2005
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Do morticians do autopsies? I thought they were the funeral home guys.
Very vivid detail and very well written. Not for a weak stomach though! I really admire your writing skills.
Posts: 1132 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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