Post Mortem

There are four of them, cold on their metal carts. They await our inspection like a receiving line, welcoming us to their one last public appearance. They are a palette of unpleasant shades, skin ranging from sickly bronze to dark black, with mottled variations in between. Four bodies, four men clad as they were in their final moments of life. We hear each of their stories, a grand rounds of thanatophelia. A portly white man in a tracksuit, inflated further by bacteria, was found in a rooming house. A black man, naked and covered in cuts and blood, found sprawled outside a bathroom. A middle aged caucasian, colored a sickening shade of tan by what can only have been long-running liver failure, brought in from the streets. An elderly widower, rope still around his neck, a victim of his own hand.

We are here in the medical examiner's lab to find the rest of their story, to explain the nature of their passing. We are here to make sure these men left us on their own terms, that no plot twist of assault or poison embellished lives their unassuming lives. We wheel the portly man to a station, and the examiner's strip his clothes. He has been dead at least four days, and in that time his natural bacterial fauna has energetically gone to work, decaying and fermenting his tissues and fluids. Even without this assistance, failures of self-repair have already started a process that, for lack of a better term, can only be described as melting.

We remove his clothes, taking with them swathes of sliding skin. The windbreaker is lined with a thick layer of dermis, slimy with the products of decay. Bubbles of blood ooze out of his mouth. Each movement brings more, a slow cascade of filth marring an already distended face. We cut him open, slicing him like a ripe fruit, a rapid parturition of a material between flesh and fluid. We listen to the examiner's mouth running, a non-stop series of puns and humor oddly fitted to the fetid sickly sweet alcoholic stink of decay pouring out of the deceased abdomen. "The report on this one wont be long" he says, shifting intestines out of the way, "but there will be an appendix." With this he pulls out the small vestigial organ, brandishing it at the room. We attempt to smile obligingly.

We drain aqueous humor from his eye for toxicology (it being the most representative body fluid after death). We remove his organs, and weigh them, trying in vain not to lose any bits of the molten instruments of life. We cut out his heart, and at first glance, it is tremendously large. It is the cause of his death, this hypertrophy, a growth of muscle leading to irregular electrical transmission. We cut out the rest of him, opening his skull and draining out the erstwhile center of his being. We find nothing else of interest, bag up his relevant bits, and mark the chart natural causes. We close the last chapter of his sad and lonely life, and consign the body to public burial. We write a report no one will read. We walk out of the lab, and back into the regular world, with it's animate people, it's fresh air.

I drive home, windows down in the cold winter air. The smell is still in my nostrils, coloring everything with sweet reek that is indescribably wrong. I drive home, waiting for the world to stop smelling of death.