Death of a French (Or is it freedom?) penguin
Okay, I need to post something. So this is what you get. Unfortunately, the great, onderful thing I was going to post was never written, so you get this instead. No beginning, middle or end. Just one long paragraph.
I’ve worked in a mortuary for a while. About a week after I started, we were bought out by some big company, but they let us keep the name, and the director stayed on. He kept me, too. There were two small apartments above the place. The smaller one was where I lived with my worries that I’d grow into some sort of intolerable neurosis. Worries that people would think I was a necrophiliac. Worried about falling into depression. Worried about the director who never talked. But the worst worry came when I was working. I prepared corpses. Cleaned them, positioned them, clothed them. At first, it scared and disgusted me, but I needed the work. I thought that after a while I’d get used to it, that it’d become just work, nothing to be scared of, like the people who kill the cows on the conveyor belts that go on to become ground beef and sirloin steaks. They aren’t affected by it. But I still feel little bubbles of nausea rise whenever I first touch a new corpse. But not even that revulsion keeps away the biggest worry. I work on anyone who comes in. There’s people I wouldn’t touch if they were still alive, and it’s almost comforting to know they’re dead. Most of them are normal. Most are men. Sometimes, there’s people with deformities, like arms that came out twisted when they were born. Some people have arms that were recently twisted up, close to when they died. It’s best to not wonder how they died, but sometimes, it’s hard. Like the ones who just look peaceful. You wonder if they lived a full life, or if they saw something on the way out. Or maybe their life was just so bad that they were happy to get out. Maybe they put themselves out. Drowning, overdose, suffocation, giving up on life. A lot of people don’t think that you can die simply by just wanting to be dead, but if you really know that’s what you want, and your life is that bad, I’m convinced it can happen, because there’s ones that come in, and during the services which are at the home sometimes, you hear people whispering about what happened. About how nobody knows, that the doctors never found anything wrong, like the person just stopped working. Just gave up and left the world, leaving me the remains. Sometimes, it’s obvious, though. Slashes, gunshot wounds, too many bruises around the neck, broken bones. The morgue cleans them up pretty well, I guess. Sterilization, though, not like the cleaning I do. Even when it’s obvious, though, you still wonder how it happened. If they did it to themselves when it’s a hole or a cut, who did it to them, when you can still see the handprints on the neck. Wondering can take your mind off of the corpse itself, of the way the flesh on the edges of the cuts curls up, all rubbery, how the insides still want to get out, even though there’s no pressure trying to get things past the skin any more. It’s as if the corpse has a will to just disperse itself as quickly as it can, it doesn’t want to be put in the ground first. Once, after I’d finished a body, trimmed it, colored it, suited it up, crossed the arms, the insides tried to spill out through a slice in his belly. There was a terrible bulge, and I had to open everything up, and try to make things look normal again. I’m sure there’s some scientific explanation for it - pressure differentials, gasses building up, reactions with dead skin and organs, but even if I knew what they were, I still wouldn’t have had an easier time with it. Nothing is really easy there. You have to distance yourself from that body as much as possible, or you start getting attached. When you’re trimming nails, brushing hair, putting on makeup, taking off and putting on clothes, you can’t think how intimate it is. When you see the bruises and handprints, and “Louisville Slugger” in cursive from the bat, only backwards, you can’t hate the guy who did it because then you’ll fall into a trap. You have to look at it as a job, or you can get obsessed with them, start to fall in love. Not like an erotic, sexual love. It’s take a sick fuck to grind in the corpses, no matter what hole you use. They were people with lives, futures, backgrounds and everything. You can guess some of it, make the rest of it up and convince yourself it’s true, but it’s rape if you do anything. Just because they can’t say no doesn’t mean it’s okay. It makes it worse, like screwing around with a little kid who doesn’t know the word yet. I don’t want to and can’t do anything. I have to respect the people I work with. I have to create an image of respect around them, regardless of who they were and where they’re going. Regardless of the fact that they’re going to be buried underground and decompose. I give them their last bit of dignity before they go to the final insult, being sealed away underground, inside a coffin, inside a cement barrier in the ground, like waste buried by some corporation.
I’ve worked in a mortuary for a while. About a week after I started, we were bought out by some big company, but they let us keep the name, and the director stayed on. He kept me, too. There were two small apartments above the place. The smaller one was where I lived with my worries that I’d grow into some sort of intolerable neurosis. Worries that people would think I was a necrophiliac. Worried about falling into depression. Worried about the director who never talked. But the worst worry came when I was working. I prepared corpses. Cleaned them, positioned them, clothed them. At first, it scared and disgusted me, but I needed the work. I thought that after a while I’d get used to it, that it’d become just work, nothing to be scared of, like the people who kill the cows on the conveyor belts that go on to become ground beef and sirloin steaks. They aren’t affected by it. But I still feel little bubbles of nausea rise whenever I first touch a new corpse. But not even that revulsion keeps away the biggest worry. I work on anyone who comes in. There’s people I wouldn’t touch if they were still alive, and it’s almost comforting to know they’re dead. Most of them are normal. Most are men. Sometimes, there’s people with deformities, like arms that came out twisted when they were born. Some people have arms that were recently twisted up, close to when they died. It’s best to not wonder how they died, but sometimes, it’s hard. Like the ones who just look peaceful. You wonder if they lived a full life, or if they saw something on the way out. Or maybe their life was just so bad that they were happy to get out. Maybe they put themselves out. Drowning, overdose, suffocation, giving up on life. A lot of people don’t think that you can die simply by just wanting to be dead, but if you really know that’s what you want, and your life is that bad, I’m convinced it can happen, because there’s ones that come in, and during the services which are at the home sometimes, you hear people whispering about what happened. About how nobody knows, that the doctors never found anything wrong, like the person just stopped working. Just gave up and left the world, leaving me the remains. Sometimes, it’s obvious, though. Slashes, gunshot wounds, too many bruises around the neck, broken bones. The morgue cleans them up pretty well, I guess. Sterilization, though, not like the cleaning I do. Even when it’s obvious, though, you still wonder how it happened. If they did it to themselves when it’s a hole or a cut, who did it to them, when you can still see the handprints on the neck. Wondering can take your mind off of the corpse itself, of the way the flesh on the edges of the cuts curls up, all rubbery, how the insides still want to get out, even though there’s no pressure trying to get things past the skin any more. It’s as if the corpse has a will to just disperse itself as quickly as it can, it doesn’t want to be put in the ground first. Once, after I’d finished a body, trimmed it, colored it, suited it up, crossed the arms, the insides tried to spill out through a slice in his belly. There was a terrible bulge, and I had to open everything up, and try to make things look normal again. I’m sure there’s some scientific explanation for it - pressure differentials, gasses building up, reactions with dead skin and organs, but even if I knew what they were, I still wouldn’t have had an easier time with it. Nothing is really easy there. You have to distance yourself from that body as much as possible, or you start getting attached. When you’re trimming nails, brushing hair, putting on makeup, taking off and putting on clothes, you can’t think how intimate it is. When you see the bruises and handprints, and “Louisville Slugger” in cursive from the bat, only backwards, you can’t hate the guy who did it because then you’ll fall into a trap. You have to look at it as a job, or you can get obsessed with them, start to fall in love. Not like an erotic, sexual love. It’s take a sick fuck to grind in the corpses, no matter what hole you use. They were people with lives, futures, backgrounds and everything. You can guess some of it, make the rest of it up and convince yourself it’s true, but it’s rape if you do anything. Just because they can’t say no doesn’t mean it’s okay. It makes it worse, like screwing around with a little kid who doesn’t know the word yet. I don’t want to and can’t do anything. I have to respect the people I work with. I have to create an image of respect around them, regardless of who they were and where they’re going. Regardless of the fact that they’re going to be buried underground and decompose. I give them their last bit of dignity before they go to the final insult, being sealed away underground, inside a coffin, inside a cement barrier in the ground, like waste buried by some corporation.