#today was chill. slow day. good coworkers. had some Adderall

[dragons-and-yellow-roses]

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[ecotone99]

[HR] The Autopsy

Here's a short story a wrote sometime last year. I think, ideally, this would end up being a scene in a larger piece but I'm happy with it for now.

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March had been unseasonably warm in St. Louis. A dense humidity hung everywhere --almost panging for the release of rain-- yet still, after every storm, persisting. This odd wash of jungle air, coupled with the building owner’s miserly decision to forgo turning on the air-conditioning, had turned the examination rooms of Clark-Horace County Hospital into George Monroe’s personal, scalpel-adorned, sauna. The rundown building was poorly insulated and had a habit of providing you with a clear imitation of whatever conditions befell the outside world. If it was windy, you could expect a draft; if there was a storm, the doors would be leaking; and on a day like today, the oxygen choking atmosphere was well-at-home in every hall and office.

George, who studied Biology at Michigan and subsequently served his residency at St. Luke’s in Duluth, had a cooler temperament. Since moving to Missouri last September, he found it difficult to adjust to the Midwest’s uniquely fickle climate. These past two weeks, his usually brisk Sunday-morning plunge down the elevators to the basement examination rooms of Clark-Horace felt more like a dive into some thick Amazonian canopy. He had even resorted to taking brief breaks in what was apparently the only room in the building required-by-law to be kept at a comfortable temperature-- the morgue cooler. Dave and Janice, his coworkers, liked to give him a hard time about this particular habit. “Frosty the Snowman's gotta get to his cooler before he melts away!” was a favorite of theirs, referencing the admittedly sluggish nature George took on when the heat started to get to him.

It was of no consequence to him. The cooler always reinvigorated George and he - a licensed Autopsy Technician of almost three years now - was never bothered by the presence of dead bodies.

But, today, there would be no teasing. He worked alone during the dreaded Sunday morning shift. Honestly, it suited him better. George had never been good at workplace chit-chat and he always felt at his most productive with headphones on and in near-solitude. Still, the workload on Sunday mornings was always a challenge for one person — a sort-of reverse graveyard shift that rotated weekly between the three of them.

Even as he worked, George could feel his glasses slide down his nose. He took near-continuous pauses to push them back up to his eyes with the back of his wrist. A pool of salty dew formed directly under the bridge of his black wayfarer frames, acting as both an irritant to his eyes and a lubricant on which the glasses would languidly shift back down. He didn’t like to wear his glasses while working. He didn’t like his glasses at all, in fact, and had years ago resolved to only wear them when he was colossally hungover, which he decisively was.

His friends had made a point to tell him that his upcoming morning shift would not alter their plans of brewery hopping the night before. He had long ago agreed to the affair and so resigned himself to his eventual fate of bludgeoning headaches and nausea. George didn’t have any particular love for the craft beer scene his friends so delighted in. The complex chemistry of artisanal recipes and their ever-expanding hierarchy of styles, colors, ingredients, flavors, and off-flavors had never inspired him to dive nearly as deep as his companions had into the fanatic lifestyle of small-batch brewing. He did, however, enjoy the company of his friends and (being completely frank with himself) he enjoyed the different tastes of the beers they tried. It was the in-depth analysis that irked him. The sense that you must mine every last ore and ingot of knowledge from every sip and understand, not only the complex palette of flavors therein but also the intention behind those flavors. Anything less and you were wasting your time and should promptly “fuck off to a sports bar and order a Bud-Light if you just want to get drunk.”

But, it got you drunk all the same. One of the dangers of craft beer, and perhaps most responsible for George’s suffering today, was the alcohol content. These were not the canned pilsners that he and his college friends stacked 30-high back in Ann Arbor. Some of these draughts would push north of 11% alcohol-by-volume! All of them deceptively draped in the added flavors of coffee or chocolate so as to slip past your better judgment. Some four or five drinks later, it would be too late, like when hypothermia cradles a stranded climber to sleep.

George could still taste the brews from the night before. Or was he smelling them? Yes, the scent must be running out of his pores now, as his body desperately pushed the toxins out via any means necessary. The clear memory of the stygian stout burned clearly in all of his senses. The ghost of the dark liquid shot up his spine: Tahitian vanilla, with the viscosity of milk, high pointed with the ever-present, fiery notion of bourbon. He felt a chill up his neck and his stomach churned like the sea.

George got too drunk, he decided. He should not have driven home, either. Usually, he did not recklessly endanger his own life like that. There was something about the jovial attitude of a night spent in drunken comradery that can give a man a dangerous level of confidence — the kind that, if left unchecked for a few successes, leads one to believe they “drive better when they’re drunk.” He scolded himself. After all, he had seen many grotesque figures on this very table that used to “drive better drunk”.

Such was the job, especially on the Sunday morning shift. Dave, another technician and five-years George’s senior at the hospital, had affectionately nicknamed it “Scared-Straight-Sunday” after the increased number of “patients” produced by accidents, overdoses, and any other form of dark debauchery that took place the night before. He used to joke that “after a year of Sundays seeing what people do to themselves when they’re fucked up”, you’d end up sober for the next ten years.

George didn’t have to look any further than the bloated figure on the table below him. “D. Vernon.” Drowned. Fallen into some rough tide of the Mississippi, knocked unconscious judging by the laceration on the left-back of his head, and washed up down-river about eight hours later. The cut was deep and had swollen outward like a mouth nestled in the beard of D. Vernon’s long, wiry hair. He had a stern face, even after passing on. The face of a man with a short temper which, seeing his twice-broken nose and scarred knuckles, likely saw him in scuffles. He was the kind of guy who would accost you in the parking lot for pulling out in front of him, George imagined. His eyes screamed back up at George as if to say “Don’t you judge me, motherfucker. I get by.”

George closed up the abdominal incision. This hangover had slowed him down more than he thought and he was behind schedule on gathering up the various tissue, blood, and hair samples. D. Vernon had been in the water long enough to cause his body to swell up though not long enough to totally distort his features. The man’s once-well-toned muscles were still visible beneath the quasi-gelatinous coat of his skin and the once-black ink of his numerous tattoos now glowed with an almost putrid green. He was like an action figure- some edgy, anti-hero character, perhaps- that was left out at the playground, melting and contorting under a brutal sun only to be snatched back up a moment too late.

Toxicology would need to come back to officially determine whether or not drugs were involved in the accident, but the track marks on his arms seemed a clear enough indication at first. Stomach analysis proving his last meal to be little more than Adderall and french-fries was all the proof George needed.

“Definitely time to dial it back,” George told himself.

Odd. Suddenly George’s eyes were drawn back to the site of his incision. It had been a clean suture- straight and symmetrical. But now, at the midpoint, there rose a mound of skin in D. Vernon’s mid-section.

“Damn this hangover”.

George had always prided himself on his organization skills. Everything had its space on his tray and would, without fail, return to that space when its job was finished. Had he really been so careless? Sewn up one of his clamps inside the body? It was a troupe that surgeons heard frequently- leaving some instrument or another inside of a patient- but not during an autopsy. George scolded himself and snatched for a scalpel to reopen the poor man when he counted- no he hadn’t counted; he simply knew- that all of his tools were still in their exact place.

“A gas pocket?” He thought to himself. “Some residual pressure one of the untouched bloated organs had finally released?” No, this wasn’t right either. The bulge wasn’t rounded as bubbled air would be when pushing up against the skin. It was singular. Almost conical. As if someone had tied a string to the stitching in the center of the incision and pulled it upward. He reached a gloved hand down to the foreign mass and gave a firm press with his middle finger. It was lean. He could almost feel a rough texture to it through the skin.

George’s examiner’s mindset must have left him at that moment. In one movement, he had snatched away his mask, uttered a choked shout and slid back against one of the brick walls of the examining room. These were not commanded movements. These were from a long-forgotten section of the lizard brain still intact underneath millions of years of evolution. The part of the brain that knows- truly knows- the sight of danger and when to shield its host from such things. For while George’s hand lay on the dead man’s strange internal growth, it began to move.

Feverishly in slid inside poor D. Vernon’s cavity. But these were not erratic convulsions. Even if this man was a fresh corpse, any attempt to explain these movements away as some rare spasm of freshly-dead neural pathways would have to be swept away. These movements had purpose. And they were becoming wilder. They had an almost feral drive- now lifting the hips of the cadaver off of the table as they searched. No, they were not thrashing movements. They were poking, prodding at the inside walls of their decaying prison for any sign of air- like a house cat rooting around under a blanket.

And then, all in a moment D. Vernon slammed back to the table, his stomach as flat as when he had arrived.

There was a ringing in George’s ears which could only be the sound of that same lizard that pulled him to the wall, now screaming viciously- desperately- in his ear to run to the elevator. His eyes were clasped onto the figure, equally desperate for the cadaver to stay infinitely still- less the madness they had just witness continue and be committed to memory. It must have been his eyes that pulled him closer to the body still, feverishly wishing- begging- to prove that there was no movement left in this bloated corpse. Against every internal instinct, he slid toward the now frighteningly still cadaver, scalpel still in hand.

The room was a vacuum, devoid of sound. So crushing was the silent pressure of this moment that George could hear his blood pumping into his brain, and that brain firing commands down to his right hand- how was it so steady? Slow and methodical, he began to unzip the stomach again, bisecting the original cut. The cold flesh gave way on either side like a blooming flower. George reached to spread the aperture further to reveal what was certainly madness incarnate within D. Vernon’s bowels.

He should have rejoiced, he remembered thinking. The scene was completely normal- as normal as the bloated organs of a drowned drug addict could be. But it was the lack of evidence that shocked George. The way the immediate normalcy seemed to laugh in the face of what he, and his eyes, and his lizard brain had all witnessed. No sign of the hateful foreign body that had just moments ago attempted to wrench its way free from his patient. No sign of the damage that such a struggle should have certainly caused to the dead man’s insides.

He tasted bile then. The ringing in his ears receded and the heavy gravity that held the room silent finally lifted. He could hear his arid respirations now louder than anything and he was reminded again how humid the room was. He was hyperventilating.

In a mad dash, George threw the scalpel to the floor and made desperately for his refuge. He burst into the cooler, gasping and trying to settle his breathing. He leaned heavily on the open morgue drawer that had belonged to D. Vernon. Then George- thinking of the drowned man, and his hangover, and the horrors he had seen- in an attempt to lament, vomited.

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