The Body

CW: Medical gore and references to suicide

“Another one,” Anthony calls as he wheels an embalming table into the morgue. While I’m cleaning up another table I hear from behind me the rusted wheels squeak under the weight of what they carry. It used to unnerve me, a haunting chime indicating the presence of death in the room. By now I’ve grown used to it, thinking only of the hours I’ll be working tonight.

The body is still covered by a large white sheet, its protruding shape like a ghostly silhouette. I begin to prepare a standing medical tray of tools and solutions, a motion of muscle memory. I roll the tray to the side of the cadaver, moving to the exposed feet where they rest on the cold metal surface, pointing up at the sterile fluorescent light where it hangs above. I read the tag tied to one of the toes: Jessica Burns, age 20. Cause of death: suicide by overdose.

When I was still a novice in mortuary science I used to have an intense visceral reaction to seeing the names and ages of the bodies that came in, especially when they were so young. On my first day in this morgue, more than two decades ago, I was brought a girl of 14 who had been killed in a car accident. When I saw her face, I rushed to the bathroom to vomit. Her young features were distorted by gashes and bruises, purple and yellow splashed onto the pale blue of her lifeless skin. Even now, after years of seeing and touching and reshaping mangled corpses, I can still close my eyes and see her innocent face.

It wasn’t long after this incident that I stopped thinking of the bodies as people, but simply as bodies. Corpses. Cadavers. They stop being people the moment the light leaves their eyes and the warmth seeps from their skin. The face I see whenever I pull down the sheet is one that used to belong to a living person, but not one I’ve ever known; By the time I see their face, that person no longer exists and all that’s left is a cold, lifeless shell.

I fold down the sheet from this body’s face, and what I see makes me jolt backwards, bumping into the medical tray and causing several glass and metal items to clang together. I stare, wide-eyed, at the face before me. It’s a face I knew many years ago; The face of a friend, a lover I’ve not seen since the day she was buried in the earth more than 20 years ago. Her face is one of serenity: closed eyes with dark lashes, lips resting in what appears to be a gentle smile. There are no marks or injuries distorting her features; If it weren’t for the cold hue of her skin, she might look as though her heart were still pumping blood through her veins.

My own heart is pounding in my chest, my breath short and uneven. It feels as though I’m seeing a ghost from my past, here to haunt me in my frigid, windowless workplace. I quickly glance around the room, checking if anyone else can see the apparition or confirm my insanity, but Anthony left as soon as he brought in the body and no one else has been working today. It’s just me, and my ghost. I look back down at the tag on her foot, checking to see if I’d read the name right, and sure enough, the corpse I’m examining is identified as that of a Jessica Burns, not the person of my memory. But the face—it's uncanny in its resemblance, enough to make my decades-old memories feel as recent as yesterday.

I’m overcome with images from my youth: soft eyes, softer lips. Easy smiles lit with sunshine. I see her on my college dorm bed, tuning her violin. She meets my eyes and my heart aches.

I see her playing for me, swaying her hips with the music. I can practically hear it. She closes her eyes as she pulls a soulful melody from the instrument, like she can feel it moving through her bones.

I see her in my school pottery studio, watching me as I mold the clay in my hands. She observes with rapt attention, eyes unwavering. An audience might normally make me uncomfortable, but she could never.

I see her at every instance of our short, shared life, and it’s like a dagger buried in my chest, twisting with every memory I’m forced to relive.

Then I see her heavenly face, framed by the blue satin walls of a casket. Her hair is soft and splayed across the small pillow, and her face is resting in a subtle smile. She looks like an oil painting in my tear-blurred vision, like an angel depicted by some mid-century painter awaiting his own death.

Looking at her, one might never suspect that she put herself here with an old bottle of anxiety medication she held onto for ‘when she needed them’. I wonder if this is what she meant.

As I look down at the lifeless figure still lying on the steel table before me, I feel it all coming back. The love, the joy, the misery, the absolute devastation; I feel it all at once, a terrifying heat rising in my chest and clawing up my throat. I know this corpse isn’t Joanna—I know I was there when she was lowered into the ground and buried, never to be seen again—but now I’m seeing her, and all I can do is grasp my chest through my shirt and surgical gown, a pitiful attempt to rip out my heart and be rid of it for good.

I feel a deep desire to free myself from this bleak world, like she did. I want to quell the thoughts about my job and the expectations placed on me, to make it all disappear. I want to join my love, wherever she is, as much as I hate her for abandoning me all those years ago.

It’s a few hours later when Anthony returns and finds me standing at the sink, cleaning my instruments, as I had been when he left. But now there is no body to be seen, and one more cooler rack is occupied than before.

“You all done?” he asks.

I respond with a curt “yes” and listen as Anthony shuffles over to the locker across the room, presumably grabbing his bag and other items, then once again leaves the room while whistling all the way.

He doesn’t notice how I’ve paused my cleaning and have been looking down at the wide scalpel in my hand. Staring at the gray, weary face looking back at me, it looks like a corpse. I’m almost convinced it is.