Of bones are coral made

The corpse looked like blue food chewed up and spit out to dry in the sun.

Wrinkled and blotchy, the jelly body barely resembled a person; a young boy not more than twenty.

“He looks like you,” Emory says, snapping her gloves on.

She looks at the hazy figure by her side: a pale boy, dripping water on the floor.

“Not saying anything today?” She prods.

He drags his feet, but there is only marble beneath them, he can’t dig his toes in it, it’s not the sand softened by the foam of a wave, it’s epoxy and cold.

His unseeing eyes - gray and glassy - stare forever frozen in the last image they beheld; it is a sight of ocean depths, bone-snapping currents, and fish that puckered their lips to bite.

“I’m sorry,” her brother says.

It’s an apology Emory has heard for the better part of the last five years, since that twin of hers swam past the red belt strewn on the face of the sea.

“ ‘Kay” She answers dismissively, looking over the victim’s chart.

“He’s twenty. A sophomore in college,” She sits her mouth in a line. “Authorities and his family have been looking for him for a week.”

Emory turns to her brother, or that hallucination of him she can’t quite shed.

Eli is looking at the ceiling lights, his bare toes digging on themselves.

“We looked for you for three days before you turned up, you know?”

He doesn’t utter a single word.

Shaking her head, she keeps silent, to wish him away, and he leaves like a sordid guest.

Looking down at her only company now: a boy with a missing eye, post-mortem contusions and lungs swollen with saline, she’s rattled by the state of him, he’s got half an arm missing, cut sloppily by abrasion at the elbow.

“You’re a good swimmer.” Water-polo contestant, Emory reads in his file.

He’s flushed with life in the picture attached, but the waves bleached his blush and painted him blue.

“I’m sorry.” She tells the shredded boy on the table, because it’s winter, and people who turn up dead at the beach, spit out by the gluttonous sea, walk to the mouth of the ocean on their own.

The world has failed this kid, just as it had failed her brother.

Emory has sat long enough with her grief to see it morph into a body part. It’s a new rib, it hurts when she crouches, throbs when she breathes, pulses when she laughs. It aches in the middle of the day, at work as she’s passing a swab through a corpse's mouth, at noon when she’s cutting at her lunch, at the end of the day as she’s driving home and the passenger seat is gorged with water, Eli sitting by her side.

She holds his hand when the world is quiet, when the loss - like the drop of a heavy mass - is the only sound left in the world.

Emory gets home when the sky is but a slab of black. In winter time, the sun rises and sets in the company of bodies. In sterile closed rooms, she has the pallor of oatmeal, and the sour stench of gangrene.

The first thing she does before her husband comes back from work is to wash off the day.

She halts when she sees a pair of man boots at the entry.

“Chris?” She calls for her husband.

The apartment is shrouded in darkness, except for the living room from where a dim light flickers. It makes her anxiety bubble and foam like milk, sensing an evening heavy with bad news.

At the dinner table, her husband sits, wringing his hands around a glass.

“What are you doing here?” Emory wants to say more, but the grave look on the face of the man she married makes the words retreat from the cushion of her tongue.

Chris carries a frown between his brows, his eyes cast down at serious looking files - documents wrapped in leather pouches ? Her husband is an electrician, he’s not one to be delicate with things, less alone with papers.

“Can we talk?”

She married him two years ago because he loved her, because she was tired of living loveless.

“Are we divorcing?” She tears the band-aid off, swiftly.

Chris brackets his arms, inhaling from his nose a lungful. Emory never knew that she could inspire such distress in anyone.

From the little slots between his lids she can’t discern the blue that had once stirred her heart.

“Yeah, I can’t live like this any longer, Em’.” And it’s said like verity, he doesn’t even try to disguise his disdain.

Handing her the thin file, and a pen, Chris mounts the wave of his bravery and delivers with not a single waver to his voice: “I already signed, read them well, you can keep the apartment, I don’t want anything from you.”

The clock ticks and ticks, its great hand sweeping the dial for every second she hasn’t showered off the stench of death.

“Why.” She fiddles with the pen.

“I don’t think you love me, I don’t think you’re capable of love, Em’. Two years, and it feels like I’m living with a dead person.” This is the most he has said to her since his vows.

“Hmm.” Emory hums, understanding.

She signs the papers, and feels a twinge of hurt pluck at the last string of her heart. The one only Chris could make tremble.

“You’re not even sad, are you?” He chuckles, shaking his head.

He had once been her hope at happiness when she thought that the grief drained all the love in her heart and he’d proved her wrong when she began to love him again, quietly but surely. Emory stands then, tall and proud, “you’ve wanted this, you ask, I deliver.” She gives him the divorce papers.

He must have carried them for days, denting the pillow next to hers with the shape of his skull, as he harbored thoughts of separation.

She can’t blame him, love slides off of her like butter on warmth.

He leaves that same night, his suitcase already made.

Her marriage ends on a Thursday night, in the matter of minutes, it hurts the way loss does, and now she has to mourn the dead as well as the living.

It’s a sleepless night.

The flat shadows of her furniture keep her company - like parishioners at the funeral of her marriage. Her alarm sets like the ringing of a churchbell, putting an end to the endless service.

Emory wakes up to another day, that specter vacillates by her side - Eli reminds her he’s there. He: the vehicle of her taciturn pain.

She calls in sick for the day, she doesn’t have any more guests on her autopsy table this week.

The last one was the boy who looked like her brother.

The ink of her fountain pen had nearly dried hovering over the autopsy form, the seven-lettered word was difficult to write - next to the cause of death, the last vision of Eli in life had moved like the tide behind her lids: to-and-fro, as the moon tugged, she daydreamed she rowed the oars of a boat, and saved him that day - pulling him up as he breathed - breathed.

The ocean slamming a palm on that flimsy raft of hers, angry for being denied a meal.

She wishes she didn’t know of the stages of decomposition of the human body, both in the harsh environments of the sea and in the damp earth under the Boston sky.

And as she did in her marriage, she lies to herself: stardust the flesh becomes and of bones are coral made.

Emory is alone in the world, loveless, her chest throbs - from a coughing fit, from a new rib.