Morgue

I

Hands pull a lifeless organ
from your chest. Its muscular rhythm still,
without a beat for 17 minutes after your
pelvis was smacked by inconsideration
of a sport utility vehicle. Hours later, after a
uniformed paramedic pressed thick fingertips into
your wrist, you lay here before him.

But he gets none
of the usual flurry of images; sensations specific
to this muscles are remarkably absent. The scientist
in him is intrigued despite your resemblance to his
dead wife.

II

You lay here naked and cold
in the ice-blue glow of examination room “A”
long fingers play against your florescent skin.

The first vibration, a mild one. You push it
the length of his scalpel.

He concentrates. Hard. Makes a slice beneath each
breast. He draws his metal instrument down
along your stomach to the curve of your abdomen.
Stops short.

He fastens a T-pin to held each skin flap in place.
Trying to pin what he sees of your history in place, too.

Snip, snap, crack.
He cuts through the last rib, pushes aside
muscle, steadies his hands against the steel table
to peer inside. A moment passes. He seems to be
considering this mess of organs, or something else.

He detaches organs from your motionless spine
two fingers peeling away arteries larynx, oesophagus,
diaphragm. One last nick and out come ligaments,
bladder, rectum.

His double-gloved hand feels the weight of each piece
of you. He places them, one-by-one, sticky and wet,
onto a scale. He measures you in ounces. Liver,
spleen, kidney.

He eyes your shape, notes how remarkably
similar it is to Elizabeth’s, right down to the way
middle age rests comfortably around your mid-section.

III

To clear the images you pass to him, he thinks of Charlise and
his best pal, Donny. He remembers the night Donny
slapped his back while pressing a blue pill into his palm.
Donny claimed that his marital status made
an excellent calling card.
“Happy birthday, buddy,” Donny chuckled as he introduced
him to Viagra and Charlise.

It is said that each organ holds a memory. He know this
to be true. Hands, large and rough with scars from weekend shifts
at his father’s butcher shop read the memories you store.

He presses deeper, his pickle-barrel chest pushes against
a blood-soaked apron, looking more like his father than he
would care to admit. His white label coat rubs against
your deadened hip as he fingers soft brunette waves of hair
that dip and swirl across your neck.

He holds your hand and sees how it once tapped mathematical
equations across a chalkboard. He watches white letters loop their way
across a smooth, black surface. He tastes the dust and knows that an x-ray
would reveal a decades-old fracture caused by a piano teacher,
a spinster who crowed about the evil of unpractised scales
and regularly resolved such wickedness with a ruler.

He sees how, much later, when arthritis set in
how your fingers ached at the memory of your
teacher’s unsympathetic eyes. His arm tremors. He can feel
where malevolent cells took the left ovary.

This makes him
again recall his dead wife and he turns away.

IV

A shaky nub of chalk soaked red numbers the weight
of every part of you. The stench of intestines and bowels
at his back, too familiar to make him
fully wretch, a sensation that never quite leaves.

Your secrets betrayed to his hands.

V

Later tonight, he will think of your still body and the
story it told, but what it did not share is what he
thinks about most. Then the lights will dim and the music will chime
to signal the end of the entr’acte. He will escort his date into
the theatre and into the second half of Act ii.