exercise 12, i think

Jamie arranged the hair around the corpse’s face with a delicate and maternal care. The brown curls were swept to one side with a pin that Jamie had set aside for a ‘special’ case. She saved the prettiest accessories for the prettiest corpses.

This one was young, probably in her late thirties, and so the green tinge of putrefaction had not yet reached her face. But it wouldn’t have mattered either way. Jamie had grown accustomed to cold bodies, stiff bodies, dry bodies. She had been working at the mortuary for three years and felt more comfortable around dead bodies than the cloying clusters of girls at the junior college. People outside of work seemed so pink and sweaty and always in a rush. The only person she didn’t mind was Zach.


Zach had watery green eyes and black hair that hung down over his pale forehead. His skin was so white that Jamie guessed it would turn neon purple under the black light at the bowling alley. Even though he also attended Plainfield Community College, Jamie had only seen him there once, walking away from his girlfriend to smoke in the middle of a fight. Zach had seen her watching, but never said anything about it.


The steel door at the back of the mortuary groaned on its hinges as Zach swung it open and threw his keys on the aluminum counter. He was the other youth assistant during the week. Jamie tried to focus on applying foundation to the corpse’s cheeks and forehead.

“What’s up, kid?” Zach said, tossing his sweatshirt on the one plastic chair in the room. He opened the file cabinet and began leafing through the day’s deliveries and assignments. Jamie noticed a few burs that had fallen onto the concrete floor.
“You sleep outside or something?” Jamie asked as she tested eye shadows on the back of a receipt.
“What, you could smell it?”
“No, you don’t smell bad or anything…”
“Oh, thanks. I actually meant this,” Zach slid a miniature bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of his right pocket, the kind you can buy at gas stations to have with a chocolate cigar. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but this is just my morning chaser. I got so fucked up last night.”

Jamie watched him down the tiny bottle in a single bout. It was pathetic. All the same, she didn’t want to let on any concern or dismissal of this scene Zach was trying so hard to create. She decided on a warm brown for the corpse’s eyelids. “You know what they say,” she mumbled, distractedly, “hair of the dog or whatever…” Yes, warm brown matched the curls perfectly.


Jamie had moved on to a faint shade of lipstick. She had to hurry: the service was at noon, and she still had find the jewelry that the family had picked out and give the corpse to Zach for packing up into the hearse.

“Hey, would you look at this?” Zach yelled from the receiving room, which was adjacent to the prep room where Jamie worked. Zach was in charge of filing the initial paperwork when bodies arrived directly from the hospital. When there were puzzling cases, the coroner would come by the mortuary to examine the corpse.

“Check it out,” Zach said, twirling his empty bottle between his fingers. Jamie looked, but it was just another dead body. Well, it was a young body, but then she saw The Face. The Face wasn’t mutilated or disfigured. The Face wasn’t turning green. The Face wasn’t even ugly; in fact, The Face had a healthy complexion and was very beautiful. The Face also looked just like Zach’s girlfriend.

When Jaime realized who the corpse looked like, she clapped her hand over her mouth. Her Latex glove left a fine, white dust on her lips.

“Don’t worry, it’s not her,” Zach grinned, seeing Jamie’s thoughts race from one unlikely conclusion to another. “but I sort of wish it was.”
“What?” Jaime was still confused.
“Oh, we broke up a few weeks ago,” Zach twirled the bottle some more, then set it on the aluminum counter, finally, “or really, she broke up with me.”
“Oh,” Jamie stared at a crack making its way from the drain toward her shoe, “Oh, I’m sorry.”