I decided to take it easy today, since I wanted to reward myself for having a 5-day weekend coming up tomorrow through Monday. This translated to, “Jason would rather write 6666 words tomorrow than write 3333 today and 5000 the next day.” Also, I’m done tagging these posts – it’s making the tag cloud want to explode.

Word C0unt: 20,065 

She remained there, squirming, miserable, for as long as I was in the room. When I left the room, she was still in pain. I was glad that she was not my patient, but sad that because she was not my patient she might be in the hands of another, even more irresponsible doctor. But all that didn’t matter, as soon as I’d left the young woman’s room. I heard a crashing noise, and went to see where it had come from. Luckily, it was just a broken jar of fluid – of what fluid, I did not know. I watched the puddles move around on the floor, sliding on the angled surface. The hospital was not level, so the droplets slipped and slid. The reminded me of Noah’s tears, which filled the canyons of her face even to this day, when she cries over how I stole her husband for those horrible extra days.

I picked up the glass, moved by the tears. I mopped up the liquid with a napkin – I didn’t care what it was. I would wash my hands afterward. When I stood up with the debris in hand, I was face to face with a friendly doctor. “Do you want this?” I asked. He kindle asked if I would dispose of it, but also said that I should wash my hands.

“The stuff in that jar will burn the skin right off of your hands!” he told me. I panicked and ran to the nearest bathroom and washed my hands quickly enough to never feel a burning sensation. The trip to the bathroom led me nearby the morgue wing, where I was the large steel doors swung open and held by a powerful magnet. Nobody had fixed the broken cadaver chamber yet, and because of Shane’s condition they had hired the second mortician, just to make sure all of the bodies were indeed dead. I wanted to pay a visit to Victor, so that I could play the third mortician, running a third check on the corpses to ensure that they stayed alive. The souls floated around the chambers once more, the mind-boggling blue mist that covered the room played tricks with the brain. But I saw in Victor the same that I had seen in Shane. His soul was hovering just above his body, trying to escape the room. But this time it was succeeding. I could feel the coldness seeping out through the door of the chamber – the souls were trying to escape, perhaps to heaven. But they would only find hell out here.

One of the steel doors slammed shut.

The magnet must have given out, because the second one followed. I was closed in, but never resisted entrapment. I looked around me instinctively. Despite the second mortician the entire wing was full of corpses. Spirits surrounded me. Perhaps it was one of them who had locked me in. Shelves upon shelves filled with frozen corpses. My feet moved without my permission, taking me down the hallway to the basement rooms. There I saw the extent of the morgue backup that I hadn’t noticed over the last three months. The cadaver drawers were full. And there was only one mortician working; he hadn’t noticed my presence at all. Where had all the workers gone? The single mortician looked exhausted, but not from the disease as I’d initially though. No, he was exhausted from working with all these heavy, clunky bodies. But where had his coworker gone?

I forced myself upon the man. He was so short, yet must have been incredibly strong in order to lift bodies twice or three times his weight onto tables to be stored and dealt with. I was about to speak with him and ask him why he was so alone in the room, but not words escaped me. I thought about whom these bodies must have belonged to. What families owned them?

“Why are you here?” I was surprised that it was not my voice this phrase had been stated in. It was the mortician’s, who had noticed me standing outside of the basement room he was working in. I walked inside.

“I wandered in here by mistake,” I lied. “The door slammed shut and I thought I’d look around, when I noticed that you were working all alone.” I paused, and tried to make the tone lighter. “What’s up?” I asked, and smiled what I could muster.

“If you’re looking for a morbid response, you won’t get it here. I’m quite cheery! The dead bodies mean nothing to me,” he said as he shoved one corpse into a drawer with another. Mixing corpses, I thought, was probably not a very good idea, but I said nothing. I had been keeping many thoughts to myself recently, and thought a few more spared to the world were simply fine. “Furthermore, I don’t know why I’m alone.”

“I didn’t ask why you were alone. I was just pointing it out. But, are you sure you don’t know why?” He probably didn’t know, but if anyone was hiding their thoughts as much as I was at this moment, it was the man dealing with all of the hospital’s dead bodies.

“I’m sure,” he said. “It’s been me and these corpses all day. They keep flooding in. I don’t even know where they’re coming from anymore! But I’ve got no place to put them. And my partner has disappeared, so I’m working alone, figuring out where to put these godforsaken hunks of meat and bone.” He scoffed, and crossed his arms. “I’m not upset, it’s just this one body on the table there,” he pointed to the table, upon which was the body of a very, very old man recently deceased, “I don’t know where it should go. All of the drawers are full, and I don’t want to overload the cryogenic freezers. Got any ideas?”

“You could find another room and dump the body there, but that might not be the answer you’re looking for.” I felt like I was solving a murder mystery. Where could we stash the body before someone found us out? But the game didn’t last long. “Maybe there’s an empty drawer. You only seem to be looking through one place,” I said, not really knowing if he’d been looking through multiple areas. It looked like he’d only been searching a single row of body drawers, looking for a spot. I opened the drawers that I thought were empty – they were all vertically next to each other, nearest the entrance to me. Made of soft, cool metal, they lined the walls, spanning up to the ceiling and down to the floor. No space was wasted to give these poor souls a home.

They were not empty after all. Indeed had the mortician gone through and filled the drawers possibly hours ago. I kept opening and closing drawers, looking for one that had space. Every drawer was filled with two corpses. One drawer had a single corpse, one was empty, and the one below that had a single corpse…

I paused, and went backwards. One was empty! I’d missed it, flipping through the drawers as fast as I was.

I pointed it out and assisted the mortician in getting the body into the drawer. We shut the drawer together, and I washed my hands thoroughly afterwards, feeling dirty and contaminated. When I went to tell the man I was leaving, I noticed I’d left one drawer halfway open. I went to close it, but the man stepped in front of me and closed it first. “What’s in that one?” I jokingly asked. I didn’t remember a single body that I’d gone through.

“Just another body,” he said. But he was hesitant – I asked to take a look. He pleaded for me not to, and said it was the body of a family member. But I was just too curious. I wonder if it was my face that scared him. This time, the look on my face might even have scared Edward Nambet. I persisted, trying to find out what was in the drawer, but the mortician simply forbade me to look. “It’s against policy,” he said, “to allow a doctor to examine dead bodies without a pathologist.” That was a lie – there were no policies about looking at dead bodies.

“Don’t you think I know the protocol?” I asked him, hoping for an accurate answer.

“I do, Doctor, but I’m asking for your respect. Please leave that drawer alone. I’m sorry I ever let you search them, it was wrong of me. Don’t do it again.” He crossed his arms again. “But I’m not angry,” he said, “I just don’t want the bodies tampered with. Especially the one in that drawer.”

I obliged, and left the morgue wing altogether. I spent the rest of the day tending to my patients, and found myself eating lunch under the painting with nothing to look forward to but a microscope and a sick man. The same happened at night. I would eat under the painting – I was allowing myself full meals now every day – thinking about what was on it, what I could do to be more like what was on it. If I was more like the painting, I thought, I’d have had the courage to tell the mortician to step aside and allow me to examine the drawer. I didn’t need his respect, and I did not need to respect him. What part of my humanity allowed him to govern me? I wasn’t afraid of what was in that drawer, and I didn’t believe that all that was in there was a family member of his. If that were true, he’d probably have that person pushed to the front of the autopsy waiting list. He’d be more concerned than he was – and most importantly, he wouldn’t be working.

So, after finishing my dinner, I drove back to the hospital. The clicks this time were mysterious clicks, and they did not remind me of my car. They sounded strange and different, almost transparent. Barely audible, they gave the impression that something was malfunctioning at a microscopic level. I had only twitched upon hearing them, and then the car’s engine revved and I was off to the hospital.