The body was still warm when it came in, not unusual. She’d come from hospice and the turnaround from time of death to our prep room was usually pretty fast. No sign of rigor mortis meant that I would have an easier time positioning her, setting her features, and the embalming would go smoother.
She rested on the prep room table as I went over details. Sometimes these places didn’t give super detailed information, but this at least mentioned a pre-need contract and names and numbers of direct family members. It was a pretty sizable contract too; a full traditional service, complete with luncheon, one of our most expensive caskets on offer, the works.
I didn’t have a lot of time before rigor would set in, so despite the fact it was after hours, I decided to stay and do the embalming immediately. I knew I’d get some extra PTO hours to spend if I did; that was the funeral home’s way of incentivizing people to stay and do embalming right away. I wanted to take a family vacation this year, so some extra time off wouldn’t go amiss.
One of my senior coworkers was staying late too, she was on call that night and decided to stay. It’d been busy lately; we’d gotten quite a few calls in, so she figured it would behoove her to stick around rather than take the removal van home, only to be called out right away.
I clipped the embalming report to the clipboard and set it in the room, then put on my PPE gown, mask, and gloves. A lot of the senior embalmers scoffed at me for wearing a mask, but hey, the more I could stave off the cancer-causing chemicals, the better.
I took off the deceased’s hospital gown and observed her. She had a couple of IVs in, as well as a catheter, and some bandages. Pretty standard hospice patient stuff, although she stood out among the others I usually did in the sense that she was fairly young, probably in her mid-40s. Younger hospice patients weren’t unheard of, some people had terminal illnesses and preferred to be in hospice for their final days. The one she’d come from was one of the best in the area too; it must have been pretty expensive to keep her there. Between that and the pre-need contract, her family must have had a decent amount of money.
I always opted to leave in IV needles until after the embalming was over; that was pretty standard practice. Removing them sometimes caused swelling. But I removed her catheter and threw it in the biohazard waste bin. She looked pretty good, all things considered. No edema, jaundice, swelling, bruising, anything that would require some extra work. For all intents and purposes, she was looking to be a pretty easy case. She was pretty heavy-set, and I couldn’t help but wonder what her condition was. It hadn’t been marked on her paperwork. Technically speaking it wasn’t necessary, unless the cause of death or conditions prior to death caused some sort of complication or risk, like an infectious blood disease. Sometimes with younger people liver failure was common, although if she’d had had that, she’d be more jaundiced.
I picked a standard mixture of chemicals; basic arterial fluid and some supplementary humectants to keep her skin supple, and poured the bottles into the embalming machine and filled it to three gallons with water.
First thing I usually did was set the features, especially on an ideal case like this. I grabbed some eye caps and a needle and suture thread. Like I predicted, she had a pretty decent set of teeth, although there were a couple missing. A simple sublingual suture to close her mouth would do the trick. The needle injector tended to flare up my tendonitis, so if I could just do a simple suture, I preferred to.
I positioned myself behind her head to put the eye caps in. I pulled her lower eyelid down and started to insert the cap when I saw her eye twitched. I jumped, then just stood there still for a moment, frozen in place. Muscle spasms weren’t unheard of, and rigor tended to settle in the eyes first, so maybe she just had some instantaneous rigor spasms. I signed and slid the eye cap in again, this time with no problems. I shook my head, trying to clear the adrenaline.
“Everything ok in there?” I heard my coworker call from the adjoining office.
“Oh yeah, no problem.” I responded. I placed the other eye cap in, and went to suture the mouth. Pulling the tongue up, I inserted the curved needle through the muscle that joins the tongue to the base of the mouth, pulled the thread through part way, and then fed the needle through the nasal septum from inside the mouth. I then pulled the two ends of thread taught until the mouth closed. I thought I saw her eyes twitch again. I took a cotton sheet and used tweezers to pack in some of the hollow cheek area to fill out her mouth a bit. After her features were set I took a step back, staring at her. Was she going to twitch again? I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. There was always something new with this job, some new weird thing bodies did. Things you read about in niche articles, or weird medical journals.
As always, the Bluetooth speaker we kept in the prep room was playing the local pop radio station, but I went over and turned it off, leaving only the faint hum of the air conditioning. I looked at her for a long time, I’m not sure how long. She didn’t move, she lay still as the grave on the cold, stainless steel table.
I got the water hose and started rinsing her body, my eyes locked on her face. Like all of them, she looked peaceful, especially now that her eyes and mouth were fully closed. The silence was eerie, I thought about turning the radio back on, but for some reason I couldn’t.
I got the pink antibacterial soap bottle and squeezed some out onto her body, gently scrubbing it in with my hands. Her skin was warm. That was normal… she just died about two hours ago. She’d just died.
Despite her otherwise normal condition, her fingernails and toenails were filthy. I usually didn’t bother with the toes, they wouldn’t be seen anyway. But I took the small metal paddled tool and cleaned her fingernails. As I moved to her thumb and cleaned out the gunk, I noticed a bit of blood forming under the nail. Cursing, I let her arm rest at her side, I’d deal with that later. I could apply some nude-colored nail polish to cover it up. As her hand rested against the metal table, a finger twitched just a fraction of a millimeter. I knew I saw it. That couldn’t be a random muscle spasm.
I looked at her face again. It was still so still. You’d think if she… if she was still alive, me closing her eyes and suturing her mouth would have been enough to rouse her, or at least prompt some response.
Feeling a bit foolish, but more panicked, I put two fingers against her neck, right under her jaw. I couldn’t feel anything except the faint warmth of her skin juxtaposed with the cold from the water I’d washed her with. I checked at her wrists as well, but there was nothing. I couldn’t feel a pulse.
I had heard of a few cases of someone waking up after they were taken to a morgue or funeral home, it usually happened because whatever night nurse on shift simply checked the pulse and nothing else and, mistaking a weak pulse for a non-existent one, they declared the person dead and immediately called us for pickup. It seemed to be happening more lately for whatever reason. I didn’t know if the hospice houses and care centers were understaffed, underpaid or under-trained, but there had been a few cases, one of which went public in the paper, of someone waking up.
It was my worst nightmare. At best it was a legal headache, and at worst you had a traumatized family and patient, and a bad word from the press, even if it was not in any way the funeral home’s fault. Still, as I kept staring at her face, I kept waffling back and forth on what to do. I kept thinking surely if I passed a needle through her mouth, that would be enough to make her… do something. Jerk, cry out, twitch, something.
I opened one of her eyes again and took out the eye cap. Her eyes were still clear, that was to be expected. They were a deep blue, and the edges of the whites were bloodshot. There was a tiny bit of blood crusted by her tear-ducts, and now that I looked closer, around the inside of her nostrils and corner of her mouth too. I put a gloved finger between her lips and parted them. I don’t know how I didn’t notice that crusted blood before. I could easily clean it, but it was weird I hadn’t made a mental note of it.
Then I saw it; there was blood coming from where I’d sewn the thread. I’d seen a couple of fresh cases bleed like that, but it still struck me as odd. It was beginning to pool too. Maybe I should remove the sutures and cotton and set the features after embalming? That would give time for any fresh blood to be pushed out and the capillaries to dry.
I closed her mouth and looked at her chest. I’d taped her breasts up with duct tape to pull them forward, so that after the embalming when her body was more dry, they’d stay in that position.
Without really realizing I was doing it, I leaned my head closer to her chest, angling my ear down to listen for her heartbeat. My mask was still on, still, this was sort of unorthodox and I did feel weird about it.
I heard a chuckle. Jumping and accidentally kicking the wheel of the table with my foot, I whipped my head around to look at the door to the prep room. My coworker was standing there, arms crossed, smirking
“Whaaaat are you doing?” She laughed.
“Oh, uh… nothing.” I stood straight.
“Is there something the matter?” She asked, entering the room fully and standing over the corpse.
“Um, I’m not sure. Just some abnormal stuff.”
“Ok? What kind of abnormal?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. That I thought the woman was still alive? After all of this? After everything I’d already done? After I couldn’t find a pulse?
“She’s just bleeding a lot” I said finally, opening her mouth and showing my coworker the blood.
“I mean, that’s not abnormal.” She said.
“I… I know it’s just, it felt a little weird.”
We were both silent for a bit. When I looked up at my coworker’s face, her expression was odd. It was distant yet scrutinizing, like her eyes were giving me some kind of warning. Not a reprimanding look per se, just… careful.
“Well, you’d better not take your time too much, her service is supposed to be in two days.”
“That’s a pretty quick turnaround.” I commented.
My coworker shrugged, “It’s the only day the family could all get together, I guess. They’re paying us a lot of money for it anyway, I figured just let them have whatever they want.” She said this last part with a slight nod, as if to say “Don’t fuck this up, and don’t pry.” I knew it well. Death was a very personal thing, and sometimes in the case with the more affluent in the community, sometimes a bad look. I made a mental note to look into who this person was, who her family was. I didn’t recognize the last name as one belonging to one of the more upper-crust families in the area, but that didn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t related.
I nodded, “Yeah, all right. It’s all right. I’m sorry”
My coworker titched, “You’re still too hesitant and gentle with them.” She left at this. She always said stuff like that. She’d been the one that trained me during my apprenticeship, so she knew my process pretty well.
My face feeling hot with embarrassment, I turned the radio back on and put on my own playlist to help me focus. I went and got a scalpel and put a fresh blade on it.
Looking at the woman, even though she was larger, I thought I would try to access the femoral artery first before trying the carotid artery. If the family was going to be particular, then I might as well try to make the incision in a place they wouldn’t see; that we wouldn’t have to try and cover up.
I felt at her pelvic bone to find the guideline for the femoral artery. I place my scalpel just under the crease where her leg met her hip and made a vertical incision downward. The new blade cut through the soft skin like butter, revealing beads of subdural fat beneath. I took one more pass with the blade through the fat pad, then stopped, looking up at her face. She didn’t move. Of course she wouldn’t move, she was dead. Everything was fine. This was fine. I would give this woman the best embalming job of my career, the family would be happy with it, and I could go on with my week. I would finish this embalming by seven and be back in time to kiss my daughter goodnight.
I grabbed two aneurism hooks; tools especially designed for blunt dissection and separation, and used one in each hand to pull the tissue back. As soon as I separated some of the muscle, dark blood started pooling in the cavity. I must have hit a small vein. Not a problem, I was probably going to not use the veins for drainage anyway. I pulled and ripped smooth muscle apart, dabbing the blood away with a paper towel as I went. I still wasn’t very good at finding the femoral artery quickly, and in a bigger person there was a lot more to get through, but I still knew it would probably be better if I tried.
Oddly enough, as I continued gently shredding and separating the muscle, the skin around the incision site started to look a bit red and inflamed, like a cut would look on a living person. As I noticed this, I pulled the muscle aside, expecting to see the bundle of vessels that contained the femoral artery.
Instead, when I pulled the last bit of stretchy muscle tissue aside, I saw… darkness. I blinked for a second, thinking it must be more dark blood pooled there. I dabbed with a paper towel again, and the towel sunk into her leg. I pulled my hand away with a start.
It was like her leg was hollow beneath the initial fat and muscle. I was going to call my coworker to take a look, but my words caught in my throat. I looked at her face again.
Still.
I felt myself moving closer to the leg and felt my hand pick up the scalpel again. With complete disregard for anything important I might cut, I put the blade of the scalpel against the lower end of the incision and cut, making it wider so I could pull it apart with my hands and look in.
I could see the other side of the muscle and pad of fat on the other side of her leg. It was like her leg was just a hollow tube. No bone, even. She didn’t have any scars and nothing in her paperwork that indicated that she was a long bone donor. My hands shook. I called for my coworker, but she didn’t answer. I pulled myself away from the table and looked out into the office. She wasn’t in her chair… had she gone on a call? Was she in the bathroom? Should I call her on the phone?
I looked back at the table. The incision in the woman’s leg was oozing blood. It was thick and coagulated like oil.
I slowly approached her, my head pounding. I moved to her leg again, reaching into my pocket for my phone. Turning on the flashlight on it, I pointed it at her leg, looking upward into it towards her torso.
In the gap of her leg, I could see… I don’t know how to describe what I saw, except that I could see into her body. She was hollow inside, and all of her major organs stuck like deflated balloons against the walls of it. Thousands of thread-thin veins and nerves connected them like a cobwebs, crisscrossing. In the bottom of the hollow there was dark blood pooling. As I kept looking, it felt like the inside of her body felt bigger than the outside. It felt like I was looking into a huge, deep, dark cave filled with viscera and organs and spiderweb vessels.
My heart pounded in my chest and I pulled away. My vision felt dark, like the lights had dimmed. I felt dizzy with vertigo. I pulled myself away from her and it felt like I was flying up into the air. I stumbled backwards.
I called out for my coworker again, my voice raspy, and I couldn’t get it to be loud enough. I was dreaming. This was a nightmare. It must be.
The woman’s head moved, and a low groan hummed in her throat. Hands sweaty, I ripped off my gloves and fumbled for my phone. It fell on the ground, and into a now forming pool of blood under the table.
I heard noise from the office, and I called for my coworker again. I heard her sigh as she entered the room.
“What? Can’t find an artery?” She asked. She didn’t even seem to notice the mess on the ground. She just looked between me and the…body.
“She…she’s still alive!” I managed to say.
My coworker’s brow furrowed, “What are you talking about?”
I pointed to her, “Look! She’s… she’s still alive! We… we need to call an ambulance.” I stared at my phone, now covered with blood that was still pooling. The woman’s arms moved.
“Look!” I cried. My coworker leaned back, her eyes widening, but looking at me, not at the corpse. Like I was being crazy.
Was I being crazy? Was I seeing things? I had to be. This had to be a nightmare. I looked at the clock and it read 6:16. The second had was moving. I grabbed the report on the clipboard and it still said the same information it did before.
“Look, calm down.” My coworker said.
“She’s still alive!” I shouted again.
“It’s fine.”
I stared at her. My vision was bleary.
“What do you mean… it’s fine? We… we need to call an ambulance… I need to do… C.P.R…”
My coworker grabbed my arm forcefully. She’d never done anything like that before. I could feel her fingernails dig into my skin a bit. It hurt. The pain was real.
She wasn’t looking at me, instead, her gaze was fixed on the embalming machine.
“Listen to me very carefully.” She said, then turned her head slowly to look at me, “Continue with the embalming. It’s vital that you keep going.”
I wrenched away from her, “What? What are you saying?”
“You just need to listen to me.”
Before I could do anything, My coworker grabbed the arterial tube and screwed it onto the tubing that connected to the machine. She grabbed the scalpel from off the table and moved towards the woman’s neck. At this point, the woman’s body was moving, squirming back and forth, she was moaning through the mouth sutures.
“What are you doing? Stop!” I yelled, grabbing my coworker’s wrist. She tried to wrench away from me and cut me with the scalpel on the palm of my hand by accident. Hot, sharp pain shot through it, fresh, living blood splattering the woman on the table.
“Look at her” My coworker said, “She’s dead. Get it? There’s no turning back now.”
“What are you talking about?!” I yelled. When I looked at the woman, her one eye, the eye that I had removed the eye cap from, was open and looking around frantically. Her moans turned to muffled yells. She lifted arms as if to grab my coworker, but something seemed to be keeping her from reaching her. I could see inside the leg incision again. It felt like that cavern within her was filling up the whole room. Darkness pressed in a round me as I watched my coworker make an incision into the woman’s neck and with almost impossible speed, raise her carotid artery. She put suture thread around it to lift it up and snipped into it with scissors. Blood came rushing out.
“See? That’s not normal! She’s still alive! Stop!” I grabbed my coworker from behind, trying to pull her away, but it was like she was bolted to the ground. She elbowed me away, and I fell to the floor. I slipped in the ever growing pool of blood, which now almost filled the entire floor.
I heard the embalming machine boot up, I saw my coworker set the pressure and rate of flow. She opened the valve.
“Stop!” I yelled again weakly.
“You’re being ridiculous. This is how it is. We have to do this.”
The woman was screeching, pulling at her mouth, trying to free it from the sutures. Blood was spurting from her mouth. More blood kept pouring out of her leg like a waterfall. Her kidneys were floating outside her body, and spaghetti-like vessels were unfurling out of the incision, filling the room. The lights were starting to tinge red. I just noticed that the music playing through the speakers kept repeating the same second of a song over and over again, the words sung garbled and impossible to understand. There was static.
“This family is paying us a lot of money,” my coworker said, turning to look at me, “… do you understand?”
“I don’t… understand…” A heart emerged from the incision, pulsing, beating, too large, strained, growing.
“It’s too late to stop it now.” My coworker’s eyes were dark, her face shadowed by the looming heart, which was now blocking out much of the light.
I felt blood up to my elbows. I fished around for my phone. Maybe… by some miracle, it would still work. My hand felt something rectangular and I yanked it out of the blood. I pressed the power button. It lit up. The light from it lit up the room in a sharp blue light. The blood was seeping up the walls, defying any laws of physics. The woman on the table screamed.
“It’s too late to stop it now.” The light from my phone reflected my coworker’s face, her eyes reflecting like an animal’s in car headlights. I punched in 911 on my phone and just before I could hit call, the woman fell off the table into the pool of blood, letting up a splash that was way bigger than it should have been proportionally. It covered my phone again, the force of the splash pushing it out of my hands and sending me careening back into it.
I came out, gasping. My coworker’s eyes still reflected that light, even though it wasn’t there. Like two spotlights staring at me.
“It’s a lot of money.” She said, her voice scratchy, static, like the speaker. “The service is in two days. The service is in two days. Two days. Two days”
With each word, her voice became more garbled, mangled. The light from her eyes filled up the room, and I saw her start the embalming machine. As arterial fluid flowed into the woman, I saw the hose throbbing like a pulse. With each pump, the woman’s body moved less and less. The blood in the room began circling into the drain on the floor. A drain I don’t remember being there. The lights overhead started to slowly fade back on, the woman’s screams dissipated.
“You’re still too gentle with them.” My coworker said. Her back was towards me now, she watching the woman as she her body moved slower and slower. The room filled with the acrid fumes of formaldehyde. Each time I blinked, the room began returning back to normal more and more. The blood disappeared into the walls, seeping into it, leaving no trace. The last of it oozed down the drain. The speaker began playing normally. Before I knew it, everything was how it had been before. The embalming machine hummed. I saw my coworker suturing the incision on the woman’s leg. She turned to me again, her eyes dark once more.
“You don’t know how bad you almost fucked up.” She said, “I should write you up…”
I blinked at her.
“You’ll understand in time.” She said, “If you come back tomorrow.”