Athazagoraphobia

Chapter One

With my hands fully submerged in the open cranium of some corpse that thought I was going to fuck him when he was alive, I grimaced and tried to plug my nose by will alone, to no avail. I never wished I would operate on a body I found repulsive in both life and death. Dried blood caked around the rim of my gloves and reeked of rust, almost coppery. Of course, my job was gruesome, but it was to make a point, and, in one quick tug, I was holding the brain. It had a clear line of bloodied tissue from the bullet that had run him through just an hour earlier. Being a surgeon for the dead was far stranger than for the living. As I trimmed the stem off and cleaned up the organ, Vincent looked up from packaging and weighing the bladder and just stared at the brain in clear dismay as he pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek.

"Good shot, eh?" I pursed my lips and lifted it closer to him. His only eye was damaged, so I had learned to be well aware that his low sight was blacked out in the center from macular degeneration. He tilted his head closer, pulled on his lower eyelid, and his grayed pupil focused with some struggle. A strange type of scarring surrounded his right eye where an entirely black false one then rested, the marks being those of his own fingernails fighting to claw it out. He didn't get as close to the organ as me. There was no way to hold it like a trophy when it caused him to hate his work.

"I mean, he's dead, so it must've been," insert a sarcastic 'heh,' "It's quite... straight... isn't it?" He shifted as though he was uncomfortable and sucked in his breath, his tone flat. I knew he was definitely more revolted by its smell than I was. I politely swiped off one of his auburn hairs that had rested on top of the membrane.

"Why wouldn't it be? You're the best." I kissed him just above his jaw and put all my weight on the side of the operating table, the rib cutting shears still in my grip. I hated that emptiness that had struck him a mere few years ago, such a horrible decline in his personality. As children, we were ready to face the world, yet there we were, in an abandoned apartment building's root-cellar-turned-hurricane-shelter just below a Raleigh road, dismembering the insides of a man we never met before last night. I could still imagine the politician who used to operate that body offering me a glass of champagne, obviously spiked by its on-taking of a cloudy, more desaturated yellow. The hands that had tucked my hair behind my ear and caressed me as I climbed on top of him were limp, lifeless, and blueing -- I liked them better that way.

Faded brick walls constructed a century before we were born, concrete flooring that was regularly splattered with blood and cleaning agents, and equipment that had truly stood the test of time and my ability to salvage their use for the future -- they made up my primary workplace, and Vee's secondary. Pursuing notability as a defense attorney was his journey. All his work was in French, so I had no idea on how to read it, though.

I started humming, trying to enjoy my work as much as I could. I didn't look at Vee as I popped the then-ballooning blood bag into the waste drain, which I had drawn out before daring to remove his organs. It was truly the most disgusting part of the job; just the smell and the viscous, clotting liquid snaking through the grate could shoo me away from the profession. I shook my head, cleared my lacrimal punctum that were watering from the stench, and returned to the body.

The spring retractor still held the thoracic cavity open. Sometimes, I considered an acid vat instead of going to the effort to put such creeps into a peaceful grave and play mortician, but Vee vetoed it on account of him believing that one's posthumous resting would determine a part of the afterlife. I did that whole process just to humor him, to be honest -- he already considered himself hell-bound, so I didn't know how he could care so deeply for the end realm of some statesman. All in all, though, toothed forceps were fun as fuck to play with and snap at Vee as a joke until he yanked them out of my hands, so cutting open the dead wasn't complete shit.