7 Days of Horror

Friday - Autopsy

"FRIDAY - AUTOPSY"

The scalpel slowly wounded the timid body of an 11-year old girl. The wound followed a Y-Shaped pattern drawn using a marker on the girl's body. 

Y-shaped incision was used to open the body of the girl--the most used method in opening a cadaver's body--and exposed her abdominal cavity. My fellow forensic-pathology intern, Dane, gingerly took the girl's internal organs out right after. The incision moved further to the girl's pelvic cavity passing her navel. And while his doing it I managed to carefully scrape some muscles off from her sternum.

The lights above us gave a full detail of how the human body would look like when it's emptied. Like a big sloppy vessel of tissues and muscles. And as I pressed myself toward the body to take a closer look at it the subtle coldness of the autopsy table felt through my gown.--reminding me how cold it could be here, but then nothing's colder than a dead body.

Earlier, before this postmortem, we already documented the details about the cadaver. I recorded them in my handheld tape recorder which would later on be submitted to the Mortuary Supervisor. Poisoning was allegedly the reason to this girl's untoward death, but then the family was strongly skeptical about the initial findings. They said it was murder and that their daughter was raped--worst, sodomized by an unknown man--hence, we're here. As our assignment, we were tasked to excavate the truth behind her death. Based on the latest findings a force entry to the rectum surfaced.

Sick.

If these findings are true. . .who could kill a young and innocent child?

As Dane slowly removed the viscera en masse from the child's body, lining them up in a very systematic fashion, I, on the other hand, gingerly made a single vertical cut in the middle of the child's neck.

The organs were then weighed, measured and set against different observations. The clock ticked like forever but then this was all ours for the night. Creepy as this may seem for others but then this is the unfortunate profession I would be having for maybe the rest of my life. I don't have issues with dead bodies but then there's a point in this job where you'd meet paranoia. And paranoia would be your greatest adversary in this sloppy, blood-wet field.

I stared at the organs and accidentally imagined they belonged to me. God.

And I heard a moan coming from outside. . .the people in the hallways walked lifelessly as the night went by. The moan was becoming loud. Can't Dane hear it? I thought.

A moan of a little girl.

Fatal hallucinations. . .audible. . .worst

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Friday night.

It was around 10 in the evening. No more patients and visitors walking in the gloomy hallways of this hospital. The paging voice from the nurse's station echoed through its silent walls.

I was alone in the morgue. The big freezer of dead bodies behind condoled me. My breath was counted. Boring.

There were two interns earlier here, Ramon and Steve, but they didn't care to say hi to me, and I knew I just needed to focus on my cadaver. I also like working on my own, without someone peeping from behind me, checking if I am doing it right. They were actually talking seriously over a dead body covered in white blanket. Ramon said to the dead body "may you rest in peace". When they were done with the body they put it in to one of the freezers and left. Did not even say goodbye to their fellow intern who would be working alone, unfortuantely, for the night.

Mine on the other hand was an old lady. She maybe was in her sixties but then her quite built up. But then after suffering a brutal death under her husband's hands she now laid down like a broken twig from a tree. Her face flat like a pancake--her husband was sentenced to life imprisonment after being proven guilty as the one who flattened her  face with a hammer.