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| The Aroma of Death |
The aroma of death hung in the air like the smell of fresh baked doughnuts in a bakery. It was a smell Joseph was all too familiar with. Death was his business. And lately, he was sick to death with death.
There are few things in life that are guaranteed, death is the only one with a hundred percent guarantee for everyone. That is why Joseph decided to get into the business of death. The guaranteed paycheck, there would always be someone dieing, so his job would always be there.
Picking up the charts, he opened the top one. ‘Jane doe’ was written across the top of the folder, flipping it open he began to read the report as he bit into his cheeseburger.
‘Unknown female, probably a transient, age approximately 30-35 years old, no identification.’ The report began. Joseph glanced down the page skimming the brief information written therein. Shoving the last of the burger in his mouth he walked over to door number three and pulled it open. Sitting the folder at the feet of the body he pulled the sheet back to uncover the face.
“Monica?” He gasped, staring down at the face of his sister. He had to fight to keep the burger he’d just finished down as he felt the urge to throw up overtake him. “Monica?”
Joseph was in complete shock. There before him on this cold metal tray lay his beautiful, beloved sister. The sister he used to protect from the monsters under her bed. The sister he taught how to ride her bike with out training wheels, to throw a curveball to impress her first boyfriend at thirteen.
Joseph stroked her dirty mangled hair as the tears began to well up in his eyes.
“Oh my dear Monica,” He whispered as he continued to stroked her hair. “What happened to you?”
Joseph stepped back and wiped away the tears and tried to compose himself. He picked up the folder again and started flipping through the pages. There wasn’t much information, her body had been found down in the shipping district, behind one of the seedier bars, half buried under an old soiled cargo canvas. She had been found when one of the patrons of the bar who had gone out back to relieve his overfilled bladder of the cheap swill they called beer down there. The report noted numerous cuts and contusions to the body. Joseph stopped reading there; he set the folder down on the table nearby and stepped back up to the tray where his sister lay. Gently he pulled the sheet down off of her, exposing her bruised and cut body to him. He tried to be professional in examining her lying there, but he just couldn’t get his mind off of the fact that this was his little sister.
“I can’t do this.” He whispered as the tears began to flow again. He pulled the sheet back up to cover his sisters face and slide the tray back inside the storage cooler and shut the door. He stood there for a while, his face pressed up against the cold steel of the morgues body bins. Flashbacks of his sister flooded his mind as his tears flowed down the steal doors and dripped unto the floor.
Joseph walked in a daze over to his desk and slumped down in the chair that by now fit his backside like a glove, from his too many years of use. He picked up the phone, holding it in his hand he just starred at it. He wanted to call someone, but couldn’t think of who to call. He was the only coroner for the quad county area, and he hadn’t ever had the need to avail himself of the assistance of any of the surrounding coroners in the twenty three years he had been here. He gently returned the handset to the cradle and starred at his hand, still holding the phone. He calmly and slowly released his grip on the handset and then just as quickly and angrily, swiped his arm across the top of his desk sending everything flying across the room and crashing to the floor. He pounded the desk top with his fists and screamed out his pain and anger.
From down the hall, Susan, the county clerk, heard the clanging of metal coming from the morgue room. She turned from her typing and rolled her chair out from behind the desk and peered down the hallway. She hesitated getting up; wanting to be sure she had heard what she thought she had heard before wasting her time and energy to go investigate. When she heard the anguished screams that followed she knew something was up and decided to go see what it was.
Susan griped her walker and slowly started down the hallway towards the morgue room. As she walked, she thought about how she was getting to damn old for this job. She knew she should just quit, but the folks around here just kept re-electing her term after term. She had only officially run for the position of County Clerk once, which was back in ’63. And although she never ran for re-election, no one else had stepped forward to register for the ballots, so she kept getting elected by default.
“Why’d it take fifty eight years for something exciting to happen here?” She asked herself as she slowly made her way down the hall. Her osteoporosis causing her more pain then she thought it was probably worth. With each roll forward of the stroller, she could hear her joints creak and groan, as if to be screaming out themselves to be put out of their agony. It took her almost five minutes to make the short forty foot stroll down the hallway. Upon reaching the door she reached out a shaking wrinkled hand and softly knocked.
“Joseph?” She called out. “Joseph dear is everything okay in there?”
She waited a few seconds for a reply before grasping the doorknob in her frail little hand and turning it. The automatic opener swung the big steel door open without any assistance from her. This was a good thing, for at eighty three, she no longer had the strength to push open a door of this size and weight.
“Joseph!” She screamed out after the door had opened and she saw Joseph sitting at his desk, gun in hand.
“Go away Susan.” Joseph sobbed through his tears. “Just go away.”
“I will do no such thing young man.” She sternly scolded Joseph as she pushed the walker through the doorway and began the laborious stroll over to Joseph.
Joseph tried to remain pissed at the world and depressed to the point of suicide, but as he watched Susan pushing her walker across the morgues floor he couldn’t help but begin to chuckle to himself. Young man he thought, he hadn’t been called that in ages. Having just passed his sixty first birthday, he was hardly young. But that was only a part of what made Joseph start to chuckle. The sight of Susan, racing across the room as if to try to stop him, made him actually laugh out loud. Hell, he thought, I could shot myself six times, go out for lunch, come back, reload the gun and shot myself again before she made it the distance from the door to my desk.
Setting the gun on the desk, he openly began to laugh, getting up from his chair, he walked over to Susan. Laughing he gave her a big bear hug, lifting her up from the floor.
“Oh thank you Sue.” He laughed as he swung her around in a circle as if they were dancing. “Thank you so much.”
“Put me down Joe!” Susan cried out, barely able to breath in his grasp. She thought she heard a rib or two crack under his grip.
Joseph set her back down beside her walker. She griped the rails trying to steady herself. She wobbled as she held on to the walker with all her strength, her head spinning on the inside, the room becoming a blur. Joseph slapped her gently on the back and ambled on out the door and down the hall, laughing all the way.
Susan tried to steady herself. She closed her eyes and tried to stop the spinning. She could not. She let out a muffled cry as she fell to the cold hard floor. She heard the sound of her bones cracking echo through her ears as she hit the floor. Then there was silence. Blackness and silence, as her frail, aged spine in her neck cracked when her head hit the floor. The last thought she had was, “Wow that was fun!”
Joseph threw his county coroners badge on Susan’s desk as he strolled by and on out the door. He was still laughing as he got into the black mercury station wagon the county had purchased eight years ago to transport the bodies of the dead. He tossed the briefcase full of official papers and toe tags out the window as he gunned the engine and ripped through the parking lot. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he laughed once again.
“Bye, bye, world of death.”
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