There was a little old lady who lived in a... old folks home. He had big glasses and white curly hair. I am sure that you have seen someone like her. She spent most of her days sitting in a chair in the lobby: thinking, thenb forgetting, then wondering about what it was she had forgotten, then wondering about what it was she had forgotten. If you've ever been old, you know what she went through every single day. No one talked to her, and she talked to no one. That was her story until she died.
When she died, she was embalmed. Her family wanted her to look her sunday finest for her funeral, to give a good final impression. Little did they know that the embalmer would lose his mind.
Upon receiving her body, he removed her blood, filled her with fixative, made her hair, painted on the skin tones. You know, the things that embalmers normally do.
But then, a devious insidious idea came creeping into his head. "I wonder what it would look like if her tongue was sticking out," he thought; "I mean, it cant hurt just to see..."
The man had spent so much time around dead bodies he had finally lost it. The sense of propriety of given to most of humanity had been lost on him. The sacredness of a human corpse had been lost on him. He had, in short, gone bonkers.
So he went to work. He opened her mouth, and with his cold metal pliers, he grabbed the tounge. He slowly pulled the tongue until it sat draped over her lip, like a dog panting for breath.
"She looks so silly," he thought as he giggled to himself.
He went back to work on the makeup on her face. Another idea struck him.
"I wonder what she would look like with her eyes crossed?"
So up the eyeballs went, and gradually, gradually, he pushed the eyeballs, rotated the eyeballs into place.
She looked almost as insane as he had become. He knew somewhere deep on the inside that his was wrong, that corpses shouldn't be be fiddled with on a whim. Deep deep inside. Getting deeper. Almost gone. It barely registered that every other corpse he had made up had not looked like someone frozen in a epileptic seizure.
He kept on working. Her hair had already been done; it would have looked perfect to any normal person. But the embalmer was not a normal person. He was overcome with the sudden urge to trim the hair. It wasn't quite right, it didn't fit with his vision.
So he trimmed the hair. Trimmed, trimmed , trimmed, and trimmed some more until a crew cut was all that was left.
"All better," he thought.
He plopped her glasses back on her head, giving her the look of a space alien or a japanese cartoon.
He didnt remember that her eyes shouldnt be crossed, that her tounge should reside inside her mouth. That part of him was gone, was waving goodbye. She was perfect in his eyes, the wife he wished he had.
"My magnum opus," he thought as he slammed the lid on the coffin.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
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