Surprisingly, it was a good morning even though I essentially woke up to a newcomer that had the misfortune to make the wrong joke in front of the wrong crowd. Not to mention my nightmares had begun once more, leaving me to wake restless yet still substantially more tired than a one-armed paper-hanger. The ambulance pulled up just as I was finishing my daily coffee and fresh, warm scone. Soon the paramedics had a body bad off their gurney and onto one of my own. Sighing with mild resentment for the time at which they chose to drop it off here at the morgue, but it was their duty and I couldn't blame them for that. Just as they had finished their part of the job, so mine began. Waving them off, I rose from my chair and approached "the meat cart", which I had deemed so very fitting a title, then turned it down the hall and pushed. The gurney's bum wheel squealed with every rotation, like a tiny pig being stuck again and again by a sadistic butcher, as it rolled down the hall.
I pushed the gurney with a covered corpse atop it through a set of swinging doors and into the chilled operating room, whistling all the while. Letting it come to a rest near the operating table, I engaged the cart's brakes and shifted the body bag onto the table. When I unzipped the bag, I expected to see a face and not the soft remains of what used to be a head. Whether or not the cranial crushing happened before or after the bumbling EMTs handled the John Doe was between God, them, and the technically headless Norseman (assuming the country of origin on the bag's tag was correct). However silent the cadaver was, I need not hear the man's tale for I would find the answers I sought during the examination. The right corner of my mouth turned upward, as I could only smirk at a thought I have concieved several times over. Given the obvious fact that the funeral for the man, whoever it may be, would have a closed-casket wake. In fact, after the identification, I really could prepare the body however I saw fit. If I truly wanted to, and a small part of me did, I could sew a bag of lemons onto the man's neck stump and drew him up in a clown suit to be buried in. I simply batted the thought away and began to prepare my tools, knowing that such "fun" would be considered...unethical.
But a man could dream, oh yes he could...