The Job

The Job

The first time she cut open a body was almost fifty years to the day. She’d been twenty six, recently widowed with three children under eight to feed. An outcast for having married into a different caste than her family, she had little money and resources. At that time, this opportunity to help in post mortems at the government hospital had seemed like a godsend. It was one of those rare positions that few wanted, given its rather macabre nature.

To her own surprise, her stomach had not churned with nausea and she rather enjoyed unravelling the story of deaths that the bodies told. How each body that came to the rusted steel table under the flickering fluorescent lab was supposed to be built the same, yet wasn’t. Over time, she had educated herself at the postmortem table and though the doctors changed, her nerves of steel had become legendary.

It was only in the last few weeks that she had started dreading the dead bodies splayed open. An unfamiliar revulsion roiled in her gut and she had come precariously close to vomitting several times recently.

And today, she had actually puked.

She now sat outside the lab, her body covered in chills, trembling. She knew that time to leave had probably come, though she was loathe to admit it. What flummoxed her was this sudden distaste for the job that she had come to cherish.

Some time later, she trudged home, having tendered her resignation. She no longer needed the job for the money; her children had ensured that. But it still galled to admit defeat in so humiliating a fashion.

That night, she ate dinner with uncommon relish, as if all the bile that she had emptied had left a cavernous hole in her stomach. Immediately after dinner, she fell asleep in her old bed, unable to keep her eyes open.

She dreamed that she was back at the steel table and a body was split open. She stood at its apex, grinning down at the face. The face of her husband who had been the subject of her first post mortem, having been killed in a drunken accident.

She never woke up.

The End