[kassyS]

He had a beautiful body, my first lover. When I first saw him, he was lying there, naked, with his eyes closed and his lips parted. I did not know his name. I stood in silent reverence at his feet and stared at his perfect, pale face. I wondered idly what color his eyes were. Regardless of his eye color, I knew that I wanted him. I knew that I would make love to him that night. I walked to him and reached toward him. His flesh was cool to the touch. When I lifted his eyelid, I could barely tell that his eyes had been green. Had been, because he had been dead for over twenty-four hours. This was my last moment of hesitation. I hesitated because of the white film that had grown over his iris. I hesitated because of the tiny puncture that was ever so slightly visible from where they had taken a sample of his optic fluid. I hesitated for a silent five minutes. Then, I closed his eye and walked to the door of the mortuary.

I locked it.

It was a formality, really. Nobody would be there for another eight hours. I had eight hours to prepare him for his funeral. That was my job. I had been doing it since my college graduation. I worked nights. I needed to work nights, so that my days could be spent avoiding human contact. I had known for years about my strange attraction to Death. I knew that it was something that I needed to be near in order to be happy. It was several years of quiet work in the basement, alone with Death, before I knew what form that attraction would take.

I walked back to his side. I did not know his name. I was not allowed to know. I was not really privileged to see that information. I knew that he was twenty-six. I knew that he had died of a congenital heart defect. I knew that he was beautiful, and that I loved him. I unbuttoned my shirt and let it drop to the floor. I reached out to him and ran my fingers delicately over the raised line of skin, textured like a soft zipper, where they had sutured his autopsy incisions. That contact, the first of its kind, was more potent than I could have imagined. I unhooked my pants and let them fall. I climbed up onto the cold, steel table with all of my undergarments still on. I reached for his hand and lifted it to my breast. I closed my eyes, and held my breath.

The room was silent. The cold, perfect, taut hand cupped my left breast as if it had been made to do so. I finally let my breath go and opened my eyes. He was just as beautiful as I had remembered him in my moment of blindness. My body was hot, my face flushed, my hands shaking. Only once, in high school, had I come so close to a sexual encounter. I had had a boyfriend for about a month when he decided to touch me. It was in his car, late at night, and I had found myself disgusted, violated, by the warm, damp pressure of his constantly moving fingers. What he was doing was too private for me to allow. I asked him to drive me home. Now, in the cool and stillness, I knew that there was no place more private, and no one more suitable to share my private moments.

I lowered his hand to my thigh and let my self lie flat on top of his body, my head against his neck. The subtle smell of decay that he wore in the place of the fashionable and overpowering cologne of the living was intoxicating. His skin gave only slightly. His incisions pressed against my chest, where I knew mine would someday be. In that moment, I knew that I would never feel that sort of connection with a living person. I sat up slightly and kissed him on the lips. He accepted it motionlessly. There was no tongue being forced into my mouth, only the pure sweetness of contact with an individual that nobody else wanted to touch, but who I knew ached for it. I was giving him my body as a gift. An offering. He would still be loved by those he left behind after he was buried, but this was the last time anyone would love him this way. In any way that was real. In any way that mattered.

Leaving his hand on my leg I sat up and unhooked my bra, letting it slip off my shoulders and casting it to the floor. The only sound in the room was my breath and my movements. There were no sounds from the outside penetrating the sanctuary that was the morgue. I ran my fingers down his inanimate chest, feeling the texture of his sutures under my fingers. My body pitched forward and my face was once again at his neck, lips pressed to the grove where cheekbone met throat. My knees lifted my body up and my thumbs blindly fumbled with my underwear. I did not yet know how, but I knew I had to have him. I had to let him have me.

The first time the bare skin between my legs touched his cool flesh I experienced a wave of pleasure so intense that I heard myself cry out before I felt it. My body, as if exemplified by the cool of the metal, the death, the room itself, was suddenly hot. I pressed myself to him. I did not need to do anything. I kissed him again and again. My fingers ran through his hair with a cautious abandon. I needed the touch, but I did not want to hurt him. His hair, so long after his breath left him, was attached more lightly than it had been when living. I pulled his hands to me again, ran them up and down my legs, across my stomach, up and around my breasts. This touch meant more to me than any other could. I knew that he must feel the same way. If not of a touches during life, at least of any contact left for him now.

It was a long time before I stepped down off the table. I had several hours before anyone was going to arrive at the morgue to check my work. I gathered the materials I needed. Still naked, I gently and deftly inserted the thick needle into his tender, still flesh to begin the embalming process. I felt hot tears on my cheeks, but I did not want to dry them. I held his hand as the machine removed all the liquid from inside of him and replaced it with something reeking and unnatural. I removed the needle and covered the hole. I delicately kissed the bandage, then his lips again. His clothes were lying on another table to one side of the room. I gathered them and dressed him, but I did not dress myself.

I gave him a final kiss and then set about making him look alive. The pure and naked way that only I had known him was about to be hidden forever. At least, until the makeup and the face that wore it was allowed to decay and disappear into the earth. Only Death and the worms could know him as I knew him.

Death and the worms.


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