Rotten Luck 

I have been trying to sleep all night.  All I’ve succeeded in doing so far was send my lone sheet to the floor with my tossing about. 

Yes, I work as a mortician; but before tonight, my work has never disturbed my sleep – or any other facet of my life. 

Tonight, though, they had brought me one of my own. 

How did that happen?  I take precautions.  I don’t work my hobby in my own town. 

This one was Isabelle.  According to her toe tag, she apparently lives in the neighborhood.  I suppose she might have been visiting a friend in Peoria?  

Rotten luck. 

I’d been ready or a light night, thee being only one body on the schedule to be dressed for funeral. 

It’s my habit to unsheet the body, then proceed immediately to a thorough cleaning.  I do it quite by rote – which is why I didn’t realize who she was at first. 

The morgue employees had already filled her up with embalming fluid, so she was ready for my work to be done. 

After cleaning her up, I rolled her back onto her backside, and began the preliminaries.  Sewing the eyelids down (harder than it sounds, since the stitches could not be allowed to be visible).  Can’t have the dead’s eyes popping open just when momma was taking her last look!  The lips got the same treatment.  I had created my own nose insertions, which I’m proud to say made the dead look almost like they were breathing normally!  When I had first entered the profession, the collapsed nostrils had always disturbed me. 

  

So there I was, about to insert my unpatented invention, when... 

She already had some inserted!  I was so stunned, I collapsed backward, all but falling on my ass! 

I took a few deep breaths to settle myself down, then stepped back up to the corpse.  I studied her better, this time. 

She was quite blond and quite beautiful.  The type that never went for blokes like me.  Her body had seven knife wounds in her chest and stomach regions.  Exactly seven.  Never more, never less.  Each were almost exactly as deep as the others (though depending on my luck, I sometimes had to push the blade in the first hole a second time to achieve that affect). 

I usually take the toe tag off just before I begin working on the feet – but I needed to know for sure.  You see, I just couldn’t believe what was happening! 

Mary Isabelle Stevens.  Age twenty-three.  She lived not a half mile from the funeral home I worked at. 

Rotten luck. 

The morgue worker hadn’t bothered rubbing off the Coroner’s marks around the vagina; arrows pointing to bruising – though those bruises, of course, had now disappeared. 

A sort of nostalgia-like feeling came over me, then.  My hand was suddenly, as if on its own, rubbing those luscious legs, the stomach, those wonderfully tight breasts. 

I snapped my hand away in horror.  What the hell was I thinking?  I never touched them once they were dead!  I’m not some sort of pervert! 

But she was a beauty – even in death.  I knew I had to make her exceptionally beautiful for her funeral. 

“Mary,” I spoke softly, liking the name she hadn’t told me.  “Did I forget to thank you?”  I hadn’t, of course.  I always thanked them right away.  After the act, but before doing what I had to do to them.  “You were one of the best!” 

“I think that’s enough for a confession.” 

The voice shocked me.  Three men appeared from behind a curtain deeper in the room - I should have noted it had been closed around another bed! 

The speaker was wearing a tan overcoat – the other two police-standard uniforms. 

I am lying on my back on a hard metal ‘bed’, in the city lock-up.  I’m told I’ll be transferred to the county jail in the morning.  I wish I could get to sleep. 

I guess it was the nostril inserts.  I brag about them a lot.  The girl was from my own neighborhood, even though I hadn’t recognized her.  I suppose someone in her family had heard me brag about those inserts. 

Rotten luck.