The Dead Man’s Cuticles
The first time I saw a dead body I was ten. The corpse was slumped against a wall under the bridge – his head bowed and limp like he was praying without any hope. A coyote loomed over him, lips smacking as it savored the taste of August-cooked flesh. I quietly stepped off my bike and kicked down its stand when the coyote flinched. It pulled its face out of the man’s chest and looked at me. Blood tinted its tawny snout a dark shade of carmine. It peeled up half its lip to bare a row of red-washed teeth. A growl boiled in the back of its throat as if to say, This one’s mine. Find your own.
I dropped my backpack to one shoulder and dug out the sandwich bag of quarters Mama told me to take to the Coinstar in Kroger. There had to have been at least a hundred bucks worth of quarters in that bag and I shook every last one of them at the mutt. It cowered away, answering each step I took towards it with a step back until I shouted, “Get outta here!” The mongrel whimpered as it turned tail and ran along the riverbank into the woods. I looked back at the man.
His chest was split open like an unzipped jacket. I saw everything – ribs gnawed to nubs, intestines all drug out. A heart hung in the corner of his chest, shriveled up as if it had died mid squelch. Death was in the air and the taste of it fermented on my tongue like a rotten fruit – disgusting but vaguely intriguing. I blinked and realized I was standing directly over the body. Something drew me towards it like a pied piper playing a song on the wings of hungry flies. What I remembered most about my first dead body wasn’t the smell or the buzz of flies or the way his ribcage sat exposed like a yawning maw full of chipped teeth. No. It was the hands.
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The first time I saw a dead body I was ten. The corpse was slumped against a wall under the bridge – his head bowed and limp like he was praying without any hope. A coyote loomed over him, lips smacking as it savored the taste of August-cooked flesh. I quietly stepped off my bike and kicked down its stand when the coyote flinched. It pulled its face out of the man’s chest and looked at me. Blood tinted its tawny snout a dark shade of carmine. It peeled up half its lip to bare a row of red-washed teeth. A growl boiled in the back of its throat as if to say, This one’s mine. Find your own.
I dropped my backpack to one shoulder and dug out the sandwich bag of quarters Mama told me to take to the Coinstar in Kroger. There had to have been at least a hundred bucks worth of quarters in that bag and I shook every last one of them at the mutt. It cowered away, answering each step I took towards it with a step back until I shouted, “Get outta here!” The mongrel whimpered as it turned tail and ran along the riverbank into the woods. I looked back at the man.
His chest was split open like an unzipped jacket. I saw everything – ribs gnawed to nubs, intestines all drug out. A heart hung in the corner of his chest, shriveled up as if it had died mid squelch. Death was in the air and the taste of it fermented on my tongue like a rotten fruit – disgusting but vaguely intriguing. I blinked and realized I was standing directly over the body. Something drew me towards it like a pied piper playing a song on the wings of hungry flies. What I remembered most about my first dead body wasn’t the smell or the buzz of flies or the way his ribcage sat exposed like a yawning maw full of chipped teeth. No. It was the hands.
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