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Cúbrame
Policemen prefer these dispatches. It gives them a chance to
speculate, to vilify, project themselves onto the scene:
--Bitch had it coming. In the very sheets her husband bought
and paid for.----If she’d been mine, she wouldn’t have gotten off so easy.-
Coroners wrap bodies in sheets to be paraded before gawkers
with blood seeping crimson into the fibers of the white, the whitest, of
linens. The wheels on all gurneys squeak, and every ambulance accumulates road dust
on its bumpers. Everything emergency personnel
touch is old, weathered and used. Blood looks different on
the sheets of the bed, blacker, like it was mixed with the dirt of the grave
before spilling out and soaking into the weave. The difference between the
coroners sheets and the bed’s coverings is the smell—one lacks the aroma of
love, is sterilized of any scent but formality and ritual. There words
the same:
--DOA of multiple
wounds inflicted by a sharp instrument, most probably a knife.--
Every once in a while, there will be a Sympathetic in the
audience, one who always hears their past singing in their ears through the
verse of an Eagle’s song, “and she drove herself to madness with the silver spoon”,
one who’s reformed:
--He ignored you. You didn’t exist until this very moment,
did you?--
Morticians play with the flesh in several different media:
cosmetics, haberdashery and taboos—fluids in before fluids out. After: with
needles and threads, the openings are sewn shut; a beatific smile sculpted in
frozen epidermis and paints; finally, to sleep in an outlandish box of heavy
metals and sateen sheeting.
Parlorists are the worst, escorting mourners through angels
weeping sheets of tears under black umbrellas, counting their money in every
dull eye, plying their sympathies on ears that want nothing more than to hear sadness:
--She’s in the third room down the hall to the right. Coffee
and smoking are downstairs. The chapel is located at the top of the second
floor. Please let us know of anything you might need.--
Ministers. Devotions in archaic parables and sentimentalities:
--Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death, I will fear no evil-- Dressed in glory, mouthing riches beyond this
world, salvation in the blood of a man nailed to a wooden cross, his blood dropping
vermilion into the coarse cloth covering his
genitals.
When the gravediggers smack the mounded earth with their
shovels, the blanketing is complete. Of the woman underneath arms primly
crossed, stabbed dead in wrongful passion, this journey ends here:
--Chili dogs or burgers?--
--It’s Tuesday, Doof. Pizza.—
Tomi Shaw lives in Kentucky, late of the
woods but now in the big city lights. She loves the
sound of rain tat-tattering on a tin roof. Summer
weekends find her at the drag strip in a
bittersweet-colored Mustang, cutting killer reaction
times and putting guys on the trailer home. Her work has appeared in Absinthe Literary
Review, Outsider Ink, Pindeldyboz, Smokelong
Quarterly, Snow Monkey, Penthouse, Literary Mama and
elsewhere. Coming soon to The Barcelona Review, The
Rose and Thorn, Gator Springs Gazette and The Dead
Mule. She has guest edited for Francis Ford Coppola's
All Story Extra and is currently co-editor of Prairie
Dog 13 Magazine.
Email: Tomi Shaw
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