Horrorcore by Ofelia Hunt
HORRORCORE
I write my name on the corpse because my partner tells me to. The morgue's both whiter and colder than I expected and though I brought fifty sharpies in my book-bag, I fear I'll run out of marker. We draw goats. We draw whales. We draw elephant seals. It's difficult to open the body drawers but we open them anyway. We tie lines to the bodies and hook the lines to a hospital tractor and drag the bodies along the very white hospital hallways beneath the pale fluorescent lights. When my partner wants to chop the limbs from the trunks of the bodies, I stop.
My partner's cell phone chirrups birdlike. "Yes, lots of ice," he says. "No, well maybe."
"Why are we here anyways?" I want to know.
"Sshhh," he says, leaning his face toward my face, thick fingers over his phone.
I sit crosslegged and read my twitterfeed for while.
I want my phone to be a hand. I want to remove my elbows and immolate them. Or just immolate my face. I'm not sure what immolate means but my partner believes in self-immolation, or so he lectured this morning while I bathed.
"We're going, new mission," my partner says.
"I'm tired of these missions, they're boring, and I have homework."
"Homework?" He chuckles and pokes my little ribcage with a tongue depressor.
In the woods behind the hospital the fog is cold but I inhale anyway. We change into new gray scrubs and burn our old t-shirts. I like pouring lighter fluid on the t-shirts. I like lighting the lighter. My partner polishes his knife and hides it in another tree. Beyond the woods, I climb into the cab of the yellow Datsun and unlock the doors. As we drive, I kick the box on the floorboards. It's full of heads and fingers and elbows and kneecaps and ears and eyeballs and hair. We're collectors probably. Probably there are lots of collectors in America, but our collection (as my partner often says) is the most unique and will eventually make us millions.
It's a game like Tetris. The goal is to fit the most people pieces in the smallest space, to design out a framework with two-by-fours and to fill the framework with pieces. We keep the frames in the backyard, back in the back bedroom, or down in the basement. The problem of smells can be solved with aromatherapy.
"Essential oils," I whisper, giggling.
"Huh?"
"I want to go to Seattle."
"We're not going to Seattle."
"Seattle's full of zombies."
Hours later we immolate the Datsun next to our little cement block house. We get the sharpies and label our new pieces and place them carefully in a new framework.
"Some day we'll get our own personal framework," my partner says.
"Okay, good."
That night I dream of sleeping in a barrel of hair. It's a common dream. The hair's gray and dry. The barrel's oak and ringed with steel and my partner rolls me and seals it. Easier for transport.
We have a lot of games like this.
We label everything in the house with post-it notes. Sometimes I label me. Sometimes we label me. Sometime we label me for hours.
* * *
OFELIA HUNT is the author of My Eventual Bloodless Coup Bear Parade, and the novel Today & Tomorrow from Magic Helicopter Press.
Officially speaking, she blogs at Ofelia Hunt, here.
Ofelia Hunt was a featured reader at Smalldoggies Reading Series PDX012 in August of 2011.