Pseudopod: The Tomb

Very gory I think, but the sentiment is very sweet in the end.

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The Tomb

Annie Abbondante

When you are dead on the smooth glinting autopsy table they will take out all your insides. The oily, yellow layer of fat that keeps your red muscles warm will grow tacky in the air and your blood will pool in the bottom of you, like puddles after the rain. They will ladel out the white, soupy vomit of your stomach contents with the same brand of ladel you have in your kitchen drawer. Seeing the bits of carrot and undigested corn from the meal you didn't know was your last. They will know you like to swallow your pasta whole, feeling it wiggle down your esophagus in one piece. You will still be beautiful. Like a sleeping child your facial muscles will relax angelicly, but you will still be you. Your lips will have the same 58 creases, dipping gently like rolling hills. Your ears are still mazes like conch shells, translucently white like coral sand beaches. Your skin will retain its same cottony consistency for a while. Smooth and cool under my fingertips as they percieve the curves and wells of you. But only my fingers will tingle with sensation as you remain breathless and still. Your hair will be messy and falling in your eyes, and so I will finger comb it, memorizing the texture and color before they split your cranium like a coconut to examine your brain. Before they peel away the skin of your face, I will commit all the slopes to memory, your geometry burned into me. I will be able to see you in constellations and building frames where ever there are undetermined shapes waiting for your form. Your nudity is as big as an opera, splayed and spread, skin and hair everywhere. You are art, NOT pornography. The heat you once generated, which pulled me in like a moth to your bare lightbulb, has now stilled like the blood on your veins. I wish to spread myself out on you, transferring life from my cells to yours via active cellular transport, absorbing as much mortality as I can until we both exist in a place between life and death. To see the insides of you, they will have to pull you apart. The doctor is really nothing more than a soft fingered explorer, who knows his way around the black lumps and brown chunks of the human anatomy. He knows which juices squish out from where and why; he doesn't know what a gift it is to hold your purple heart in his latex hands. He will make you an empty shell of yourself, with your breastplate screaming open loudmouthed. Everyone will be able to look inside you, like the crematoria at a concentration camp. I want to crawl inside where your heart used to be and warm up what's left of you. You will be my cave, your ribs arching over protection; your sternum the keystome of my tomb. I want them to sew me in there forever and let me go with you where ever you go, regardless of what rot or pungency or worm should occur. I want to be the stuffing in your turkey and the picture in your locket. In a thousand years, someone will find you and open you up carefully, lovingly, as the most precious artifact that ever existed, gloved fingertips touching every rotten hair on your putrid head with reverence. In all your gory glory, they will crack you open and find me inside, tiny and curled up where your heart once was, and they will shake me awake. Yawning, I will tell them of you.