Short Stories

Gross

The crowd swarmed in. Growing in size, each individual taking up the space of two. Eager to be the first. Pushing others out of the way, politeness forgotten the closer they got to the stage. 

Behind the curtain, members of the band were patiently and nervously waiting for the lights to go on and their cue to go on stage. They could hear the crowd growing excited, and the butterflies started churning faster. 

--

This was probably not what they meant when they said: 'Keep an open mind'. 

On a table in front of me was what remained of the victim's brain. Grey matter, pate, whatever you wanted to call it. Well, let's say a blender would have left the brain more recognisable than this shotgun headshot. I mean, it is hard to miss your target when you're that close, but they didn't give much thought to the poor cleaner that had to deal with cerebrum bits all over the walls. 

The forensics team could have been more careful, maybe putting brain matter into more than one bag labelled 'gross'. But I guess that's what you get when you hire young grad students. What would they say if they knew this bag of gross was probably around their age?

I wonder where the rest of the body is? There were no hair particles, so they must have been bald. Either that or...nope, just bald. It's too early in the year for someone to go around scalping people. I hope.

Why would you, for lack of a better term, shatter someone's brain, unless you had something to hide. What would you hide in a brain? 

One particular bit of goo stood out. Black, and slightly more discoloured than it should have been. 

When (if) the body was found, they'd have some more information from the burn marks on the eyebrows, but there was no reason that the brain should have been scorched. Maybe melted a little from the birdshot fragments mixed in from the shotgun load they used, but not particularly cooked enough to change colour. 

Scooping up the weird goo, weird in this instance was obviously subjective, I decided that the lab would have more fun with this. Especially with their very large, and very powerful...wasn't I supposed to be avoiding the beautiful lab assistant? Man was I a sucker for glasses. Oh well, an excuse was an excuse, and their microscopes were just a little newer anyway.