the series of r/nosleep | volume one: the {smile} series

{C}remation

I come from a small town where the only jobs for freshly graduated college kids stupid enough to return home are fast food and Walmart, so I practically peed myself when Anita called me out of the blue and offered me an internship. It's not the most ideal job, and it's something I have to lie about when I talk to other people or I get a lot of really stupid questions -- "Does it smell in there, Cassie?", "Do you ever, you know, check out peoples' wangs?", "Are you scared?"-- but it's a weekly paycheck and I have the chance to stay on after a year.

First off, I've got two brothers so I've pretty much seen it all. Steven used to bring home deer and rabbits, and skin them right outside my bedroom window. Chad, he was normal, but he'd always show up with some freak injury that he'd be more than happy to shove in my face while I was trying to eat my Cap'n Crunch. I can safely say I was a already fairly morbid midwestern girl far before I started working at Reynolds Funeral Home.

And secondly, you can't just turn down an offer to work in a funeral home. Forget all the dead bodies stuff, being a mort tech is a cushy job. I mean, that's why they always keep it in the family! I think I work about twenty total hours a week, get paid for forty, and spend all my free time in the upstairs lounge on one of the pastel rose couches reading my kindle and avoiding Centaur, Anita's mastiff with a affinity for humping my hip. Plus, did I say I may get to stay on in a year? I mean, that's like a life gig; the golden ticket and all those other corny cliches. So, when weird things happen in a mortuary you tend to ignore them, because the perks are good.

That's normal, right?

Okay, so a few days ago I got called in to prep two bodies; a mother and son poisoning, which as sad as it seems is a pretty big cash cow for funeral homes. We'll take nice safe heart attacks and poisonings any day of the week over gun shots and car wrecks. There's no physical reconstruction, maybe a little around the mouth if there happened to be a large amount of bile or resuscitation efforts, but it's way better than trying to jigsaw puzzle somebody's face back together. And as in any business two is always better than one.

We're a small funeral home, you could almost call us mom and pop, except Anita's husband died a few weeks ago, so I guess we're a mom and random girl business. We don't have a whole lot of money for sub freezes and heavy duty storage like you see on tv with the stacked drawers and stuff. We've got one positive temp storage in the basement with an old Mopec table, and three gurneys for overflow. The door to storage is one of those big steel insulated ones that seals when it's shut, so when you latch it down you can't hear a thing on the other side. Which is why the noise really freaked me out.

I was washing down the boy, he smelled like strawberries and stomach acid, and I was lost in thought about some teen romance I was reading when I heard a shuffling sound. I said the storage was sealed shut, right? Like, no sound? Because, that's what I was used to and when I heard it, let's just say I jumped over the table like I was an Olympic freakin' high jumper.

"What the fuck?!" I screamed. Not the most eloquent I admit, but it got the point across. "Anita, are you messing with me?"

She wasn't, I mean, she never had in the past and she wasn't the type to randomly prank an employee surrounded by dead bodies. She's like a grown up Wednesday Addam's, but with less personality. I scanned the room slowly, looking at the empty corners first, then counted all the tools on the instrument cart. One saw? Check. Two bone cutters? Check. Two flush retractors? Check. One really big pair of scissors? Nope.

"Seriously?!" I screamed. It came out much louder than I was expecting in the small room and I raised my hands to block my ears. In my right hand the scissors came extremely close to stabbing me in the temple. "Oh," I said to no one. I must have grabbed them off the cart when I hurdled the boy.