The Still Heart

*Trigger Warning*

Dr. Elise Qiu was properly stumped. This autopsy was nothing like the others even though it had started out that way. Her notes regarding the body’s physical appearance were simple enough. The body, Nicholas Price Newman, was exactly six feet and 176 pounds upon his sudden death. His eyes were green, his hair was Auburn brown and about 1.8 inches long with short tapered sides, and he had a faded, jagged scar longways across his neck. He was Caucasian and exactly 23 years old, as he had inexplicably dropped dead on his birthday in the middle of a parking lot just two days prior. He wore a plain grey sweater with blue jeans and black sneakers with no socks.

The body had been received at the medical examiner’s officer two days ago shortly after the death had taken place and had been refrigerated in the morgue until Elise could begin the examination. The seals of the body bag were broken, the body photographed inside, and notes had been recorded on the positions of the clothing the body wore.

After closely examining the body’s clothes, Elise removed them, keeping a watchful eye for any abnormalities as she looked over the body itself. No paint flakes. No gunpowder residue. No bullets. No drugs. No blood. One black pentagram tattoo on the right hipbone.

After gathering hair, nail, blood, and skin samples, Elise made the appropriate notations on her body diagram before reaching for her recorder. “Throughout the external examination, the body has exhibited no abnormalities nor external traumas,” Elise stole a glance at the body as she spoke. “The pupils have dilated and the skin is pallid and cold to the touch, and though there is nothing else of note, the body is beginning the process of Rigor Mortis late at exactly two days, two hours and thirtythree minutes after death. Additionally, there is no lividity whatsoever on the body despite the lack of a heartbeat for two days now.”

Elise carefully placed a body block under the patient’s back, stabilizing it as best she could. Steeling herself, she steadied her hands and carefully made the first incision running from each shoulder joint to the sternum, then down to the pubic region.

As she prepared to peel back the tissue with her scalpel, Elise felt herself freeze in place as her skin suddenly went cold. A heavy weight hung in the air, a weight that emanated agony, loss, and bereavement. She shivered as the fleshy sensation of an unseen hand scraped down her neck, unable to shake the insurmountable feeling that somehow, despite being alive and well, someone had just maliciously stepped over her grave.

Shaking her head to clear the cobwebs, Elise pushed the enigmatic imagery from her head as she moved the skin and tissue back. She pulled the chest flap up to expose the ribcage before making two quick, precise cuts on each side. Slowly, she incised the tissue behind the ribcage before removing the bony structure from the body altogether.

A bitterness hung in the air, tasting of anguish, torment, and sorrow as Elise set about detaching various organs. She pushed through the unwavering memories that bubbled up in her subconscious, though she absentmindedly noted that they did not feel like her own.

An unexplainable onslaught of images assaulted her mind, her very being, as she worked on the body. She saw herself lying on the body block completely nude, throat slit, unseeing, terrified eyes wide open as they misted over in death. The scrape of

| McKenna Baxter

metal and flesh tearing echoed in her ears as inky sensations clouded her vision.

Elise felt the breath pulled from her throat as a distorted vision appeared before her. The light faded from her eyes, some inscrutable darkness plucking her melting eyeballs from the sockets as they liquefied. Her healthy skin paled to a sickly grey, and her curly, black hair began to smoke, invisible flames burning it down until all that remained was her charred scalp.

In the haze of her mind, Elise could feel a shadow seeping across a room, trickling darkness like a dying man bleeds red. Examining the organs exposed to her, she found herself deafened by a distant heartbeat so loud, the sound of blood flowing into the arthbeaderies rushed to her ears. A hazy swirl of rich crimsons, varying in shade and hue, erupted in her mind as she stepped away from the body to regain full focus, an intoxicatingly metallic sourness hanging in the air.

Suddenly whisked away into a dark hall of blistering heat, Elise screamed to unhearing assailants as an unearthly anguish rent the flesh from her bones, burning hotter and brighter than a funeral pyre. Ancient words rode her wails through the halls, past splatters of blackened, rotting blood on tattered tapestries, timeworn yet still imbued with delirious terror of times otherwise forgotten.

In the veil of moonlight through the worn hall, Elise howled as her ribcage exploded, blood and innards streaming outwards in a despondent dance of death.

Elise gasped, holding a hand to her rapidly beating heart. Sweaty, shaken, and left with lifetimes of terror and pain seared into her subconscious, she exhaled shakily, resolving to finish the procedure and take some time off after the ordeal. She had been planning her honeymoon for some time, and she needed a vacation now more than ever.

Globules of sweat beading on her face, Elise pushed through her shakiness and carefully cut the heart out of the pericardial sac, freeing it. Turning the heart over in her hands, she immediately realized something was wrong; the presence of black, oily blood and veins. Her chest felt empty, her rapid heartbeat slowing until she couldn’t feel it at all. Her fingers darted to her neck, feeling desperately for any hint of a heartbeat as the panic crept back into her mind like a tidal wave of agony and terror rising over a drowning, exhausted man desperately clinging to life.

A gentle, rhythmic thumping in her hand attracted the attention of the rattled doctor. Though her own pulse had curiously disappeared, the heart in her hand had slowly resumed beating, black beads of slick blood spurting from the aorta, a sinister forest of black veins creeping over whatever red and pink there was left. Warmth and color bled from her skin, hands and arms turning a sickly bluish grey.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Elise rasped, eyes frantically darting from the heart to her own skin. Her voice rose to an unhinged scream, nails digging into the tender flesh of the heart as she tightened her grasp. “It doesn’t make any damn sense! I’m alive without a heartbeat, and the heart is beating without a body!”

Perturbed and frozen in place by a sudden, potent otherworldly presence, Elise cautiously shifted her clouded gaze from the once-still heart softly beating in her hand to the pallid cadaver before her.

Slowly, almost trancelike, the body opened its unseeing eyes.