CAUSE OF DEATH

Madeleine Vigneron

After they fish the waterlogged corpse from its resting place at the bottom of the lake, they arrange it on a table like a funerary slab. The coroners detach the metal hooks from the dredging net and unwrap the mesh from the cold body. The ragged remains of clothing, drenched and muddy, are carefully sliced and peeled away, and they wash the silt and seaweed off her clammy flesh. One picks algae from her hair, disappointed that it falls in thick matted clumps rather than floating, long and light, about her head like Ophelia’s. The body’s surface, too, is a disappointment. It is not pale and marble-smooth to the touch—the lovely lines are disrupted by bloating. The skin is pebbled and discoloured; visibly covered in short, dark hair. That is, where it has not been bitten and torn away from its time on the lakebed. They might conclude, if they are particularly adept, that as the body sank downward, it was curiously nibbled by small fish darting in schools through the sun-warmed water. They might notice from the shapes of these incisions that she thrashed, not against death but against the indignity and discomfort as she reached for it. But that conclusion is unlikely, as those minor bites are hidden by the larger chunks of tissue ripped from the water-softened body by those creatures at the bottom of the lake, by which point she had learned—or at least grown tired enough— not to struggle. Most likely, they will conclude she went to the feast willingly.

When the knife meets flesh, it yields quickly to the dull metal, spilling turgid lake water rather than blood. The muscles of the thigh are saturated, soluble; slowly drowning as the lungs did during her descent. They discuss whether this leg might have carried her to the cliffside, walking purposefully as a bride to the altar, or whether she might have been pushed by a stranger, suddenly and violently. Ultimately, this part of the corpse is too waterlogged to meaningfully study, a thin wrapper of mottled flesh broken easily, like the skin of a water balloon.

They move on to the head. A long incision across the hairline, and they peel back the scalp from the white bone of the skull underneath. This, at least, is as hard and white as expected. As the serrated saw rasps through the chalky barrier, the one not holding the saw remarks that he always tends to see bone as less alive than the rest of a body. Sure, he can imagine life coursing through the soft parts. But, perhaps from all the skeletons he’s handled, he imagines the hard bone as a frame for the soft living matter rather than the living matter itself.

“Even the soft parts of this one are dead,” says the one with the saw, and he continues his work.

When they finally break through, cracking the skull open like an egg, it too has been filled with filmy lake water, seeping into the skull alongside the spinal cord. The brain sloshes about in its fishbowl, fissures and sulci unfolding and unfurling, surrendering to its surroundings just as easily as the leg did. It is impossible, in this half-decomposed state, for the brain to provide any meaningful information about how the body ended up underwater. It is hard enough to tell where the girl ends and the corpse begins; perish the thought of how the girl ended and the corpse began.

A vertical cut down the middle of the chest; the ribs snap away like decaying twigs. They peel away the flaps of skin and fascia and secure them to the side with hardy metal clamps, petals of tissue opening up like a flower. They try to carefully dissect the organs, but each one dissolves into the soup of viscera.

At the centre of the corpse is a blackened cavern where the heart should be. This, at last, is something that makes sense. A flaw at the girl’s core; scorched evidence of a blaze burning self-destructively through flesh and bone. The equilibrium makes a poetic sort of sense; the fire inside her sought out enough water to pacify it. This was less a tragic death than an inevitable one.

They record the incident as a death of natural causes: the girl’s own nature and of the nature of her surroundings. One of them carefully cleans his blades, and the other hopes their next corpse will be more beautiful.

Be Here With Me on this Train Car Seat For Just Three Hours

By Sophie Ye

The woman two seats down with her slim cigarette is laughing into her phone, somewhere a phonograph plays a twinkly tune—How’d that get in here?—And the train, which is a living machine, thunders north. It’ll take us to where we need to go. Right now, we are nowhere at all.

I have a lot to tell you. (But first you break your scone into pieces, buttering each one before popping it into your mouth.) Here’s something: the idea of peace rips me apart. I ask you: Can you imagine walking and having an identity, or knowing desire, or being truly okay with the fact that nothing ever stays the same? and—Where are we going, again?—I tell you: Recently I feel removed from myself.

So yes, I’m in poor health, but it could be worse. I could be inconsolable. I could not see the green-gray fields on those perfect off-kilter mornings but I do, and the fog that slithers between the trees is always gone by the time you open your eyes.

But anyway, tell me what you see when you look out the windows. Even as the world is rushing by, describe it to me as though we’re the only people walking through it, taking our time. Sun-washed red upholstery, the maple wood table between us, and the faint smell of coffee beans. This rickety chandelier that might fall on our heads and the stained carpet beneath our feet.

I like watching you lift your teacup to your mouth, sipping, looking right at me. You pose a simple question. Did I get that right? I don’t even need to try to love you.