Blood Sugar by Kat Turner

Author:Kat Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64898-090-9
Publisher: City Owl Press

Fourteen

An acrid bite of embalming fluid and rubbing alcohol stung Eve’s nose. She swiped two streaks of coral lipstick across a dead woman’s mouth. The contrast was garish against heavy pancake foundation, but oh well. The deceased’s survivors wanted the woman to look her Sunday best, and customers had the final say in aesthetic matters.

Seven days had passed in a mundane drag. Eve worked, then returned home to binge-watch Netflix and eat takeout for one. Meg and Eve’s folks had sensed she needed to be alone and let her be, considerate and supportive people they were. So she had stewed in her loneliness and regret, regret for what she’d agreed to do while tranced out and deep in the bowels of Amazonian soil. Regret for failing to be there emotionally for Jonnie, to offer support or an ear while he faced tumult and sorrow in his personal life, plagued her.

But she’d made a pledge, and she had to quit stalling and fulfil it.

Eve fussed with the body’s brittle hair, folding its cool hands in a demure fig leaf over the midsection as she finished those final dignified touches. The steady whir of the funeral home’s central air conditioner, the only sound in the basement, calmed her some.

She took a step back and appraised her work. Imperfect, but perfection was an unobtainable platonic ideal in her line of work. Due to their very nature, corpses never looked quite right. They sagged with a peculiar deflation. Clothing refused to fit them properly. Heavy makeup and slack musculature gave their faces the appearance of uncanny rubber masks.

They looked as if they were missing something, incomplete, which of course they were.

The dead surrendered their souls, their spirits, that mysterious fifteen ounces that came to Eve as golden balls of light. The waste, the corruption of turning meat, remained.

But in a sense, imperfections defined what Eve loved about her work. She dealt in entropy and chaos, striving to bring a modicum of beauty, or at least integrity, to the physical evidence of something intrinsically ugly. The ugly truth of us all.

When facing what we will ultimately become, Eve theorized, we might as well allow ourselves to see the bit of ghastliness, wrongness, that without fail seeps through puritanical attempts to mask it.

Eve smiled at the prepared cadaver. The dead were stubborn, insistent upon showing their grotesque faces. She respected that about them.

And now magic bound her to both facets of the departed, shimmering souls and rotting bodies. Eve chuckled, her voice making an echo against shiny metal walls. She’d been promoted. Go her. She removed her blue rubber gloves with a snap, tossed them in the trash, and washed her hands.

But enough reflection. Duty called. She yanked her purse off its wall hook and slung it over her shoulder. The blue towel, saturated with Jonnie’s blood, weighed about a million pounds in her bag. It was an albatross, her guilty remnant of him.

Her heart thudded as she raced up the stairs, checked the lights, and locked up.

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