Another Excerpt From “Stone Mother”
A young man in pink scrubs popped out of the stairwell. “Sir, will you come down to the morgue, please?”
“Pardon me?”
“I think I have a live one in a drawer.”
“Let’s go,” I shouted across the hall. “Ross, I’m making a house call.”
Steel Mother by Henry Rex Greene
The morgue was on the second floor. In hospital jargon, death was referred to as a “second-floor transfer.” The morgue attendant directed me to a drawer where an open body bag exposed the upper half of a naked young woman. She felt warm, but no pulse. Her heart was silent. I shined a penlight into her eyes. The pupils were fixed and dilated.
“She’s really most sincerely dead.”
I scanned her chart. She had an idiosyncratic reaction to street drugs and spiked a fever of 109 degrees. She died in an ice bath and hadn’t yet cooled down to room temperature.
On my return, the hallway clock on the admitting ward read one thirty a.m.
“Roscoe, I shall retire to my call room to contemplate the meaning of life.”
“Thanks for the help, Max. Where were you?”
“In the morgue, checking a corpse. She was still warm and supple from malignant hypothermia. The attendant thought she was alive.”
“Did you get a little?”
“Ross, you’re one sick fuck.”
He laughed. “Actually, I draw the line at necrophilia.”
