» Have you ever seen a dead body?

Have you ever seen a dead body?
I served a stint as an Auxiliary Police Officer in a major American city. Part of our training was a sesh with the Medical Examiner's office, and knowing that we were civilian volunteers they always picked out the choicest corpses when they knew that the Auxiliaries were being dragged in.

Anyway, the corpse they had lain out for us to see was what they call a "floater" - fished out of the harbor in an advanced state of decomposition after roughly two weeks of leisurely summer bathing without the aide of a pulse.

Anyway, when the M.E. dramatically pulled back the sheet, two of my cohorts launched their lunch straight down the front of their uniforms, one passed out, and the rest of us wretched from the stench, which was sort of like low-tide at the rotting fish beach - the M.E. explained that the majority of the stench was from adipocere - the liquification of putrefied fat. Further, he demonstrated something called "skin slippage" by using a forceps to grasp a bit of skin near the dearly departed's left shoulder and in one motion, peeling back the poor gent's entire chest skin, leaving rivulets of runny, stinky, rotten liquid fat cascading down the man's sides and pooling beneath his bloated buttocks. I should also mention that his twig and berries had been considerably scavenged by whatever decided it liked the taste of him, so most of what was left down there was vessles, some greasy snippets of muscle, and one ancient, withered testicle, looking kind of like a shucked oyster with a bad disease.
(Fri 29th Feb 2008, 20:33, More)