I dream... of a morgue..

Love was blossoming around the dissection table, the pungent fumes of formaline filling the room. A wrinkled corpse was in the center, a bespectacled kid slicing its chest with a shining scalpel out of his new dissection set. “In a straight line from the collar bone to the left nipple, and around it.. That’s your vein there.” The dissection room was silent, as it was supposed to be, and when the anatomy professor spoke, his voice traveled up, hit the ceiling, and came back in an echo. Dreams have a bad sense of timing, so the echo stood out from the original voice, and I heard him twice. Perhaps it was I who heard him best, because the kid who was slicing me seemed to be too engrossed to listen, and the couples in while doctor’s coats were too absorbed in their new found love that for them nothing seemed to matter much. The girl on my left didn’t notice either. She was covering her nose with her perfumed veil, and was trying to think of more pleasant things. Because another look at the black cut on the dark brown blistered skin would make the vomit she was holding back to come out. The professor stole a quick glimpse at the black name plates of the dreamy couple, because it would hurt him much if they passed the anatomy exam.


I was bodiless, but somehow attached to the lifeless, withered body, like a swarm of noisy flies around a blotted corpse. Only there was no noise, only tranquil silence. I was bodiless, so I could travel up people’s nostrils into the darkest corners of their minds, and know their thoughts, and I could see myself without a mirror – I looked ugly.

They had kept me for a whole week in the freezer, along with so many other unwanted bodies, and had given a column on all the local newspapers with a picture of my swollen face, which appeared on corners of the 7th and 8th pages. No one had answered, so they stuck a tube of formaline into my jugular vein, so that I wouldn’t rot from the inside.

“I have a bone set, I have two full skulls, and a whole set of vertebrae. You know, I’m not too proud about the two skulls I have in the iron trunk, but the vertebrae set I have, they get spoilt so soon after the subject’s death. So, it’s a matter of pride to own one whole perfect set.” The spectacled boy explained to his mother. He was proud, and she was prouder.

One of the skulls were mine. One of the mortuary keepers had dug me out from where they buried me, after I was once again declared useless, after they had sliced my insides for the umpteenth time. He was drunk, two cheap quarters of rum had cost him Rs.80, and he had sold the bone set for rs.550 to the excited first year, and he had made a profit of Rs.470.

This is a reconstruction of a dream that I had. After a really long time. It was really detailed -most of this description is original - even the Rs.550, but I have added a little here and there for the sake of continuity. I think I should donate my body. And that is what I am going to do.