Suggested Audio Jukebox:

 

[1] Alice Cooper “I Love The Dead”

[2] Siouxsie & The Banshees “Night Shift”

[3] Fields of The Nephilim “Reanimator”

[4] Ray Evans & Jay Livingston “Bonanza”

[5] Slayer “Necrophiliac”

 

The things we do for love. I always dreamed of meeting the guy of my dreams as a little girl but it’s been a long and arduous path to where I am now. They say you have to kiss a fair few frogs before you find your prince and I make them right you know. If you don’t believe me, you should take a look in my basement. You see, I’ve always found it incredibly hard letting go, even when a relationship is dead in the water, and like to hold onto a keepsake, something to remind me of the time we spent together. Some hang onto cinema stubs or poorly written love letters, I prefer body parts as there’s so much more you can do with them once things head south. It just so happens I’ve amassed quite the collection over the last few months and I blame unresolved detachment issues from my childhood for that one. Call me a hoarder and I’ll show you my jar of eyeballs. But deep down, I’m just a girl desperate to be loved and deserve my shot at happiness just like anyone else.

I think I knew pretty early on that I was different from the other girls in class. Most of them were drop dead gorgeous and that’s precisely what I secretly wanted them to do as I didn’t grow into my skin until much later. I guess that made me an ugly duckling and school is no place for those who struggle so much with identity. I wasn’t athletic and neither was I particularly academic; so I was fighting a losing battle from the get-go. It also didn’t help that I was riddled with acne and that my clothes originated from the thrift store. I lost count of all the nicknames I was called and none of them were at all becoming in case you were wondering. Do you have any idea how hard it is to secure yourself a prom date when you’re known as “Fugly Freda”? I wouldn’t have minded but my birth name is Anna Louise Jefferson for crissakes. Kids can be so goddamn cruel.

While secondary education held little appeal to me, I found biology lectures fascinating and it was during one of these that I found my niche in life. When Mrs. Talbot dropped a frog in my tray, handed me a scalpel and requested that I dissect it to determine the sex, it was like all my birthdays arriving at once. Indeed, so enamored was I by my amphibian friend that I negated to put on my safety goggles, gloves, or lab apron and had it pinned wide open before she could return to the front of class. I believe it was then that I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up; although I wisely kept any visions of grandeur to myself as I didn’t fancy making myself any more of an easy target. Instead I kept my head down and got an A+ for Biology, which went some way to opening doors. Others went on to further education, trying to work out their vocation in life as they’d spent the past five years pissing their education up the wall, but not I. And I have that nice Mr. Erikkson to thank for that one.

He may have been my mentor but Mr. Erikkson was actually my very first friend too. A mortician by trade, he was Swedish of origin and his English was sketchy at best. However, as his assistant, I was fast-tracked to precisely where I wanted to be and we soon overcame any language barriers. I love the smell of formaldehyde in the morning and my nostrils flared the very moment I stepped into his workshop, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He adored my enthusiasm and willingness to learn and, within no time, had me right up to my elbows in sanitation duties. There are numerous stages to a funeral director’s process, but dressing and casketing the cadaver held little interest to me and I reckon he knew it. Thus I was responsible for the embalming, leaving his deft touch for the all-important last minute touch-ups. Draining the fluids always seemed more intimate to me and allowed me to get hands on as soon as another stiff was slid onto the gurney. I listened intently to his instruction and never once questioned his authority; so he didn’t think to point the finger my way when certain apparatus began to show up missing.

I hated going about my business in such an underhand manner as I truly saw Mr. Erikkson as a father figure and had no desire to rip the old guy off after all the kindness he’d shown me. But eventually every bird needs to fly the nest and he’d taught me all I needed to know about getting started. I still showed up every day for my shift, not a solitary second late I might add, but made my own job perks is all. We’re not talking grand larceny, just a pair of forceps here and a jugular drain there, enough to stock up my own makeshift laboratory at home. This enabled me to save sufficient funds to rent my own place and I got decidedly lucky on the landlady as she seldom shows her face. I keep up with my monthly payments and she rarely hears a peep from me so, by all accounts, I’m pretty much the perfect tenant. In my chosen field, discretion is everything, as the service I provide doesn’t necessarily adhere to legal guidelines.

Mr. Erikkson hadn’t taken a single day’s vacation in over thirty years as a qualified mortician so I suggested he take a break as he was beginning to look a little jaded. It took a great deal of persuasion before he came around to my way of thinking; but I swore blind he could leave his home from home in capable hands and that I’d swing double shifts if that was what it took to remain on top of his ever-swelling workload. Reluctantly he took my advice and let’s just say that there’s an empty sarcophagus or two out there in the church graveyard. That’s not to say all corpses weren’t dressed appropriately, casketed affectionately and corsetted accordingly for their public viewings, more that they never quite made it to the packing and shipping phase. The way I saw it, they’d served their purpose, allowed any grieving loved ones to get their emotional goodbyes out-of-the-way, and nobody stood to get hurt by me snatching the old body away for the good of scientific advancement.

What can I say? My teenage pin-up was Herbert West as his re-animation skills really were second to none and I’d be happy just to possess a 10th of his know-how or single vial of his luminous reagent. Alas, I learned a harsh lesson here, as you really shouldn’t believe everything you watch in the movies. It would take years of dedicated research to reach his level of ability and I was all out of patience after harboring this hankering for my entire adolescence. Besides, subjects fascinated me more when they didn’t possess a pulse, and I didn’t have to concern myself with pointless arguments over whether or not I should be afforded the power to play God. I never had a Barbie doll as a girl and hated that I’d missed out on such a fundamental part of my childhood. This just allowed me to make up for lost time and I reckon I have done just that.

The thing is, young women have needs outside of youthful fantasy, and all of this was coinciding with some drastic changes in my own biological make-up. I didn’t get my first period until I was almost seventeen, my breasts didn’t start to develop until around my nineteenth birthday, and the urges girls normally entertain during their teenage years didn’t arrive until I no longer fell under that age bracket. Changes were clearly afoot and it felt like the right time to explore these forbidden desires further; so I considered my options but not for very long. Dating seemed like such a dishonest pursuit and I had no idea what boys wanted to hear or how to exhibit faux confidence. Thus I decided to home-school when it came to sexual enlightenment and learn the ropes with a more passive subject.

Considering I only had two potential suitors in my possession, there wasn’t much of a choice to be made here. One of the dead men, Gershon Aaronovich, was almost eighty years young when he snuffed and no longer quite the ticket with regards to moistening a virgin’s formerly unsoiled gusset. If he could no longer get it up in life then the chances of him doing so in death were slim to nothing and his genitals were far too unsightly to play any part in my very first time. However, Seth Boothroyd was an entirely different prospect and, as luck would have it, I was only too familiar with this young buck from back in school. “Bonk-on Boothroyd” they used to call him after he sprung an unsolicited erection during a district swim meet and these growth spurts weren’t exclusive to the pool either. You could hand him detention and Seth would no doubt get a rush of blood; so the title was very much fitting on this occasion. The fact that I knew how mean the other kids were to him meant that we shared some common ground and, while I wouldn’t have wished harm on this quiet, unassuming boy, I wasn’t about to waste his rigor mortis.

Now I know a lady shouldn’t kiss and tell but Seth’s hardly going to blow the whistle and you know the kind of hardship I’ve had to endure en route to my long overdue deflowering so I’m not expecting loose lips to go sinking any ships here. It was such a monumental experience, such a pivotal rite of passage, that it only seems right to paint a mental picture. Necrophilia tends to be frowned upon in ordinary society and I’m more than aware how taboo it is considered. But we’ve all got to start somewhere right? I mean, I have every intention of sleeping with a live subject at some point, just to make any necessary comparisons you understand. The fact is that Seth Boothroyd perished with a boner, was delivered to us with a boner, and it was his boner that prevented his family requesting an open casket. Why must it end there? Naturally I’d be delicate as the last thing I wished to do was spoil the goods. That said, it was to prove something of an unknown quantity, and I had precious little control once the flood gates opened.

Have you ever rode bronco? I think I overheard one of the girls in gym class referring to it as “riding the volcano” and this exchange ordinarily occurs once climax becomes inevitable. Seth was a big boy and his rigid member encouraged just the right level of friction to get the honey dripping so to speak. I knew that time was of the essence as he was starting to drop beneath room temperature and the preservative I’d topped him up with back at Mr. Erikkson’s knocking shop was no longer proving quite so effective. Decomposition is a necrophiliac’s biggest headache as it opens things up for maggots and other freeloading undesirables and we necromantics like things to remain one to one. Society may deem it utterly unforgivable but, to us, it’s a most sensual act and dignified in its own special way. Some folk like the way that wine tastes fresh from the vineyard, others like myself prefer something a little more vintage. That just makes us connoisseurs right?

Seth may not have come at the end of this particular aerobic pursuit, but I certainly did, to the tune of multiple throes no less and every last one of them thrashing. How could I have denied myself this very human pleasure for so long? More importantly, how many times could I saddle up in one night? With “Bonk-on Boothroyd” bucking beneath me, I managed to achieve seventeen orgasms and I’m reasonably assured that’s an impressive tally you know. Better yet, there was no need for anything pointless such as post-coital snuggling while awaiting recharge as the only fluids spilled were from my neck of the woods and he remained primed the whole time like my very own personal sex slave.

We continued to hang out afterwards and I still have parts of Seth pickled in the basement just as a reminder of the magical evening we shared in one another’s company. However, it felt like we were better suited as friends, and I still had rather a lot of copulation to catch up on with fresher meat shall we say? This is where Mr. Eriksson really is the gift that keeps giving as, he was so taken by my deputy skills during his downtime, that he packs his bags for sunnier climates quarterly now. Right now I’m up to half a dozen stiffs and, while many of those have exceeded their sell-by dates, I just so happen to have welcomed in a fresh intake. His name is Richard Charles Stevens and his papers say he died as a result of multiple stab wounds to the face after a drunken brawl. This proposed a unique challenge as I’d never before been required to work on such a complex facial reconstruction and I only had a single blurry photograph to go by. Fortunately, his family didn’t expect the moon on a stick and a closed casket was permitted for his wake. That’s precisely what they got.

You see, while they were mourning over their recent loss over a pine receptacle accommodating several years’ subscription to Girls & Corpses, I was riding this felled thoroughbred like Godiva and giving him the kind of send off that I’m certain he would have chosen for himself, had his demise not been quite so out-of-the-blue. That’s where you join us now; think of yourself as a fly on the wall and please ignore any other insects congregating at the scene as their invites got lost in the post. I just wanted to share this tender moment with you and hopefully show you that what I do isn’t that dissimilar to what couples have been doing for thousands of years now. So what if he’s beginning to turn; he still makes a rather delightful snuggle buddy. Speaking of which, it really is past my bedtime, and I have a big day tomorrow as Mr. Eriksson doesn’t return to work until next Monday and I’ve got a male stripper in transit from Colorado as we speak. For now, I hear you sleep better after a good bedtime workout, so request that you let yourself out quietly. That is unless you get a kick out of watching. Nitey nite.

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