Death's Embrace
by Bob Gunner

It wasn't the best part-time job in town, but it paid enough of a salary to help Mel stay in college. He had always believed if he stood by his plan for implementing a realistic career goal, he would someday become a doctor. The world needed good doctors. Realistically, if he were to become a doctor, he would have to get use to seeing death.
One thing was for sure, at the funeral home where he worked he saw plenty of the dead.

Mel's work duties were basically simple, tidy up and straighten things a bit. A little sweeping, a little mopping, a little
disinfecting and sanitizing. Since he worked in the evenings after the establishment was closed, and was virtually unsupervised, he pretty much was his own boss. He could work at his own snail-like pace. Take a break to rest, or drink a soft drink, and do his homework assignments just about any time he wanted to. The job certainly didn't
distract him from his study sessions.

Working for the only mortician and funeral home in a small country town was quite an education in itself. Because Winding Oaks had total population of about 450, it wasn't that hard to keep tabs on who had died, married, or given birth. When anyone passed away in Winding Oaks, you knew it. It hung in the air like a dark fog. You knew the whole morbid story, all the hows, whens and whys. Yes, everyone knew everybody in Winding Oaks. So in turn, each body laid out on the marble slab was a friend, a neighbor or part of the extended family. Each cold corpse had an identity and a story.

Mel was running a few minutes late, he had forgotten to set the clock-radio when he took his afternoon nap between classes and work. He hoped Will Rankin-the elderly gentleman who not only owned the funeral home but also served as the coffin and burial-plot salesman and mortician-wouldn't notice. If Rankin did he didn't show it. He met
Mel at the door with the same friendly smile on his lips as always. His silver-grey hair greased back flat and wet against the sides of his head with rose scented hair oil.

"Ahh, Mel my boy, how are you today?" Rankin questioned as he handed Mel a slip of paper upon which was handwritten his instructions for the night.

"Fine Mr. Rankin, just fine." the teenager answered in a soft tone. As Mel looked over the list sizing up his work load for the night. Will Rankin recalled something he had forgotten, "Oh by the way Mel, there will be a delivery this evening."

The use of the term 'delivery' was Rankin's way of preparing Mel with the news that a new stiff would be arriving from the local county hospital. The angel of death had closed it's wings around another fresh soul, claiming the prize for himself. There was no hint of sensitivity in Rankin's voice, no compassion or sentimentality, no expression at all. No big deal.

Mel watched as the frail man in his late sixties reached for his Barsolino hat which hung on a wooden peg on the finely crafted coat rack mounted by the delivery entrance. The hat was made of fine black brushed felt accented with a bright crimson red silk band. The brim had been blocked and steamed in the cocked style of a 1940's gangster.

Carefully putting the hat over his head of thinning hair. he adjusted it-watching his moves in the mirror on the wall-and pulled a big fat Cuban cigar from his expensive pin-striped suit coat pocket. "Ahh. one of the finer benefits of the good life Mel my boy, a good cigar." he joked. Mel would identify Will Rankin forever with the smell of  those big cigars that smelled like burning rags and cheap dime store cologne...

Will tugged on the red piece of narrow plastic which was designed to help tear through the thin wrapper, and the clear cellophane came undone. "Oh by the way Mel, I just wanted you to know you have been doing excellent work around here, I put a little extra in your pay envelope this week. Maybe you can use it to take one of your  pretty young girlfriends out for a pizza or something?" Mel smiled at the comment, amused at the unusual display of kindness from the older man and replied, "Thank you sir. I'll do that."

Will paused by the door and flipped his cigar into the air catching it like a baton, licked it slightly around the edges-placing it to his lips- and lit it with his Bic. Opening the door, he paused again and looked at Mel. "Please be sure to lock up everything when you leave, there have been a few burglaries in the neighborhood in the last few  days."
"Sure." replied Mel, as the older man stepped out the doorway and into the shadowed veil of night.

Will Rankin's comment about pretty young girlfriends had struck a bad chord. Mel was kind of ashamed to admit he really didn't have any steady girlfriend. The closest he had come to any kind of actual intimate relationship with a woman was two summers before when his best friend Charlie Baker had 'arranged' a date between him and the
class slut Denise Willhite. Denise was the daughter of the local Baptist preacher, but she wasn't exactly the 'saintly' type.

The occasion was a double-date. Charlie Baker and his girlfriend Patrice Howard, and Mel and Denise. The plan was the boys would get the girls up to the local make-out spot (a heavily wooded area on the edge of town) and spend a few hours of heavy petting and possibly some sexual experimentation with them. What Mel didn't realize was
the only reason Denise had agreed to the date was because she wanted the chance to be close to Charlie, who she had a crush on.

Shortly after the two couples arrived at their destination, Charlie and Patrice had a fight, and the girl ran crying into the forest. Patrice had caught Charlie and Denise being coyly flirtatious, winking at each other and making sexually suggestive comments between themselves. Mel, feeling sorry for Patrice, followed the girl into the forest. After talking over their problems for a few minutes, they both came back to Charlie's car to find him and Denise nude and
making passionate love on the hood. Patrice suffered a mental breakdown from the incident, and Mel decided there would be no more double dating for him.

Mel was a normal healthy teenager with a normal healthy desire to have relationships with pretty girls and there was one very special girl he had admired from afar. But she of course probably didn't even know he even existed. College and the part-time job at the funeral home kept him too busy for a dedicated or even a leisure romance, but
if his plans for the future panned out the way he felt they would, this soon would change.

Mel latched the dead bolt to the delivery entrance and turned his attention back towards his chores. Cautiously opening the door to the utility closet, he reached down to pick up a bucket and a gallon of cleaning solution. A broom slid down from its place in one corner of the closet and almost landed on his head, catching him off guard and
causing him to tremble.

Standing the fallen broom back in its place-grabbing a mop instead - and closing the door behind him, he thought how terrifying it was to open closed doors at night in the empty funeral home. Darkened hiding places for creatures who had escaped from the bowels of hell. Something very possibly could leap out and bite your head off  and drag the rest of your body back in, all in a matter of fleeting seconds.

He instinctively reached to feel the Mexican silver cross he wore on a chain around his neck-rubbing it with his fingers-there was a little relief in the knowledge that it hung there to protect him. He wheeled the mop and bucket into the embalming room. spilling an occasional puddle of pine-scented water on the tile floors.  And shook his head at the scene awaiting him.

Two canvas covered bodies lay on cold steel work tables being fed intravenously with a commercially produced formaldehyde mixture. He recognized one of the bodies as being the old widow Brown who's late husband John was one of Winding Oaks founding fathers. She appeared just as mean and bitchy as the day she had chased Mel and several other of his teenage friends out of her personal apple orchard.

The other, a male, he recognized had been the butcher at the Friendly Supermarket in town as far back as Mel could remember. He could recall watching the man as he worked hurriedly behind the meat counter of Friendly's grinding big pieces of dripping bloody red beef into piles of hamburger which his mother bought to turn into dinner fare. Yum yum. He was always kind of facinated by the nasty process. Somehow, hamburger would never seem quite the same after tonight.

He gasped as one of the tanned muscular arms of the butcher - who with his dark black bushy mustache and circus muscle-man build-jerked with a nervous spasm. The corpse had apparently just arrived and had not yet completely succumbed to the hold of rigormortis. Mel could never really get use to all the familiar faces just laying around. Some being worked on in the laboratory, some dressed out in coffins. All of the bodies being related in some way to people
he knew. All silent and peaceful-looking in their forever sleep.

Drops of crystal embalming fluid seeping from the comers of  their mouths, as they lay all dressed up and fit for a night on the town after a tedious and comprehensive complete make-up session with skinny Miss Maples from the comer beauty shop. Maples who was a single mother, worked part-time at the funeral home to help feed her six snotty-nosed and bratty kids who were sired by six different fathers. Mel had heard Miss Maples had a thing for younger men and had once even seduced and given one of his classmates-a captain on the football team-a head job, but he felt he would never get the opportunity to find out if the story was true.

Usually by the time Mel arrived at work, sexy Miss Maples was already finished with her chores for the day and had gone on her merry way. He would probably never have the opportunity to find out if she was as 'easy' and 'willing' as his schoolmate had boasted. Mel slowly mopped his way like a dancer swaying to the music of  an orchestra through the four fancy viewing chapels, polishing the black tile floors to a shine.

He sprayed canfuls of industrial-strength air freshener into thick toxic clouds that sailed through the rooms in an
effort to cover the nasty smell of nauseous embalming chemicals. He wiped the smeared oily and gritty finger prints (left by mourning visitors) off the walls, and vacuumed the dirt and dust that clung to the luxurious deep crimson plush carpet . Mel considered himself to be a perfectionist, and so in turn, everything would be cleaned to his idea of perfection.

As Mel entered the crematorium, his least favorite room of the establishment, the smell of acrid ash filled the air and his nostrils. Kind of like a barbecue smoke-house. Mel stopped and felt the thick steel door leading into the furnace, it was still warm from earlier in the day. He pressed his nose against the thick glass window to look inside. His breath fogged the lower part of the glass. The subject's ashes were still inside cooling. He saw a few burnt and broken bones scattered among the powdered remains. A shiver went up his spine and for a moment he thought he might vomit.

Once again rubbing the silver cross pendant which hung from his neck, he suddenly heard a faint tapping sound that echoed through the chamber. Knockity knock, Knockity knock. He backed away, thinking the sound was coming from inside the furnace, and started to tremble again. His face suddenly lost its flesh color, and then suddenly flushed to a beet red tone as his pulse throbbed in his forehead. What if some kind of poltergeist or devilish banshee was trying to get free from its otherworldly prison? What if?

Mel realized his fears were unjustified as he gained his composure enough to realize he was wrong about the tapping sounds origin and tracked the noise to the back delivery entrance. The 'delivery'  Will Rankin had spoken of earlier in the evening had finally arrived...

Remembering Rankin's warning of burglaries in the neighborhood - and already being as paranoid as hell like he was-Mel took the liberal precaution of looking through the delivery door's peep-hole first. All he could see was a free-floating distortion of a mouth with its lips twisted in a cartoon grin. Then, the man on the other side of   the
door-acting in courtesy-stepped back where Mel could tell he was wearing a white hospital jacket with a patch that read: Winding Oaks County Hospital. He didn't recognize the man. he had never made a delivery to the funeral home before.

"I've got a stiff here for you guys," the man said. "Yeah, hold on," Mel replied as he began to undo the various locks and chains on the door. It took a few minutes to open the numerous devices, but the door finally creaked open. "What's a matter fella, you afraid one of your customers are gonna get away?" the stranger joked. "Not really," Mel
replied as he helped the man in white get the stretcher with the zippered body bag through the door. "But we have had a burglary or two in the past few months."

"That right? What the hell would anyone want to steal from a funeral home?" the stranger questioned. "Oh you know, mostly jewelry and stuff," Mel said, adding. "When a family member dies people are usually so shocked and confused they forget to take all of the valuables off the body." The man handed Mel a release form to sign for the body, shaking his head in disgust at what he was hearing the teenager say, and said in a serious tone. "Damn shame people are so hard up they would go so far as to steal from the dead."

The stranger helped Mel to get the body bag up on a prep table, and left, Mel closing the locks behind him. Mel studied his copy of the release form. and then the bulky body bag on the table. It was time to do the one chore connected with 'new deliveries' he hated most of all, removing all of the personal belongings and putting them into
the safe for Mr. Rankin. He hoped the body would not be too terribly disfigured or mangled. Once he had opened one of the bags to find the contents infested with huge maggots feeding in a frenzy...

Gaining his composure, he made note of the last name on the form: "Simmons". He looked at it again, his heart stopped beating for a moment. The girl he had always admired from a distance last name was Simmons. That 'special girl', the one he felt he could love more than any other. Her last name was Simmons. But hell, he thought to himself, there were probably a lot of Simmons in Winding Oaks.

Mel then read the rest of the information as he held his breath: "Cindi Louise Simmons. age 17." It was her! Mel felt the heat of fever in his flushed face, and a tear slipped from his eye. The tear fell to the black tile floor in what seem to be slow-motion -where it formed the shape of a crown on impact- and then separated into tiny droplets.

The unaswered questions bombarded his mind. He felt the need to deny the belief the girl was dead, he felt anger God had allowed it to happen. He realized the meaning of being completely helpless and unable to do anything about it.

She had never known he loved her. How could she? He admired her only from a distance, waiting and anticipating the special day when their time would come. She was the most beautiful and refined girl he had ever known. That he would ever be given the chance to admire. And now she was gone.

Mel recalled how in life Cindi's curled golden tresses fell to the sides of her perfect smooth face. Her olive eyes sparkled with the glitter of stars in the heavens, and her sensual big pouting lips gave her the appearance of a magazine cover-girl. This was the young lady he had longed to hold next to him since the first time he laid eyes on
her in the second grade. The temptress of his earliest exotic day dreams. He had longed to hold her perfect form next to him and to kiss those inviting lips, but the chance never came, never would.

He was shyer and more introverted than the other boys and never could find the courage to introduce himself and tell her of his feelings. Now Mel had lost her for eternity.

Mel had seen Cindi only a few days earlier at the beach, she was working on her tan with a few of her girlfriends from the college. Laying out in a flimsy string-bikini on a big beach towel with those slender long legs. It gave him a hard on just to think about her. She seem to sometimes be the most unobtainable woman in the world.

Her perfect body emitted sex. A sensual wave of passionate warmth. Cindi had aroused Mel with every movement she made in his presence. He had almost approached her to attempt a conversation that day, but decided against it because he was frightened she might notice the rock-hard erection in his swimming trunks. So instead, he just sat in the sand and as always admired her from a distance, hoping she might accidently glance over in his direction and their eyes would meet. And she would know of his intimate need and longing for her. But it never happened...

Mel angrily rejected the grim reality the subject of all his adolescent sexual fantasies now lay lifeless in the body bag on the table before him. No, nothing that beautiful and so full of energy and life could die. He noted the cause of death on the form. "Heart-failure,  coroners verdict: natural death." It couldn't be true, there was nothing 'natural' about Cindi's death.

It wasn't fair, he had waited so patiently and prayed for the day when they could be lovers. He had always felt sure the day would come as soon as he made something admirable and respected out of  himself. Cindi was so special it would take those virtues for her to even consider him. If he made high grades in his college courses and worked towards becoming a doctor, he would sweep her off her  feet and they would live the rest of their days together.
Making love every possible moment and clinging to each other feeling full...

Now he felt wounded and hurt, as though he had been slapped in the face. His dreams were unobtainable and unrealistic. Mel put the now tear stained form down on Mr. Rankin's desk, and approached the body bag on the table. Tenderly taking hold of the zipper, he pulled it down the length of the body opening a seam. Then he pulled the bag
away from the corpse, like petals from a rose.

Her beauty lay before him in the dim light of the room like a princess in a fairy tale. merely asleep, enchanted by some magical spell. Her eyelids closed tightly and a slight smile on her lips. She looked to be more beautiful than he remembered. More erotic than he could bear. His sobs became louder and his tears flowed more freely now. He touched her pale cold cheek with his fingers. He had loved her so much...

He kissed her cold lips. finding it so difficult to say good-bye. But the kiss would not only be his first but his last. His final opportunity to tell the girl of his dreams how he felt. He would not. Could not be robbed of his chance. He was glad no one would know. He knew his college friends would make fun of him if they knew. And they thought he was too strange now.

Wouldn't they have a field day if they saw him kissing the dead girl, if they only knew how sexually aroused the kiss made him. He pressed his forehead against hers, his tears flowing from his cheek to hers. If only she had known, if only he had told her...

He felt her cheek turn from cold to warm, and all at once she took a long drawn out breath, and gasped for air. He tried to withdraw in disbelief but she took hold of him and would not let go. Her eyes opened. Those sensual olive eyes sparkled like stars again. He touched her hand in shocked silence, it too was warm.

"How?" Mel managed to ask.

"You, you have done this," she whispered, "You who hid your love and believed in the chance that we would be lovers, I couldn't leave this plane of existence without experiencing your love." She used her arms to pull up on the table, her bare full breasts uncovered. "I couldn't die without making love to my betrothed at least once."

She raised her arms out to him, and he replied only by returning her embrace. Their lips touched again, this time their tongues savoring each other's. Heat and compassion burned in their combined being. "I want your love sweetheart, I need you inside me."

As they kissed, she unbuttoned his shirt, pulling the tail from his jeans and off of his shoulders. He felt her hard erect nipples against his, and the pressure of his penis trying to burst through his jeans She kicked the body bag to the floor-spreading her long legs to invite his favors-as he undid his fly and pulled his pants down. As he stepped out of the jeans, she took his hand again and he mounted her.

"Love me. love me so it will last for an eternity," she pleaded as he entered her deeply. Both of their bodies danced in combined rhythm, grinding in a circular motion to fulfilling their needs. Her cries and moans of pleasure filling and echoing through the room and chambers.

"Like that my lover. Like that..." she screamed, clenching to his shoulders, clenching to anothers whole and being as she never had before. In one explosive moment of combined orgasm, they held to each other, happy and never wanting to let go...

When he arrived early the next morning in the shadows of the dusk. Will Rankin found it odd the lights in the funeral home were still on. It wasn't like young Mel to forget. He found the two of them locked in their cold embrace on the table. Smiles of satisfaction and eternal content on their dead faces.

But he had seen this once before, ten years earlier. 'Death's embrace' they called it at mortician's school. Two souls belonging together, and not even the angel of death could keep them apart. He would keep their secret...

©2002 Bob Gunner

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