Empty Drawer

Stephanie sauntered blithely through the cemetery, wrapped in a robe of sunshine. The grass radiated almost too green, possibly dyed brightly by the decaying dead bodies it blanketed. Chewing on a strand of blonde hair, she hesitated in front of the funeral home. shifting her weight from foot to foot. She skipped around the building to enter the mortuary from the back door. She quietly let herself in and tip toed into the morgue where her friend Evan was leaning over a corpse and he and the old gentleman's remains were both being very still.

Stephanie hopped up and sat on a counter watching Evan dress the old man in a black suit for burial with a piano necktie.

Stephanie had visited Evan every day at work for the last six months. At first he had thought that she like-liked him but with every increasingly cheery surprise visit, he realized that she only liked dead people, just platonicaly. Evan finished up his work, put the dead old man in the morgue drawer, and the two of them went out for lunch. Evan watched her hands dance with vivacity, fingers curling like ten worms levitating and fornicating in the air. As she verbally breath-stroked from topic to topic, her hair swirled across her face like a curtain of yellow healthy urine. He looked down into his nothing-colored pasta, willing time to speed up.

The next day Stephanie came to visit again, sitting backwards on a chair and propping her elbows on the plastic back and resting her chin in her hands. Evan was hunched in front of the morgue drawer.
“He’s gone,” Evan said.
“Who?”
“Piano Necktie man. I put him in the drawer and now he’s gone.”
“Was he not dead yet? Almost dead? No pulse and not breathing yet still able to crawl?”
“Watch this,” Evan said. He rolled a marble into the morgue drawer and shut it. Then he opened it again.
“It’s gone?” Stephanie stood up and walked over. She squinted into the long thin drawer and felt around the cool metal.
“That’s the twentieth marble I’ve tossed down there,” Evan said. He grabbed a half drank can of coke and set it inside the drawer. When he opened it; it was gone.
“That’s amazing!” Stephanie yelped.

She danced around the morgue grabbing random things and tossing them in. She sent a piece of old pizza and a few books and even a camera out into nothingness. She cart-wheeled around the morgue and kissed Evan on the cheek. Evan blushed hotly and ushered Stephanie out so he could finish his work. He ignored the morgue drawer of disappearances and hurriedly struggled his way through his boring-as-death tasks with his mind locked in a jar elsewhere. On the way home from work Evan bought a bouquet of lilies. She’d like that because they were a funeral flower. He went to sleep with a smile on his face knowing that the next day he would go to work reeking of tenacity.

That night Stephanie put on a little black dress and bright pink high heels. She brushed her hair for the first time in several months and even clipped her fingernails. She rode her bicycle to the morgue, singing happily to herself as she did so. When she got there she parked her bike at the cemetery gate without bothering to lock it up. She let herself into the funeral home using the key she had stolen from Evan’s pocket when she had kissed him. Since no one would be there after midnight she walked straight in through the front door and confidently into the mortuary. She tied a string to the long table with wheels on the legs. She slipped off her high heels, leaving them purposefully against the wall.

Looking over her shoulder, Stephanie climbed into the morgue drawer. The cool metal exhilaratingly embraced her arms and legs. She lay there, surprised at the tightness of the space, staring into a ceiling a few inches from her head. She saw her reflection peering down at her and she smiled for a moment and closed her eyes. She yanked the string in her hand with all of her strength and the work table rolled plummeting through the empty room and slammed the morgue drawer shut with a snap.