They can’t go back. Cold. Still. This curious persistence.
A remnant? A slow leaving. What floats away from what was living. A theft. Or something owing.
An escape.
It’s cold in the room, the skins of the bodies prick with it. They are glimpses, thisnesses, entrances and exits in various attendants. A tug at a white sleeve, a nose sniffing. Multiples, in air, in breath. In limbs, in bone, in marrow. The warmth of the mouth behind its mask. The dimpling in these skins, in this room chilled for the dead. The ache of tired feet and strained necks. The low buzz of a craving. They know where the body, their body, lies, know without effort. They see it sometimes, laid out on its slanted steel. Its skull has been sawn open, its eyes are closed. An expression of uninterrupted sleep. It’s hard to pity it. It’s only a body, laid out stone cold. They can no more go back into that house than smoke can enter charcoal and make a tree grow.
So it’s in other hands, these hands, other skin, other itches, aches, eyes that they approach it. They want to stay near it, keep vigil. But these hands, these itches, want things too. To carve. To sample.
In this joint, a wrist, the heel of the hand bent back against the bone, against some cooler surface. It wants to stretch. Tendons in a row like piano strings, reaching through to tug the keys of fingers. Blood from somewhere, in and weaving, through and out. The traffic of its tiny appointments, its minuscule deliveries. The pace of its pulse. The feel inside the vessel, wrapped by muscle by nerve by skin, that artery so close to the surface, where the skin’s enclosed by a ring of not-life: a poly-cotton blend that itches, just there. Detail scales up to perfect order. The hand that comes to push it back is not their hand.
They like this, here: the warmth of the wrist. The tick of hairs resisting. The blood encircling a small cut, carrying oxygen, collagen. They like the repair work, the body’s business. The sensory intelligence that patterns through these tunnels, through all that inner muscle, moving resources, feeding and eliminating. The nowness of it.
Aware in these hands. Aware that time persists, and of their trespass.
What are they becoming?
Is this a theft? Or something owing?