I don’t want to be sick, and I look away from him, from Marino. Don’t stare. Fixating is a recipe for disaster, and I look here. I look there. Up and down. Moving around. I don’t allow anything to hold my attention for more than a second or two, barely stopping my eyes from moving. Don’t fixate because that’s when it will happen.

That’s when you lose it, and I can’t count the people I’ve collected off the epoxy paint–sealed floor or presented with the ubiquitous plastic bucket. Mostly cops who gather around the stainless-steel autopsy table as if it’s no big deal, and I always see it coming.

That fifty-yard stare as my scalpel slices through the chest, making the Y incision, running down the torso, detouring around the navel, reflecting back tissue with quick deft flicks of the blade.

Exposing gastric contents, the intestines, and it’s not aromatherapy, to quote Marino. Only he pronounces, even writes it Romatheraphy with a capital R. As in the Eternal City. As in Romulus and Remus.

Two

Four

Six

Eight

Remember

Not

To

Fix-ate!

My little morgue ditty. Rhymes are an easy way to remember. Keep moving. Look here. Look there. Don’t stare. I recite my little ditty in my mind because I’m the one who needs it this time. And I keep my eyes moving. And my attention wanders …

Over the grass.

Across the tawny dirt path.

Back to the dead woman forlorn on her back.

In her white sports bra.

Her blue shorts.

And gray-striped socks.

Her head, each hand, each foot wrapped in brown paper like an uprooted tree in a burlap diaper.

Dead.

Packaged as evidence, disgraced and depersonalized, and that can’t be the bold, proud, spirited woman I met earlier today. Not once. But twice. Attractive, quick-witted, fit, overflowing with confidence and life. Reminding me of Lucy. How could she be reduced to this? To detritus hauled away and carved up?

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

But it did kill her, and what a strange thing to say, as if a part of her knew and was trying to laugh it off. I should have stopped it somehow. She was in my presence twice and I didn’t stop anything.

I look around the black cubical tent with its exposed gray aluminum frame. Then back at the body, and I remember her strong tan shoulders and bright smile as she taped recipes to the walls inside the Loeb Center. I remember her dropping her water bottle on the sidewalk in front of the Faculty Club.

You’re the peanut-butter-pie lady.

She was hot, her tan skin covered in a sheen of sweat. The sun was going down. There were smudges of peach and pink along the horizon, and I watched her ride across Quincy Street.

Dead.