Total disembodiment is my hidden ambition. On overcast days when the
weather is moody and brooding, I whisper ridiculous secrets into the
wind. Only grave robbers hear them. They correspond.

I have been called a thief by the corpses many times. They are cold
bodies and have cold voices. The sterility of the hospital morgue only
augments their sheer frigidness.

“Stop, thief!” cries Robert Penn, aged 65, cause of death: stroke.

“Stop, thief!” screams Alexandria Dumont, aged 23, cause of death: alcohol poisoning.

“Stop, thief!” moans Quinn Carter, aged 41, cause of death: African sleeping sickness.

I excavate organs like mandrake roots. They bathe in formaldehyde like
snow monkeys. A bittersweet preservation. The dead always pine for
what they have lost. No one but me hears them and I am the one who is
doing the taking.

“You’ve stolen my heart,” says Thelma, aged 17, cause of death: unknown.

Thelma continues. “It’s never known love, you know. It’s completely useless.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “As long as it once beat, once pumped blood, once kept you alive. That’s all that really matters.”

Thelma’s hair is copper-red and curls like the wires of an electromagnet. I cut off a lock and stuff it into my breast pocket.

“But it does matter!” she lets out.

“What does?”

“Love!”

“Oh.” I almost forgot to stitch her chest back up. “Well, you can do without it.”

“That’s impossible.”

She is relentless and unusually chatty for a corpse.

“Darling, to put it frankly,” I say, “you’re dead. It’s time for you to transcend emotions.”

My fingers coupled with needle, thimble, and thread sew the mottled
white skin of her chest together. It’s like the mouth of an under-sea
trench being pressed closed by the steady pressure of tectonic plates.

Thelma whispers, “I think I died of a broken heart.”

Thelma’s eyes haven’t been forced shut yet. They’re intensely teal and intensely starry and of course glazed with lifelessness.

“Now that,” I reply, “is utterly ridiculous. If I had to guess, you
were poisoned. But I can’t be completely sure. I could be wrong.”

When I’m done, you can hardly tell that that her chest was sliced by a scalpel.

“How does it look?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“My heart. What does it look like?”

“Does it matter? It doesn’t even belong to you anymore.”

I place her heart almost ritualistically in a Tupperware container.

I continue. “Huitzilopochtli didn’t care whether a heart was, of all
things, pretty or not. He cared about the blood. A sanguine heart cut
from the chest at the alter was all he needed from the Aztecs to
continue their solar cycle.”

But when you’re dead, that doesn’t really matter.

“So there really isn’t a heaven?” Thelma ponders tragically.

“You’re just a body, dear. You don’t belong in heaven.”

I cover her corpse, complete with copper, electromagnetic hair, stained
white skin, and wistful teal eyes, back up with its plastic jacket.
Then, I leave.

A week later, Thelma is incinerated at a crematorium and her heart sits in my closet.

The grave robbers whisper me ridiculous secrets through the wind. I
correspond with a story about the empty body of a girl still yearning
to feel something. The natural world listens.