HFM

The Bomb Induces Insanity, Part 2

The fifteen year old girl entered the morgue of the hospital.  There was an attendant on duty, making notes about the cadavers and the way they died.  The attendant looked up at the pale, ghostly girl wearing a hospital gown and asked what she was doing.

“I’ve come to claim my parents and bring them home with me.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.  These are where the dead are kept.”
“My father is very rich.  We live in a very expensive Victorian on Prytannia.  If you let me take them home, I will make sure that you are paid properly.”

The attendant thought of his wife and child back home and so he agreed to help the girl.  They found her parents and a vacant ambulance and they drove to her parents’ house on Prytannia.  The girl asked the attendant to wait outside in the ambulance while she spent time with her parents in the house and got his payment.  The attendant sat in the driver’s seat of the ambulance and lit a cigarette.

Meanwhile, the girl sat at the kitchen table, across from her parents.  There was a vase of dead flowers that had collected dust in the middle of the table.  The girl pressed her hands against the table’s surface, watching the perspiration evaporate.

Her mother gave a stern look, her father looked complacent.  The girl got up from her chair and walked auound the table to where her parents were seated.  She made her mother look guilty and her father look terrified, mouth agape.  She continued changing their facial expressions for some time.  A fly landed on the dead flowers and died.

So much time had passed that the morgue attendant began to worry.  Someone at the hospital might notice the missing ambulance, or worse, missing corpses.  After his fifth cigarette he got out the ambulance and knocked on the front door of the house.  There was no answer and so he entered.

He found his way to the kitchen and there was the mother, making coffee, and the father reading the morning paper, both their mouths caked with blood.  The fifteen year old girl lay on the table, the vase of dead flowers shattered on the floor.  She had removed her tongue and her eyes and fed them to her parents so that they might live and move their faces themselves.  She was tired of doing it for them.