Summer Writing Project
As I stated earlier, my goal this summer is to write a new novel. I'm a bit behind so far due to the crap that's been going on the last few days, but I have gotten started. The first part of the rough draft so far is below.


The hollow feeling inside me came from the fact that I didn't seem to have a liver. In fact, someone had removed most of my vital organs.

I blinked my eyes and lifted my head. A rubber brick lay under the small of my back, pushing my torso toward the ceiling and exposing my chest. The word hard came to my mind. Hard and cold – the metal slab that I lay on. I looked down at the incision running from my Adam's apple down to my pelvis. Somewhere in the empty cavity of my open torso I should have seen certain ever-important necessities of life, such as my heart and lungs. Instead I had a body-lake of blood, bile, and dust where the mortician had sawed through my ribcage. Turning my head to the left, I saw my various body parts bagged and tagged, sitting on a metal table like a museum display. It occurred to me that maybe I should scream. I decided against that. After all, I seemed okay, exposed chest cavity notwithstanding.

I felt a tingling sensation on my left hand, like it had fallen asleep. My palm started to itch. I raised my hand and took a look at it. A black-lined eye stared back at me. The eye spread from the base of my thumb to just under my pinkie. The outline had an unnatural egg shape to it, like an old Egyptian hieroglyphic. It had no iris – just a big black pupil.

And it blinked.

The eye shut once, then opened again a fraction of a second later. My hand tingled as the tattoo moved. A hoarse gasp escaped my throat. The noise probably would have ended up as a scream, but I had hardly mastered the art of speaking, let alone shouting, without a pair of lungs to help me do it.

The eye blinked again. I heard a rough splash of blood as my body shook. The tattoo's pupil shifted slightly, looking first at the left side of my face and then at the right. Then the image transformed, changing from the rough outline of an eye to an inky black cloud. In a moment, that cloud reformed into printed words – words directed at me.

WELCOME BACK, EDDIE.

The name rang a bell, but seemed foreign to me nonetheless.

“Eddie...” I croaked, still wondering why my body didn't seem content to remain the lifeless corpse that science told me it should be. “That's me, right?”

The tattoo became an inky mass again, then reformed into new words. EDDIE KAFKA. YES.

“This must be what happens when a brain dies,” I said. I lowered my head, letting it rest against the cold slab underneath me, and dropped my hand back to my side. Hallucinations. A brain can survive up to eight minutes after the heart has stopped. I didn't remember the color of my own hair, but I remembered that fact. It seemed the most relevant at the moment. Obviously, I had died and my current experiences were nothing more than random synapses firing off in my brain's final moments. I relaxed and waited for my life to flash before my eyes.

Except it didn't.

I saw nothing. I was nothing. No memories. No past. I frowned and tried to force the memories, and still nothing came. I heard the ticking of a clock on the wall, felt the tingling sensation of the moving tattoo on my hand, and smelled the nauseating scent of formaldehyde in the air. My last moments of life, and I couldn't even remember how I had gotten there.

Footsteps echoed from down the hall as someone approached the room. I glanced at the tattoo, which immediately shaped out more words – instructions I needed to follow.

LIE DOWN.

CLOSE YOUR EYES.

DON'T MOVE.

Of all the things I had just experienced, those instructions made the most sense. The mortician didn't need to find a fresh cadaver squirming around on the examination table, and I didn't need to reveal my zombified nature to anyone just yet. I returned to the rigor mortis I had awoken from and closed my eyes. Imitating a corpse turned out to be easier than I expected – I had no lungs to breathe through and no heartbeat to measure. The only difference between being alive and dead for me was a matter of movement.

The door swung open and the footsteps approached the table. The floor creaked loudly with each slow, shuffling step. From the sounds of it, I had an overweight mortician.

A tape recorder clicked on and the mortician started speaking. He had the voice of a middle-aged man – hoarse and tired, but with an unusual excitement behind his words.

“Continuing the examination of Kafka, Edward. The autopsy has proven inconclusive but intriguing. While eyewitness reports of his fall are vague, with some suggesting suicide and others claiming they saw a man push him from the rooftop, there is no evidence of a physical struggle. The body reveals no sign of penetration or blunt trauma. In fact, the organs themselves show no sign of damage from the fall. Spleen remains intact and the amount of internal bleeding is minimal. If it wasn't for the lack of a pulse, I would consider Mr. Kafka to be in perfect physical health.

“With cause of death undetermined, the body will be held here until the conclusion of a police investigation. With an unfortunately limited amount of resources available to this office, the mystery behind Mr. Kafka will have to wait for more evidence in order to determine true cause of death.”

The tape recorder clicked off and the mortician began humming to himself as he started working. I risked opening up one eye to sneak a peak at his actions, thankfully finding his back turned to me. It looked like I was about to go back into storage for a while. The mortician, a heavy, gray-haired man, started placing my organs in clear plastic bags, ready to drop them back into my body like I was some sort of lunchbox. I closed my eyes and let him do his job. Might as well make sure my heart doesn't get left in San Francisco, or wherever I am.

For some reason, I had expected to feel whole again as the doctor put me back together. Instead I felt like a scarecrow, only filled with plastic and gauze instead of sawdust and leaves. The mortician left the organs in their plastic bags, placing them roughly where they were supposed to go in my body. Then he clamped them in place and packed their surroundings with gauze to make sure they wouldn't slide around. The emptiness I had felt since I woke up disappeared, but not in a good way. The process only made me feel more artificial.

Once the mortician had put the organs back in place, he closed up the flap of skin that exposed them. He gave my sides a hard push together and then pulled the skin shut. I heard a creak in my ribcage where bones that had been broken apart and sawed through came snapping back into place, splintered and nonfunctional but giving enough of the appearance of good health to satisfy a funeral home. Footsteps receded from the table, and I heard the mortician rummage through some drawers on the far side of the room. I didn't open my eyes this time to see what he was doing. Some part of me seemed to know what was going to happen next.

Not surprisingly, I felt a stabbing pain at the bottom of my throat. He was suturing my incision shut – patching me up to make sure I didn't leak all over the other corpses. My hand started tingling again. I worried that the mortician might notice the ever-shifting tattoo as it tried to spell out new instructions to me. Thankfully, stitching a corpse back together seemed to take all the mortician's concentration.

I felt the pain of the needle as it plunged into my skin again and again, and I felt the stitching running through my loose flesh. However, the sensation seemed distant, almost foreign. Pain was easy for me to tune out, like an annoying commercial on television. I let my mind drift away from my patchwork body and into other times, other places. A highway somewhere in the Midwest. Glacial peaks from a bygone era. A woman, I think, her form obscured behind frosted glass. The images were gibberish – maybe memories, maybe fantasies. My brain seemed like the rest of my body: functional, animate, but not really alive.

I heard the crinkle of heavy plastic and felt the mortician start to wrap something around my legs. A bag...a body bag. He was getting ready to shove me back into the cooler. And I felt something – the first real something I remember this new Eddie Kafka ever feeling. I swallowed and started to sweat. The thought of getting shoved away in a dark, frozen box made me want to scream. It frightened me more than seeing all my organs on display. I finally knew something about myself: I was claustrophobic.

“Wait!” I shouted, sitting up and raising my hands.

The mortician had zipped the body bag to my knees, but stopped as soon as the corpse in front of him started moving. His face turned ashen. He clenched his teeth together and let out a rush of air that sounded like steam escaping from a tea kettle. Then his eyes rolled back into his head and he slumped forward. He would have cracked his skull open on the corner of the metal table if I hadn't moved quickly and caught him.

“I didn't mean to give you a heart attack,” I whispered to the unconscious mortician as I lowered him to the floor. “I just didn't want to wind up in cold storage.”

I laid him down on the floor. Was I supposed to keep his feet elevated? I couldn't be sure. I wasn't a doctor, or at least I didn't think I was. I touched his neck with my left hand, feeling is pulse. On my palm, the tattoo blinked. Then it turned into an inky cloud again, only to reform into new words.

HE'S FINE.

“Are you sure?” I kept my fingers to his neck for another fifteen seconds, measuring his pulse. “He's alive, but I think the fright might have done something to his heart.”

NO, said the tattoo as I pulled my hand away from the unconscious mortician. JUST FAINTED.

IT'S ALL QUITE A SHOCK.

“Whatever you are, you're really good at understatement.” I stood up straight and then looked down at my body – pale, pasty, naked me. “So what am I supposed to do now?”

PERSONAL EFFECTS.

IN THE OPEN LOCKER BY THE DOOR.

I nodded and headed toward the exit. Sure enough, inside the metal locker on the wall lay a stack of plastic bins, with the one marked “Kafka, Edward” on top. Each piece of property had its own plastic prison, wrapped up securely in airtight bags as though they were infectious – just like my organs. I pulled out the clothing first and got dressed: a pair of black cotton socks, some checkered boxers, and a pair of blue jeans. Dirty white sneakers with frayed laces. A faded blue t-shirt with the words, “New York Giants: Super Bowl XLII Champions” on it. A gray paperboy cap. I had a black nylon wallet with twenty-one dollars in cash, no credit cards, and an expired New York State driver's license – the old kind from the days before photo ID became the norm. The driver's license said more about me than I previously knew: height 5'7”, weight 168lbs. Hair brown, eyes green. And a home address: 84 Bauer Street, White Plains, New York.

“Well," I said, slipping the wallet into my pocket and adjusting my hat, “I've got a home address, so I know where to go next. Unless you've got another idea.” I held my hand at eye level, waiting for a response from my tattoo. The pupil of the eye shifted back and forth but offered no further instructions.

“Good,” I said. “Now let's get out of here before the doc wakes up and starts calling me a zombie.”

Fully clothed and armed with less than a sliver of information, I walked out of the morgue. The plastic bags that held my organs in place crinkled audibly when I moved.

My name is Eddie Kafka. Apparently, I can't die – not permanently, at least. Now I have to find out why I wound up in the morgue.