The Body Watcher

My apologies for the sudden ending- kids came home and I had to wrap it up.

My line of work makes it hard to find a date. It is not because I have a job that makes me work too many hours or a crazy boss. It is because of what my job is. I work in a morgue as a body watcher. In simple terms that means that when the morgue receives a body I am given the task of cleaning and preparing it for burial.

More often than not it means watching the distraught loved ones of the deceased sob or curse over the corpse, sometimes both. Grief manifests itself in any number of ways. Sometimes I think that I should go back to school and learn how to be a shrink. Heaven knows that a lot of these Joe's could use some serious psychological help.

As you can imagine many women are a bit uncomfortable calling a body watcher their boyfriend. I once had a girlfriend who was so unnerved by my job she would demand that I scrub my hands in water that was just short of scalding. I tried to make her feel more comfortable by telling her about the stiff who came in with a stiff...well you know.

Anyway, I tell her about the owner's crazy wife. She used to be a doctor but gave it up to live on a farm on a mountaintop with her slacker boyfriend. After many years of living off donations from her children and heaven knows how many drugs she decides that she wants to come back to reality.

So she divorces the slacker, moves off the mountaintop and seduces Mr. Schlatter, the owner. At least I think that it is how it went, I am not really all that clear. All I know is that Mrs. Schlatter is not quite right. I can't tell you how many stories there are of her antics inside the meat locker, (that is what we call the room with the bodies).

In this particular case Mrs. Schlatter couldn't help but notice the condition of this body. It is almost as if she is spellbound. She waddles over to the side and proceeds to stare at it like it is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen. She she fully enraptured by it and for a moment I am afraid that she might try to touch it.

By this point in the story people are either laughing hysterically or squirming off the edge of their seats. Not my girl. She is horrified, so much so that she is enraged and demands that we file charges against her. You can't imagine a moment that was more uncomfortable than this one.