Easy Money? by Matthew D. Smith (best book club books of all time txt) 📕

Ye have lost a child--nay, she is not lost to you, who is found to Christ; she is not sent away, but only sent before; like unto a star, which going out of our sight, doth not die and vanish, but shineth in another hemisphere.

- Samuel Rutherford

It was supposed to be “easy money”, as explained to me in the interview. It was really an interview only because that’s what, Tony, my proposed employer, called it.

“You’re used to this stuff, right?” He asked.

“Yep!” I answered.

“Well, I guess you can start on Thursday at ten o’clock.” He said, followed by a quick clarification of “Ten p.m.”.

“OK.” I remarked.

On Thursday I showed up a little early and filled out the necessary paperwork. Norman, the guy I was relieving, said it was simple. Sit in the office and read a little or troll the internet, every once and a while, I would need to go in the back room and check on things, and occasionally, I would get a call to go pick up a new “customer.”

Norman took the company van to make a pickup since I was early, and because he knew he would get a little overtime. I waited patiently in the office for his return.

A call came in that a new “customer” needed picked up. I jotted down the address and called Norman. He said he had to pass by the place and would take care of it on his way back.

About an hour later, he pulled the van up next to the building. I met him outside. “it’s in the back.” Is all he said and quickly walked over to his car and drove away. I didn’t know Norman, but felt that he was very abrupt in his comment. To think back on it now, I can’t blame him for having his mind somewhere else.

I opened the back of the van and looked at the stretcher with the body bag lying atop it. Something visually appeared odd about the shape of its contents. I pulled the stretcher out of the van and pushed it into the intake room. “So this is funeral home work.” I commented to myself.

A solid metal table with a centralized drain hole dominated the room’s middle section while a wall of coolers was on the far side of the room. Norman had previously instructed me to always leave the body, last picked up, on the table. With far less effort than I thought it was going to take, I pulled the vinyl bag onto the table.

After placing the stretcher back in the van, I locked the door and went back to the office.

Tony had told me that my medical training and previous exposure to traumatic death was the only resume’ I needed to get hired by him. It initially sounded very good. I would make fairly decent money over the summer semester to study my textbooks at night. I would only have to check on the intake room a couple of times a night and pickups were “occasional”, as explained by him.

I went back to the office and began studying for the anatomy and physiology test I had coming up. My mind wandered as I tried to focus on my book. Why did the body bag seem only half-full? Why was it so light? Was it some traumatic victim cut in half for which they couldn’t find the rest of the pieces? Or perhaps, a person long dead in their home that had been half eaten by their cat or their dog? As each minute passed, my mind focused more on the body bag and less on my textbook.

I found myself walking down the hall into the intake room. Standing with my hands in my pockets, I stared at the bag on the table and replayed all my previous questions in my head. I had not been told that I couldn’t look in the coolers or bags; and so, my curiosity finally convinced me to unzip the bag.

With the bag laid open, I stood with a hand over my mouth, staring at the body. I don’t know how long I stood there, but I was only brought back into the moment by the realization that I had tears streaming down my face and across my hand.

Lying lifeless was a beautiful blonde haired girl of maybe five or six years old. Her battered and bruised body was a pale white, with the exception of the blood covering her chest and shoulders that had come from having her throat cut. She was pale with the exception of the fact that almost every inch of her was tinged in the greens, browns, blues, and blacks of bruises. The scars of previous burns, some appearing to be from cigarettes, dotted her abdomen and chest. I did not look at her back; but I could only imagine what would have been there.

“Someone hated this child”, I thought to myself. I wanted to cry harder. I wanted to scream. I wanted to do a lot of things; mainly, I didn’t want to be here. “They could have given her to me,” I said. “I would have loved her, I would not have treated her like this.” Each successive comment that ran through my mind was less of a remark and more of a pleading to God as to how any person could have committed such an act.

I zipped up the body bag, taking special care not to catch any of her beautiful flowing hair in the zipper and went back to the office. I cursed my curiosity for leading me down a path to a vision that has haunted each day since. I spent the next few hours crying, pleading with God, cursing the person that had committed the act, as well as my own curiosity.

When Tony showed up a little early the next morning, I met him in the parking lot.

“Boy, you must of done twenty pickups last night! You look like hell!” he stated.

All I could say was,“I quit!”

Publication Date: 07-09-2010

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