Copper Carcass
by Nora Marcus-Hecht
There’s a body in the break room when I go to grab my lunch. Maggots have infested its eye sockets and rats have been nibbling away at its toes. Its wrinkly bosom stares at me as I maneuver my way around it. No one questions why there is a naked body festering by the fridge but as long as it doesn’t smell none of us feel like disposing of it.
Marsha from HR is chatting my ear off one day when the body goes missing. She’s telling me about her husband’s family’s vacation home in Santa Monica when Creepy Hank from two floors down tells us there’s a blood puddle by the stapler. When I ask why he’s in our office space using our stapler he just tells us that last night he had to put his dog down and we feel sorry for him. Marsha offers him a cookie.
Two weeks go by and no one cares to ask where the body went or whose body it was to begin with. Creepy Hank is browning the walls again when I come in. We don’t ask why he makes them brown or what he uses to brown them but there’s a faint smell of copper every time I walk by and he’s going at it—scrubbing up and down with the same moldy blue sponge he’s been using since before I was hired.
A week before I saw the body for the first time, I ran into Hank on my morning run. I had made it a New Year’s Resolution to get into shape so I’d stop wanting to dry heave every time I walk up the stairs. He said how are you doing, Bessie, and I rolled my eyes because Bessie is not my name.
I said same old same old.
He laughed and his breath smelled like copper.
The body never smelled when it was living by the fridge but flies would buzz around it and then die on sight like in a cartoon. I’m drafting an email when I hear my stomach burble and realize it’s lunch time. When I open the fridge, my white rice is dark brown and the curry on the side smells like it could curdle anything it touches. I’m about to throw it away, glass container and all, when I hear Hank gargling something sour from behind me. He says his dog likes that kind of food and if I let him have it he’d repay me and give back the container later.
I give it to him so he’ll go away. I didn’t think he had two dogs.
An obituary for Bessie Abrams shows up in the paper at the end of the week. She was found dead in her apartment almost a month ago and the police have been investigating her cause of death since. Looking further down the page, I read that she was a teller at one of our local branches. I think about her when I’m in meetings and cooking dinner that night and flossing my teeth before going to bed. As I turn off the lights, I see brown creeping along the edges of my bedroom walls and the faint smell of copper spreads throughout the air.
Nora Marcus-Hecht is a junior at Ithaca College majoring in creative writing. She is a fiction writer with a strong love for dark comedic stories. Her other passions—and the focus of much of her writing—include human sexuality, strong female protagonists, and clowns. You can read more of her work and learn more about her at noramarcushecht.wordpress.com.