Hospital Morgue
The smell of formaldehyde hits your nose just as you open the door. It’s 3:00 AM and your hand searches frantically on the cold steel walls for the light switch. CLICK! The humming buzz of the overhead fluorescent light is now heard as a flickering, ghostly blue glow fills the room. You push your cart of pine-smelling chemicals, which you can barely smell over the odor of the formaldehyde, into the tiny room and begin to sweep. On your left is a large transparent drum filled with human lungs. “Funny,” you say to yourself, “how easy it is to see which lungs belonged to smokers.” You sweep past the drum and turn to face the blue, cold, steel examining table. The table is speckled with half-dried blood, and patches of human hair are clumped near the top of it, where the medical examiner removes the brains of the dead to be weighed.
You sweep around the table and under the shelves to the right. On those shelves sit glass jars filled with eyes, hearts, cancer-eaten breasts, and sliced up testicles. “I wonder what happened to all of these people,” you ask yourself, as you pour pine oil into your bucket. You look at your watch and realize that you have ten minutes before break, so you hurry and mop the blood-stained, yellowish tile floor, and scrub the exam-table free of human debris; then you put your mop back into your bucket and notice how the smell of the formaldehyde has been masked by the pine oil and how the examining table looks so much more sanitary without the bloody clumps of hair. You then exit the morgue while turning off the humming fluorescent light, notice how peaceful and clean-smelling the morgue is in the dark, then close and lock the door.
After putting away your cleaning equipment, you take your Coke and your Twinkie to the back of the hospital, sit on the stairs next to the bio-incinerator, and watch the smoke of incinerated flesh rise to the heavens, in the black of night, while enjoying your snack, and thinking about the bathrooms you’ll have to clean when you resume work.
The Arm Chair Pontificator 
Fantastic read sir, and you actually did that as a job!? you are a braver man than me!! 🙂
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I worked maintenance in a hospital and part of the job was cleaning the hospital morgue. Friggin’ memorable, I’ll tell you that. Thanks for the compliment. 🙂
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wow I am glad to see in the comments you did the job. For a minute I thought you were channeling some cleaning person on the other side of humanity. However I have to say you must take your job seriously to remember all those details so well written. I admit I half expected a ghoul or ghost to materialize after you closed that door. Hugs
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That job, cleaning that room, left a very strong impression on me. It isn’t the kind of thing one easily forgets. Glad I conveyed that in the piece. 🙂
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Oh man, that’s dark!
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Thanks. It’s a job I actually did once, years ago.
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I have total admiration for you, no way could I ever do anything like that. The way you wrote it, it was so…..real and cold and….urgh *shivers
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It was no fun cleaning that place. I worked the over night shift and that’s when we cleaned it. My work pals snuck up on me one night and slammed a metal bucket down near me. Scared the fuck outta me. almost had a heart attack.
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Jeeeez! Your work pals sound like right barrels of laughs
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It was sort of an initiation activity for new guys who got to clean the morgue. After the shift we all went out and got piss drunk and laughed about it.
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Yes, I’m sure I would have laughed about it afterwards if it’d been me, but it would have taken me a while and a fair bit of alcohol to appreciate the joke haha
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Oh, believe me, it did. 🙂
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Crikey! That ones a bit of an excursion – blindingly good. Reminded me of the time I was asked to repossess a load of ‘medical kit’ from some laboratory. Upon taking possession one of the guys loading up the van pointed out that we had jars and jars of what seemed to be (and indeed were) pickled ears; noses and such like. Took an age to find someone to dispose of them properly! The client lost a fortune but at least I got paid. Shame you couldn’t have written the report to said client – he might have felt he’d got value for money!
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Sounds like you’ve got a story there, too.
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