Occurrence In Dead City

One day coroners in the Morgue

of Popes, off

Gramlin and Trayhurst,

in the swill-gray center of Dead City

began to notice–those lumps of meat in the shapes of

ghosts coming off the street

began to look less different from each other.

A few drawn from their frozen drawers

in storage looked even more identical. Each

to each,

one man one woman, a kind of

postmortem Adam and Eve. Black male,

aged roughly early thirties,

high cheekbones;
the female a white brunette, thin lips

and a beauty mark just left off center of her chin.

When they pulled the charts

of all bodies on hand, they

were amazed. Age and race, height and weight

had been cannibalized almost overnight

into an archetype, in the

flesh. As fresh bodies
rolled through the double doors, they tracked them.

It took, according to their lights, no matter how dim

three days to a week for their native features to melt away

and reveal the Jane or John Doe lying beneath.

One man and lady killed after the fact, repeatedly.

In a day or two it took to the news

as a leak,
so the police provided sketches

of the two in their original state, borne off the faces

of two dozen too many. The result? Some families

requested the exhumation of spouses and children;

and when, like secret potatoes, the coffins

were unburied, the air struck them
as a fact drawing all its strength from a rumor. There

their son or daughter, brother or mother

lay, in various nudes of decomposition,

changed beyond the resemblances that made them.

Newly ruined, the bodies

turned

face-up to the lights
by car wreck or heart attack or overdose,

changed with the slow-motion wooziness of smoke:

a nose growing lean, lips

swelling fuller, eyes

migrating a half inch farther apart. When

the bereaved came to the ward to identify them

it was even less than useless. The form

of the problem they loved
had vanished completely. Had

migrated to the dumb calm of the generic,

one man and woman for everyone. It went

much that way for weeks

until, a month later, the news caught something

even more terrifying by the toe

and held on tightly enough to tag it. A man

in New Poland, on the Northwest Side

had been seen walking out of a Kroger,

followed by one or two

witnesses of the eye,

then tracked by half the neighborhood

to a brownstone on Fuller. When the police

arrived, he was exactly what they’d found:

a living specimen. John

Doe, a flawless clone

or maybe the original

psychopomp of all those copies. The

look from his eyes was terror. It

swam through his body like water. The cops

cut the crowd and took him into custody.

Not a day later a woman in Collin Heights

was pulled off the Blue Line, her dress

and coat torn off her like wrapping paper,

naked and

begging, carried

by a dozen hands

to the nearest station. Within a half hour

they had an exact match

for the woman who had been taking

so many of their wives’ and mothers’

faces. During

interrogation both ur-corpses

expressed nauseous bewilderment, paranoia

of their own skin. What had they

done to assume the forms of so many? What

were those vanishing likenesses

telling them, that death could remodel

their features to resemble them?

By decree of the state, they were

thrown on trial,

put to beg for absolution by a jury.

A verdict came back like an echo

from a resentment on borrowed ears:

to their own faces

we sentence them. Execution by

lethal mirror. A month later their bodies

went limp on the gurney. And almost

immediately, a postmortem miracle.

In the morgues and newfound graves

of Dead City

a hundred wayward corpses

were born again.