Molly pushed
her index finger against the tip
of her nose, as if it were a button
that could heighten the smell of
pre-death. “I love this aroma of
anticipation,” she said to Stanley,
who was marinating in a tub of
cold water.
Stanley held
his elbows and shivered. When he
spoke, his teeth clacked together. “I
thought we were gonna have sex.”
“Way too early
for that.” She opened her mouth
and winked, as if he just might
like what she had planned.
Molly had
initially found out about Stanley
when visiting her therapist friend.
Upon snooping through some confidential
files, she’d found the following
note scribbled at the bottom of
a page: Stanley is the most suicidal
client I’ve ever had.
Molly had
shared many of her quirky ideas
with her therapist friend, including
her philosophy on prescription
birth control: It wasn’t foolproof;
therefore, she wouldn’t use it.
If you climbed into bed with a
warm body, no matter what precautions
you took, you could get pregnant.
Molly didn’t
like babies. She found it annoying
that they had so much life ahead
of them. She preferred dead people,
who had their whole life behind
them.
“Here you go.” Molly
pressed down on the top of a red
click pen. Excitement shot through
every vein in her body, and she could
feel her blood lighten and percolate,
as if a champagne cork had been pulled
and the celebration was about to
begin. She placed the pen in Stanley’s
right hand—the hand she’d made him
keep dry.
Stanley nodded
and began to cry. His tears made
her think of embalming chemicals
leaking from a corpse; the foamy
soap around his nipples reminded
her of a lactating mother more than
a lover that she was about to experience;
his fingernails were long enough
to pick a banjo.
“Remember,
vertical not horizontal.” Upon her
leaving the room, Molly pointed at
a white pad of paper.
Her strategy
for remaining barren stayed a secret,
but her proclivity for dating suicidal
men became a constant source of gossip
and speculation. Afraid of picking
up a charge of assisting suicide,
she moved on to other types of men:
chemo patients, death row inhabitants,
and when desperate, she trolled the
interstate for fresh traffic accidents.
Eventually,
her pregnancy fears began to increase.
What if there were a small amount
of postmortem emission? Did such
a thing exist? If sperm can live
for 72 hours in open air, could it
live for 72 hours inside a dead body?
Enough is enough,
she decided. Molly started taking
the pill, became a hospice nurse
and only assisted men who, at same
point in their life, had undergone
a vasectomy.
