Hellacious Shock!!

by Tommy Kuiper
(Granville, Ia)

I have a story for you that I’ll enter into the funeral home contest. It did not actually take place in a funeral home, but I think its close enough that you’ll enjoy and accept my entry. It happened 8 years ago when my wife and I were having our first child. The morning after my wife delivered our child via C-section, I went to the hospital to spend the day with my wife and newborn son. It should be noted here that this hospital is connected to a nursing home. Sometime in the midmorning I was walking the hospital halls looking for a vending machine to grab a bag of chips and a can of soda. I found the machines at the end of the hall next to the elevator door. About the exact same time my chips hit the bottom of the tray, the elevator door opened. Out of the elevator came a friend of mine that I used to play golf with years ago, and I haven’t spoken to him in quite some time. He’s a mortician in our small town of 5000 people in NW Iowa. We bullshitted for awhile until the conversation led to me asking why he was in the hospital today. In the blink of an eye he replied….”I just came from the nursing home….do you remember old man Smith?” (I’ll leave the real name out just in case) He asked me as he reached back into the elevator and pulled out a cart with a body under a sheet on it. Before I could gather my thoughts and pinpoint a visual of old man “Smith” from memory, he pulled the sheet back exposing the body from the head to the waist. “Holy Shit” I said….”OMG” what happened I asked. Then he realized that a dead body wasn’t something I’m used to, and especially one that looked like this. The body had been lying in bed for several days before it was discovered. When he flipped the sheet back…it wasn’t just a body like you see in a casket….this was pre embalming etc… It had started decomposing….so the eyes, mouth etc… were extremely creepy looking because they were all sunken way into the face. It was straight out of a horror movie. It’s hard to explain how the body looked and just exactly how nonchalantly and quickly he exposed it to me without warning, that’s the part of the story that makes it so good. It’s a good laugh today, and that image stuck in my head for quite some time…..good thing I have a relatively strong stomach and clean sense of humor and horror!