The Nightmares Come While I'm Awake

What sort of body refuses to rot? Catholics say that saints won't decay, they smell of roses as the earthly sloughs away. Their bodies transform into relics instead of into bones and putrescent puddles. Perhaps Jane Doe is a saint, Saint Jane of the Beautiful, of the Lost, of the Forgotten. But she doesn't smell of roses. Without preservation she smells slightly of the sort of perfume that little boys buy for their mothers or their first girlfriends. The aroma is sharp, cutting through the antiseptic and air freshener scent of the morgue. It is blunted a bit through the passage and by being trace amounts, but it is there despite the tender washing of that soft flesh. She seems asleep. The newspapers didn't believe it at first, but they came and saw and started referring to her as sleeping beauty. Some went with Brier Rose. As if there was a prince charming out there who could come and wake her up.

Exactly the sort of thing that didn't need to hit press. Especially not with the lover letters already coming in. Killers, freaks, kids who can't get the sight of those too perfect tits exposed for examination out of their minds. The coroner won't cut her open, so they've just been putting her through every sort of test they can think of that doesn't go inside. X-rays and cat scans, hook ups that look like polygraphs. They're hunting for a sign of life. Doctors say that there must be vital signs hidden somewhere. Blood samples don't lie, but neither do the other devices.

They keep missing that there are people involved, and they'll fail you and foul up all the technology they can to keep the fiction going. Some pretty girl, dead but not decayed, looking like she belonged in movies and magazines before ending up dead and no one can say where she came from. News slips free of the city but nobody calls from across the country to tearfully whisper a name into an investigator's ear. That's what's supposed to happen.

It will bring out mania. We all know it. There will be cults. There's already a little shrine where they found her, and at the only location we know she was at before then. There are love letters there, among the prayers and the flowers. Thousand and thousands of love letters to our Jane Doe, lady of mysteries.

All of it forgetting the simple truth. She belongs in a pine box, beneath the ground, and the longer she stays out of it the worse it will be.

Arthur Manx
Editor