I knew it was dead body before I even had to look at it. The smell, oh the smell. It was awful, a dingy and foggy scent that clusters your nostrils and breaks into your conscious. My mind was warped when it grabbed and clutched its claws into my senses the first time I was forced to sniff it. Reluctantly, I looked down. There it was. A bleeding mass of dead skin and no soul. Eyes there, but not really. They were squished in their sockets, a bubbled mass of disgusting matter that wouldn’t stop staring at me, the pupils drilling into my being. I used to have to look away, at least for a second, just to attempt to get my mind to pretend it was a game. Yeah, it was a game. A game where no one got hurt, we all got to go home in the end, and …show more content…
I stunk, and I knew that. Human remains don’t clean off as easily as some would like off of clothi9ng and skin, and clung to every fiber of cloth and every molecule of skin, their stench creating a sort of force field that told others to back off, that I was a Cleaner and not to be bothered. The dead bodies create a sort of unique scent, foul and pungent, yet sickly sweet...as if someone had sprayed an overdose of a rotten perfume into the air. “Are you done? You're done, aren't you?” Claudia. I turned my head towards the young girl that clung at the entrance to the Block. The Block was just a generally used nickname for the hell that Prosperity had created. It was just as the label said- a cement block with one entrance, a white door, along with various decorations on the inside, such as forts for the victims to hide behind. “Mercy? You're done aren't you?” “Yes,” I grumbled back, voice barely registering in the blank atmopshere. Claudia was a trainee, my replacement when I died. I assumed it must be soon, as she was sent. She was going to do a terrible job, that was for sure. Timid to the point of breaking down when meeting a new person, she was not a joy for me to
“I shall never forget the awful climb on hands and feet out of that hole that was about five feet deep with greasy clay and blood (although I did not know then that it was blood).
This article is a narrative. It does not aim to analyse the topic. It describes the author's experiences at the mortuary and the resulting disturbing thoughts she had.
Continuing the journey, John Reed goes through a horrid of corpse. In “The Valley of Corpses,” he travels through the country and sees the Serbian and Austrian dead in the trenches. “We walked on the dead, so thick were they—sometimes our feet sank through into rotting flesh, crunching bones.” For around six miles, thousands of dead bodies laid on the floor with their skins rotting away and the air reeking of the dead. Due to the war,
Throughout the novels Perfume and Chronicles of a Death Foretold the authors tends to use many literary devices in order to really bring life to the work and keep the reader intrigued. Exaggeration is very apparent in both novels and almost seems excessive, but vivid at the same time. In Perfume Suskind refers to “stench” many times and based on the imagery used in the novel the context gives the word “stench” almost a positive meaning at times. For Example, when Grenouille murders the girl, the way he describes her “sweaty armpits, oily hair, and fishy genitals”, makes the sensation seem like an actual perfume to his nose. The author also uses scent to characterize in the novel. Grenouille who had to apparent sent seemed equal to one with
“Death's Acre” tells about the career of a forensic hero, Dr. Bill Bass, creator of the famous "Body Farm" at the University of Tennessee-the world's only research facility devoted to studying human decomposition. He tells about his life and how he became an anthropoligist. He tells about the Lindbergh kidnapping and murder, explores the mystery of a headless corpse whose identity surprised police.
The mind is a very powerful tool when it is exploited to think about situations out of the ordinary. Describing in vivid detail the conditions of one after his, her, or its death associates the mind to a world that is filled with horrific elements of a dark nature.
parts and put them together and used a special technique to bring the corpse to
Dealing with the death of a loved one is one of life's most challenging obstacles. The pain and suffering that a person goes through cannot be fully understood unless experienced firsthand, like people that have experienced death through abortion. However, for some who have experienced death in war, death is something more like a game, where it is feared, yet made fun of in hopes of lessening the truth of reality. In the short story, “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brian, the author demonstrates his attempts to make death less real through tactics like telling stories about the dead as if they were living, joking about zombies and conceiving the dead as items instead of people.
The child’s game had ended. After I nearly ran Kurtz over, we stood facing each other. He was unsteady on his feet, swaying like the trees that surrounded us. What stood before me was a ghost. Each layer of him had been carved away by the jungle, until nothing remained. Despite this, his strength still exceeded that of my own. With the tribal fires burning so close, one shout from him would unleash his natives on me. But in that same realization, I felt my own strength kindle inside me. I could just as easily muffle his command and overtake him. The scene flashed past my eyes as though I was remembering not imagining. The stick that lay two feet from me was beating down on the ghost, as my bloodied hand strangled his cries. My mind abruptly reeled backwards as I realized what unspeakable dark thoughts I had let in. Kurtz seemed to understand where my mind had wandered; it was as though the jungle’s wind has whispered my internal struggles to him. His face twisted into a smile. He seemed to gloat and enjoy standing by to watch my soul begin to destroy itself.
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the resence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood – you give it together, you take it together. (O’Brien, 220)
When Divakaruni moved to the United States, tried to abandon the smells of her childhood in favor of acculturation. She realized this is a mistake when she has a child of her own. She eventually comes to appreciate the smells’ abilities to comfort, give joy, and motivate. One smell in particular she told about is how the smell of iodine reminded her that “love sometimes hurts while it’s doing its job.” In rearing her own offspring, she intentionally tried to replicate the “smell technique” with her own twist in hopes that her children reap similar benefits. One example is how she filled the house with the aroma of spices and sang American and Indian tunes with her
As a small child, Jeff seemed happy enough, playing with his dog or riding his bike, but was fascinated with death. When Lionel removed some animal bones from under the porch, the remains of small creatures killed by small local predators, Jeff seemed quite pleased by the sound they made dropping back into the bucket. His father dismissed it as childhood curiosity.
Imagine yourself as a mortician, certified as an embalmer, retort operator, funeral director, and a funeral cosmetologist. You get a call late at night, there’s been a terrible accident and someone has died. You arrive at the hospital and are directed to a small room where the body of the deceased is being held. There’s blood all over the sheets as the doctor and coronary assistant zip up the body bag and inform you the body was badly mangled in a car accident, which is going to make reconstructing the deceased very difficult. Your assistant puts the body on the stretcher and loads it into the hearse while you talk to the wife of the deceased man. She tells you they plan to have a funeral so you give her your card and a reassuring word before leaving the hospital and driving back to the funeral home. Now your job begins, not only will you have to reconstruct this man’s disfigured body, but you must meet with the family, discuss funeral arrangements, and deal with the family’s emotional trauma that comes with losing a loved one. Although working in the funeral business can be emotionally draining, it’s a satisfying feeling to see mourning families able to say goodbye to their loved ones. Despite the fact that working so closely with the deceased can be chilling, Mortuary science can be a thrilling field to work in.
However the 24 girls whom he extracts scents to create his perfume are described to be “virginal” alluding to their chastity, which also suggests their purity. The women have a distinguishable physical beauty that Grenouille accounts to their equally beautiful scent. The notion of the girls scent as pure also draws connection with the concept of the soul. The essence of these women who are innocent and uncorrupted is in contrast with society which stinks from their vial venality. Ultimately Suskind suggests that the qualities of a scent possess the possibility of spiritual transcendence into a physical manifestation of the
I was lying in my own filth, being tied up for several days, without being able to go to the toilet; it's not a pretty sight. My body was slowly wasting away, no food, and only drops of water I couldn't cope. I could see my team-mates, my friends, slowly going insane. They were talking in there sleep, screaming for freedom, but what was the point. The guards treated us like filth, something they'd stepped on and couldn't get rid of. I could see their point though, we killed their friends, and so they determined to kill ours. But I had to escape, I was the only sane one in there, my mind was at ease. You see, everyone else was going crazy wondering about their loved ones, but I had no one.