The Autopsy
by Brandon Freels
"Brandon?!" Amanda cried out.
She had found the dead whale in the bathtub.
"Oh, that old thing," I said. "That's nothing to worry about."
I shrugged my shoulders.
I could've been wrong about what Amanda meant when she cried out "Brandon?!" but I assumed that she was either appalled by the smell of rotting blubber, or frightened by the fact that the whale was actually dead.
I opened the closet and pulled out a small box of about thirty or so dead whales and showed them to Amanda.
"Where did they call come from?" she asked.
I had no idea. I held up several of the dead whales by their flippers, and bombed them on top of the other dead whales that were still left in the box. I liked the sound the dead whales made when they crashed into each other. I could hear waves smashing against a coastline.
"They came from somewhere," Amanda said, pushing the conversation.
I pulled out my suit from the closet and put it on. I looked very handsome. I had thirty-five minutes to get to work.
Being distant I responded to Amanda's question like this: "I don't know. They just showed up. In the kitchen, in the bathtub, in the closet, under the bed, etc."
Seeing that our conversation was going nowhere, she held up one of the dead whales and then slowly laid it flat on the floor of my apartment. I watched her as she gathered all the portable lights from my apartment around the dead whale, and began to perform an autopsy on the poor thing.
"Have you seen my socks?" I asked.
I had twenty-three minutes to get to work.
"Shh!" was her answer. "We're dealing with a widespread age old phenomenon here. Do you own these dead whales?"
Amanda had just taken a course on the "dead whale phenomena," so she obviously knew a lot about the subject.
"I don't know," I said. "They just showed up one day. So I guess I don't actually own them. The police said that if no one claimed them in thirty days they'd be mine."
"Has it been thirty days?"
"It's been about four months."
"So technically speaking, these dead whales are yours?"
"Yes, I guess so, technically speaking."
Amanda took the only sharp scalpel I had from my kitchen and used it to cut the dead whale's body open. She pulled out the intestines of the dead whale. She took a handful of blubber and threw it over her shoulder.
I didn't mind her performing an autopsy on the one dead whale she had laid out on the floor, but I didn't want her messing with any of the other dead whales, so I put the small box full of dead whales back into the closet where I knew they'd be safe.
Amanda cut open the skull of the dead whale she had laid on the floor and removed the brain, this time using a pair of scissors, forceps, clamps, a needle, and a pump. She pulled the brain of the dead whale up out of the skull, looked at it for a good two minutes without saying a word, and then threw it into my cereal bowl. My cereal bowl was full of Fruit Loops.
I grabbed my glasses and quickly put them on. I had to see this one-woman slaughterhouse at work. It's not every day that you get to see a woman such as Amanda, so tall and voluptuous, perform an autopsy on a dead whale.
I held a piece of blubber in one hand, and my cereal bowl with the dead whale's brain in the other. I acted very professional about it.
Amanda looked at the clock.
I looked at the clock.
I was ten minutes late for work.
We have no idea who Brandon Freels is. He sent this to us, and we liked it.
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