Deceased Occupations

She wasn’t there, but her heart was on Little Mort’s miniature steel table, which stood beside the full-sized steel table of Big Mort. No bloody mess; just another dried up heart, severed at the valves, the heads of a dozen multicolored push-pins poking out. Little Mort’s third heart.

When handing his son a heart, Big Mort would tell where it had come from. For the first heart, he said, “This is a politician’s heart. Notice its blackness.” And the second heart: “This came from a lawyer. Feel how cold it is.”

For that third heart, Big Mort looked squarely at his son. “The heart of a prostitute. It’s empty.”

But Little Mort didn’t know the word “prostitute” from any school books or spelling tests or TV shows he watched with his dad in the den before bedtime. He had to Google it. Noun – a woman who engages in sexual activity for payment. However, this did not sate his curiosity: it rather prompted more. So he clicked on the “images” tab. And scrolled down and scrolled still further down until dinner time finally interrupted.

When the next female corpse rested on his father’s shiny table, and Big Mort wiped the heart in preparation to give it away, before his father could moralize the heart’s occupation, Little Mort said, “Can’t I have that whore’s pussy, too? She can’t sell that in the ground, can she?”


**This piece began with a prompt: "She wasn't there, but her heart was...." I don't know that I went in quite the direction the prompter intended, but I found it a fun place to start thinking all the same. The prompter is Veronica Helen Hart, a novelist in her own right. More about her work can be found here.


Comments

  1. Veronica Helen Hart6/23/14, 5:11 PM

    Lenny, You crack me up. What an imagination. Great job.

    ReplyDelete

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