Anatomy of a Murder

"Now, take off all of your clothes," she instructed her victim, one of the few uncomfortable phrases that could supersede even his terror of her gun aimed at him.

Except in the bedroom, under the blankets of consensuality, a man who is naked is at a psychological disadvantage in any confrontation with a woman who is not. He is not a lover. He is flaccid. Even silly. He cannot be formidable.

She had led her victim at gunpoint to the hospital morgue. Dead of night. Only meal cart traffic driven by stoned kitchen staff, easily fooled. And easy to get him into the perfect position.

The morgue corridor, dark and spooky, served as the perfect backdrop for her vengeance. A bespoke revenge; apropos. Precise. Self-righteous and gender-affirming.

Just what her victim had done was not important--just that it was personal and cruel and was enough to deserve what was to happen now. A cautionary tale for those who wrong the brilliant and the clever and those who keep score.

Gun in one hand, she held the burlap and twine in the other, which she extended to him. Pre-measured couture, it was enough to wrap him redundantly.

"Everything!" she barked at the man standing in just his underwear. There were the back-and-forth refusals, then the compliance that a cocking gun commands. Now naked, the man complied with her request that he self-wrap in the burlap. "Over your head, too," she added.

He twirled the excess burlap flap in a spiral over his face. Even in the dark, she could see his facial expression attempt to reconcile both horror and resentment.

He now stood still, naked, under the burlap, which scratched his genitals, nipples, and other points of protrusion in his anatomy she knew so well. It was such a constraining papoose that his tormenter could lower her gun to allow her to encircle the twine until his wrappings were held fast. Even under wraps, she could see that her victim trembled. She enjoyed watching the shivering cocoon until, after a long moment, he protested.

"What now!" His demand was met with silence. The burlap continued to scratch, and now itch, his skin.

She stooped and fingered a brass latch, flush with the floor, that opened a trapdoor to the recessed chamber underfoot. The creaking of its swinging open broke the silence. It was the perfect sound for a dark corridor, in a dark morgue, in the subterranean milieu of the avenging ambiance of retribution. The morgue--an oxymoron: death lived here.

She tugged at her burlapped prisoner. The smell of formaldehyde wafted up. He knew that smell!

He knew where he was.

He countered against tottering at the edge of this pit of wrapped corpses floating in formaldehyde; there they bobbed, imbued with fixatives and chemicals.

"Get in," she seethed. He didn't care what would happen to him--he would not willingly play any further in whatever script she had written for him.

She reconsidered her strategy of pushing him in and deferred, lest she risk his falling on her, ruining the plot. Or worse--the both of them falling into the pit she had reserved for just him. She raised her gun once more and fired a single bullet into his groin. He doubled over in his brown body-length pall and fell obediently into the pool of bodies.

She let the heavy metal trapdoor slam shut over him and his new friends. It once again lay flush with the floor and it would be some time before it were opened again.

He banged desperately from below. He cried pitifully. He scratched frantically at the metal. He was audibly choking on fumes.

He was where he belonged, and she celebrated that thought.

The following Fall, in her first-year med school gross anatomy class, her dissection team would be surprised to find their cadaver, John Doe, had a bullet in his groin. It would make for glib talk in the medical school cafeteria at lunch that day, and she would be there to hear it. She would impress all of her fellow students with her rapier wit when she would chortle, "Call me a hopeless romantic, but he probably had that coming."