The body splashes as it hits the river, limbs trailing above torso. Rats flee sinking ships and small bubbles burst from blue lips. Hair drifts in the current. Muscles still and blood slows. Empty fingers claw at nothing, only the gentle movements of the current stirring them to motion. The water, tinged green and brown, gurgles contentedly as its surface stills. The moment extends outwards, a final flash of the dim night sky above captured in those dead and staring eyes. It's a perversion of humanity, a twisted tangle of limbs and flesh. It's blasphemous.
The men on the bridge lean over the railing, struggling not to breathe the stench. Smoke curls upwards from glowing tips of cigarettes. Somewhere overhead, a helicopter roams, searchlights glaring downwards on the city. The sky is dark. The buildings are bright. The water below is black and empty, swallowing all they put into it. A dull chill crawls their backs, a feeling they can't quite explain. There's the dim fear that, someday, they too will choke in it. Their boss yells at them to get back to work. Shrugging, they grab the next bag and hoist it over their shoulders. It makes the same splash. In the river, all are equal.
Dead fingers scrape the muddy banks, nails clawing off. Broken bones pierce through skin. Lungs fill with fluid, the desperation for any kind of air growing until he can barely stand it. Perhaps he thought that death would be easier. Perhaps he thought that it would be peaceful. Perhaps he thought it would be anything but this. The current runs a hand through his hair and he finds himself staring into someone's eyes, eyes just as dead as his own. Their skin has rotted, bone shining through. All he can see is the agony etched into their staring eyes, a perfect mirror of his own. He tries to shut his eyes. He tries to look away.
He can't. He's dead. He can do nothing but wait as more and more bodies rain down around him, as curling limbs wrap him, as skin meets skin and death greets itself. He can do nothing but wait as the current slowly takes him in its meandering grasp. He can do nothing but wait for the eternity that comes after life departs.
He almost notices the hook sinking into his flesh, the gentle tugging as it lodges into his back. He almost notices as he lifts from the water, fluids draining from every empty orifice as he dangles there in the empty air. Oh, air! How soft it feels, how lightweight after the crushing pressure of that toxic mud. If his lungs still worked, he would've gasped for breath. If his mouth could move, he would've uttered a thankful prayer. If his nerves were still connected, he would've screamed from the way the metal claw wrapped his spine.
But hours had already faded into days. Each rising sun became a falling moon. He'd spent at eternity below and so he didn't notice. What difference did it make to be slammed into the dull wood of that old dock, the impact no gentler than the scraping of his empty vessel against the rocks of the river?
The boy smiled as he shrugged the corpse onto his shoulder, fetid water soaking the back of his shirt. His smile stayed plastered on even as his thin mask slipped slightly and the toxic breeze tickled his nose. His lungs were already rotten from the inside out. The mask was a warning, a barrier to hide his green and peeling lips. He grunted as he rolled the body onto the cart. It squelched onto the pile, a tangle of bodies and body parts and the other detritus that made up the countless lives once taken. But the one at the top was whole and for that, the boy would be paid handsomely. For that, the boy smiled as he began to work the cart down narrow streets.
The wheels squeaked protest every time they hit the potholes and cracks in the worn road. The boy did his best not to notice, ignoring the hushed glances and stares coming from all around. From huddles in the shops and restaurants, from where people gathered in throngs under awnings, they stared at the small child who stank of sewage and his cart of rot. The bodies in the cart didn't notice this. They didn't notice anything at all.
He walked the route with confidence. Down narrow streets, between tall buildings, ducking into tight alleys. The cart fought with overflowing dumpsters, barely shifting around the people lying in the street. The boy hummed to himself as he shoved. He licked his lips, scratching his head, seemingly completely checked out. Forwards by two blocks, a left, a right, and then there it was. The wooden door wasn't signposted, nestled tightly between a chain burger store that was perpetually closed and a strip club best known for selling illegal drugs. He knocked once, sharply, and then leaned against the wall, rubbing his sore arms.
The corpse on top of the cart remained still. Dimly, it was aware something had changed. But it had a hard time saying what.
The matchmaker opened the door slowly. She glanced at the boy for just a moment and then, without a word, strode to the cart. She poked the corpse. Bending forwards, she inhaled deeply. Gently, she lifted one of his arms and watched it fall.
"I've told you before," she said to the boy. "No live ones."
The boy shrugged, his gills flapping defensively. "S'dead. Fished him out."
The matchmaker ran her hands along the corpse's chin to his neck where his gills should've been. His lips were stained but noticeably red. His corpse was clean. His lungs failed to move despite the exertions of his spirit. "Fine," she said. "I accept this charge. Bring them up."
The boy leaned forwards slightly, his mouth opening to reveal sharp teeth. "And?"
She laughed as she vanished back into the cavernous space of her workshop. "You get thirty minutes and second choice."
Still not moving, the boy pointed at the intact corpse atop the pile. There was a strange beauty to it, his pale face almost calm. The matchmaker turned slightly, hovering in the shadows on the boundary. "That one's mine. You can have the rest."
The boy shook his head. "Not worth. Want that one."
She sighed, pulling a leather-bound notebook from her back pocket and flipping through it. "Steep. Tik pulled up a fresh one two days ago. You'll like it."
"Full hour then." the boy croaked.
She found the page listing the boy's account. Her brow knitted together as she studied it. "Fine," she said at last. "Full hour. That brings you to an even twelve."
The boy smiled widely as he lifted the body back onto his shoulders and followed her into the darkness of the the flesh shop.
The corpse came to awareness slowly. It was like awakening from a deep sleep, like a river slowly freezing. It was lying on a surface. That was different from before in infinite ways and yet felt the same in others. Where once water currents had battered it, now air currents did the same. Noises rippled across its surface, understood as vibrations in the skin rather than words that could be understood. The motions danced as lights and shadows, moving pictures on the cave wall. The corpse tried to flex its fingers and found that it could not. It wondered if it even still had fingers.
There was a woman who came to check on it. Her eyes glowed, reflecting the dim candlelight back over him. She ran her hands down his forehead, over his lips, through his sides and into his lungs. She cupped her breath in her hands and pressed it into his lips. She whispered divine words and wrote messages on his chest with her blood. Each and every time, he felt slightly more alert. Each and every time, he felt slightly more alive. Each and every time, the memories started nagging at him again, the rotting parts of his brain threatening to repair themselves.
She worked nearby when she wasn't checking on him. She worked with sharp knives coated in black goo, saws that buzzed and whirred, needle and seemingly endless thread. Her hands, her everchanging hands, were always stained red. Her eyes smiled as she worked, mouth hidden behind a mask. Sometimes the things she worked on were silent. Sometimes they screamed.
One day, he rolled his head over to watch. She had cut a boy open and he squirmed beneath her as she ran her hands through his body. Deftly, she plucked out his heart and began to squeeze it. She poked and prodded it, cutting it open and then sewing it back shut. She reached over to a table nearby, plucking bones from it to build a little box for the heart. She placed it back in his chest and laid her hand on his forehead.
"I match bones to flesh. I match hearts to cages. I match wounds to safety," she said. "A caged heart is a safe heart. In all things, function follows form."
The patient gasped with pain, his teeth gritted.
She continued, "I curse you with loneliness and I bless you with peace."
He writhed, the restraints tight against his limbs.
"The which was broken requires space to heal. In time, you will set yourself free." She bowed her head slightly. "Life is flesh. Flesh is malleable. Our perceptions are all we are. In changing ourselves, we change our world. I grant you this with thanks."
Between laboured breaths, the boy hissed, "With thanks."
She nodded. Without another word, she reconstructed his chest. Time passed by slowly as she scooped in organs, twisting bones back into place, strengthening the ribs with extra gristle. Finally, she closed the flaps of skin and bid them seal, knitting them together with black thread until there was scarce a trace of her work.
When it was done, she wondered away, leaving the boy to recover. His breathing slowed and became steady. Movement returned to his limbs and he rubbed his chest, looking for signs that mere hours ago he had been spread across three different tables. He sat up and met the eyes of the corpse. Neither of them said a word.
The matchmaker drifted back and patted the patient's back. "That was quicker than expected. You still have another forty minutes."
The boy flexed his gills, running a tongue over sharp teeth. His voice was croaky and decaying, his vocal box damaged by long years of toxins. "Tail?"
She shook her head. "Would take at least several hours for a strong match."
He frowned. "Then what?"
She put her hand on his head and leaned it back, tilting it side to side as she examined. "If I do your lips, you could pass for at least a few dives."
He considered for a moment.
She lifted one of his wrists and held it up, gesturing with his hand. "I can web your fingers. Make swimming much easier."
He flexed his knuckles. "Hard to hold things."
"Yeah," she said. "Or you could bank it. You'll need new lungs and gill filter within the month."
The boy considered for a long moment. "Fingers," he said at last.
Without a word, she turned to the pile of spare parts in the corner, drawing a very large knife as she went.
Eventually, the corpse sat upright and looked around. The room was dark. There were no windows and the overhead lights were off. The few scattered candles were hardly sufficient to light the space and left the room full of silhouettes and mysterious shadows. Some were big and boxy and some were shaped like people. One of them moved. The matchmaker looked over at him.
"Hello," she said. "It's nice to meet you."
The corpse tried to move his mouth, but it wouldn't respond right. He swallowed, his tongue feeling too big and bloated, something massive caught in the back of his throat. He tried again, muscles convulsing against nothing at all, something blocking him entirely. Something in his stomach twisted and turned. He rolled over slightly as it burst, fetid water forcing its way out through every orifice at once. He coughed as he vomited, as his nose burst, as his filled with fluid, as his vision went brown blocked by that which now massed from his tear ducts. It hurt like nothing he'd ever felt before. It was the most real sensation he could ever remember.
He hung his head over the edge of the table as his body drained itself. A calming hand found the back of his head and rubbed it gently. They stayed there as the flow turned into drips, into coughs, into shuddering gasps, into pained but dry heaving motions. She pushed him back upright and put weight onto his chest until the hiccups stopped.
"Don't force it," she said. "Your vocal cords are likely rotted. Be patient. Remember to breathe."
He did so, air whistling through the holes in his lungs. Language was coming back to him slowly. He was struggling to understand what she was saying, let alone think of what he should be saying. Words sounded more like noises. There was a buzzing in the back of his head he couldn't ignore.
"Where?" he whispered slowly, each syllable a monumental struggle to sound out.
She smiled, lifting her hands over him. "I'm Misha. Misha the Matchmaker. You're in my workshop."
"Ma'ch'ker?" he tried, unsuccessfully.
Misha nodded. "I match flesh to flesh. One of my patients brought you here as spare parts."
"Sp're'rts?" he repeated helplessly.
"Yeah." She ran a hand down his side. He could barely feel it. "But I could feel there was more to you than that. Didn't match you at all while you were out. Now you're awake, we can see about fixing you up. Get you back on your feet."
He tried to shake his head, but his muscles weren't working yet. "No," he whispered.
"No?" she said.
"C't pay."
She put a finger on his lips. "Don't worry about it," she replied. "Not many corpses can."
He blinked. His eyes felt squishy. The world was all blobby shapes and strange lines. "Hurts," he said.
"I know." She nodded. "It'll get better with time. Rest."
He closed his eyes slowly. The air swirled around him. It felt like he was still in the river.
Misha's eyes were strange, slightly too large and too yellow, with pupils like slits that flashed when she smiled. They let her see in the dark and she preferred to work in shadow. Despite this, she began leaving the lights on for him, bathing the workshop in painfully white fluorescent light, forcing her patients to blink into it while she worked. He watched her change someone's eyes once, a beautiful man whose bloodshot dark eyes were swapped for a pair of intricate green ones sourced from somewhere. He didn't think about how she had changed her own. He didn't want to know.
Misha was constantly working. That was the other thing he noticed. She rarely seemed to leave for more than a few minutes at a time and that was usually to collect spare parts from the parade of fishlike youths constantly bringing their carts to her door. Scrawny children would bring her food, paper wrapped sandwiches, boxes of noodles and meat, carved hunks of something unknown. In exchange, she bandaged scrapes and cuts, set broken bones, wove together that which they had broken. There was always an exchange is what the corpse was starting to learn. Misha frowned as she negotiated. She frowned as the line outside her door grew and grew and she had to turn some away.
The food itself caught him off guard. The room usually smelt of blood, sewage, poison, and rot. But sometimes when something hot came in, as Misha leaned into her worn leather armchair and rapturously inhaled, wisps of steam would drift over to him and despite himself, his nose would twitch. Flashes echoed through his brain, long lost moments of a life he hadn't lived for a very long time. He'd eaten food before. He vaguely remembered what it was like to bite into a hunk of meat, to slurp at soup, to gnaw on pizza like he was starving. Maybe he was. His senses grew sharper as did his control over his body. His memories hovered there, just out of reach. It was as though he was watching a life on the surface from below the rough waters of the river.
She talked to him sometimes while she worked. Most of the time he lay there still, not even responding. Sometimes he watched her work intently. Sometimes he sat up and looked around the workshop. It didn't really matter. In a way, he felt that she would be talking even if he wasn't there. It was more for her than for him. While she knitted flesh together, she explained the process. As she wove together whatever was needed, she whispered little prayers.
His eyes wandered the room. It had maybe once been a shop of some kind. Huge walk in freezers held most of her body parts, but some were out on the shelves, on the tables, on the workbench. Tool racks and shelves held some of her collection, but the rest scattered tables haphazardly. She always seemed to know where everything was, never even hesitating as she danced over the web of extension cables on the floor to find an unused one to plug her saws into. The walls were bare. The floor was stained, but clean from dust or rot. There was always an exchange. Those with nothing else to give, who came in with broken bodies unable to move, who she cut open and put back together with entirely new parts, gave her their time. They cleaned and carried and smiled when she patted them on the back and sent them on their way.
She explained the philosophy to him several times as she worked. He appreciated the repetition. He still struggled with words and concepts, needing to listen several times to understand. She would've helped everyone if she could. But there was just one of her. She already pushed her body to its limit, frequently having to replace her own hands, arms, heart, stomach, and so on. She never slept and she rarely ate enough. The only time he ever saw her cry was when a new hand had a persistent tremble. It grasped like it wanted to hold something and he knew that she was seeing whatever its last owner had failed to hold. She cried as she grabbed her big cleaver and severed it. She wept as she burned it, praying for the poor soul who was tethered to it.
Despite this, she did what she could. He learned the fish kids were only alive because of her. It was symbiotic. The only available source of spare parts was the river, that toxic sludge full of corpses. But diving into the river broke them down, rotting them from the inside out. She kept them alive, kept them on their feet. She forged necks into gills, feet into flippers, finned tails for mobility, and bulbous eyes to pierce the muck. In exchange they brought her parts, all the parts she could ever need. Sure, they were rotting. Sure, they were dripping with toxins. But if someone's heart was failing, it would buy them a few more months for far less than a synthetic one.
She talked about the importance of the work often. She talked about the ways bodies can break down on their own and the ways that bodies are broken by force. She rarely talked about herself, where she learned the art, or why there weren't any others here. There certainly were others. She mentioned a few names sometimes, people she'd studied with, people whose techniques she wished she knew. But there was a space in her stories, a gap made obvious by its absence. Some kind of falling out. A disagreement.
She talked about the corpse too. She speculated on his past, on what sequence of events led to him being thrown into the river. He couldn't tell her. No matter how hard he tried, it only hurt when he attempted to recall. She didn't seem surprised. He gathered he wasn't the first corpse she'd watched crawl back to life.
Walking came slowly and agonizingly. The first time he tried, he sat on the edge of the table and dangled his legs. They hung in the open space and he felt like he was floating. For the first time, he considered the state of his body as a representation of himself rather than an abstract object. He was, perhaps, disgusting. His skin hung off sharp bones, mold clinging to blue-green flesh. His blood was sluggish and toxic. She'd dressed him in a simple wrap-around hospital gown, stained with some sort of dark substance. Straining his decayed muscles, he reached for the floor.
She was by his side, gripping his shoulder. "You can do it," she whispered. "Don't think about it."
His toes, the three of them that were left hesitated just a little above the tiles. "Can't," he said. "Scared."
One of her fingers found his chin and guided his face away from the ground and towards her. "Look at me," she said. She was a chaotic parchment, a patchwork of fleshes stuck together by prayer and love. Her mismatched eyes, her cold lips, her warm smile. "Do you know what the secret to doing scary things is?"
Wordlessly, he shook his head.
"Never look down." She tapped his forehead. "Fear is all in here. It's all in your head. It's all anticipation. Don't think. Just be."
He could feel himself getting lost in her eyes. There was a weight to them. She was too real. It was like staring up the trunk of a very tall tree. Maybe part of him had flown out into the river and he was just half a man now. Maybe something ineffable had been lost and would never be recovered.
He shook his head. She smiled and laid him back down. They'd try again soon.
By the time he could stand, she'd replaced all the muscles in his legs. By the time he could speak, she'd given him a new tongue and matching lips. By the time he could stare at himself in the filthy bathroom mirror, his face was another's. He was tinged green and rotted, cut across with stitches and scars. His body was breaking down, toxins from the river leeching from the fresh parts into the older ones. He was dissolving as he lived, only kept upright by the tender ministrations of the matchmaker.
Despite this, he found himself smiling as he swept the shop. It was nice to feel his muscles move, to put himself to work. It was nice to tame Misha's chaos, to bring about a small improvement in the world. It was nice to step outside and inhale, to breathe the fresh air.
He'd died once. He didn't know how or why. But here, he was happy.
Author's notes: I've decided to start doing author's note more. This has been on the draft heap for a while. It's unedited, obviously. Been suffering from health problems lately (yay food poisoning). I'm not super happy with the ending. I had several longer takes in my head, but they've all resisted being written so this is the version you get. I figured finishing something would improve my mood (we'll see). No art is ever finished, there's just a point where you cease working etc etc. I reserve the right to sequel it later. Thanks for reading!