SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 103
SINE QUA NON
RUNNER-UP — CREATIVE PROSE
Renate Widermuth
When a Body Meets a Body
The body was slumped over the desk in the cramped studio apartment and looked like
it had been there a while. Which didn’t mean the middle-aged female had been dead all that
long. The bones of her spine showed like a mountain ridge under a cheap, faded blue blouse.
Her eyes were wide open, also blue, but that could have been corneal opacity setting in after
death. Her cheek rested on the desk on a sheet of paper. Her hair was stringy and unwashed,
streaked haphazardly with grey.
Age is a sloppy painter, Sergeant Angel Rodriguez thought to himself. He’d seen the
artist’s work in his own mirror. There was nothing about this death that stood out, compared
to all he’d seen in his long career. He didn’t think he could be moved or surprised, but
something troubled him about the hand, bony and emaciated, the knuckles white and
bloodless. The deceased seemed to have been holding the pen in a death grip long before
rigor mortis had set in. He leaned closer. The pen had run out of ink, but she had continued
to write on a loose piece of computer paper. He could see the indentations in the whiteness,
but he couldn’t make them out. They were just the ghosts of words.
“Heart attack,” Aleksi Denisovich said as he took his place next to Rodriguez and crossed
his muscular arms.
“What makes you say that?” Rodriguez asked as he looked at his partner whose face had
yet to be etched by time or worry.
“Just a guess. How much you want to bet? No sign of struggle, no blood.” He yawned,
looking around the small studio at the books stacked here and there in unstable cairns. “I
talked to the neighbors. This place was supposed to be empty. No one knew her or even knew
she was here. Probably an illegal sublet, maybe a squatter. We’ve got a call in to the owner.
Maintenance came in to change the air filter and there she was. Let’s just get an I.D. and
move on.”
There was no strong odor yet, but an insect landed on the page next to the bony hand.
It was more sensitive to death than humans, an expert in carrion. It turned the hundreds of
facets of its eyes on the invisible words scrawled there.
“‘I heard a Fly buzz - when I died-’” Rodriguez quoted softly under his breath.
“Huh?” Denisovich said.
“Emily Dickinson.”
“How do you know her name? She sign that paper or something?” He looked closer.
“It’s blank.”
Rodriguez sighed. “Emily Dickinson is a poet. That’s a quote from one of her famous
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