A jumble of limbs, needles, tissue and time

My budding mortician friend has a lethal arsenal of amusing and horrifying stories from her time at mortuary school (and all this before the portion where she gets to handle the corpses). I've been trying to convince her to write them down and submit some of them here. This could be considered a lesser example. One of her classes covers "restorative arts." Here she learns all about the preparation of a corpse for funeral services. This includes various facial reconstruction techniques, gluing hair onto the scalp, and, of course, embalming. Her professor is fond of recounting tales of his own days as an active mortician. Recently he told an ill-timed story.

It was Tattoo-Sleeved Kim's birthday, and so cake was to be served in restorative art. [I can only hope that the frosting wasn't some wan, pastel color.] TSK's arms are covered with tattoos, down to her wrists. The school has a strict business dress code, and so she must wear long sleeves, even on the hottest summer day. In the stories my friend tells, Kim's only identifying features are those cumbersome, inked limbs.

Prior to the cake's arrival the professor told the class about his first experience preparing a post-autopsy body.

What with all the prying and the slicing and the organ weighing that occurs over the course of your typical post-mortem examination, the vascular system tends to get a bit disrupted. Hence, the embalming process becomes significantly more difficult. In fact, it becomes necessary for the mortician to embalm the head and limbs individually.

He had done all this by the book, but, being a novice, refrained from embalming the torso. After all, the torso would be covered in clothing, and nobody would notice.

Unfortunately for him, the man's widow had called. Her late husband was to be stored for nine months before the funeral would take place. The funeral home trundled him off and locked him away for the allotted amount of time. When they pulled him out, much to the chagrin of the future professor, all that remained of the man was his arms, legs and head. [I pictured them rolling around on the slab, though that almost certainly wasn't the case.]

"What you've got to do with the torso," he explained to the class, "Is to embalm the individual folds of fat, too." Needle those chemicals right into that spongy insular tissue.

At this point the door burst open and in came the cake. "Happy Birthday, Kim!" shouted the proud organizers of the celebration. The class reeled at the juxtaposition. Hooray for rich dessert foods marking of the passage of time!