Pieces: Part 2

The mortuary has a big walk-in freezer. Its wire shelves hold detached human parts whose former owners stil live. These are the bits amputated or extracted in surgery from all over the state.

Each piece is wrapped in white paper, labeled with a discreetly typed tag. One bulky package contains the mangled legs of the boy whose bicycle slid beneath the train. The narrow slab is the wrist and hand of the sawmill worker who slipped and fell against the machinery. The skier's frost-bitten toes are in the small parcel beside the toes of the diabetic. Various bundles hold a pancreas, several appendixes, a malignant stretch of colon. There are the boxed breasts of the senator who didn't stop wearing wigs even though her hair all grew back after the chemo.

The boy, brilliant in his speeding wheelchair, is a bitter debater in his college classes. The ex-mill worker has a hook and two sons to help on his Christmas tree farm. The skier limps slightly and vacations in the tropics.

According to the faith of these survivors, each abandoned part must be given Christian burial. For those who can afford the nominal storage fee, the pieces will wait two or ten or fifty years. The Senator and her breasts will sink together in the hillside plot she's already chosen and paid for.

Other pieces sit frozen for months or years until enough of them have collected on the cold shelves. Then they are stacked together in a cardboard box and carried out to a ready hole. A hired priest reads over them and blesses them before they are lowered and covered. Then the thawing begins.

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