Coroner’s Name: Kai Amaki
Coroner Room Number: B3
Marks and Wounds:
The deceased’s nails are short and blunt, and the cuticles are bitten down. Fingernails have traces of dead skin cells and dried blood, both tracing back to the deceased.
It starts with my hands. Electric itching concentrated in my fingertips. I feel my mind drifting away from the group call conversation, their bickering fading to white noise. I bring my hand down towards my leg, hooking my nail underneath the lifted edge of the scabbing wound. As I peel back the scab, needle-point pain radiates from it. With a final tug and jolting sting, the scab comes off, and red begins to stream down my leg. A wave of relief drowned out the feeling of crawling ants and dulled the electric pain to a warm throbbing. I reached over to my desk drawer to grab a wipe and Band-Aid. After patching up, I tune back into the conversation, but the corner of my mind knows that my hand is still searching my skin for other pocks or divots. 5 Band-Aids later, I use a toothpick to clean the blood and other grime from underneath my fingernails. It always comes back to my hands.
The left knee has sustained a wound with continuous trauma.
When I was younger, I tore out a chunk of my knee after tripping over a rock. I remember watching the clinic doctor stitch the wound up, knots pulling the skin taut together. The skin closed from the bottom up, slowly reknitting the flesh holding me together. Close the gap to open it again. I feel the twisting of stress in my gut, tension radiating out. Like the clinic doctor but with fingernails as my scalpel, I scrape off layers of skin—red streaming down my legs. A seemingly endless task. After, feel relief wash over me like a lukewarm shower. As the sun will always find its to the horizon, my nails will always find their way under my skin.
The arm hair, particularly the forearms, is patchy. There are places where the tips of the hairs are just peaking out, barely penetrating the skin.
Even during casual conversations, the twisting in my stomach wouldn’t ebb. I’m still thinking about yesterday’s mistake, and last week’s, and last year’s. I found myself picking absentmindedly at my arm hair. My dull fingernails struggled to fully tweeze them out. My arms had started to turn blotchy from the picking, and my fingers hurt. Each hair I plucked was supposed to bring cool solace, but the warm pain only burned. Like ants scurrying in frantic lines. The tortuous discomfort stayed with me for long hours into the night, and as I closed my eyes, I could still see the ghostly outline of my mistakes haunting me.
There are many red spots and divots on the cheeks of the deceased’s face. The right lash line in particular has a spot with fewer lashes.
Acne pustules are swollen across my cheeks, and I feel familiar anxious feeling swelling. I tried to smooth my face out with my hands, as if pressing and pulling would make the unbearable texture dissipate. It always came back to my hands. My nails find the bump’s edge, scraping it off. One by one until my face is no more than a mess of marbled reds with tears welling up in my eyes. Through my watery eyes, I could see a spot on my right lash line where it had been thinned out from picking. I pluck multiple at a time during tests, homework assignments, and casual conversations. As if tearing them off would also tear away the tension I felt rising in my gut. While rinsing my hands, the sink water seemed as if it were stained red. No matter how much I washed my hands they still didn’t feel clean.
Coroner’s Notes:
When I got to work on the body, I felt distanced from the person staring back at me. He is unrecognizable—nothing like what I see when I look in the mirror. Looking down at him on the morgue table, I trace my dull fingernails over his face. I can feel soft pocks from acne scars and the thinning spot of the lash line. I lift my hand to feel my face, isotretinoin smoothed out my acne’s marring, and my lash line has filled in. Moving down, I can feel the bare patches of hair on his arms from where they’ve been plucked away. My arm hair has grown back, filling in the patches. The hair is feathery; a soft and soothing texture. Even further downward, my fingers run over the countless dips and divots marring his legs. While mine aren’t without flaws, the wounds I had since being a tween have now closed and faded away. With the fading of each of the scars, I felt the twisting knots in my gut unwind bit by bit until the pain had seemingly vanished. I know why he couldn’t live on—why his heart had to stop, and his body still. Moving back upwards, it always does seem to come back to the hands. Holding his cold left hand, I run my thumb over the small scab on the back. His fingernails’ jagged edges catch on my skin as I softly brush against them. My nails haven’t made it past my fingertips yet, but the nights of scraping dried blood out from underneath them have become few to none. With the waning of sleepless nights and relentless picking, he had lost everything that he was. Looking over the entirety of him, I see that the scattered scars look less like blemishes and more like the stars that speckle the sky. I close up the body and flick the lights off, and as I walk out the mortuary door, there is relief like a midnight breeze in leaving it all behind.