The light cuts the eyes. Sterile. White.
It reeks of formalin and congealed blood.
On the table – meat that once answered to a name.
A corpse.
We begin.
The scalpel traces the first letter of the incision.
The skin gives way without resistance, like wet paper.
Yellow subcutaneous fat.
It never heard of eternity.
The glint of instruments.
The snap of the retractor breaks the ribs like dry twigs.
The chest cavity is flung open.
The path is clear.
We search.
The heart. Muscle.
Three hundred grams of petrified indifference.
This organ did not love – it only tiredly pumped fluid.
Empty.
It is not here, what we came for.
The liver has rotted – a brown filter of toxins.
The lungs – gray bags that spat out the last of the air.
Deeper.
Behind the stomach, in the plexus of channels and glands,
in the damp labyrinths of the fading gut…
There it is.
A tiny. Slimy. Pale-pink lump.
It is moving!
The body has been cooling for two hours now,
the vessels filled with heavy mercury,
yet it – pulses.
A blind worm, knotted into a coil.
Hope.
It resists the inevitable.
It trembles in the jaws of the forceps,
gnawing into the dead tissue.
Dark, but dreaming of life
and refusing to relinquish it.
A parasite that grew fat on illusions,
now writhing from hunger in a depopulated shell.
This part dies last.
I remove it.
Only a thin trail of slime remains.
Final diagnosis.
Cause of death – necrosis of reality.
But Hope – is still warm.