Morose Marvin

Morose Marvin

Marvin awoke to thunder: the thunder of a hundred other boys filling the dormitory, all shouting and laughing, pushing and shoving. He peered down over the edge of his bed, just as another boy peered up over it, right at him.

"Hey!" the kid called loudly, alerting other boys. "New kid!"

Marvin shrank back and laid still.

"What's your name, eh?" said the now-unseen kid.

Marvin weakly offered his name.

"Marvin!" The boy called out. He jumped into the bunk beneath Marvin, sitting firm, and rocked the whole of it with his feet. It creaked and swayed unsettlingly with Marvin on top, clinging to the frame. The boy taunted loudly,

     "Marvin Marvin on the rise!
     Enemy of tiny flies!
     Fill the corpses, paint a smile,
     Puke up all your stomach's bile!"

The bed careened around as the boy sang and it finally came to a stop. Marvin, pale and ill, queased down at the boy. Everybody burst out laughing.

As the laughter died away the kid offered his hand. "There, you're in now! One of us. Peter."

Marvin shook Peter's hand and everybody else went back to their noisy recreations.

That evening, Peter took Marvin to dinner, an event filling the mansion's dining hall with professors and remarkably quiet, well-mannered boys. Afterwards Marvin and Peter sat and chatted for a while, and then went to bed.

Marvin slept soundly; he was exhausted.

The next morning Marvin met the headmaster, who told him about the school, about the glorious work of preparing the dead, and about the exciting career that awaited him when he graduated. Marvin excused himself as quickly as possible; he found the whole notion horrid.

Marvin then attended his first class, "Theory of Embalming." Next was "Corpse Makeup," and then he was off to courtyard exercise, followed by lunch. In the afternoon he took "Corpse Costuming," and finally, "Embalming Lab."

That was the first time Marvin had ever seen a body, apart from his mum's funeral the previous day. It was an old woman. The clipboard near her head read "Maguire, Emily, Mrs." He stared, but refused to touch it. This angered the professor.

"It's meat, boy. It's dead. It's an inert mass, a thing. And it's your job to keep it from stinking. Now am I making myself clear?"

Marvin looked miserable. He sat up on the tall stool and stared at the corpse. It stared back dryly under drooped eyelids, jaw slack. He gingerly touched it with his finger and shivered, and glanced bashfully at the professor for approval.

"Good boy. Moving on, people!" The professor lectured briefly, occasionally pointing at a large chart mapping the veins of the human body.

The day's lab concerned how to insert the embalming needles to appropriately pump out the body's own fluids, and pump in the embalming fluid. Without bodily fluids, the corpse would be slower to fill with bacteria, and with embalming fluids they shouldn't be able get a start.

Marvin made his way through the lab as best he could, his stomach clenching every time he pushed a needle through the firm, rubbery flesh. He got the corpse hooked up to the embalming machine, and looked to the professor.

"Going to start it up now?" the professor asked Marvin.

Marvin quickly surveyed the mess of needles and tubes and valves, and gave the professor a small, uncertain nod.

"Think you have it right, do you boy?"

Marvin looked less certain, but he didn't want to touch the body anymore, so he just nodded again.