By Joshua Vise – May 30, 2024

Published in Flash of the UnDead by Wicked Shadow Press. Lulu: Paperback or EPUB

The Fairfield Anatomical Museum was a modest place, at least from the outside.  Occupying a nondescript rectangular building attached to the medical wing of Grandhaven University, the Fairfield’s collection of prepared human specimens highlighted human development from conception to advanced old age, while simultaneously showcasing a variety of preparation methods that have been used over the past two hundred years.  Entire bodies stood posed like mannequins, their viscera extracted and exposed in ways designed to call attention to different parts of the human machine; here, a knee opened up to reveal a surgical implant, there, a torso expanded laterally to spotlight the position of the major organs.  It attracted pre-medical students and the morbidly curious in nearly equal measure, and those who could get past the squeamish idea that the exhibits were once living people were treated to displays that one reviewer for a local newspaper described as “a powerful demonstration of our frailty as well as our resilience”. 

Still, even the most enthusiastically unflappable visitor found themselves shaken by a small, darkened wing set back from the main exhibits.  Off the main path, this area was only accessible by navigating a hall with a sharp L-bend in the middle, a precaution taken by the museum ensuring that those not wanting to subject themselves to the sights within would not errantly catch a glimpse of anything inside.  Navigating this pathway led to a curtained entrance, outside of which was a sign bearing the title “Roadmap to Development”, with accompanying text placing the exhibit in historical and scientific context, and which issued one final unavoidable warning to museumgoers about the nature of what they were about to see.

Once stepping through the curtain, viewers found themselves standing face-to-face with a wall of anatomical jars, thirty-four in all.  Inside each jar was a human embryo or fetus at a particular stage of development, starting from week six of a typical pregnancy and ending at birth.  Dimly lit from behind and underneath within their recessed shelving, each fetus seemed to glow a dull amber yellow, a color selected specifically to enhance the contrasting elements of each specimen. 

Sensing the potential for religious and political controversy, the museum was very careful to point out that each of these specimens (and they were always referred to as specimens) were the remains of nonviable pregnancies willingly donated to the museum.  They were collected many decades ago, and neither the museum itself nor the Grandhaven University Medical Department either performed abortions or advocated one way or the other in matters relating to abortion.  The curator of the Fairfield had hoped that this clarification, along with the specialized entrance and warning sign, would be enough to mitigate any potential antagonism surrounding the exhibit.

What could not be anticipated, however, were people’s reactions to a particular specimen.  For reasons that most were not even fully aware of, people’s eyes lingered just a little bit longer on specimen thirty-two.  Some claimed to feel a peculiar sense of anxiety, often accompanied by goosebumps or a slight shiver, when in its presence.  Occasionally, a guest would let out a nervous chuckle, as if timidly asserting their mastery over their own feelings of discomfort.  Others simply passed it by as quickly as possible.

In viewing the entire exhibit as a whole, there was little to distinguish specimen thirty-two from any of its brethren.  However, a keen observer would be able to note the few specific non-developmental differences that others missed, details which left them with an even greater sense of dis-ease.  For one, its lower eyelids drooped open, revealing cloudy gray orbs that resembled a cat’s-eye marble, or milk stirred into a cup of water.  Another difference was its posture; either through damage from the preservation process or as a natural result of time, specimen thirty-two seemed to stand more upright, rather than in the classically curled position in which most medical texts depict fetuses.  These two discrepancies by themselves were enough to impart a sense of dread to exhibit goers who noticed them.  However, the most starkly unsettling element would only reveal itself to those studying the exhibit over time.

Preserved in liquid formaldehyde like the others, specimen thirty-two nevertheless had decompositional gas trapped somewhere within its tiny body.  This small pocket of air was enough to cause the corpse to revolve slowly.  Over the course of the day, its yellowed, shriveled body, sunken face, and droopy, lacteal eyes would slowly pan across the room.  Discussions were had between the curator and collections specialists as to whether this disturbing behavior could be corrected, but since the gas could not be released without a serious potential of damage to an irreplaceable specimen, it was left as it was.  The janitor had even become accustomed to rotating the jar at the end of the day to correct for this idiosyncrasy.

In early fall, the Fairfield was the recipient of a beautifully plastinated corpse of a woman in repose, a temporary loan from a much larger European museum.  Denuded of its skin, she lay on her side, legs crossed at the ankle, her knees together.  She leaned on her left elbow, her head propped up on the palm of her left hand.  Even reclining, she leaned back, her right elbow pointing upward, her right hand against her head as if running her fingers through nonexistent hair that the plastination process had stripped from her.  This pose presented her chest and lower abdomen, opened to reveal the baby that was inside her when she died.  Aware of the extreme emotions such a specimen could engender in the public, the curator decided that the best place for such a singular piece would be in the “Roadmap to Development” exhibit opposite the line of jars.  Viewers would now walk through the center of the wing, with the jars occupying the wall on their left, and the prone body of the pregnant woman to their right.

The first night after the corpse’s installation, the janitor came to mop away the footprints of the day’s visitors.  But when he extended his arm in customary duty towards specimen thirty-two, he found that it had barely rotated.  Instead, its frosty stare was fixed singularly on the new addition to their wing.  Bearing the disposition of a man comfortable enough to mop floors at night surrounded by dead bodies in various states of dissection, the janitor thought little of it, and attributed it to the corpse gas finally freeing itself from the fetus’s remains.  He spun the jar slightly so that the yellowed face would be angled towards tomorrow’s guests, and continued on with his janitorial duties, eventually locking up and leaving for the night.

The next morning, the curator arrived only to find the museum docents in a state of hysteria. He could not make sense of their concurrent attempts to explain the situation as they grabbed him by the arm and led him through the sharp L-bend and through the blackout curtain.

The mess at the end of the exhibit stood in stark juxtaposition to the usual sparse tidiness of the rest of the display.  On the ground was a puddle of formaldehyde, with curved pieces of glass jutting here and there from the acrid, sour-smelling liquid.  Radiating away from the puddle were bits of glass ranging from the size of a grain of sand to larger, coin-sized chunks.  The whole mess shimmered as the reflected amber light from the display case was distorted by the wafting fumes of the hazardous chemical. 

In the center of the room was the plastinated fetus, which had been ripped from the womb of its deceased mother, and cast to the floor violently.  Its plasticized body preserved its pose, so that to the curator it looked like a doll a toddler might have thrown across the room in a fit of temper.

A single streaky trail of noxious fluid, punctuated by sparkling glass, led away from the puddle and across the lines of fluorescent colored tape that marked off the spectator walkway.  It continued in wet, narrowing lines, eventually tapering off at the side of the mother-to-be’s pedestal.  It was then that the curator’s eyes took in the horror that the docents struggled to explain to him. Inside the hollowed-out womb of the plastinated woman rested specimen thirty-two, its milky glare peering out from between the edges of the slit in the woman’s belly.