Nut Job

As I hacked through the breastbone of a seventeen-year-old motorcycle accident victim, my youthful arrogance boiled over and foamed out of my mouth, all over the morgue, into all my coworker’s ears. I blame my recent discoveries of Nietzsche, Marx, and the XTC song “Dear God'' for what I said next. “Kenya, I don’t get how you can believe in God and still call yourself a scientist, let alone work at this horror show.”

Poor Kenya didn’t deserve this theological inquisition. The stale blue light from the Gross Lab’s Macintosh Classic monitor made her crucifix necklace shimmer. She just wanted to be left alone with her cadaver and the Philadelphia Phillies game on her tiny radio. Even if it got poor reception down in the morgue. 1993 was a great year to be a Phillies fan, until the World Series.

Her silver hammer was in her hand, about to break into what was left of an alleged arsonist who didn’t make it out of a Shoprite in time. She needed to see if the missing belly button ring of a Jane Doe was indeed inside of his stomach as reported.

Right before I gave up hope of her answering, she said, “You ever heard of Mr. Peanut?”

“The talking cartoon with the top hat and monocle on the Planter’s Peanuts tin?” I said, laughing.

She didn’t break a smile. “No. The serial killer. I performed his autopsy on that slab right over there, table 23. He worked handing out parking tickets for the Parking Authority.”

“I already don’t like him," I said in my Rodney Dangerfield impression, to let her know I was joking around.

No smile. Northing. Just a middle-aged woman with graying Bantu knots giving me that badass 22nd and Dauphin St. stare until I returned my full attention.

“That's why no one questioned him hanging out at all the parks, especially in the hood, '' she said, “While the mother or the babysitters weren't paying attention, he’d slip a Mars Bar wrapper—they don’t have nuts— into some sweet little girl’s purple Barney the Dinosaur backpack. But it wasn’t a Mars Bar inside. At home, he'd meticulously wrap Snickers Bars, packed with peanuts, into Mars Bars wrappers.”

The radio interrupted us. “And it’s going, going, gone! John Kruck just hit another homer and Veterans stadium is going wild!”

The entire morgue, even the medical sketch artists, stopped their duties and applauded, claps muted from latex gloves. All this candy talk was making me hungry, an eerie sensation while surrounded by corpses.

I pulled back my cadaver’s skin. “But how did he know if the kid had a peanut allergy?”

“He was dating a couple of preschool teachers, and would listen to them whining about how they couldn’t bring peanut butter to work anymore, because of the risk. The guy had a tattoo on his arm that said “survival of the fittest”, and a huge triangle on his back with “environment,” “education,” and “heritage” written on each line, and other weird eugenics symbols I’ve never seen before.”

“He sounds like a real winner.”

“Mr. Peanut lived above his sister and her cop husband's garage in the Northeast. He kept his bookcase filled with eugenicists like Karl Bant, Charles Davenport, Winston Churchill, H.G Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, G. B Shaw, and owned a copy of “Mein Kampf” in German. The lady on the news said that he’d blare pornography to keep everyone away so he could spin his bookcase around and admire the newspaper clippings from his victims thumb-tacked to the back of it. His sister said she’d suspected something when she’d caught him listening in on her husband’s police scanner, laughing at the report of an eleven-year-old girl with seashells in her braids dying in the ambulance. The man thought he was a damn hero, keeping the blood lines pure.”

“That’s fucked up.” I said.

I knew Kenya didn’t like that word, but humanity invented this term for those situations.

She continued, “Then one day he didn't show up to work, and his boss called his sister because he never missed a day. His sister goes to his room, and finds him dead, with an irritatingly blissful look on his face. A week later, his sister cleaned out his room, found all the candy wrappers stashed in his desk drawers, and screamed after her husband moved his trophy bookcase. Mr. Peanut’s cause of death: a coronary from congenital heart disease.”

My mouth fell open. “So the guy who targeted kids with bad genetics . . .”

“ . . . was killed by bad genetics,” she said, smiling for the first time, “Now, you tell me that ain’t the hand of Jesus.”

I stared at the drain on the floor as the radio blasted. The Phils scored again but no one clapped. Unfortunately, an atheist cannot pray their way out of a philosophical debate. I would have tried.

“Look,“ I said. “The irony isn't lost on me. If God exists, maybe He does have a sense of humor. But you really think that God swooped in and fixed everything for everybody? I mean, it’s a simple numbers game. Let's just look up the percentage of serial killers in the world and the amount of people with that defect. I think we’ll find overlap.”

“MM-HMM,” she said, but what she meant was “bullshit.”

I said, “Do you have a kid with a food allergy or something? Is that what gets to you?”

“No,” she said, her eyelids fluttering a warning, “I had a niece with allergies, though. She loved Mars Bars, Barney the Dinosaur, and going to the park. She should have been graduating college this year.”

And with that, until Kenya retired, all we talked about was Fightin’ Phils, the Sixers, the Broad Street Bullies, and the Birds. She put her crucifix necklace on me when she left. It’s the dirty little secret hiding under my dress shirt when I give lectures to my godless peers at coroner’s conventions.

***

Steve Levandoski’s writing has been featured in The Oddville Press, Microfiction Monday, The Writing Disorder, Sci-Fi Lampoon, Flash Fiction Magazine and is slated for the Summer ‘24 issue of the Coffin Bell. He’s the big cheese at Next In Line Magazine. Described as “interestingly off-putting,” Steve lives in an underground bunker somewhere in Philadelphia with his better half Lisa and their pug Phil Collins.