**wikiEmbalm**
[[Mrs. Hicks]] body was half-drenched in embalming fluid before [[Terry Whittaker]] managed to turn off the machine and wrestle the tube back into the proper position. The wikiHow (with pictures!) he’d been using included a lot of detail when it came to the simple stuff, like shaving the few black hairs that had sprouted from a mole on her upper lip, but once it came time to make the incision, it’d been curiously absent of descriptors or illustrations. His boots were covered in body juice.
Terry looked at his phone again: Part 1, “Preparing the Body,” had gone completely fine.
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/rxI9yEZ.png">
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/SlvWPRs.png">
Part 2, “Setting the Features”—not a problem.
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/nXxUjOx.png">
He’d used his personal chapstick, even. But then there was Part 3, “Embalming the Arteries.” If you asked Terry, or [[Mr. Hicks]], who’d asked the funeral home director if he could watch the process and was now stifling a half-sob, half-shout, Part 3 is [[where things went wrong]]. Mrs. Hicks liked to carve watermelons to look like animals. It was perhaps the only true solace she had against what in 2018 was well-understood as crippling anxiety, but throughout her childhood had merely been called hysteria. Her most recent masterpiece, [[a monstrous melon carved to look like a shark]], sent ripples through her Baptist church’s bake sale, on account of the grapes she’d packed in its mouth that looked slightly testicular, and on account of it not even once having been in an oven. [[Mr. Hicks]] bought it anonymously for $245. He dumped it out behind the old chapel (which was rarely used these, days, except for weddings between senior citizens) and returned to Mrs. Hicks, who was, for the moment, content.
In retrospect it is easy for us to say that Mr. Hicks should have kept the $245, so as to be able to afford a slightly more luxurious eternal resting place (or at least a more graceful transition) for his wife, who slipped while carving an icebox watermelon and subsequently died of a concussion sustained in the fall. The half-melon, half-squirrel stared down at her sadly, as if to say: "Your husband’s going to take you to [[Papa D’s Funeral Home]]. Sorry."
Mrs. Hicks was not the kind of person who would have found [[her body’s current situation->Start]] funny.Terry Whittaker didn’t mean to lie during the interview. Or, at least, he didn’t mean to lie so holistically. He figured that every funeral director would have their own vision for how to pump a body full of fluid—an assumption that would have worked out just fine in every other funeral home in the city, and most in the country—and that he’d be able to learn on the job. But [[Papa D’s Funeral Home]] ran on a simple cost-profit process of “cheapest possible cost” to “maximum possible profit.” Terry told the director he already knew how to embalm bodies because he’d watched [[tutorials on YouTube]], and the director told him he’d start that evening.
[[With Mrs. Hicks->Start]] Mr. Hicks was not nearly as religious as [[his wife->Mrs. Hicks]], a devout Baptist. He'd stand politely next to her, mouthing the words while she sung loudly and raised her hands to hymns and the pastor's son's Christian rock songs, which neither rocked nor had anything much to do with Christ. Occasionally the words "Jesus is my rock star" would mumble through the church's walls, scattering stray cats. But mostly Mr. Hicks would find opportunities to excuse himself to the bathroom during Pastor Tom's sermons. He didn't like the idea that there was a hell, which is mostly what Tom talked about.
Mr. Hicks was a retired plumber. He kept himself calm with the sound of well-flushing toilets. Unfortunately, [[Papa D’s Funeral Home]]'s toilets didn't work at all. When [[things went wrong->where things went wrong]], he had nothing to calm him down.It was certainly step three.
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/P2qAvka.png">
[[Terry->Terry Whittaker]] did not look nearly as confident as the doctor in the picture. And Mrs. Hicks' body wasn't looking as well either.Though no pictures exist of this particular watermelon, [[Mr. Hicks]] pointed [[Terry->Terry Whittaker]] to google, which produced this:
[INSERT IMAGE]Papa D's was the Papa John's of Funeral Homes. People only went there when they were desperate or high. [[Terry Whittaker]] was both. [[Mr. Hicks]] was only the former, but he'd probably have been in a better mood if he was the latter.It's horrifyingly charming.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rc_QSyWl-GA" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
None of it helped when [[things went wrong->where things went wrong]].