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after eyeing the bottles arrayed there. It was a peachy salmon kind of color. He suggested an amount.
    “That’s based on dilution in three gallons,” he said. “In any case, just go easy with it.”
    “Thanks.” Impulsively, Todd laid a hand on Gabe’s upper arm.
    Gabe nodded. Again, he looked at Mrs. Morgan’s picture. “She’s Manhattan Transfer,” he pronounced, as if it were a ruling. He nodded again. “Definitely. At first I thought she might be Gershwin, but there’s a touch of Swing in her.”
    Smiling, Todd shook his head. Now Gabe would sit in the break room and listen to the music he’d assigned to Sally Morgan while he communed with his muse. When the time came for him to work his magic, he’d be ready. Mrs. Morgan would look like a million bucks, at least by cadaver standards, when he was finished with her.
    “I’ll come get you when she’s ready,” Todd said as Gabe pulled off his lab gown.
    “Good. My psychic powers aren’t fully developed yet.” Gabe wore a simple green T-shirt. It hugged a very nice physique. He’d once told Todd he’d been a gymnast in high school.
    Todd watched him leave the room. It was definitely getting more difficult to write Gabriel off as a wacky short guy in whom he had no interest.
    He readied the fluid pump, but his mind wasn’t entirely on his work. As he packed the body’s orifices and rubbed cream into its skin and slipped a plastic robe over its withered length; as he opened and intubated the carotid artery and jugular vein, he thought of Gabriel Acker, the young man he’d been taking for granted as well as spurning for the past several months. As a water-based solution of formaldehyde, ethanol, and methanol replaced stagnant blood, and as various buffers, humectants, and plasticizers counteracted the harshness of the primary chemicals, he couldn’t decide if it truly would embarrass him to be seen with Gabe in public, or if he truly would find it impossible to be excited by what Fallon called a “snack-sized” lover. In fact, he wondered where he’d gotten those notions and why he’d been clinging to them.
    What makes me think I’m so fucking special?
    He removed Mrs. Morgan’s plastic robe. Vacantly, he watched as a flush of color spread beneath her pallid, wrinkled shell and the surfactant in the solution kissed a little softness into it.
    Nothing.
    There it was: Nothing had ever made him feel special. So he’d adopted a pretense of superiority anchored in superficial things.
    Bloodless and pink as a frozen, cooked shrimp, Mrs. Morgan silently awaited the next phase of her preservation. Todd stood back and regarded her. Thank goodness she wouldn’t require more than a bit of touch-up here and there. Todd was in no mood for a lot of fussing.
    He made a small incision between one and two inches above the lady’s navel and inserted a trocar to aspirate her abdominal and thoracic cavities. He could tell just by listening to the fluctuating sounds of the suction how the cleansing was proceeding.

    Junk out, eternity juice in. Todd disconnected the trocar’s hose and reattached it to a bottle. As he probed again with the tubular needle, gravity did the work and filled all spoilage-prone organs and areas with full-strength embalming fluid.
    In elementary school, Todd’s classmates had called him Toad. It was an apt nickname for a pudgy kid with oily skin. He didn’t mind it too much, until he hit the riptide of puberty and discovered he yearned for other boys the way other boys might yearn for a princess. So, at thirteen, Todd began to insist his name was actually Rock. It only stuck for a while, and only sporadically. The boys didn’t find him any more appealing. Not one of them wanted to bring out the prince in him with a kiss, and his tenacious acne didn’t exactly improve his odds.
    A toad by any other name was still Todd Heileman.
    Skin care, body building, and hair styling took up where Rock left off. Todd still stood five-foot-eight,