Suckers - J.A. Konrath

how disgustingly horrible it was. I was trapped in a coffin, lying on top of a naked dead guy with
nuts the size of a basketball. A curly-haired basketball with a bratwurst glued onto the top. It
pressed against my pelvis in a way that could only be described as awful.
My upper half wasn’t any happier, with my face inches away from a dead man’s. He didn’t
really smell like rotting meat. Not exactly. It was more like meat that was about to go bad, but
dunked in formaldehyde first. His flesh was waxy, sort of stiff, and cold in a way that only dead
people get. I moved my hands up across his nude, hairy chest, fighting the urge to vomit, and
then pressed my elbows into his gut to force some distance between us.
It was a mistake. His autopsy meant his ribs had been cut away, and no ribs meant no
internal support. My elbows ripped through the stitches and my arms disappeared into his stillmoist
body cavity.
I felt things. Horrible things. Squishy things. To prevent the organs from leaking, the clever
embalmer had placed them in plastic bags, like some sort of lunch snacks from hell. I thanked
the darkness that it was dark and I couldn’t see anything, because I had no light. But I screamed
anyway.
When the screaming finally stopped, I screamed a little more, and then realized the only way
I was going to get out of here is to do what women have been probably doing with me ever since
I’d been sexually active.
I’d have to fake it.
Unfortunately, the only way to fake a sexual movement is to perform a sexual movement.
So I locked my knees on either side of his hips, his giant scrotum tucked beneath my legs like a
fleshy bicycle seat, and began the humping motion. I also began to cry.
The coffin went with the rhythm, back and forth and back and forth, and it was a high end
model which meant springs in the cushion which meant this felt even more like the real thing.
Even though I couldn’t see I squeezed my eyes shut and invented gods in my imagination so I
could pray to them to make this end. I tried to think back on happy times, but too many of my
happy times involved sex and that didn’t help me block out the unhappy fact that I was fake dryhumping
a corpse. I tried thinking about happy times when I was a kid, and unwillingly focused
on the time I was six years old and my mother bought me a Hoppity Horse for my birthday, and
how I used to love bouncing up and down the neighborhood and, oh goddamn it...
I threw up in my mouth. Energy drink and pizza mixed with stomach acid. I swallowed it
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