HALLOWEEN WEEK CONTEST
Runner-up
BY BARRY YEDVOBNICK
Copyright is held by the author.
YOU AND three other medical students flank me with goggles and masks shielding faces from formaldehyde fumes. Day one of Human Anatomy Lab, and my cadaver lies naked on stainless steel under intense lighting. Forty gloved fingers examine my skin, but I won’t be dissected today despite the instructions.
Your group shows little interest in my art, anxious to see what lies beneath. Only you look closer. Five serrated knives, edges dripping red, drawn over my carotid artery within an outline of Texas. You’re puzzled by a fleeting memory, and you pause. The others urge you to start cutting. Instead, you find the next tattoo.
Several words are etched across my chest in Gothic font. They sit inside Idaho. You recognize the street names of those drugs and recall the party in Boise with 12 overdose deaths —unexpected in a state suffering so few. The tragedy persisted in the media, and investigators decided the fentanyl contamination was random. Others weren’t so sure.
You glance back at my neck, and Texas seems more familiar. Yes, the five unsolved murders in Austin. Didn’t forensics conclude the weapons were serrated? You ignore more pleas to pick up a scalpel. Perspiration fogs the edges of your goggles.
Gazing lower, California stretches horizontally across my abdomen. Are those blueberries spread along the Sierra Nevada? No. I’ve labelled the genus and species. Atropa belladonna, Deadly Nightshade, the beautiful but poisonous lady. Her berries grow large and plentifully in the moist and shaded areas of the Sierras. So sweet, and so few provide sufficient toxins. Most attending that celebration last spring loved the unique flavor of the fruit pies. You remember the reports and know exactly how many died.
Turning away, your mind flashes through questions. Is this the corpse of an acolyte who recorded these events? Or the serial killer? You’re about to shout for the instructor, but first, there’s one more tattoo.
You jump back — breathless and disoriented. Your knees hit the floor as you tear off the goggles and mask, inhaling the cool air. Formaldehyde burns your eyes and throat. The others rush over to help, but you push them away.
You can’t speak. All you can do is point.
The last tattoo.
This hasn’t happened yet.
***
Barry Yedvobnick’s fiction is forthcoming at Literally Stories and appeared in The Phare, Sky Island Journal, Neither Fish Nor Foul, Litbreak Magazine, Bending Genres, 10 by 10 Flash Fiction, and other places. He narrates Sci-Fi stories for AntipodeanSF radio, and his nonfiction writing received a 2025 Georgia Press Association Award.
