After I Died, My Own Mother Dissected Me

I died on the second Sunday of May.

Mother’s Day.

My biological mother, the top neurologist in the United States, was standing in front of my corpse.

She looked at the bedsores all over my body, at the ribs that had been stomped broken, and explained coldly to hundreds of cameras:

“Trash from the bottom of society, covered in needle marks like this, doesn’t deserve to dirty my dissection table.”

She didn’t know that the “social garbage” she called a pill-seeking self-harmer was the son she had abandoned ten years ago.

When the cold scalpel cut open my chest, an old photograph stained with black blood slipped out.

The moment she saw it, the woman who had stood above everyone else—

went completely insane…

--

I died on the second Sunday of May.

Mother’s Day.

For three years, the trembling of opioid withdrawal, the agony of nerves being torn apart, had ruled me.

And in this second, it finally stopped.

I floated lightly free from that ruined body—burn-marked by cigarettes, eaten through by bedsores deep enough to show bone.

“Push epinephrine! Don’t stop!” Dr. Sarah from the ER was covered in blood, kneeling across the hospital bed, pressing on my chest in despair. Tears struck my shriveled chest in heavy drops.

My hollow soul didn’t stay.

It drifted with the cool early-summer wind out of the public hospital window—

and across the street, toward that building crowned in glass.

The top neurological research institute in America.

My biological mother was there.

Evelyn Hayes.

Chief neurologist of the United States.

Through the blinds, I saw her.

Sunlight fell across the perfectly cut lines of her custom white coat. Her desk was piled with preserved flowers sent by the elite of the medical world for Mother’s Day.

She was still so noble.

So elegant.

So untouchable.

Then an intern assistant carefully placed a takeout paper bag on her desk.

A dense, cheap, sweet smell of reheated cheese drifted out.

One second earlier she had been composed.

The next, Evelyn’s face turned ghost-white.

Bang!

She snatched up the paper bag and smashed it into the assistant’s face. Scalding macaroni spilled across the floor.

“Who allowed this kind of cheap garbage onto this floor?!” Her carefully maintained makeup twisted with rage. She looked like a lioness gone mad. “What are you trying to remind me of? That murderer who killed my younger son?!”

The assistant collapsed to the floor, shaking.

I hovered in the air, my soul pierced through by an icy poisoned spike.

Ten years.

She still hated me this much.

I was five.

Dad had left.

She was in the lab all night.

My three-year-old little brother was crying from hunger.

I only wanted to be a good big brother. I climbed onto a stool and stuffed a microwavable macaroni tray from the fridge into the microwave.

Just for the few seconds it took me to turn around and grab a fork.

My brother tried to reach for a toy on the counter. He fell from the high stool. The back of his head hit the marble island.

He never woke up.

That night, Evelyn looked at my brother beneath the white sheet.

She didn’t hold me.

She looked at me—my hands still covered in blood—like I was a monster.

That same night, she shoved me onto a long-distance bus and sent me away to an alcoholic, drug-addicted distant uncle in a Midwestern slum.

“You do not deserve to call me Mom.”

Those were the last words she ever said to me.

She would never know how I survived the ten years after that.

When a terrible rare neurological disease hit and my legs started wasting away, my aunt was overjoyed. She pocketed my disability checks.

To sell my powerful painkillers on the black market for drug money, my uncle stomped my ribs broken in hard leather boots—

just so he could drag me to the ER for a fresh prescription.

Three years ago, when the pain of my nerves being ripped apart made life unbearable, I dragged my broken leg three miles and called this institute.

“Please… let me talk to my mother… it hurts so much…”

What I got back was the icy mockery of her assistant:

“Dr. Hayes does not have a son. If you call again trying to run a scam, we’ll contact the police.”

That was the day I gave up.

In a basement thick with the stink of urine, I bled out the last of myself.

Bzzz—

The vibration of the internal line cut through my memory.

Evelyn drew a breath, forced down her anger, and hit speaker.

“Dr. Hayes, the national clinical pathology demonstration is ready for two this afternoon.” The academic director’s voice was oily with flattery. “Today’s teaching cadaver is an unidentified male just transferred from across the street—”

“Unidentified?” Evelyn cut him off coldly, disgust filling her eyes. “I do not dissect stray drunks and junkies pulled in off the street. Without rare pathology, they do not deserve my table.”

“No, please listen!” the director rushed to explain. “Dr. Sarah from the ER strongly recommended the case! She says the degree of muscular atrophy and neural necrosis makes this the most extreme rare case in the field you’ve been researching for the last ten years.”

“The most extreme rare case?”

Evelyn’s eyes changed instantly.

It was the excitement of an academic predator sighting top prey.

“Good.” Her lips curled coldly. “Prepare my usual German scalpel set. I’ll open the chest myself.”

A huge force hit me.

My soul was yanked back across the street into the morgue.

On the freezing steel table, a cheap yellow tag hung from my toe:

John Doe.

Because I had no family, I didn’t even deserve a name.

Dr. Sarah had just hung up on the academic office.

She stood beside my body, eyes swollen red, lightly stroking my face—twisted by agony and so disfigured that not even my own mother would recognize it.

“Sam…” she choked out.

Tears hit the cold steel.

Then she wiped them away.

In her eyes, usually so gentle, there was something chilling now—cold and absolute.

“I couldn’t get your demon uncle thrown in prison.” Sarah bent down, her lips close to my frozen ear, voice shaking but filled with cruel anticipation. “But I prepared a gift for you.”

“Your mother is giving the most important demonstration of her career today.”

“In twenty minutes, that woman who sits above everyone else—the woman who wouldn’t even take your call for help—is going to cut open your chest with her own hands in front of hundreds of cameras.”

“She’s about to dissect you herself.”