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Modern Grave Robbing

By Ethan M. Choi 

Art by Aron Ladanyi

Take the body, Sell the brain. Find the glassy-eyed professor – he’s always taking a bargain: A dollar for a toe, twenty for a hand, and hundreds for the brain. They always were his prized obsession, academically and perhaps even erotically. “The brain is the greatest mystery!” he’d yell while slicing heads open, grey-matter splatting onto the table. 

Buying bodies is an affront to humanity, but he isn’t some misanthrope - he loves people, his students, the next generation. He once asked me what their deadliest vice was. “Drugs? Alcohol?” I asked. He grinned no, fingered some brain mush, and replied: “The internet.

Although brain tumors or deformities intrigued him, he’d wage more when I found any evidence of brainrot or doomscrolling: rust engulfing the mass, smells far more rotten than they should be. The oxidation festers as a colony, breaking into one’s thoughts, perverting minds with bleakness—not like hatred or fear, but more like a dumb joke, a fear of missing out, an escape. If lost, brains turn masochistic, helplessly embracing the rot.

He’d pay me double for these eccentrics, so I’d search for more. Sometimes in the graves of the furthest fields, isolated from friends and families. Others in overcrowded yards of the dead, buried by the masses. These corpses were trapped in the internet’s cyclical nature, most of them far too young to have lived proper, fulfilling lives.

I remember this one juvenile braggart. Winds toppled his gravestone, rain muddied his soil. The cemetery was overflowing and overshadowed by the adjacent columbarium highrise. In his skull, the brain was a light cold pink – fresh as if it never died. The professor brought it under a heat lamp. Its muscles convulsed and fused to the table. It squirmed out, trying to stay relevant to the scene, with no direction, twisting until it ripped itself apart. The professor asked for the dead pieces. “But it’s alive, it’s warm.” I griped. “It’s warm”, He said, “because it was under the light.”

There was also this adolescent solitaire. We found her box under a tree with a modest cross over her grave. She was malnourished, her health an afterthought postmortem. There was a subtle smile as her dead hands embraced a phone, sleek and gilded with gold. When we opened the skull, there was nothing there. Floating spine connections but an absence in everything else. No memories, no thoughts.  It obscured itself to reels and incessant scrolling, vanishing from existence.

Recently the professor found holes in his graverobber’s brain. My Brain. Sprinkled like constellations, digging deeper in. It colonizes my thoughts as I write here. But it wasn’t the internet’s doing -  It connects and consumes with such attentiveness. It was my disuse, my obsession with digging into other people’s lives that rots me. I could’ve left the bodies and felt the sun, but all I can do now is escape my own grave. If I’m buried, take my brain and sell it, hopefully society will find a cure then.

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