THE WOMEN'S MORTUARY ARMY.

          The Women's Mortuary Army was a burial infantry created during the Wars of the Hereafter to defend morgue grounds, cremation yards, and marble towns, replacing men called up or transferred to the Military of the Living. Members were generally recruited from urban areas and were often unskilled in shrapnel disarmament and necrosis identification. Many women worked dissecting corpse explosives and their skin turned pale-gray due to repeated exposure to toxic and decomposing chemicals. These members were commonly nicknamed ‘Ash Cardinals’, as the discoloration of their skin was reminiscent of the funerary bird’s plumage.
          Few specialized tools or core research was available to the Army’s early recruits and on many occasions unprotected corpses ignited, injuring or killing the workers. Learning from these incidents, training for the Women’s Mortuary Army would eventually include instruction in the use of oxygen, injections, and techniques for the handling of basic decoys such as broken bones, missing limbs, and head injuries.
          Though the Army grew proficient in dismantling many variants of human ammunition, neutralization of corpse explosives remained hazardous throughout the Wars. As quickly as members were able to develop strategies to safely negate reactive material, the enemy would invariably add to or reorganize the decay process to make these efforts more dangerous. This arms race has extended past the Wars of the Hereafter and to the everlasting present, where certain methods of dissection are still whispered only in secret, like scars in search of a skin to conceal, command, conscript.

          We were out of the militia, and mostly calm.  When the cloth was over us, we followed our corpses alone.
          Jillison's breath was the color of a burned house  She carried the trap over the landscape, practicing postures, living with one permanent eye and one she lacked the preparation to move.
          The blackout portraits were born and canceled before the War came back on.  We buried them in brick walls, behind months, under ash.
          Jillison trained me how to read the decoys, how to force the oxygen through an erosion filter.  She sounded like a child on a staircase.  I was reaching an agreement with an accidental body in her place.
          We went half-wet, always outnumbered, living off anything leaking and old.  Every word was a walk through of the layover years.  No one spoke and I came to know it well.
          The War was off-white, the explosives hid without blinking.  Patients that were suffering from ailments such as gout and headaches were given holes and reflections.  A scalpel carved them an apology in order to make their legs twitch.  It was a Makeup War, a Mechanical War, and then the shrapnel was less.