Body Parts

Met a guy from Mid-City this morning while eating breakfast at Slim Goodies.

He said he was working a job that sounds pretty gruesome: pulling bodies from homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. “Extraction,” they call it.

I was surprised. “Are they still finding bodies?”

“Oh yeah. More like body parts at this point. After six weeks or so there’s not much left that’s even recognizable as a human being.”

But he said the stink from refrigerators on his block in Mid-City was even worse than the smell of decomposing bodies he was working with all day long.

Somehow I managed to finish my breakfast.