On days like these I always wonder what it would be like to be the Grim Reaper. Having just left Holy Cross, a shitty, rundown hospital in Kendall---I know exactly what it's like.
My name is Mario but most everyone in the business refers to me as the Removal King. What exactly do I remove and why am I the king? Well, let's just say that as I walk out this dilapidated building trying to pass itself off as a hospital I am not walking out with medicine or even paperwork. In my awkward-looking, black case, purchased by Daniel's Funeral Home sometime during the Nixon administration, lies a small, dead, and rotting baby girl, wrapped up in a sheet, a plastic, and a red bio hazard bag. I should be distraught, what with being a brand new father, but I feel nothing. It's not that I don't care, because I do, but the truth is, well, I don't.
It's my fifth year in the business and to say making it halfway to a decade is rare would be an understatement. I am the last of my breed in the business. Most funeral homes don't even do their own calls anymore; they call companies to do them. Those companies, or "removal services", hire pretty much anyone off the street, so long as you can walk, talk, and don't have an insatiable thirst to have sex with a corpse. Somewhere into my 2nd year someone close to me anointed me the King of Removals and it sort of just stuck.
The hot Florida sun seems to be burning through my black, blood-stained suit. There are another four calls waiting for me. Perhaps, that is one of the hospitals calling my cell phone as I load "Baby Rosalyn Perez" into my van. I might just be losing my mind, finally. I am working 24 hour shifts, 6 days a week. Most of the times I sleep in the death-scented van waiting for someone to die. Some might call that dedicated; most would say there is something wrong with me. I am just 8 calls away from my 2,000th removal. I am also close to the end. I don't know which will come first but consider this my first entry into my journal of Death.