{"id":1439,"date":"2019-09-05T01:06:01","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T01:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/?p=1439"},"modified":"2019-08-31T18:10:27","modified_gmt":"2019-08-31T18:10:27","slug":"anatomy-of-a-cover-up-by-kristen-langereis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/2019\/09\/05\/anatomy-of-a-cover-up-by-kristen-langereis\/","title":{"rendered":"Anatomy of a Cover Up by Kristen Langereis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Kristen Langereis is a Dutch-American writer living in Amsterdam. With no pets or children, she still finds ample time to fall behind on daily tasks. She is of the opinion that a sandwich tastes better when made for her by someone else. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0Anatomy of a Cover Up<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0 I knew a lot about death, even then, including what a dead body smelled like. It\u2019s a fun way to open a conversation. I could tell you what embalmed flesh looked like. It\u2019s flaked skipjack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     You see, Dad could\nonly eat white meat tuna – albacore packed in water. He took it with bread and\nbutter pickles and too much mayonnaise. He wouldn\u2019t\ntouch skipjack, nor would my mother. She wouldn\u2019t even buy it because it\u2019s poor\npeople food. Dad said skipjack reminded him of the cadavers he worked on in\nschool. He mentioned it every time she made him his tuna sandwich, which was\nevery Friday, and he only finished about half before he\u2019d get that look which\nsaid the good tuna had turned from safe to dead in his imagination. So, I\nalways ate that extra half sandwich – thinking it would be a shame to waste it\nwhen my mother took such pains to open both a can and a jar. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

     I was nine when I\nthought for sure I would know how a decomposed body might smell. When pilfering\na third, or fourth popsicle from the back freezer I had left the door ajar. The\nmajority contents, stuffed every which way next to Lean Cuisines, bags of party\nice and popsicles of every flavor were the individually-wrapped remnants of a\nbutchered whole cow. Dad had traded the cow for oral surgery more than five\nyears prior. I remember thinking we were going to pick up an actual, living breathing\ncow when Mother drove us to the ranch south of the city. I should have been\ntipped off by the two big coolers she brought, I suppose. But I was young, and\nhappy to be allowed in the front seat next to the air-conditioning. The cow\ntraveled home with us disassembled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     The steaks,\ntenderloin, and roasts had been eaten first and the remnants, garbage-meat as\nMother called it, lived in our utility room freezer. My carelessness caused\neverything in the freezer to defrost and dozens of cherry-mottled white butcher\npaper packages, some visibly stamped Heart\/Short-Ribs\/Tripe, mingled their\nbloody juices with a corn syrup rainbow. Mom screamed and shut the door. She\nsaid we must to wait until nightfall, while Dad slept, to bring everything to\nthe big black garbage can in the alley. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

     When he started to\nsnore she grabbed my hand and a roll of black garbage bags. We snuck out back\nto clean and dump it all. I think we both knew that even though there was slim\nchance our family would eat tripe, especially cooked by her, that he still\nwanted to hang on to it, just in case. I was sworn to silence. But, as it goes\nwith crime, eventually someone finds out. Weekly garbage collection had just\nhappened a few days prior. Everything we hoisted that night into big black\ngarbage bags festered, cooked, and decomposed further within the big black\ngarbage can. Our across-the-alley neighbor called 911 because he thought\nsomeone had dumped a dead body. Since he was a cop, I figured he should know. I\nfigured that a dead body smelled like old, dead cow parts, cherry popsicle\nfrostbite and panic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

     I tell that story to\nthis day, never mentioning that now I really know what is the real smell of\ndeath, and adding that Dad never thought that the huge amount of dumped meat\nwhich had caused a minor neighborhood ruckus was indeed his. Even at the end,\nwe kept that from him too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kristen Langereis is a Dutch-American writer living in Amsterdam. With no pets or children, she still finds ample time to fall behind on daily tasks. She is of the opinion that a sandwich tastes better when made for her by someone else. \u00a0\u00a0Anatomy of a Cover Up \u00a0\u00a0 I knew a lot about death, even … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-nd","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1440,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439\/revisions\/1440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}