Communion, of sorts

Big, big disclaimer: Much talk of dead people detritus, like preserved limbs, skulls, weird malformations of the skin. Well, not all of that, but if you get grossed out easily, or you’re eating lunch, skip this entire entry.

I can’t watch horror films, but I love seeing human specimens at their most grotesque. At the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, so many titillating objects elicited my attention, such as the drawers containing objects extracted from people’s throats, endless samples of limbs and blodies that bloomed foul with syphilis, leprosy, smallpox, gout, scarlet fever, and measles, a whole room devoted to specimens preserved in fluid, fetuses, babies, entire body systems, the smaller, dustier, mad-scientist version of Bodies: The Exhibit, currently showing at South Street Seaport.

Then there was the gallery of skulls with yellowed nameplates beneath each one, the paper slightly curled at the edges, the print clear but faded, the typewritten words compelling a certain amount of pathos in the viewer. If all the facts were available, each card listed the area where the skull came from, the name of the unfortunate one, his/her age, and the cause of death. Sometimes additional information that I neglected to copy down, such as “mandibular fracture,” or the descent of something or other (I have such a great memory), but it was the other pieces of information that seemed to hold the most story.

I was accompanied by a friend from graduate school and her mother, who was originally supposed to see this exhibit with me alone, as my poor friend could not think of this place without shuddering with revulsion. She came along because she’s a good friend and because, really, she can’t resist a story. We probably spent almost half the time at the museum just in front of the skull gallery, and because we couldn’t help ourselves, copied down the nameplates of a great many of the unfortunates.

These were a handful that I felt were the most compelling:

• Lower Austria. Franz Braun, age 13. Suicide. Hanged himself because of a discovered theft.
• Gorale (Polish tribe, Tatra Mountains). Stanislas Stara, age 43. Train solder. Died of gunshot wounds.
• Istria, Trieste. Girolamo Zini, age 20. Rope-walker. Died of atlanto-axial dislocation (broken neck).
• Linz, Upper Austria. Simon Juhren, age 19. Suicide. Hanged himself because of unhappy love affair.
• Salzburg. Veronica Huber, age 18. Executed for the murder of her child.
• Island of Lissa, Dalmatia. Orazio Trani, age 39. Idiot.
• Wende (Slovenian tribe). Magdal Pagrac, age 23. Maidservant. Died of puerpal sepsis (childbed fever) in the general hospital.
• Northern Hungary. Julius Farkas, age 28. Protestant, solider. Suicide by gunshot wound of the heart, because of weariness of life.
• Sgigeth (Hungary or Romania). Geza Vironenyi, 80. Reformist, herdsman. At age 70 attempted suicide by cutting his throat. Wound not fatal because of ossified larynx; laryngeal fistula remained. Lived until 80 without melancholy.
• Prague. Araschtau Gottlied, age 19. Suicide by potassium cyanide because of suspected unfaithfulness of his mistress.
• Wallachian. Constantin Anesku, age 32. Died of gunshot wounds in Bucharest. High mandibular body at mid-point of chin.
• Calabria. Alessandro Zaccarella. Bandit. Shot by police in the Abruzzi Mountains.

Definitely stories here, and something that I wish I’d had as a resource back when I used to teach. Wouldn’t these have been great little prompts for stories? Perhaps I would have had to gloss over the fact that I had taken these from skull descriptions at a museum (wet dream for old sawbones the world over), but let’s take the last one, Alessandro, the bandit who was shot by the police in the Abruzzi Mountains. Doesn’t that sound kind of romantic, and if cleaned up a bit, would make a great mist-filled scene in a Gothic suspense novel?

So let me open this up to our dear readers, all four of you. Do any of these skulls inspire a story or a great opening line?

Here's mine:

Running along a rocky, precarious precipice with the wind coming at his front and the whistles and curses of the carabinieri at his back, with the heft of a ten-pound bag of jewels in his nutsack, Alessandro Zaccarella finally realized why his mother always told him to wear roomy, breathable underpants.