The Best of Joe Haldeman
“Boy, do I want to keep it. It goes back twenty years, to Vietnam. To Graves.
Dead bodies turn from bad to worse real fast in the jungle. You’ve got a few hours before rigor mortis makes them hard to handle, hard to stuff in a bag. By that time they start to turn greenish, if they started out white or yellow, where you can see the skin. It’s mostly bugs by then, usually ants. Then they go to black and start to smell.
They swell up and burst.
You’d think the ants and roaches and... beetles and millipedes would make short work of them after that, but they don’t. Just when they get to looking and smelling the worst, the bugs sort of lose interest, get fastidious, send out for pizza. Except for the flies. Laying eggs.
The funny thing is, unless some big animal got to it and tore it up, even after a week or so, you’ve still got something more than a skeleton, even a sort of a face.MoreLess
Dead bodies turn from bad to worse real fast in the jungle. You’ve got a few hours before rigor mortis makes them hard to handle, hard to stuff in a bag. By that time they start to turn greenish, if they started out white or yellow, where you can see the skin. It’s mostly bugs by then, usually ants. Then they go to black and start to smell.
They swell up and burst.
You’d think the ants and roaches and... beetles and millipedes would make short work of them after that, but they don’t. Just when they get to looking and smelling the worst, the bugs sort of lose interest, get fastidious, send out for pizza. Except for the flies. Laying eggs.
The funny thing is, unless some big animal got to it and tore it up, even after a week or so, you’ve still got something more than a skeleton, even a sort of a face.MoreLess
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