Fiction | December 18, 2023

Forensics 

Richard Bausch 

Earlier, at a murder scene involving hoarders in a decaying old house on Maple Street, Detective Casado happened upon a prosthetic leg with a gray woolen sock and a tan suede shoe on the foot. He had been pushing his way through a chest-level dune of old newspapers and magazines and seeing the frayed strap where it would attach to the knee, pulled it out of the mess. The fact that it turned out to be merely one more piece of junk amid horrors unstrung his nerves, burdened as he already was with the increasing desire to quit this job, find something else. It flickered in his consciousness all day as he labored in that hellish, packed, detrital place, raking through the rubble, advancing by inches, thinking of his hands and his breath and decay, this macabre excavation, wearing a gas mask. Coming upon what his therapist had called “imprinting sights.” (“It’s just a phrase I use, Elijah.”) 

A random prosthetic leg.  

It felt as if something had tipped over under his heart. And the experience worsened an already existing anxiety scenario—a what-if. What if, having decided definitely to go, there wasn’t anywhere to go to? At forty-eight, police work was all he knew; it was essentially the only working experience he possessed.