Fiction hits the blog.

New fiction, a short story, makes its debut now. This is by blogger R. Tangeman,
and will be posted in four installments starting here and now.

Le Petit Corpse

Usually, a story can be set most anywhere. They always put Dragnet in L.A., but it would have worked as well in Chicago or Miami. The same goes for most of Agatha Christie’s tales, and lots of others. But this story, even if it were not true, could not be reset, for three reasons: New Orleans is old. New Orleans is French. And New Orleans is wet.

Burial of human corpses is more complicated and more interesting in New Orleans than almost any other place. Since the town is so old, the ratio of dead people to living ones is very high. Thus graveyard space is at a premium. The specific gravity of a living human is a little less than one, which makes humans float in water. Because of the gases which form during decomposition, a dead human tends to float even better.

When you place a corpse into a sealed casket, the casket floats. You put the casket into a sealed metal vault, the whole thing floats. And vaults are always sealed. Sometimes the things are even sold with a hundred-year guarantee against leakage. Would you want anything less for your own dear mother?

Even as far north as Baton Rouge, above-ground burial is used to fight these problems. This becomes more common as you head south. Large portions of New Orleans are even below sea level, and there is a lot of rain.

Jacques Rameau owns and runs a mortuary in New Orleans, and some say he dabbles in voodoo. Most people associate voodoo with Haiti, and that was (or is) the center of it. But voodoo is strongly intertwined with old French Catholic culture, and New Orleans is about as old French Catholic as you can get. The voodoo capital of the U.S., if there is one.
.... to be continued soon .....