Prompt: Dream, Cemetery, Pipe

Phin sleeps all day. That is part of his job. He can only leave his workplace when he begins to stir in bed, gently waking, groggily blinking into reality. Phin was not a mattress tester, or strictly speaking not entirely one. Only recently did a research team deployed by a mattress company decide to reach out to Phin’s company with an offer to sponsor them in exchange for some biological data for a new mattress in testing. To Phin, it almost seemed absurd that they only thought about doing that now, considering how long people in his line of work lie on mattresses.

He is one of the few thousand body sorters in the business. They can only access their ability when asleep and dreaming. Otherwise, it would be pretty disturbing if a lone graveyard wanderer or an awakening mourner from grieving chanced upon the actual happenings behind the scenes in a cemetery. The cemetery is not so quiet if they could see an army of movers each engaged in intense and dischordiant activities, throwing up soil, heaving the corpses head first into gaping holes in the graves. Obviously, then, body sorters had to work without physically existing to the human eye. Phin has to do his job in his dream.

Phin was no body-snatcher. Big difference, but it was hard for him to explain to his friends and parents. His parents never really understood, but bore with him in confused patience after seeing how he had received his first paycheck for sleeping all day. He had attempted, early on in his job, against the warnings of his senior advisor, to be truthful about his job to friends and acquaintances. It was with a small group of politely disinterested guests at the wedding reception of his older sister.

“I work as a body sorter,” Phin had declared with pride, “I handle the corpses that come into the cemetery and send them into somewhere deeper in the earth. You could almost imagine me as a librarian filing away books into the archives, except instead of books, you know, I just handle bodies.”

He learnt to lie after seeing the faces and the awkward stretch of silence that followed. “I’m just kidding. I work as a librarian, plain and simple.”

Sometimes, when Phin is engaged in chugging the bodies into the pipes leading into the bellies of the earth, he does wonder what is the point of his job.