Playing With Dead Things: The Mummification of Beavis I, Part Three: Disemboweling Two, Electric Boogaloo.

Then came the liver.

Yup. Definitely a liver.

Compared to the intestines, the liver was easy. the hardest thing about it was getting it out in one piece, since it was so huge. We had to turn Beavis upside-down and let him flop around a little every few minutes to make sure we weren't about to sever a lobe.

Scrub-a-dub-splat.

Carving the stomach, intestines, and liver out of Beavis' abdomen forced us to pierce a few pretty major blood vessels, and blood was pooling in the corpse and making an even bigger mess of things than we'd planned. So we gave the body a quick bath before continuing.

Beavis is foamy because that liquid he's soaking in is hydrogen peroxide. That was just one of many compromises I had to make in the face of circumstance, at the cost of authenticity. If it had been available, I would have used palm wine, but that's apparently brewed, fermented, and drunk all within the space of 48 hours by the people of sub-Saharan Africa, and it's never occurred to them to bottle any.

If I had it to do over, I wouldn't use hydrogen peroxide again. Firstly, it interacted with Beavis' tissues in a in a godless, filthy way, inflating previously indetectable pockets of gas in the fascia of the muscles, which we had to pop. But more importantly, that foamy crap you see is the product of a chemical reaction. A chemical reaction that produces heat. And there was enough chemical energy in Beavis to turn that entire bowl of peroxide as warm as bathwater, which was easily the foulest sensation of an unusually foul day. A whole planet of horrible. A planet slathered in the greasy brown gravy that oozes out of funerary vaults when it gets hot. Oooozes.

But I digress.

Zuh?

After piercing the little tissue-paper diaphragm, we started poking at the lungs. Initially, we could only spot one. It took us a while to realize that Beavis'right lung was so grotesquely diseased that we weren't even recognizing it as an organ.

Also visible in this shot: My ever-so-slightly deformed cuticle, the result of slamming my thumb in a car door at age 16. I've always been very smart, you see.

Whaddaya think? Two packs a day? Three?

And this is, theoretically, is what killed Beavis. Mycoplasmosis, an ailment of the lungs. For the profoundly inexperienced, or those of you who were never subjected to high school health classes with aggresively graphic Scared Straight anti-smoking campaigns, the healthy lung's on the right, and the infected one's on the left.

The back view.

Crimony. No wonder he's dead.