Episode Details

Corpse Collectorby Cas Chessahttps://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Corpse_CollectorTomato positive mice look like bubble gum and licorice inside. What isn’t red is pink, and what isn’t pink is red. Candy or plastic, glossy in the way organs tend to be beneath their thin membrane coatings. I neatly slice the layers of flesh, fat, muscle, and sinew to peel the skin back like wings and display these vibrant organs. Bedding scrapes and scatters nearby as the remaining borrowed mice scamper and fight. One mouse is loosely biting another’s scruff and kicking up against his stomach.“Play nice boys,” I tell the little mice as I set the splayed open corpse outside the window.Their black little eyes shine and their pink little noses twitch, swaying those whiskers like stiff wires. They dive into the cardboard tubes and cloth hides I’ve set up for them. I rinse my hands in the kitchen sink, two scrubs with the dish soap before and after stripping off my gloves. I don’t have biohazard waste at home. Hands damp and scrubbed raw, I grab my coffee, unfortunately lukewarm at this point, and sit at my small kitchen table. I run my finger across the grain, watching my window, waiting.The first time I saw the creature, I was walking from school. An accident on the train track or by means of an over-eager vulture, left half a deer ribcage hanging in the dense foliage of a small triangle of trees. It was humid but the air was cooling, so I took my time on my walk. The glossy candy pink of flesh stretched taut over the ribs stood out like spring blooms against the bright green of freshly unfurled leaves and young vines. It didn’t stink the way old chicken in crab traps did, slimy and green and so foul you’d vomit in your nose before you could fully describe the rotting chicken scent. This deer was fresh and vaguely damp, just sitting in the tree.My legs stopped moving beneath me as I came up to it. Leaned and tilted and raised my head, trying to decipher the body part. Initially I did not realize it was an animal corpse; that’s probably why I stood there so long. It was like a trance. The shape of the ribs against this pink bag like structure, a dark hollow stuffed with poorly defined shapes from my angle, my brain trying to decipher exactly what I saw. I may have stood there for hours, at least long enough for the light to change.Eventually it clicked that it was part of a dead animal. I wouldn’t know exactly what until years later, when I worked at a nature reserve and put out roadkill for the vultures. I stood there a little longer before I gave up on trying to figure out what exactly it belonged to. Just as I was turning, the smell hit me. Like green, rotting, waterlogged chicken and perforated guts. I stopped in my tracks to gag and pinch my nose, rub the sight blurring tears from my eyes. The fresh piece of dead animal hadn’t smelled like that. The wind hadn’t changed.The same curiosity that got me to stare at the deer ribs, urged me to turn back around, in the direction of the smell.It wore no skins.Instead, it had a mottled coat of pink, grey, brown, green, and black. The coat hung like tassels. Shredded muscles in varying stages of rot, stringy and clumpy all at once. Muscles hung from yellowed bones. Knobs of vertebrae, a radius hanging from the last strings of connective tissue to an ulna, ribs. The bones were lightly gouged, scraped clean of all flesh. All I saw was the coat as it rose and rose and rose. Then dropped, snapping branches on its way down with the partial animal corpse. An empty gap in the foliage was all that was left where the deer ribs once hung. I turned at the first snap, curiosity smothered, and I ran. I’d stop at that spot in the trees every day through the rest of high school, looking for a sign of that creature, but all it left were a couple of broken branches that were gone by late summer. It never came bac