Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 1041


Show and tell.


“This is my daddy. He cooks.”

Christopher was proud of his father, and it showed as he puffed out his chest and stood to full height in front of the man in the tall white hat, toolbox in one hand, other hand resting lightly on the boy’s shoulder. A Chef seemed like a much better option for a school parental career’s day than someone who cut up dead bodies. Smiling, Sid thought briefly, and then dove head first into speaking about his profession during his five minute allotment, while the fireman, the doctor and the optometrist waited patiently at the sidelines.


There was a time, actually, there were many times after the Twin Towers fell, that I was tempted to stop moving, to stop feeling, to stop processing. All this continued life around me, and sometimes, all I wanted was for it to vanish, was for me to become unfeeling, un-noticing, unmoved by all the loss. I just wanted to be some sort of numb extant pillar, punished by being the one to remain, but unyielding to the influence of life otherwise. I am continuously thankful for the chances I have been given since that time, the opportunity of support from my friends and family, the ability to keep working when it looked like I might fall apart. I am grateful to Mac, because now he allows me a certain about of pretence, a pretending that allows me to go about without being known as the one, just like him, who lost it all.


Marianne was playing the role of petulant lover and he the role of decisive master, her long heels stamping the dance floor as he held her a little too tight, a little too possessively for absolute comfort. He dipped her and she mocked forgiveness, pushing suddenly closer to him, back to his chest, slithering down his body, hips gyrating all the while. As the sparks between them became almost tangible in the air, she snapped once more, putting a little space between them as he twirled her, both sets of feet moving all the while. He showed her off and between them they told a little story of their own making, gave a little performance, a tiny insight into an imaginary but entirely believable other kind of life. It helped that his hair was streaked with grey and hers wasn’t.


Some people are unable to be divided, as their love creates an indivisible bond between them, one that is satiated in togetherness and strained in separation. It is why such conditions exist as broken heart syndrome, or those slightly mysterious but all too real cases of an elderly widow or widower dying soon after their spouse has. With Marianne and I, if we were both old and doddery it would have been like that. My heart, in the end stages of life, I am sure would not have been designed to live without her for very long. However, I have at least thirty good years ahead of me, and at the most many more than that, and this number was only larger when she died, when my sons died. My heart needed to continue, because as much as Marianne meant to me, she was a apart of my life, and my life, with her departure, with the departure of Christopher and Michael, it still, at that point, needed to continue. The need to continue has been one that has stayed with me ever since. Whereas they once gave me something extra and something lovely to live for, I now live for myself, and for their memory, and for life itself, of course.


“This is my girlfriend Marianne.” Sid said, propping the red haired girl against the teacher’s desk, nudging her into place with an errant hand on her upper arm. They had only really been dating for about a month, but it wasn’t like they had broken the news to everyone. The teacher, having had sat through seashells and five assorted pieces of interesting leaves and insects quietly rolled his eyes and gave the boy permission to continue via a wave of his hand.

“She has lovely hair, like a sunset, and she smells like flowers. Lavender today because her mom bought her some new soap. I taught her to make cookies and she showed me how plait her hair. Her favourite ice cream is vanilla with sprinkles, and she laughs like those, those.”

Forgetting his speech wasn’t part of the plan.

“Sleighbells on the horses at Christmas time near Central Park.” the girl interjected, smiling widely, happily, her cheeks just a little bit red as she urged the boy to go back to his desk, sharp fingernails suddenly pressed square into his palm.


Once I had a wife named Marianne and two children named Christopher and Michael. For many, many years, decades even, my wife and I showed each other off to the world, and through our own individual learning, we told each other many things. When my boys came along into our lives, we showed them off and told of them to family and friends and to the inquiring prising hands and eyes of old grandmothers walking the streets of New York City. I once had much to show and tell of, and while I was a proud man, I was never greedy, I was never too egotistical, too narcissistic, too anything bad. Then suddenly, all that I had to show and tell to the world was gone, simply extinguished in a combination of flames, death, planes and falling buildings. Since then, I have my job to show up for, and my friends and family to tell stories too. With the memories of my wife and children close by my heart and my head, this form of show and tell is enough to make me happy. I still miss my wife and children, and I always will, but it has not stopped me living, because I have too much that I can show and tell to the world, too many things I still want to do and speak of. Their love, the memories of them, and now the love of my family and friends, it does sustain me in happiness, it does, it always will.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 1035


Take someone out.


Nostalgia. That wistful yearning to return to a place, a memory, an experience that one has previously occupied in the past. Like the fad of tie dyed shirts or the time everybody played with pogo sticks. Our world is made up of nostalgia, past epochs, eras kept in basements and museums, in back order catalogues and old things being remade with new packaging. Death often brings about this emotional longing for a time in the past. I see people in my job, I have experienced it myself, the sudden incessant yearning to go back and dig through one’s memory boxes, through forgotten cupboard spaces and photograph albums. Nostalgia is yearning, it is the longing for something that elicited in us some happiness. It is a desire to return to former times, when things were perhaps safer, or simply, more pleasant. Time moves on though, and the recreation of the old can only do so much.

He supposed perhaps it might be dirty of him, covetous of him to think, to truly believe, that he always needed her. What might happen if she came to a day when she didn’t want him? What would happen if she left him before, before, that final act? Would he accept it without complaint, happy to have had her for as long as she was willing to treasure him as hers? Oh pious pity, the days of all marriages being long term and absolute were not with him, he now existed in a time where things were translucent and conducting of such vivacious social change. What if, what if, what if?

Sid looked up at her as she emerged out of the bathroom, holding up her hair, long arms extended, elbows just little bumps of flesh and bone along china doll skin.

“Up or down Sid?”

It wasn’t until she repeated the question and playfully kicked him in the shin that he realised she was paying attention to him, finally raising his head to answer, eyes contemplative.

“Up. I like the way you pin it.” he said, he smiled, he forgot his worries.


Transformation. It occurs in the human race much like an incredibly slow metamorphosis. A haircut one single day, does not equal a completely new self view the next other day, but it may, for some, be part of the changing process. It is an act of changing, and for some it is harder than it may be for others. For some people, to change is hard, and it comes slowly, painfully, and for some it is easy, another lifeblood, another air. It is all up to the person to seize their own particular moment in life, and do something with it, about it. The change may be slow, because no transformation is an instantaneously working miracle, but it does not mean it has to drag on for months or weeks, or years. To get over a death may take months, but to become happier in one’s self may simply be a matter of a week and a good book. It all depends on the person.

He was the perfect cavalier gentlemen, escorting her from the limo shared with friends, opening all the doors for her along the way, vehicle and building orientated alike. When they came to dance he paused and bowed at her, and she curtsied with whimsy in return. They danced a perfect dance, turning and touching at the right moment, eyes meeting and departing and eventually stealing hidden glances whenever they could. They mingled and were social, miming adult responsibilities and sensibilities in a teenage school dance setting, mimicking actions and stances, but sharing the age appropriate conversations about other people, other places.


Isolation. One of the hardest concepts to overcome is the sudden deathly act of being left all alone in the world. It is a tricky thought as well, to supposedly be all alone, because no one is ever truly alone. There is a thought I have sometimes as I process bodies in the morgue, especially those of murderers, or the victims of drug abuse, of homelessness. Once, even for a moment, a person has been loved. Whether it was a mother, a father, another family member, a teacher or simply a stranger they have passed in the street and never known, they have been loved. It is impossible to go through life, from birth to death without ever having been loved, even if only for a second. So, between love and death, what went wrong to lead this particular person, any particular person, to my table. Perhaps I was fortunate in that the remains of my wife and sons were never found. No one ever had to think those thoughts about them as they lay on someone else’s table. No, that isn’t true. Marianne, Christopher and Michael are dead, they have been gone for so long, and while I have my family, my friends, her family, even her friends, the hole is still there, I still miss them, I still ache for their company sometimes. I can not take them out of my life. That would leave me totally alone of them, deprived of them, and I can’t do that.

One day, one single glorious, perfect, absolutely idyllic day, he whisked her out of work, he organised it with her boss and stole her away to a hidden rooftop garden. He made a picnic, twenty different foods in little portions sealed inside individual containers. He bound her hands and hid her eyes with silk scarves and fed her tiny morsels until the sun set. He took her out and it was glorious, and when they arrived home to their children they were happy to see them. They made popcorn and ordered pizza and watched a rented out movie, and it was satisfaction, it was happiest. Then seven months later they were dead, and, there was nothing. He couldn’t take her out anymore. Couldn’t take his children out anymore. Couldn’t show any of them the beauty, the whimsy of life. And he felt nostalgic, he felt isolated, and eventually, he transformed into something different and continued on, taking himself out of the experience of mourning, of death, and continuing on with life.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 782


You pass a complete stranger on the street and notice they are crying. What do you do?


Sid found the woman outside a baby supply store, eyes brimming with tears, throat whimpering with obvious pain, or regret, or both. The store was the king that sold clothing and nappies in bulk, as well as the latest trendy prams and cots, the kind of thing he had long since thrown out, and not just because his children had grown up, although he still had kept a few items. He glanced at his watch, but his feet had already decided as he steered himself off a busy footpath at lunchtime, and sidled up to the woman’s side. He gathered her in gentle arms and held her as she looked, taller than her body by a good bit, able to encompass the complete stranger in his dangly, hand ended appendages without so much as a complaint. Need fitted into comfort, as his mother had sometimes said when he was down as a child, and she had hugged him to cheer him up.

Having said not a sparse or a bountiful word to each other, when she gave indication he lead the woman down the street, sat her at a small cafe and ordered two cups of jet black coffee. Sitting down with the mugs and a cookie he broke it and offered her half silently, and so they sat there, like two cheeky children sharing a forbidden fruity snack, the sharing of emotions continuing in their conversation already replete with silence.

“Christopher was eight, Michael was four. It gets easier.” the Medical Examiner said once they had eaten and drunk little, and it was then her turn to eye him quizzically, with the expression of disbelief and needing for similarity that he had come to associate with so many victims of lost love.

“My husband died, we were going to call her Mary.” the woman blurted, and the man continued to watch her, knowing how her thoughts must be racing, knowing how her mind must have reverted back to the most basic of human instincts, to speak of what was most troubling without letting it make wholesome sense. He waited for her to go on, continually patient and eternal with his kindness.

“Died of, died of cancer. Mary, Mary she had something wrong with her, they said, they said I was lucky to keep her as long as I did!”

The woman’s voice rose a little in a vindictive warble, and Sid grasped her hand tightly under the table. That stilted conversation ended, they finished their drink, finished their secretive cookie and he lead her back, through trains and buses, back to his home, to a nice couch seat and an offer of dinner between needing, lonely strangers, for what any of such action was worth. The pair talked over dinner, the woman silent now, content to mostly let him finish his story, which was, in his domain, a little bit longer than what she had offered since they had left the cafe.

“My wife was Marianne, not French, just red haired and unusual. We had our children, look, here they are.”

He pulled out his wallet and showed her old family photographs, young boys with older parents, and all smiles. His hands flickered the knife along the row of beans, topping and tailing, evening them up and then into thirds.

“Had them later in life. She worked in the World Trade Centre, higher up, nearer to where the planes hit than some.”

Carrots fell into perfect circles and onions into miniature flat rectangles. In a bit, during a bout of silence, garlic spiced the air and oil sizzled in a frying pan.

“It was a little office thing, a little thing to show the kids what work was like.” Sid said, and smiled, suddenly fond and unusually warm.

“We were older than most parents, and no respecting older child really wants to come and do office work. But Chris and Mike were young enough to still see it as an adventure. I’m pretty sure, they may have been the only, ones, the only, children, there. I’m not really sure.”

There was a lot more silence after that, but he had made it clear, in the few snippets of conversation they shared before dinner was served, that his empty house, was truly empty, and the woman, gave much the same story of her own home.


When they mourned together between the bed sheets, he made her cheerful not because he preyed on the down and out, the sad and missing of love. He cheered her up through nipping ministrations, because they both needed cheer, and because they could both provide each other with cheer, all other circumstances, histories, futures and conversations, excused.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 1803


Cheer someone up.


There is something violently intrinsic about the bond between child and parent, whether mother or father. It can be either really, because relations within our society are so multifaceted that one child is no longer destined to be raised by mommy with brief interspersed visits from father in the evening time. Although my parents weren’t like that, it seems that with my generation and those close to it, the father was a distant figurehead designed to impose order and restrictions upon the household. Yes, well now in the modern day, I may very well be a man, but when I was married, it wasn’t anything like that. Marianne and I, we both had our hectic schedules, our appointments and designated duties to perform in order to earn our pay, but there was always that seemingly idyllic time for family. These glorious unexpected times in the day, for business papers spread over the dining table, and wooden blocks splayed readily across the floor while dinner was made around all the mess and commotion. There was always time for family in our household, as much or as little time as we had to give on any particular day; there was always something, some of it to be given, to be shared.

The notion of children though. How could I have explained to Marianne when we got married that one day we would produce between us two individual beings, two creations as it were, made out of the splitting and mingling of genetics to become, something else, something ours, but still of its own. It was a funny thing, we knew we wanted children, but we only held distant figments of girls in dresses or boys pulling up flowers. We had rough sketched names and other designations, but we had university to go through, we had our own growing up to do, and children were a long way off. Then all of a sudden, the years had rolled past us, and there Christopher and Michael were, indeterminable bundles of joy, vomit, crayon drawings and diapers.

There was one working day, perhaps a year or so before they died, probably about a year and a half, when I took the train to work as opposed to the car, bike, or even the bus. I got off at an earlier stop on the way home to visit some friends and to look around a late night grocer to find some milk, bread, and ah, some bok choy, that Marianne had asked me to pick up. We were having stir fry for dinner, because Chris had begun a recent but vivid fascination with chopsticks. Michael wasn’t quite old enough to manipulate them with Christopher’s dexterity, but we were harbouring the interest for what it was, childhood fascination of the obtuse and the extraordinary.

That night I visited with two friends, one artist and one art supply store worker who lived together in this kind of blaze of tie dyed pillows and abstract paintings. Either way they went about promoting artistic expression, they were good people, so we shared a drink and a few words. The art supply store man gave me a defective box of crayons for Michael, two dark blue colours instead of one light, one dark, I remember this precisely. With two boys, I had learned to err on the side of slight caution with those slight tinges of jealousy, but it was, as with so many things, not something I gave a thought to that day. Thus I ended up at home with the milk, bread, crayons and bok choy. Marianne and Chris had started on dinner and Michael was scribbling on paper in a high chair.

Michael took the box of crayons with about as much grace as someone near to two and a half or thereabouts can do, and bidden out of the kitchen by my wife I sat down with him at the table. Suddenly there was Chris pushing himself under my arm, looking at this box of crayons. He was himself inclined to drawings, yes, but perhaps more so to other things more constructive, like Lego. But gifts are gifts, either way, and through a child’s eyes, one sided gifts are, how to say it, hard to perceive, different from an adult at the very least. There weren’t tears, no, no, Chris was a lovely, lovely, understanding boy, but I did see those flickers of confusion in his eyes, I remember that. I remember a lot of little things about my boys, those tiny looks and those awkward glances when they had done something wrong. I remember so much of them, and I only had them for such a short time. Parents are not usually meant to outlive their own children.

Something truly weird happened that night. I took the place of Christopher in the kitchen, helping Marianne with the vegetables for the stir fry. The boys stayed at the dinner table, I assume Chris was watching Michael, who was catching quickly onto the concept of drawing a rudimentary circle with whatever art supplies he could get a hold of. When I returned to the room to check on them, cutlery and chopsticks in hand so I could set the table, there were all the crayons set out on the table, broken clearly in half and divided amongst siblings. The two alike crayons for which had made the box come into my hands in the first place, the two dark blue ones, were again divided, but were not broken. There were two of the same, of course, they were two equal instruments, so there was no point in harming them. I’m not saying that the broken crayons were perfectly and clearly divided in half, but it was pretty close. I didn’t really ask as I set the table, because they had shared the paper also and begun drawing, as they were often tempted to do when supplied with such things. Looking at Michael for a moment, he must have given me his best attempt at a shrug, and for all the world, as young as he was, I knew it had been him who had made the effort to flatten out the playing ground between them. Of the two, I am sure Mike would have been the more inclined to art and Chris more inclined towards things of the hand, of putting delicate part with delicate part, but that is not the point.

Having children is a unique experience, and, well, I have heard the saying that no one can know exactly what it is like until they have indeed experienced it. I suppose, to some strengths, this is true, because Marianne and I could not have imagined the very specific uniqueness of our children, only the concept and the imagined emotions that were associated with the act of being a parent. Once it happens though, ah, there is a whole new set of things to associate, to learn and remember. What child likes this, which one belongs to that, who prefers which blanket or which toy; just like any other human, really, except they are dependent on you entirely for their own wellbeing. Just that day, though, just that day I learned, or had reinforced, the lesson about sharing. I suppose any parent brings gifts for their children, it is what I, what I did, what I would have done in the future, because causing happiness or thankfulness is in itself a fulfilling experience. I suppose, there would have been other times, with two children, where one got something and the other didn’t, but while they were that young, and a prime example in that experience especially, maybe the understanding wasn’t quite there between them, that one could receive and the other could be content to get something at another time. Thus they shared.

I had two boys once, two wonderful, lovely boys, and before they died, I loved each of them as an individual, and together we loved each other as what I regarded to be a nice family unit, albeit one with its own specific differences and eccentricities. I still love my boys, but this love is not based on the continuing existence of a physical body with a mind subjective to its own thoughts and experiences, willing to be objective under the gaze of everyone else. No, I suppose, when it comes to the need to cheer myself up, all I have left is what they left behind, all their objects, their toys, their things, the drawings they created and the seemingly tiny clothes they were meant to continued wearing. All I have left to bring me cheer as a result of their existence is those objects and my memories of them, of my two sons, of Michael and Christopher and very much in the same object cum memory boat, my wife, Marianne.

In having a family, I once had a lot of cheer. Now, I still have a lot of cheer in my life, but it is no longer of that atypical warm and fuzzy family kind, well, not the kind associated with spouses and offspring. No, the cheer I get nowadays is from the family I have left, my mother, my father, Marianne’s parents, it is from my friends, from the people I meet in and out of the job, and form the city they I live in. My cheer comes, as it has done all throughout my life, from the life in and around me, except that now, I am not looking in the familiar places that my wife and children provided for me. It is no longer from alcohol, even if that addiction was brief and fleeting, it is just from the fact that I have a continued life, and that life around me does continue on.

I needed Marianne as I needed air, and she felt the same way about me. In that respect we were inseparable, even when we were away from each other. Now that she is gone, what do I do to be cheerful without her, without them? I breathe the same air, and I live with myself, with the memories of them, of the collective memories of us together in a past very different from the present as it is today. Oh, in their death, cheerfulness may have faded away for a while, but now, here in my own future, all I can do is simply, keep breathing, and continue. I could never have stopped after their death, because if I had, if I had not cheered myself up by remembering them, I wouldn’t be here today. That is the truth, clear and simple and unadulterated. My wife, my two sons, they brought me cheer, and now, without them, I move on with the memories of them perfectly intact.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 784


Is redemption truly possible?


Someone cut me off while I was changing lanes in traffic the other day on the way to a crime scene, and for a brief illustrious moment I did think fancifully evil things about them. It only lasted for a second, though, only a second or two of barely simmering rage. Then, like so many other situations in life, the anger subsided into reasonable disbelief that someone sandwiched in peak hour traffic could be that rude. It is hard to believe, yes it is, that when there were obviously, hundreds of other commuters trying to get to this destination, in such and such a direction, and so forth, that one man or woman could put themselves before numerous others. It happens, I suppose, oh yes, how I know that rage can override a person and make them see nothing else. I am very experienced in dealing with the results of rage as the result of my job. Rage and violence, and much much else that is wrong with the present day world, I get all of it on my morgue table in the bodies of dead children, of adults, of people who could have or did have, promising lives ahead of them.

Forgiveness, though, I am talking about forgiveness, as well as atonement, glorious somewhat quasi archaic words they might be to some people. To forgive is to pardon the transgressions of someone else that may have angered or upset you in some way. To atone, then, is that act of apology, of reconciliation, that serves to try and deserve the forgiveness of another person, in the first place. Therefore, if I am redeemed, then I have atoned and been forgiven, and if I am in need of redemption, I have not been forgiven, and may have not yet atoned for any of the sins or anger bringing actions I have committed. It is a curious concept, I am aware, entailing of the immense bravura with which humanity carries itself with. If we commit a wrong, we expect that if we follow a coded set of rules, movements and spoken words, that we will get forgiven, nay, that if we do this little dance then we may even deserve to be forgiven, whether it was an unforgiveable act, or not.

This kind of thinking is where I run into some issues with the idea of redemption. I am a man who has religion yes, not as strong as some others, but I am still known to attend church and frequent graveyards, to visit graves of my dead loved ones, of course. I pray, I take communion, I make cakes for cake stalls, I am a small part of a religious community with inhabitants who are inevitably, far more passionate and devoted to Christianity than I am. Looking at Christianity, we get the idea of sin and of forgiveness, even atonement. We sin, we atone via prayer, bread, wine, and we are forgiven by a person in power, of all our past sins and awful transgressions. Then the next week, we go back and do it all over again. It is not that I mind, so much the idea that the church can absolve everyone of everything bad they have ever done, without that person truly having learnt the meaning of what it is to say sorry, to atone and mean it in absolute.

I think that redemption is truly possible, but not without a stringent set of associated happenings that must happen to make it positively true, without deception. It is far too easy in modern society to wave a magic wand that gives over that magic feeling of forgiveness without any atonement or poignant inner thought having happened, at all. As with training dogs, most people learn through repetition, not through a pat on the head and a proverbial cookie in the form of a prayer or a set of words aimed to induce a state of feeling that one has been forgiven. To truly receive redemption a person must first atone for their wrongdoing, they must apology and try to make things right. If and only then, have they learned the error of their ways, have seen that their past actions are wrong and have committed to try and never repeat the same movement of misfortune again, may any person or people, ever, be truly receiving of redemption. To be honest, as much as I may have religion, a pat on the head, the bread and the wine, the prayers, it all seems very weak to me when the person learns nothing at all and continues to repeat the same action, or voice the same words, throughout the rest of their life.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 882


Prison.


Weeks before she died, she caught him chained to a tree with a bunch of protestors, mingled amongst which were university students studying ethics, philosophy or environment management. There were professors as well, of those subjects and other similar topics, and various other lecturers and teachers from educational institutions, all attendees somehow relevant to their united particular cause. There were so many people that it hadn’t just been one tree, it was many trees, many chains and locks and badly printed t-shirts. She had caught him pressed between a young female graduate student studying feminist literature, and a professor in something he couldn’t quite remember. The gentle waving of bodies and picket signs hid him until the Detective came upon his face in passing, and smiled a sudden warm, open, grin.

All these people protesting the destruction of the environment, and her, as part of the people drawn out to work, who were meant to keep the peace. Then there was him and her, and they were, for a glance, for a moment, separate people, not co-workers or friends or acquaintances. They weren’t people who knew each other; they were just people leading separate lives, each fulfilling a particular social role within the order of the community. Just him, one protestor, and just her, one Detective smiling at him, before he snapped on his glasses and brushed his hair off his forehead.

“Hello there Detective. Very nice day out is it not?” the Medical Examiner said, waving the hand free of a sign in greeting as the woman looked at him, even more amused yet. She had recognised him the moment their eyes had met, but they didn’t see each other very regularly as co-workers, and even less as people outside of work, although slightly more now she was supposedly involved with Flack. Seeing each other in such an out of proportion situation, the levels of normalcy had skewed their perceptions of each other for brief and quiet moments.

The two people continued to eye each other carefully before she greeted him back, waving and smiling back with equal warmth.

“Sid. You’re out here? I thought it was only...”

The younger girl, younger than him at least, took a look around and raised a conspiratorial eyebrow, head lowering forwards slightly

“Hippies and university students?” the woman whispered near his ear, and he thought how lucky Flack must be, to love her, and so he had heard, been loved back. The woman was beautiful, reminiscent of Marianne in elegance, at the very least, although so many beautiful women reminded him of Marianne.

“No, no.” the man replied.

“They roped in us working intellectuals as well” he went on with a wink.

The Medical Examiner laughed at this, and they fell into conversation as two co-workers did, people who worked in separate area, all for the same cause, really, of solving crimes and protecting society. In different strengths of course, but still, same sort of thing, the same end purpose. She was like Flack, and all the people in the lab and the morgue knew Flack well. Flack was part of the family, and by association, so was Angell.


There was, as with so many peaceful yet shout filled protest to save the trees, one single idiot, neither university student, professor, lecturer or teacher, but someone else. One single idiots who, for some reason that made sense in his head, lit small little smoke bomb fireworks that popped off like the explosion of a gun, and which injured several people.

As the chains fell as a result of magically produced cutting instruments and police officers surged forward, intermingled with other people who were present to protect and serve, of who which Angell was one, the woman caught him by the arm. Like some others, she was there on her day off, and her presence even near him was merely happening circumstance. She cuffed him and dragged him away into a group of trees, pushing him behind a nearby toilet block where she hushed him with quiet words in French and then released his hands from their bonds

Sid was thankful for that day, because several of his academic friends had criminal charges pressed. Even though they were dismissed, several graduate students were punished and several people were charged for disrupting the peace. Yet Angell saved him from a supposed prison, perhaps, some supposed punishment which he knew could have, may have, affected his career in some way.

As he autopsied her, she opened her up and peeked into her insides, Sid was thankful for that, thankful for what she had done for him. As he saw Flack’s face, though, as he saw Flack’s face, he could only remember now, the grief of losing, the grief he felt and that Flack must feel over having the very one that belonged at their individual sides, ripped away like a piece of refuse caught in a sudden wind. And it hurt, it hurt beyond the good memory of escaping prison, because the prison of Jessica Angell’s death, for her, was eternal and permanent and absolutely, absolutely, final. Just like Marianne, just like Christopher and just like Michael, Jessica Angell was lost because the ills in the world had saw fit to cause them all an untimely demise.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 540


Under what circumstances, if any, is it ok to break the law?


“Have you ever broken the law, Sid?”

Mac’s tone was conversational, his left hand grasped around a steaming cup of coffee, the other with fingers pressed against a particular article in a newspaper, where his name had gotten a mention. When the CSI spoke, the Medical Examiner looked up from a fine examination of his own lunch and quirked one eyebrow down, the other flying upwards towards an imaginary heaven. Briefly proud of this feat of facial muscle mastery, he momentarily lost concentration and spent several seconds assuming some degree of a dazzled expression.

“Sid?” Mac pressed on further, catching the arrangement of the other man’s face and letting a small amused smile tug at the edges of his lips.

“Why do you ask?” the ME replied, smiling himself, amused, placing more bait on the hook as it were. As if Mac didn’t know about some of the things he had done, seen, experienced.

“Just curious.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” Mac said, drinking from his coffee cup, replacing it on the table, staring intently at his lunchtime.

Ah, so it was a game.

The eyebrows lowered themselves, the look of a storyteller replaced one of befuddled amusement.

“I suppose, without mentioning acts of sexual deviancy and exploration.” Sid said, pausing and rolling his shoulders in a shrug.

“I stole a packet of gum when I was eight. I do remember partaking in creating the absence of a window one time.” he continued, smiling at the CSI’s blank stare.

“We were rescuing puppies.” the greying man said, shrugging once more, pushing his glasses up his nose with one free finger.

Mac blew air through his teeth, an unusual motion for someone normally so reserved. He finished his coffee with a final swig, grimacing slightly as all the finely granulated sediment of leftover beans ran down his throat.

“I broke a couple of windows, I suppose. Hawkes told me of some of your stories Sid, I’ve already heard many of them.”

There it was, conversation finished.

The men turned the topic at hand onto work after that, work, and papers, and cases, politics, future things to do, to deal with. Not the breaking of laws, the enforcing of them, the following of them, the interpretation of them. What Sid was going to do with the bloated water laden victim whose smell was beginning to permeate up from the morgue, or so several lab workers said.


If only he knew, though, if only he knew all the indecent things he had done. What would Mac think of him then? Having flouted so many laws, not harming anyone, never, but always in the name of love.


Acrobatic artistry near articulated skeletons,
Coitus conducted underneath cakes stalls,
Gyrations given near tubs full of gelatin,
Maverick mastery of womanly downfall

Sexy seduction carried through on the stairway,
Threesomes thriving with thrill and thunder,
Mile high ministrations all on the airway,
Foursomes then fivesomes then orgies and all

Exploits endured on a library trolley,
Breaking barriers to bang on the walls,
Holiday mischief under high priced pink holly,
Doors deftly unlocked to let deviants past

Insensitive idling of leather and whips,
Hiding hurriedly while naked and bare,
Lovers loving through locked living lips,
Remember, remember, the absence still there?

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 1091


What have you done to make ends meet when you were broke?


In my life, I never have really been left wanting, I have never been without a house, and I have always had shoes on my feet, if the having of such things is any indicator of lifestyle. I have had debt, of course I have had debt, I own a house and I have a car, I once had two children to clothe and send to school. In the past I have had medical school to pay off, and before that many things to buy for my work as a Chef, which I still try to maintain to the present day. I am getting on in years now, in terms of being past the point where I work instead of attend school, live by myself, instead of with parents, but I do not think of myself as old. Despite this, despite the fact that I still have many years ahead of me, Marianne and I were fortunate in that we both earned good amounts of money through our respective jobs over the years, and between us, oh so fortunately we had cleared off our debts many years before she died.

Being that I have no intention of selling my home in the very near future, being that I will not need a new car for a while yet, being that I now live by myself, my living expenses are minimal as far as basic necessities go, and my chance of incurring more debt is low. In terms of my job, there is petrol to buy, and for the sake of continued learning I do keep up subscriptions to several reputable medical and criminal journals and databases. While I may enjoy cooking, I am responsible, most of the time with the amount of money I spend on food, and being a tall rather compact human being, I find clothing easy to find and I use water and electricity responsibly.

Now, in terms of lifestyle, I suppose, aside from bills, and necessities such as food and liquid, most of my money is spent on the things I do or the things I have. This is normal, however, because if we only spent money on food, water, electricity and having a roof over our heads, I would imagine we may all become naked and reduced to walking around the city on bare feet. That is a bit wild of me, I do elaborate in that hypothesis, but I am trying to show that in buying myself nice clothes, and occasionally stooping so low as to buy tabloid magazines, I am continuing the act of being a relatively normal human being.

While I am not rich, now I lead a comfortable life, and I have enough money around that I can indulge in going out to clubs or to dinner if I desire. I have enough money that I can buy myself books and lovely knives. I have a television that is not space station worthy, but it does a decent job, and I have a home computer, a laptop as well, that I replace when they become very slow and clunky, which takes quite a few years, experience given. Swinging, fortunately, is a free act, but the kind o sexual lifestyle I lead, does not come without expense. Leather whips cost money, as does edible underwear and fanciful silk straps, as does the wining and dining of ladies and men. I am a humble man, but people have described me as eccentric, eclectic, whimsical even. I am known to buy funny things, but it is not something I am known for at large, it is just merely a tiny facet of my being, my totality.

New York City, by itself necessitates a certain level of fluidity in life. The ability to change with the days, to change with what is needed or expected of a person is a talent I excel in, while all the time remaining myself, of course. I keep myself well up to date with the procession movements of technology and culture, so I see movies, I even own a portable music device, which as a young man who served me coffee once remarked, is awfully progressive of an old “dude” such as myself. That is not the point, however, I am simply trying to show that I have, in the past, and in the present, Managed my money well, and worked hard to make sure that I am able to live a life that I desire to live, without overly indulging or wasting money in excess on things like gambling, drinking and smoking. I am a responsible adult, and while eccentric, even I know I am eccentric, I get by well.

I have a vegan friend. Well, to be honest I have several vegetarian friends of various levels who I cook for every now and then, although I am perfectly sure one of them once stole all my eggs. Anyway, I have a vegan friend, a lovely girl, a bit younger than myself, who works in the film industry. While I have never been permanently living with small amounts of money to sustain myself on, well, as with any other life, there has been a period, before I become a Medical Examiner, and prior to my career as a Chef really taking off, where I had very little money, enough to live with, but not much else. In a time a couple of years after I married Marianne and while my vegan friend was breaking into the film industry, more hammering at the door, I helped her make a student film. While it was a fun experience, I did do it for the money, because I was nearing a certain level of being broke. Suffice to say, somewhere there is an old student film where I am grotesquely murdered in a dark and scary scene by a zombie, no, several zombies, yes. Oh, there is nothing colder and more uncomfortable than being covered in fake blood in the middle of the night and having to film my last fictional moments alive trapped in a dumpster. I also spent a week or so as a male stripper once, but that was more for pleasure than anything, really. Anyway, in my life, I have always made ends meet, whether barely or sufficiently, money is a thing I no longer spend hours obsessing over, not that I ever really did, that much. There is far much more to life than just money, that I am completely, totally and absolutely aware and sure of.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 1079


You’re fired! Talk about a time you were forced out of something.


Forced out of love. Forced out of marriage. Forced out of that winsome purity that accompanies young romance. Forced out of habit through fire and through sybarite flames, his riddle was spent, he yearned for recompense of a kind he could not have.

There is a common theme in literature of a phoenix character, the very sole person, usually the hero or heroine, who can overcome adversity and come out, on the other side of the story, a winner. I have never studied literature to the extent of some professors and critics, but I have done my fair share of plays and movie watching, I see how things go. The phoenix character, they suffer, they go through the climax, the anticlimax, but it is near inevitable that at the end of the story, they are reborn into contentment.

There were a lot of first times after that firing of notions and erasing of daily habits and normal habitats. There was the first dinner he cooked without the help of his sons. The first lunch he ate without his wife. The first time he had sex without her consent. The first time he wrapped fingers around a certain appendage without knowing she would take the edge off when he got home. The first time he went to a film festival without her. The first anniversary of their death, where he stood there, stood in life, a year alone, a year already gone without her, without his sons, by his side.

In murder, some people find the contentment that they have killed the person who was the cause of all their inimical life woes. I have been the last port of call for the victims of vicious serial killers, and I have seen the worst and the best of murder, if such a thing can be said. I find contentment in doing a good job for the people who can no longer speak for themselves, I find, I have never been able to find any contentment in the fact that they are dead. This is what puts the murderers and the people who process the remnants of a murder apart. One takes joy in killing, and the other takes joy in seeing that the victim receives just and fair treatment in death, as they would have in life. I have for a very long time tried to understand the notion of terrorism, even back in my youth where it was of a different kind to the large scale actions of modern day. I can get the concept of terrorism, of the need to kill, but nothing, not even the death of my wife and children made me, go out, and murder, other people.

The heat of the pizza oven was explosive in the enclosed space of the kitchen, and Sid thought he could feel the small hairs on his arms vaporizing as he shoved the paddle inside the heated interior. He resolved almost immediately to buy several bags of ice on his way home and bathe in them. The heat rendered him a glutton for punishment though, and as the orders came in he remained shovelling the prepared pizzas in and out of the heated dome, placing one in immediately after one came out. All around him were the smells of the kitchen, the noises of the restaurant, the eclectic collection of sensory assaults on a rapturous Friday night. As the man moved in an exquisite dance of taut muscles and sweating forehead, hungry New Yorkers hawked their orders in the background, at the front desk, and the aroma of herbs haunted the air, as did the sound of flickering, chopping, knives.

I once met a man with no feet who whizzed around in a wheelchair delivering parcels to office buildings. I owed a friend a favour, so on a particularly busy day for this man, I accompanied him on a bicycle carrying a recent shipment of particularly heavy office supplies. This man had no feet, but he moved on his chair with the most amazing speed, and he knew, oh, he knew every single floor of every single office building he went to. He greeted the receptionist, talked sports with the office jock, and commented on the wedding pictures of the recently married, or the holiday snaps of the recently divorced. I am quite a lanky man with a long stride and good muscles for hauling and pushing various objects or bodies, but whereas my current work goes at a fairly steady pace, riding around on this bicycle all day, tailing someone in a wheelchair, it was a different experience. Something new and fresh, and, different. I suppose that is why dog walkers make a mint in this city, because dogs need to run, and there are so many places in this city to run to, or form.

There was a day, after she died, after his sons died, where he sat for a few hours on the floor of the lounge room surrounded by old photographs and coloured building blocks. Spurred by the sudden impetus to build a castle, it had sat on the coffee table reaching skywards before he inadvertently knocked it down with a wayward book. As the blocks tumbled and fell to rest scattered across the floor he quietly got up. He then proceeded to place on appropriate shoes, appropriate clothes and lock the door behind him. He walked to the residential address of a local dominatrix, who, without surprise, dressed in exquisite Japanese manga style stockings and skirts. They flouted the laws of convention and shared tea together, and afterwards he lay on her couch and stared at the ceiling.

Having the normal way of life fired from out beneath you is hard. It gets easier, but the fact that your life has dramatically changed and taken an alternate course to what you would preferred to have happened, that still remains.

Forced out of love. Fired into continuation. Forced out of marriage. Fired into continued exploration. Forced out of winsome purity. Fired into the extension of his old self into his new self, and beyond. Forced out of habit through fire. Through the same fire fired into an entirely different convention. A lifestyle was obliterated in fickle flames and falling rubble, and he was instead fired into a life replete with the memories of the old, and the nuances, the possibilities, the chances of the new, and the exciting, and all else, so much more.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 1007


What languages do you speak?


Languages, ah, I love languages. I speak fluent French, and I am especially proficient in American Sign Language. As is requisite from the love life I have chosen to lead I know how to say I love you and please bend over in more than, oh, twenty or so different tongues. However, often enough, as it happens, the tongue is sufficient to get the message across without using any words at all, not that such a talent has any real relation to how many languages a person speaks. It may help, though. Either way, talented with my tongue, or not, as some others may be, I have lived in New York City for the largest percentage of my life, and it was inevitable that I learned more languages than the largely spoken English. Continuing to live in a multicultural society as I do, I keep up the effort to try and speak in as many different languages as I find the time for, because putting phrases together varies so much across all the different tongues, and even still, across different dialects. For someone who loves life, who adores culture and art as much as I do, it just comes naturally to want to know more than I am given by simple hands, more than is readily available for me to learn as typical or ordinary.

My parents, Canadian as they are, ensured that I learnt French from an early age, and sign language was something I happened upon during the course of my life. I was in my early twenties I think, when I spent the most delicious night with an entirely deaf woman whose sense of, and talent for, touch, was beyond the exhilarating exquisite. Now, I was indeed married at that time, but also quite into the already well emerged swinging society. No injury to my wife, no, because she knew where I was that night, and as a result of this awareness I was able to give my full attention to my acquaintance. That night, oh how wonderful it was, I was given the chance to watch and fully appreciate the fluidity of the way her hands moved in her type of physical speech. Suffice to say, being friendly with that woman as I was in times afterward, opened a few doors for me in the deaf community, and I gained, from assorted teachings and classes thereafter, my proficiency in another type of language.

Choosing to do French at school was largely useless for me after a certain age, so as I continued my education I took up Spanish. Spanish is yet another language I find very common across some strains of society, where people have moved from here or there and brought their entire background and culture with them. They bring their food as well, oh, how glorious food of different countries can be. Just as French can be romantic, Spanish also has that ability to sound utterly guttural and deprived of archetypal social niceties if a person is aware of how to use it properly to achieve a desired effect. While my accent, strongly Canadian as it sometimes can sound, is more readily lent to French, being able to speak Spanish has distinct advantages. Where French may not be working with a woman, or a man for that fact, Spanish is often successful, and is entirely useful when I may be out and about and would like to listen in on a conversation or help to solve an argument.

As for the other languages I speak, well, I do enjoy a smattering of different languages. My Chinese is very basic, and my Japanese is rusty but still with a low level of fluency, having not lost any in the passing years. I have more recently enjoyed trying to learn Greek, which now is probably just as good as my Japanese is, and if I remember correctly, I have basic abilities in Portuguese, and am slightly better at German. I have some or much talent with Lithuanian according to the situation. For the time being, when I find time I try to improve my Japanese and Greek speaking abilities, although trying to fit these in with my musical and dance interests, along with my job, sometimes proves hazardous to my brain. It is alright though; I have, hopefully, many years left ahead of me, and plenty of spare hours when all my paperwork is finished, to continue to educate myself in my particular areas of language interest.

New York City is a great place for learning languages, and for providing the impetus to do so. While I may not spent as much time outside of the building I work in as my colleagues do, my languages skills have occasionally proved useful when a translator can not be reached. Aside from that, it is just generally nice to be able to speak so many varied tongues, because I do not limit myself to just understanding one language, just English, or just something else. When I go out and when I walk around my home, so large it is, I come across many different people, who have many different cultures and who appear form many different backgrounds. Knowing so much, I can listen to them, to these people, and I can share the love for life, the zest for life that they have. I probably could not achieve such multicultural understanding and appreciation of this diversity if I spoke only English. I speak many languages because I love to do so, because I am interested in the linguistics of all these different people, all this sheer multitude of living beings. When I was young, I was raised with French and English and soon happened upon so much more. I was raised to be understanding, to be compassionate and loving of life, and while I now work with the dead, speaking their language and translating their mysteries, I have not given up on all else that is out there to do with words and other tongues.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 922


Cremation or burial? Talk about funeral arrangements.


When she died, my wife had it in mind that she would like to be cremated and spread over some flowers in Central Park. If our children met an unfortunate fate before they were old enough to decide for themselves, then they would, under our love and care, be remembered in the same way. It is nothing we had against being buried in the ground, but my wife and I, we were always very free spirited people. Even before she died, I had seen some of the worst cases of decomposition, the worst cases of grave robbery and bodily destruction after death. It seemed like a better choice, at the time, for our bodies, in death, to be given to the ground, where some part of us might be incorporated into the flowers and plants that we loved so much. We were part hippy, after all, so even if that simplistic idea is taken into mind, it makes more sense than being buried and left to rot inside a wooden box for all the rest of eternity. In the scheme of things, it also takes up less space.

It was not the choice of my wife, nor my sons, nor myself, for them to be burned by flames and crushed under the weight of falling concrete. It was not any of our collective choices for Marianne, Christopher and Michael to be buried under the remnants of the Twin Towers, and neither would we have ever desired to die in such a fashion, any of us. No, it was never a choice we had, it was never a decision we had to make, it was something, so far beyond our control that I still, I still, I still struggle with the fact of their complete and utter absence. What pains me now, is that when I had a funeral for the three people I never should have lost, while the physical body may be irrelevant in the totality of a person’s personality, I never had anything to bury. Oh yes, there were remains that were found in those days and weeks following, and the odd case of bones being found on top of buildings in New York City many years later. I was there, I saw the towers fall, I knew, know of, many more people who died there, more than just my wife and children alone. And for all the people who found something of what was left of their loved ones, their friends, their family, I had nothing. For all I know, what part of my wife and children that wasn’t turned to vapour, what wasn’t melted into the floor, was probably carted off as part of the impenetrable wreckage left behind once all the burning was done and dusted. While we had a concept and idea of how each of us was going to end up in death, it wasn’t anything like we could have ever imagined.

When it came time to have a funeral for Marianne, for Michael and Christopher, they each had a coffin, but it wasn’t burned, it was just buried. I know, I could have done the same thing, and spread the ashes of empty coffins, but it wouldn’t be the same, and bless me, I wanted something, needed something that would stand there and would serve as a reminder of them. I needed something physical I could go to and stand by, so I wouldn’t, so I wouldn’t forget. Long ago, I know I learnt that my physical body does not constitute all of what I am, but there was nothing left of my loved ones, nothing I could in good conscience spread and call a part of them. So, yes, instead, I bought coffins, I arranged for them to be buried in the plots we had bought a long time ago, through tradition, and through the need to know that somewhere was reserved, even though, in death, we all intended to be spread elsewhere. What did I bury that day? I buried three coffins, each containing a photograph of who they should have held, I buried memories, I buried sadness, I buried regrets and remembrances.

In my death, I hope that I die through natural causes and not by murder or by accidental death. The only thing I really fear about dying is that my body will never be found, and, well, to me that seems reasonable, considering my past experiences. So, yes, now, I would chose burial. I have a plot next to the empty caskets of my wife and children, and I would like to be buried there. I still prefer cremation, but I no longer prefer the idea of my ashes being spread over the flowers in Central Park. In death, I would like to be cremated and buried in totality next to the memories of the three people I lost far too soon, and who I never had any choice over where they ended up, except to box up the memory of their physicality and push far down back into the dirt. In death, in dying, the only thing I will nourish is a memory of what was, and what could have been. For my ashes, for my body, there will be no flowers, no trees, no dirt, just a position next to the empty containers that may have held the three people with which I could have done so much, and who I will miss, for the rest of my life, for as long as I continue to live.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 1053


In the event of a zombie apocalypse, what would you do?


A zombie apocalypse? What fun! I suppose, not so fun, on the inside of the matter, if you are being pursued by the brain hungry un-dead, by beings intent on your imminent destruction and recruitment into the legion of mindless wanderers. While I can’t speak from personal experience, harking to the actual nonexistence of the living dead, from my varied reading and watching of horror and science fiction, I feel that there are several varieties of zombies. This comes more from the development of the zombie genre, I think, as opposed to any direct sort of correlation between science and the possibility of actually bring long deceased people back to a mindless living state.

First off, there are the zombies from my childhood, and from the increasingly ancient literature before that. The zombies of childhood tales were slow and completely without great cognitive abilities. You could raise them, I suppose, with spells, and they would walk off under your command in that slow stiff stumble associated with zombie kind, the result of what I assume would be the remaining stiffness of rigor. These un-dead held their arms out, maybe for balance, were very stupid and mostly useless. In fact, if I remember correctly, most of them could be destroyed with salt, and damn it all if by that time all their arms had fallen off, and their eyes as well.

The second kind of zombie is what I call the mildly intelligent and more durable zombie. By the time I was in my twenties, or so, I remember a number of local filmmakers had found interest in those delightfully awkward slasher films. Remember, this was before the time of really astounding computerised special effects, so the blood was corn syrup mixed with dye, and all the injuries looked predestined because of the bags of such stuff kept under shirts. When the heroes and heroines were injured, the plastic limbs that such victims kept losing gave the whole film an air of cheap backyard sheen, which was exactly where most of these classics were made, I think. At this time, I also believe that someone got the idea that the state of being a zombie could be transmitted to someone else just as a diseased could be. If not by being covered in zombie blood, then you were certainly doomed if you were bitten by zombies. Ah, what a reverie, but I remember so clearly, these films, with people being bitten and ripped apart everywhere. Then there was that whole good and evil debate about whether you killed your best friend, lover, potential lover, roommate or favourite stripper once they had been infected and before they wanted to snack on your brains for lunch. This stage of zombie development was where horror really got a chance to shine, because the only way you can destroy zombies, of course, is to blow them up or stab them with something very pointy, indeed.

Now, the zombies in backyard slasher films were mildly intelligent, but they are nothing compared to the zombie of today. In the perfection of the zombie race, we have the highly intelligent, more indestructible zombie. They still may lose limbs and walk around with parts of their brains hanging out, but they have lost that very stiff walk and now just move around like they have a case of mild arthritis. The makeup of the modern day may make them a little more realistic, but that isn’t all that makes them so great. Being that I grew up with so many supposedly substandard kinds of zombie, I am a little resistant to this kind of un-dead, because to me, they just seem a little too animated and a little too full of it. In my day, the un-dead could be killed outright, but in these kinds of movies, the zombies bite people, they put things into the waterways, and it spreads like an infectious disease. For the lover of action though, modern day zombie movies promise a more packed punch, because along with increased mobility, it seems whoever directs these zombies also found out how to make them more intelligent. Nowadays, not only are the mobile, but they can think, they can open doors and they can lurk, waiting to bite people. Because they are now more threatening, the heroes and heroines who could normally defeat a zombie apocalypse with a shotgun and several rounds of ammunition, now need tankers and flame throwers and lots of giddy weaponry that is bound to appeal to any thrill seeking move goer. Of course, you still have to shoot the infected people after they are bitten but before they turn. As any good zombie fan knows, once you are bitten, you always have a very short time to say goodbye to your friend or your lover before you have to blow their heads off with that inevitable shotgun.

In the case of a zombie apocalypse affecting me, Sid Hammerback, directly, I would prefer that it be an apocalypse of the very stupid and easily destroyed zombie. Being that I enjoy living, I wouldn’t mind coming out of such an unfortunate occasion unharmed, with the likelihood of not only continued living, but also the complete eradication of zombie kind. By which I mean, I would very much like the stupid zombies in the case of an apocalypse, because making them extinct is really, only a matter of a large bag of salt and some fast running shoes. In the case of the mildly or highly intelligent zombies, they need larger, bigger, more powerful weapons, and they are more mobile and largely more intent on destruction, thereby making them harder to destroy and creating a very bothersome situation in terms of complete eradication. See, when zombies are simply brought up by other means, it is rather fine, because there is a certain number of them, but when the zombie plague is an infectious one, well, it spreads like a disease, and, it is that much more difficult to wipe out. Also, if you had to fight the horrible, smelly, walking un-dead, in a zombie apocalypse battle of zombie versus human, wouldn’t you prefer the business of killing them be easily and swiftly completed in a very short amount of time? Yes, yes you would, and so would I.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 742


What do you think?


My wife and I used to do silly things together, the kind of things they talk about in romantic comedies, the kind of things that young couples wish for, and old couples fail to notice because they’ve become used to the familiar spontaneity. We never found it familiar though. Sometimes she’d bring me home roses, or she’d arrive home from her office and I’d have made apple strudel for no reason. We were lively modern products of a revolutionary era, not only in politics, but in gender rights and equality. We enjoyed playing with the norms of the day, reversing what roles we knew society expected of us. She would open doors for me, I would dress in pink and she in charcoal black suits, and we would dine out while I talked of makeup and she made conversation about sport. She saw beauty where I saw beauty, and, Marianne and I, we ached for each other. If we went out, we’d constantly point to things, wanting the other to notice the beauty of life around us, wanting them to notice that we’d noticed, even if they had already seen the flower blooming or the dog running by.

When my children were born, we began to share those moments with them, we pointed out tiny nuances, and read them funny translations of fairy tales. Sometimes the only thing that would put either of the boys to sleep was Shakespeare, and we had fun creating for them a world rich in imagination, in literature, in science and knowledge to found their futures upon. As a family, we loved each other. Like anybody else, we all had our arguments, but they were soon forgiven and we always quickly moved on. As a unit, Marianne and I functioned excellently, and as parents, I don’t think we were entirely that bad, either. There was no pretence for us, no querulous undulating madness, only so much reality and so much functionary bliss.

When I work, I am always working on someone who, at some time, mattered to someone else. Even if they end up abusing and starving them to death, hormones generally dictate that at one time, a parent loves a child. Even if they shoot them in a fit of rage, it is usual that a girlfriend, at one point, loved her boyfriend, unless of course, contrary happenings occur and the love was never there in the first place, and had only been there for means driven by ulteriorly motivated means. Whoever I autopsy, was once loved, or had always been loved, by at least one person, and in many cases, their end is untimely and unfortunate, even if they may have done something wrong.

It was the same kind of situation with my wife and my sons. I loved them, and they had all been loved by at least one person throughout their lives. Our relationship was built on love; together we created it out of love, respect, all those things. It wasn’t fair, no, it wasn’t fair that they died, but what I still think of so often, is them, is what they were, what we had together, what they all gave me. There was nothing I could have done, really, except ask them to stay home, and I didn’t. They died while we still loved each other; they died for no reason at all, with love in their hearts and at their fingertips.

I was thinking, oh, what was I thinking? The nature of love, yes. The nature of love, what creates it, involves it in a person’s heart and soul, for those moments that it lasts, it is everlasting. Sometimes, as in divorce, it ends, and people move on. Sometimes it lasts, and is then snatched away in murder, in death, in suicide, and somehow, the person who is left behind must move on still, but while still having that love all the same. I think of my wife and children frequently, I still mourn over them, but the difference between how I once grieved and mourned, compared to today? I still have love, I still have grief, and, and, I still mourn, but I move on. Each day that passes I move on, with this constant and brilliant speed, because while I may still feel sadness, the nature of the love I had was part endurance, and even with my loved ones passed away, dead and buried, their love endures still.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 1161


Schadenfreude.


Love can be about the satisfaction and scintillating pleasure derived from your lover’s misfortune. Their pain turned to your emotional gold, as can be felt by the people who indulge in the pain, pleasure, dominance triad, the trio of concepts that the submissive mentality originally arises out of. Bondage, dominance, submission, masochism, as well as discipline and sadism, depending on how you interpret the acronym. With all this in context when examining the world of kinks, then a lot of schadenfreude is possible. Whipping is not just about harming someone, or causing them pain, it is not sadistic in the sense that murderers or medieval tormenters may do or have done it. It is done, and expertly so by those long experienced in the act, to create pleasure for one or more parties through one person’s pain.

Going to another area, let’s imagine a different situation. For instance, the act of strapping a collar around the neck of your submissive playmate and getting them to play the part of pet is not just about humiliation. It is about the satisfaction derived from their misfortune of being collared, of being treated in an inferior manner, this all done in order to derive the very pleasure they have been seeking! It is perhaps why some church groups and stagnant minded politicians will always attack the lifestyle of a BDSM lover, once they have ridden the gay love horse or the abortion horse right back into the ground again. From my perspective, I am a man who works with various laws to be able to perform and understand the roles of my job adequately, to the best of my ability. I fully understand the definition of murder, of grievous bodily harm, and so on and so on. Leading the sexual lifestyle that I do, however, I have also been privy to supposedly darker sides of the human psyche that are nowhere near as harmful or dark as the things I see in my morgue. What the politicians and tightly bound church groups take offense at is the fact that people like me enjoy hurting others for sexual gratification, and being hurt back, for our pleasure or the pleasure of another. People like me, we may draw blood if the partner desires it, and our skin may be broken if that is what sets us off, but, oh, I have seen true horror, and what the indulgence of a BDSM lifestyle does to a person, to other people, is nowhere close.

In my lifetime I have seen two meanings of schadenfreude that humanity likes to indulge in. One is, of course, kink play, bondage, dominance, submission, masochism, as it were. It is the world of whips, straps, pulling, pushing, shouting, that illicit and seemingly naughty experience of pressuring someone to their edge, and if you are lucky, being pushed to your own infinite boundaries. This satisfaction is derived out of the misfortunate circumstance of the other person, caused by being at your pain wielding hands. The play is safe, it is with sanity intended, and it is consensual, but as it is so often with the pressuring of boundaries resulting from kink play, there is a risk involved. Whether it is a small or large risk, therefore, depends on the play being indulged in, the act being committed, on whether there is an understanding between the two halves of the whole that will prevent each of them from being irrevocably harmed.

Then there is the other kind of schadenfreude that I might often see in my job as a Medical Examiner. This pleasure derived from misfortune transcends inwardly laughing at someone with ice cream in their face, and it far surpasses even the most seemingly harsh bondage and whipping sessions. It is what, as far as I understand, drives some murderers to murder, some rapists to rape, some assaulters to assault, amongst many other variations of harmful acts that humanity can willing perform on unwilling participants. Yes, some murderers do murder by accident, but that is about the extent of those who are safe from this kind of emotion. When someone willingly murders, even if it is for a brief moment, they are said to experience satisfaction, because, after all, they have just completed an act with some or much intention behind it. Whether they have planned the murderer, or whether they have just willed it into happening shortly before they carried it out, for those who intend to kill, there is always a glimmer of pleasure for a job done, one that for whatever reason, they desired to be complete. People who kill, and serial killers are a prime example of this, do find pleasure in the pain and misfortune of someone else, and because this seeking of satisfaction has lead them to break the laws and conventions of society as they currently stand, they are inevitably punished.

What the church groups and politicians don’t understand is that my kind of schadenfreude, the one I indulge in, inside my bedroom, is one permitted by law. It is consensual harm to another person in order to provide satisfaction to them, as well as to derive it for personal use. I whipped my wife, I bonded her with intricate rope knots, but I never abused her, I never broke the law, and when she said stop, I knew to stop, and to halt there and then until she was ready to continue or be set free. See, in the play of BDSM, there should always, and most often, is a stop word, there is that knowledge of how much a person can be pushed, how much they can take before they need to halt, to rest, to be set loose for recuperation. In murder, there is no stop word, in rape, the roles of dominance and submission are overridden with the intention to cause pain through hate filled harm, in assault the conventions of stop, of go, or push and pull, are thrown aside into law breaking nonexistence. So yes, I do believe that schadenfreude can exist in a beneficial realm, but alternately, when the concept is used with ill and law breaking purposes intended, then it is not beneficial anymore, it is not even good. I do know the meaning, for a large majority of my life I have been intricately aware of this dual realms of harm, one where harm is alright, and one where harm is harmful beyond reprieve. I know, being the man I am, leading the life I lead, having the experiences I have had, that I will never, ever, forget this difference. For now and forever more, I remember the many roles I can play in society, and while my role in life may change from where I am know to where I may end up in death, being a murderer, a law breaker, will never be the kind of schadenfreude filled role I will ever permit myself to inhabit.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 890


What are you wearing?


What a peculiar question to ask. I suppose not so peculiar as I have been asked such a thing many times before, by many, many, many different people of varying ages, and genders. Over the phone, over email, via handwritten letter, text message, sticky note, I have been asked what I am wearing for many different reasons, in many different contexts, and as long as it isn’t an answer that does not want answering, or could get me into trouble if I did so, I usually give a reply. Whether it is known or not, aside from the sheer variation of people who might ask such a question, there are also several relevant situations of different originations in which it can be asked. A person could be at a suit maker, a dress maker, at the receiving end of an unctuous fashion columnist, they could be having phone sex, or could be interrogated by a lover tumultuously burning with desire. The question could come from a simply inquiring passerby, or an interviewer, even a child, wondering why a person is wearing what they wear, and what they might do or be doing in it if it is a particularly unusual costume.

What am I wearing now? Let me introduce my outfit by telling forth what I was wearing an hour ago. An hour ago I was wearing my normal affair, dress pants, a nice cotton shirt, a striped tie for a splash of colour, nice leather shoes and a lovely hat that a friend bought me in Paris. A few hours before that I had some slacks on, a comfortable pair of pants and a warm shirt with my work clothes over them, I was wearing some trainers as I pushed things around the morgue and took an x-ray of a particularly grisly car crash victim. In the end, a victim who incidentally hadn’t died of a car crash. Before I wore that I was wearing pyjamas with fragmented yellow paisley swirls on them. The car crash had happened around the time of a shift switch at the morgue, and it was my time to go anyway. I went to work rather early this morning, and now, oh now, it’s getting on to later in the day, and the night is just beginning. I have worn so many sets of clothes today, to fill as the people who study habits might say, certain roles within the structure of society. Sometimes it feels as if each organisation of clothing has a certain situation attached to it, a certain set of wants and needs, as well as expectations, and indeed it generally does. If it didn’t, people might wear nothing at all, or they might turn up to a funeral of a person who hated clowns, in a clown suit.

Ah, but now, now, I am wearing something entirely different. I have retrieved old pairs of clothing items from my closet, and a friend has bought over some clothing items to lend. I have put on stockings and slipped into a pair of specially tailored high heel shoes, designed for the large feet of men. I have on a form fitting sequined dress, and underwear unconventional, normally, for someone of my gender. I have had other unconventional things put down my front to make me look like something, someone else. In half an hour, I’ll be picked up in a limo with several other drag queens to fill an empty spot in an impromptu drag cabaret style show put on for someone who has just come out of hospital after their final gender reassignment surgery. For an hour or so before that, however, various other queer characters, both in the sexual meaning of the word, and the meaning that they’re just funny, will do my hair and makeup. I have a gaudy pair of glasses to wear so I can see the world just as well as I could with my others, and I’ll dance, kicking my legs high and brilliantly, to a crowded room of applause giving well wishers and other such folk.

The way we dress, the way people dress, does not matter to me. Yes, I have a certain aversion to people wearing things grossly inappropriate for them, such as the jumper two sizes too small that my sumo wrestler friend insists on wearing every Christmas, but generally I don’t mind. Oh hell, if I could only give every intricate detail of everything I’ve worn during my lifetime. While I may be largely straight, as far as sexual orientation goes, I do cross dress for the benefit of others. Normally, I am partial to smart, lovely clothing that feels and looks nice. Nice shirts, exquisite ties, eccentric bowties, dress pants, leather shoes, beaded shoes, painted sneakers. I dress, I dress particularly for every occasion! I dress to feel enjoyment, and joy, and spectacular, lovely, admiration for what I wear. I dress, oh I dress, for the love of dressing, and when I undress, I do it for the love of the body, the love of skin and touch and dulcet tones of lovely moans of satisfaction. Clothing does not make the man, nor the woman, but it does give rise to appearance and feeling, to texture, and perhaps in some way, a picture of the person as a whole.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 987


Customer service.


Some people call what I do for a living public servant. I am a public servant, that is what they call me. Considering it, yes, I do provide a service, and to the public at that, but my job is more than that. In investigating the cause of death, in cutting open and examining the insides of any particular victim, I am speaking for those who can no longer speak, as the old forensic pathology adage goes. I am exploring the territories of a grisly story, individual to each person, but still which shares the similarities of those other cases that have come before it. For us Medical Examiners, down here in our domain we are one of the first ports of call for people who have just been notified of the death of a loved one, and who are beginning the grieving process. Inevitably, in many cases, even if they are not required necessarily to identify the victim, they still come here to see the person that has left them behind. An so we take out and uncover the sibling, the parent, uncle, cousin, friend or co-worker who has suffered death, and will, in the future, return to the Earth, so to speak. Time must move on without whoever is gone, and I sometimes help people to start realising that, depending on the situation at hand.

If I merely let people look at their dead loved one, that wouldn’t be enough. Any machine could do that, could retrieve and display what is really, for me, a day’s work in the process. No, in doing what I do, I don’t only show someone a body, I don’t only autopsy and examine the dead, I care for what I do as well, for who I see and who I work on. There are those who would seek to refute this, saying that getting closely attached is hazardous to my own mental health, but I am wry and humorous towards this point of view. You see, I have already experienced the worst of it! I have lost, my wife, my children, and now, well, now, I care for the people who have lost like I have, and for those who are lost, like Michelle, Christopher and Michael are. I am not saying that to do my job, a person must have suffered, but even before I came into the social situation I am in now, I saw victims not only as victims, but those who needed the care I could provide. The families were not just part of a functionary whole, but they were an individual, individuals sometimes, who had lost something that transcends normal, everyday customer and service provider relationships. Whereas someone working in a department store or a restaurant works to please their customers and to speedily solve their problems if they arise, I provide a different kind of service. I do not seek to please, I seek to comfort and inform, I do not seek speed or absolution of my customers from their problems, but I am a middle ground to their despair. I do not throw them out if they are displeased, I welcome them in, I show respect, and I display their lost one if they want, because it is their right to see them, something I should do, not something I could do if I pleased.

The reality of my service is that I see people who are dead, I see them naked and marred, bloodied and injured. I see them on the worst day of their lives, because there is not one single moment worse than death, and then I go on to see the people they have left behind. I see the sorrowful sisters, the fearful fiancés the pickled parental notion of futility that fathers and mothers feel, that they should have been there, should have been able to do something. When I provide a service to a customer, they are not a customer in the sense that they have come to me to partake of my service. No, my customer service is provided to people who are there because unfortunate circumstances have brought them there to the doorstep of my workplace.

I worked for a long time in cooking, and I still do now, occasionally. When you provide customer service to a person in a restaurant, you cook their food in hygienic surroundings, using proper methods, and you ensure that is well presented for their personal pleasure. Providing service here to the customers that inevitably come to the morgue, both the victims and the ones left behind, I still have to use hygiene, and proper methods, but it is not for the end game of customer pleasure I do it for. Instead, now as I work, now as I cut and slice, it is for science that I do it, and for the notion that, if I find evidence that can help solve a case, then there will be a few more customers who can sleep a bit more easily at night. There will be a few more who will have had my service rendered to their unwilling hands, so they can go on with their lives and remember fondly what has been lost, without having to grieve maybe as much. People worry, I know, that I cut into their loved ones without giving a damn as to what thing, what body, I was further damaging, and I provide customer service to them. I assure them that whoever or whatever the person was in their life, I respect them now, irrelevant of what they have done or had done to them. Even in cutting up a dead body, the victim’s family, their loves ones, deserve to know that they can expect a service out of me in this particularly sad customer service situation, and I try very hard, yes I do, to provide one to the best of my ability.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 1057


Are you an only child? Write about your siblings or lack thereof.


Ah, yes, I am an only child. Not for lack of love on the part of my parents, but life in New York City, like is does in many other places I am sure, simply carried us on our way before we knew what was what. One year my mother might mention having another child, and the next she was on with her job and my father was on with his job and I was on with going to school, with growing up, with living life. As the simple strumming of a guitar inevitable gives way to silence once the performance ends and the coffee shop closes, so did the hum of a possible sibling. I have, at times, questioned myself as to what a brother or sister would be like, and in the course of my life, I have read articles and written works on such a topic, if not to avail a sense of curiosity, then to simply satiate an internal knowledge for the meandering wonderings of other people.

Conclusion wise, I had just as many great childhood experiences and awkward moments as any person with a sibling does. I could hardly miss emotionally, or miss out lifestyle wise, on something that I never had, after all. Maybe the financial structure of the household was a little securer than some people, but that is just a statement as about irrelevant a comparing Batman to Robin in feats of strength and costume design. It may be a point to some, but it’s not a contention that I see as grievous, or cause for undue guilt. Oh yes, I may have had no siblings, but I had friends, I integrated myself into a wonderful life of friends and bits and pieces of family when they visited us. I had sleepovers and get togethers, and I was picked on by the older brother or sister of my fellow cohorts, just as if I was related by blood. In many ways, I had the experience of someone with a brother or sister, through my friends, except that the actual reality was that I had neither gender of sibling, to speak of.

I can, in retrospect, be fairly proud that it did not damage me either, having no brothers or sisters, as it seems to do to some people, creating in them some undue fear of companionship, or being able to handle the troubles of their own children’s tumults. I have no fear of being left alone, because, now especially, I am alone, and my need to continue living and surviving, far outweighs any hidden desire to leap off the face of the Earth. For the time I had them at my side, I did have and successfully raise, two children, two boys, who for all their little squabbles, appeared to me to get on fairly well. Sufficiently so that I can further back up my assumption than I am no further damaged by being an only child as I would be whole trying to be stabbed to death with a sword made out of printer paper.

If I ever had those days where I wished for some company of my own age which would remain at length inside the household, Marianne sufficed that need quite quickly once we began friends, later to be lovers, or perhaps, we were lovers all along. Those quiet nights of childhood I spent with her sleeping over at my house, first at traditional sleepovers, and later, in my bed, head on my chest, throughout our adolescence, they quite filled any lingering need I may have had for close contact with someone more my own age, and not from my parent’s generation. Not a blood relation to me, she very much filled any hole, if there was one, of a brother or sister, caring for me when I was sick and playing trucks with me when I got home from school. Of course, I wouldn’t sleep with a brother or sister if I had one, but I’m trying to make an analogy here between what I have actually had in my lifetime, with the pretend idea of me actually having had a brother or sister, or more, of not being an only child.

I suppose it is nostalgic, but when my wife died, it felt like a part of me died with her, and that I may never get it back. I can liken this to any pain someone who loves their sibling, might feel in their passing, because not only was my wife my wife, she was my lover, my friend, my confidant, the closest thing I had to having a sibling, someone who loves you because of a bond that does not need to be simplified and explained out in so many words. To be simple though, I can look at the situation of not having a brother or sister, like a sports game. A game of sports, like many other things in life, is not only the sum of its parts, but the sum of the people who put it together. People get so angry at unnecessary last minute team changes because the team already works well. However, it may be just as likely that the new teammate will be just as good, and eventually, become part of that family, that inner sanctum of comradery that sports teams are meant to have.

My parents, my team, they made a decision to only have one child, because their time worked fine like it did. Sure, I am very aware of the fact that another child would not have changed anything much, if anything at all, but the fact is that it could have gone either way, me having a sibling, a d it went the direction that I ended up with no sibling at all. The team still worked, and while we as a family unit had no more members, we worked, we loved each other, we were, and still are after all the loss we have had, still good people. That is the thing about single child or multi child families. As long as the children are good people, being a single child or a child with siblings, really doesn’t matter. It never mattered to me much, if anything, at all, and it still does not, nor, I doubt, will it ever.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 859


"That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version." - Chuck Palahniuk (Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories)


I once worked a case where a child had drowned in a pool after being caught in the massive vacuum created by the device that creeps along the bottom. A normal healthy child may have had a great and fighting chance against this thing, but the kid had been severely ill, and, well, there really wasn’t the chance, nor the strength, to make an escape. Imagine that, parents go out to buy ice cream to make the child feel better, they get home, and their kid is dead. By the time I got to the scene, the eyes were a little cloudy, but still mostly clear, and oh, what a shade of blue they were, what a shade of blue. It briefly made me wonder what my boys must have looked like after being knocked unconscious by falling rubble, or scorched by the flames, but it’s not a matter I like to dwell on at great lengths. My imagination is best served elsewhere, with my work.

It has been said, among the people I have worked with in medicine, those specialists, each with their own little medical niche in the world, that the art of medicine comes from diagnosing someone who so many others have failed at pinpointing the illness of. To put it in simpler words, if someone is sick, and man upon woman upon man upon specialist, simply can not work it out, then the person who does, finds a certain artistic completeness at having solved the puzzle. Just as relevant is the fact that the art of cooking comes from the preparation, the mise en place, that folds seamlessly into well structured and wonderfully presented meal.

While I do not work with the living anymore for a large majority of the time, that is not to say that I have lost the love of the art which initially drew me to this kind of scientific realm of thinking. I may not be diagnosing anything living or active, but to me, to someone like me, my morgue is alive with all this, how can I say it, this grim history. While it may be horrific, while it may make people feel uneasy, I find art in death, in dissecting the body during an autopsy to carve out a cause of why that very person in particular, has ceased living. Whereas my fellows in diagnosing the still breathing are working to find out an active cause of their patient’s illness, I am finding the causal relationship between injury or harm, and the cessation of living.

Like discovering why a person may have a propensity towards heart failure or epileptic fits, any patient history that can be garnered, is often quite helpful. There are some times, although rare, where I may have been about to attribute a murder to a hereditary illness, the knowledge of which pops up at the last minute, and vice verse, from supposed illness to actual homicide. So, it can be seen perhaps, that this where my art lies, not in diagnosing that which is found hard to treat, for death is the single most irreversible of diagnoses, but in find out what causes death, to put an end to all the relevant suspicion. I look back to find out what has caused someone to come to lie on my table, and in reviewing this past, I can better understand the future of the investigation, and the victim themselves. Do I need their liver for analysis? Which funeral home does this woman need to be directed to? How in the world did he or she get a gun injury this severe when the evidence from the CSIs says this and that? And so on and so forth.

There is no harm in looking back on things, on the death of a loved one or the murder of someone you barely know. There is no issue with remembrance that I have, as long as it does not cause the harm of others in infidelity, drunkenness, drugs or rage. There is no art in ignoring what can be made obvious through thorough investigation and a compiled set of knowledge and facts. While I may not be able to control the cause of death in order to make my job easier, and why would I want such an absurd proposition in the first place, I can still control my own set of events, my own inquiry and investigation into death and dying. There, that is my art, one of many ways of explaining it. I look back on death, on its causes and myriad streamlets of information, in order to see what made it happen, maybe even why, and to see that, in the future, my examination is sated of further curiosity by coming to the junction of assurance or conviction. In my own way, in my own role, I review the situation, as much as a man working with a retrospect of events can, to hopefully contribute to a future where that case or this case in particular, can be followed through and closed, with the least possible amount of doubt in hand at the final moments.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 714


What question do you most dread?


There is nothing quite telling parents that their only child is dead. It silently implies a fact that many parents fear, that they will have no chance to have further descendents, that their lineage, whatever constitutes it, may have come to an end. It’s even worse when the child at hand, the victim on the morgue table, is a bit older themselves. It is worse when the parents are just at that point where they are thinking about retiring and are dreaming of using the new found freedom to take off on a cruise of the world, hoping that, by the time they get back, a grandchild might be on the way. If it is important for the lineage to continue, for whatever reasons, then it is difficult to try and explain to them that their one and only child has ceased to continue living, and that they themselves, are probably, if not definitely, too old to have another one.

In trying to explain this, I am not trying to put any emphasis on having more children than necessary, nor am I trying to give rise to the thought that having someone to continue on with your genes is exactly the most important thing in life, because it is not. It is just the background behind some of the many questions I dread as a Medical Examiner, personalised inquiries like “Is she really dead?”, “Really?”, “Are you sure it’s him?”, “How do you know it’s her?”, “How can you be sure?”. I don’t dread them like they are the end of the Earth and their asking will severe my final hold to humanity, but they are not my favourite part of the day, and neither can they be the worst of it, because if they were, I would have fallen under a long time ago.

The general populous fears death, people at large, even if they have attempted to make peace with the matter, still fear death. No one can deny that it hasn’t crossed their mind that the minutes they spend in line for lunch, or the hours they spend at work, move them all that more closer to being coffin bound for the rest of eternity. Looking at history, the population of the world has grown larger, and it has been scientifically proven that all people will die, for hundreds of years, yet we still fear the inevitable. In dealing with this inevitable fact, I take on a multifaceted role. I am examiner, I am knowledge collector, knowledge processor and town crier all in one. I look at death, I gather together and process the facts about it, I make reports and if needed, I phone the people who need to be informed. Only when the victim is finally sent to the funeral home is it really out of my hands.

I do not really dread the deaths that come into my domain. It is my job, it creates the entirety of my profession, this profession, that I am able to deal with the deceased in a manner that is filled with respect and thoughtfulness. However, it is the passing on of the sentence that death brings, that irreversible ruling of someone having passed on, that sometimes does stir an uncomfortable emotion within my heart and mind. After all, who ever really desires the task of having to tell someone that their child, their husband, uncle, sister, grandmother, has died? Has committed suicide, has been killed in an accident, or has been murdered? No, it was never a task I desired because I take joy in causing others pain, it has never been like that. But in wanting my job, I have taken on this role of receiving the questions of grieving people, because I must, because someone who has been educated to be respectful and thoughtful, needs to be there, in person or on the line, when they are asked. I may dread these questions every now and then, but I have long since made peace with the fact that they must be asked, that it is proper that they can be asked, because it is essential for people to move on, to accept the act of death so that they can, one day, find some sort of, well, peace, themselves.

Name: Dr. Sid Hammerback

Fandom: CSI: New York

Word Count: 927


"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (Who watches the watchmen?)


Opening up his eyes, Sid stretched his hands up in the air, watching his fingers as they bent and unfurled themselves over and over in an attempt to shake his upper extremities out of fuzzy edged sleepiness. His eyes were similarly clouded with tiredness, and his mind, as it started to slug itself into action, made a vague attempt to remember why his very own body was being so uncooperative. Something reproachful tapped at the back of his mind, a tsk tsking caution against whatever he may have done the night before, whatever might have been enacted upon himself that had wrapped him so soundly in the land of dreams.

Looking out the bedroom window he was able to discern the edges of the parted curtains and the windows beyond them, not lit as he would have expected, with daylight, but like his mind, similarly clouded with darkness. A grumble rose in the man’s throat, an unwitting protest of unhappiness and confusion and he pushed himself out of bed to what he could only assume was a standing position. His feet, directing themselves of their own free will, started to carry him to the bathroom, where he had the vaguest recollection that he might find his glasses somewhere beneath a pile of towels. Finding them and placing them befittingly upon his face, Sid glared at himself in the mirror and repeated the whining growl, the sound permitting itself only because he had nothing else to say.

Awake now in what the clock showed to be some of the most early morning hours of the day, the Medical Examiner found himself unable to go back to sleep. He was awake, not enough to run a marathon, but sufficiently so to be unable to deny the fact that he could not return back to the dream land of pure, unadulterated exhaustion. Enough rest had been had to curb the thirsting need for temporary unconsciousness that the previous work day had brought about, and he wasn’t about to return to bed. As rational thoughts entered themselves into his head like the fractured light off a disco ball, the man concluded that he needed coffee, a large amount of coffee, and maybe a bagel.

Wrapping himself against the night cum early morning chill, he found clean jeans, a shirt, a striped scarf, a nice hat. Things that normally resided in a backpack or a briefcase, wallet, keys, mobile phone, were shifted into a satchel bag, something more befitting of someone who intended to wonder the streets of New York City when the sun still wasn’t up, in search of caffeine, of all things. As he walked, pavement passing onto road and then pavement once more, the man made his way to a destination his mind could not bring forth the name of, but his feet knew nonetheless. Brushing through the door of a local coffee house, he ordered a coffee, eyes lighting up in false brilliance as he laughed in pretence at some joke the barista made.

The coffee shop denizens themselves made no such attempt at amusement, and continued about their business, constructing things on their laptops and frowning at the stocks in the newspaper. One group were crowded around a table that was too small for them, all holding the same book, all edging themselves to finish their novels, the coffee driving them towards an ending that, in the grander scheme of things, would not make much difference to their lives to come. Gingerly cringing as he saw and recognised the cover, Sid collected his coffee and left the place, gut writhing guiltily. There was something about novels that portrayed his business that he could not bear to contend the thought of at such a moment, his mind too clouded with the real evil of the world. The real worldly evil that surely, no author, no matter how talented or acclaimed for their art, would ever be able to put into words, that would ever be absolutely accurate enough to convey the depravity that they were meant to imagine forward.

Walking further still, sipping occasionally at his cup, the man wound his way around the streets towards another unnamed destination, his free hand already anxious in his pocket, playing with the note that would become his bribe. This payoff was pushed into the palm of a doorman to an expensive set of towering apartments who in turn gave him his all access pass to where he wanted to go, the card to the lift that would allow him up to the roof. The man who watched the security camera in the life would not notice either, because he knew the appearance of Sid would ensure that he received fresh doughnuts at the end of his shift. It was simple knowledge that no one watched the man who simply wanted to sit on the roof and have one of the best views of the sunrise in the city.

The Medical Examiner leant against the wall next to the lift, facing the rising the sun, listening to the stirring chirruping of the city, the early morning commuters and late night delivery trucks, the birds and the rise of voices from everywhere below. The city, that morning, made an attempt at music, but it fell on dull ears. Sid Hammerback was, on that particular day, concerned with watching and watching only, although the thought of how many other unwatched watchmen were out there did tickle at the base of his mind as the city bloomed into the life of a new day.