The Body Was Torn Apart.

The body was torn apart.

When someone says, “The body was torn apart”, I think of an animal. A wild animal, maybe a wolf or even a bear, biting, using its fangs, clawing at a body until it is unrecognisable. Until there is nothing left but a bloody mess, an open chest, flesh hanging loosely from bones. Fingers, or entire hands or arms missing and later found in a bush, half-buried, half-eaten.

When someone says, “The body was torn apart”, I think of a grenade. A pulled trigger, maybe from an enemy across the border, hitting the ground in a trench, and blowing the entire thing up. And there is nothing left but a few bloody remains of the uniform, or just about the last parts of the body if the person was standing enough far away.

When someone says, “The body was torn apart”, I think of a maniac. A knife, maybe from the house’s kitchen, maybe from the nearest butcher, stabbing a person until their breathing fails. Until the ribs are broken, the chest covered in cuts and bruises, sometimes even entire fingers or ears cut off and thrown across the room, creating small puddles of blood.

When someone says, “The body was torn apart”, I do not think of this.

But this is so much crueller, so much more horrifying than anything I listed above.

There are no scraps of skin or flesh lying around, no pool of blood around the body. There is nothing to indicate anything remotely close to an explosion, no reason why there should be. There is no knife, no brutal mess around the person.

I have a reason to believe, though, that we will find a severed arm later.

The body was torn apart in clean, fresh cuts. And in several ways, this is better than the cruel methods listed above.

But whatever—whoever—tore this person apart was no animal, no hand grenade, no maniac. Whoever tore this person apart was thinking clearly. They knew what they were doing when setting clean cuts into the skin, slowly pulling it off the muscle fibre. They knew what they were doing when cutting open the ribcage with bone scissors, twisting the ribs around to face the outside of the body. They knew what they were doing when emptying the chest, taking out one organ after the other, cleaning it, and setting it back inside.

And in so many ways, that is a lot more unsettling than an animal or a grenade or a maniac.