Cold Call

I handle dead bodies the way most people handle bad marriages. Keep your distance. Maintain professional boundaries. Never admit how much you prefer the silence.

The morgue at 3 AM sounds like a restaurant after closing. Fluorescent tubes buzzing their death rattle, refrigeration units humming their mechanical prayers. Formaldehyde burns clean through your sinuses, straight to the brain stem. You learn to breathe through your mouth. You learn to taste death instead.

Tuesday morning. Angela Martinez, 28. Motor vehicle accident. The intake form doesn't mention she once threw a plate of eggs Benedict at my face in front of forty-seven breakfast customers.

"I wouldn't fuck you if you were the last man alive," she'd said, voice pitched for maximum audience participation. Hollandaise sauce dripping from my chin like something obscene. "Not if I was dead on your fucking slab."

The diner went church-quiet. Cash registers stopped mid-ding.

I smiled. Paid her check. Left a thirty percent tip.

Now she's here, stretched out on stainless steel, wearing nothing but a toe tag and bruises that bloom across her ribcage like watercolor roses. Her mouth hangs open mid-word, mid-curse, mid-something. Blonde hair fans across the table, tangled with glass fragments that catch the light like discount diamonds.

I prep the instruments. Scalpel. Forceps. My hands move with practiced precision, muscle memory taking over while my mind catalogues the irony.

The Y-incision will start at each shoulder, meet at the sternum, continue down past the navel. Standard procedure. I've done this eight hundred and forty-three times. But my hand hovers, blade catching fluorescent glare.

Angela's lipstick, Dior Rouge, shade 999, I'd memorized it, still clings to her bottom lip. One perfect corner intact.

I lower the scalpel.

That's when her fingers move.

Not a twitch. Not rigor mortis releasing. Her index finger beckons.

The scalpel clatters against the floor. The sound ricochets off tile walls like a gunshot in a cathedral.

Her eyes open. Not flutter. Snap. Like blinds yanked up too fast. Pupils dilated black, rimmed with ice-blue that shouldn't be possible at her core temperature of 34 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Hey, stranger." Her voice sounds like gravel in a garbage disposal. Vocal cords shouldn't work after that kind of trauma. Biology says impossible.

Angela sits up, vertebrae popping like bubble wrap. The toe tag swings between her feet, a tiny pendulum marking time we don't have.

"Funny thing about being dead." She examines her fingernails, black with coagulated blood. "Gives you perspective."

My throat constricts. "You're not... this isn't—"

"Real?" She laughs, and something wet rattles in her chest cavity. "Neither was your thing for me. But here we are."

She slides off the table, feet hitting tile with a meat-slap sound that makes my molars ache. Steps closer. The smell of her, copper and perfume and something else, something wrong, fills the space between us.

"You were right about one thing." Her hand, cold as January, touches my cheek. "The silence is nice."

The fluorescent above us flickers. Once. Twice. Dies.

In the darkness, I hear her lipstick-smeared mouth curve into a smile.

"Now," she whispers, breath that shouldn't exist fogging the air between us, "about that date you wanted."

My hand finds hers in the dark. Her fingers lace through mine, tight as sutures. The dead don't let go easy. I should know.

The emergency lighting kicks in, bathing everything in red. Angela's face splits into a grin that's all teeth and no warmth. Behind her, the refrigeration units hum their approval. The other bodies, my silent congregation, bear witness through steel doors.

"One condition," she says, pulling me closer. Her skin feels like refrigerated silk. "You have to die a little first."

The scalpel glints on the floor between us.

I pick it up. Test the edge against my thumb. A bead of blood wells up, dark as a promise.

"Deal," I say.

After all, relationships require sacrifice.

The fluorescent bulb flickers back to life just as I press the blade to my wrist, and in that staccato light, I catch Angela's reflection in the steel cabinet doors—

Nothing. Empty air where she should be standing.

But her hand in mine is real. Cold and real and pulling me down, down toward the drain in the floor where all the secrets go, where the blood circles before disappearing into pipes that lead nowhere good.

I follow.

The morgue security camera records nothing unusual. Just another night shift worker, talking to himself, walking backward toward the supply closet where they keep the formaldehyde. Where they'll find me in the morning, smiling, wearing surgical gloves on both hands and Angela's lipstick on my throat.

The toe tag on table three reads: Angela Martinez, 28.

The body is missing.

But in the paperwork, in my handwriting: Released to next of kin.

Signed.

Dated.

Witnessed by no one.