The morgue was quiet that night, with a deep, echoing silence that only happens after midnight. The pathology nurse on duty went about her business with practiced composure, enrolling new patients, verifying their ID badges, and filling out documents.
Around two in the morning, paramedics brought in a middle-aged male who didn’t have any papers. He was found unconscious in an apartment, and even though they tried to bring him back to life, they said he suffered a heart attack as he was being taken to the hospital. As usual, he was sent immediately to the freezer.
The nurse put the stretcher in place, covering the body with a white sheet from head to toe. She started writing things down in the logbook, but something didn’t feel right. The morgue was normally quiet, but now she felt a strange, unwavering presence behind her, as if someone were watching her every move.
She spun around a few times, looking down the empty hallway, trying to get rid of the feeling. She heard it then: a soft noise coming from under the sheet. Not the usual settling of a person or the squeak of a stretcher, but something gentler, like a weak, muffled breath.
She told herself that it was normal for bodies to move and make noises after death. Muscles could get tighter. The air may move. After death, bodies sometimes moved in little ways.
But protocol said she had to look for any indications of life that might still be there. Not common, but not impossible. She has seen a wrong “death” previously. She took a breath, moved closer, and lifted the sheet’s edge. What she saw made her knees weak.
There was more than one man lying under the cloth; it was her spouse. The husband who had informed her he was on a business trip hundreds of kilometers away. The husband who had video-called her just a few hours before and said he was exhausted and going to bed.
She couldn’t believe how he had ended up on her morgue table, so she just stared at him in shock. But the truth came out fast after that: he had never gone on a business trip. His job confirmed that he had taken the whole week off.
He had been with his lover the whole time and died in her apartment. The paramedics called him an “unidentified man” since they were still checking his papers. And thus, by a twist of fate harsher than anything she could have imagined, the lady he lied to was the one who found out his last secret.
