The Coroner's First Case

In a small town in the Canadian Appalachians, a coroner who inherited the family business describes the first strange body they ever received—just four days after taking over from their father. The corpse was found face-down in a creek at the bottom of a cliff, apparently a victim of a fall. But something was immediately off: there was no smell of decomposition, despite the body being bloated and discolored as if it had been dead for weeks. And when the coroner cut open the throat to investigate a hard obstruction, they pulled out a palm-sized leather wallet.

The Unspoken Rules of the Job

The narrator explains that they grew up resenting the expectation to take over as the town's sole coroner—a family line they couldn't escape. After eight years of schooling and ten years on the job, they've accumulated stories they've never shared, worried they wouldn't be believed. The town has fewer than a thousand residents, mostly a mix of Indigenous peoples and descendants of European colonizers. Strangely, the narrator has never received the body of a local. All the corpses that come in are from outside the town, found in the surrounding mountains. The sheriff, a weathered man in his sixties who has held his position for over twenty years, seems to have his own understanding of how things work.

The Body That Didn't Add Up