The Coroner's First Case

A palm-sized leather wallet, pulled from the throat of a corpse that had been decomposing in a creek for days. No broken bones. No signs of a struggle beyond that one impossible detail. The sheriff told the new coroner not to think too hard about it. "You'll see weird shit like this plenty working in this profession. Don't think too hard on it. It ain't a threat to you if you ain't a threat to it."

That advice held for ten years. Until a dead body sat up and screamed.

The Family Business

The narrator inherited the job of town coroner from his father, a man who "came home smelling like shit, both literal and metaphorical" and made clear from childhood that his son would take over. After eight years of schooling and a decade of service in a job he hates, the narrator has accumulated stories he's never been able to share—because the truly strange ones would not be widely believed.

He works in a small town in the Canadian Appalachians, fewer than a thousand residents, a place that started as an Indigenous settlement and became a melting pot after European colonization. One might expect a quiet workload. Instead, he receives several bodies a week. And in ten years, not a single one has been a resident of the town.