“Who’s the first body on the docket today?”

The question is a little hard to pick up over the clanking and rattling of my drawer being opened, but my hearing has yet to degrade as far as my vision so I can still understand it well enough. The tension of plastic against my body is distant, but I’m probably being lifted were I to hazard a guess. I can’t imagine that most people who end up in morgues get as intimate a tour as I’m receiving, not unless there are other corpses as lucid as myself.

Huh.

The thought feels like it should be terrifying, but without a heartbeat, without a clenching in my gut, without any physiological feedback of any sort it’s hard to say what I’m feeling. Still, for the sake of those with a similarly decaying disposition I hope their afterlives involve much less vivisection. Or is it dissection? I am dead after all, and it's not as though I feel the scalpel dragging through my belly as anything more than a vague pressure.

The hand though.

Even through the nitrile of their glove the warmth of flesh is distinct. The pulsing of their heartbeat runs in tiny rivers beneath their skin, tickling something in the core of my being. The pressure of their fingers as they hold my flesh still for the blade to swim through me, five distinct points of heat and movement and life. 

My gut growls. The first movement of my body since I gained consciousness. One of the morticians mutters something that I don’t pay any mind as their hand reaches under my skin. Warmth enters my body for the first time I can remember and it is now my reason for existing. The faint thrum of their heartbeat echoes through my body like a memory long forgotten, bringing movement and life to meat long stilled and cooled. Is this what it feels like to be alive?

My organs shift and squelch as they’re pulled from the cavity in my torso. I can feel the cold of the tray they’re placed on and it aches horribly when compared with the warmth of life against my core. The sterile chemical scent of the air is slowly replaced with the stench of decay, tempered only by the cold of my corpse. I can’t focus on the feeling for long though, as the emptiness beginning to replace my innards is wrapped about the vitality currently rearranging my guts, filling me with a vibrancy that is just so fucking close to being mine.

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Something twitches inside of me.

“The fuck…?”

Mine.

“Hey, come take a look at this.”

Mine.

“What the hell is that? Where’s their stomach!?”

M I N E.

A rush fills me as my bloated and endlessly coiled tongue unfolds, sliding out of my throat to reach through the cavity the morticians are inspecting. I feel their lifeblood twitch away from me but it’s nowhere near fast enough as my barbed appendage wraps about the arm of the first, bending it snapping it twisting it so it will all fit inside of me the warmth and vibrancy and life suffusing my cold and stilled and rotted corse. The first doesn’t even have the time to scream as I coil about them, dragging my own dead weight over them, engulfing them, filling my cavity with their skin and muscle and bone and pouring my own insides within them, their screams choking against my putrid stillness as it fills their warmth and spills throughout them.

Soon I feel the firing of their nerves echoing through me and I ensure that they keep their co-worker from escaping, the echo of an echo of the sensation of their hands crushing a windpipe sending an involuntary shiver through me. My ribs twitch and flex, snapping themselves open so they may act as the teeth of my new maw, gnashing and tearing at the gagging leaking broken meal-to-be as it drags the other heartbeat towards me.

And so do I tear and coil and snap and fold until their warmth becomes my warmth, their bones become my bones, their flesh my flesh. And so I lie there, a bloated, contented mass. My warmth leached away by the chill of the morgue, and as it leaves so too does my consciousness.

Until another heartbeat arrives to feed me.

And I can claim yet more warmth.