Midnight on the Morgue Floor

The clock in the corridor drummed twelve times, as if counting down to a private confession. The morgue’s lights hummed with a patient insistence, and the cold seeped through the walls like a measured breath. I had taken this shift to prove a point: that fear could be organized, filed, and stacked in neat rows beside the bodies we preserved. The carts squeaked, the door to Bay 4 sighed open, then closed again, and the quiet settled into my bones the way dry ice settles into a cold pool. I wore gloves that squeaked with every motion, a name tag that read Night Duty, and the kind of resolve you feel when the world tilts just enough to prove you wrong.

On nights like this I learn to listen to what the freezer won’t say. The room smells of resin and rain and things that do not deserve a second dawn. I run the routine: check the calibration log, note the temperature, seal the compartments, and pretend the body in Bay 7 is just a patient with a complicated medical history. The corridor lights pulse faintly, and a distant faucet taps in a rhythm that sounds almost like a heartbeat—almost. Somewhere between the squeak of the gurney wheels and the soft thud of a door closing on its own, the ordinary night begins to murmur secret things.

“The morgue keeps its own time,” the old supervisor used to say, almost as a joke. Tonight the words return as a whisper between machines, as if the room itself had learned a new language and is practicing it on my nerves.

I keep a ledger of small phenomena—the kind you dismiss until you cannot. A pale fingerprint on the glass of Bay 9, a cold draft that brushes the back of my neck even when the vents are off, a tag that rearranges itself to read a different name, a medical history I did not tick. Tonight I note them not as anomalies but as a pattern, a map of where fear hides when no one is watching.

• A quiet sigh drifting from Bay 3 as if someone exhaled in their sleep and forgot to stop.
• A seam of frost tracing a handprint across the stainless steel, perfectly centered over the lid.
• Footsteps that never quite align with the tracks on the floor, always a fraction ahead.
• A whispered correction in the margin of the logbook, a name that shouldn't be there after hours.
• The door to the cold room clicking shut from the inside, even with the latch clearly set outward.

When I finally swing Bay 9 open again, the air feels heavier, as though the room had gathered something and refused to release it. The figure on the gurney lies exactly as arranged, yet the blanket trembles with a breath that isn’t mine. I step back, count to ten, and listen to the floorboards remember a rhythm they had forgotten. A shadow slides along the edge of the corridor, dissolves into the fluorescent glare, and leaves behind a memory of laughter—soft, human, gone.

Dawn never fully arrives here; it merely refracts through the frosted glass and into the minds of those who work the night shift. I wipe the condensation from my face, seal the lids, and push the trolley toward the exit. The doors sigh as if a long-held breath has finally escaped. I walk into the corridor's pale light and carry with me the knowledge that some nights, the living merely lend an ear to listen to the dead telling stories they already know by heart.

We move through the quiet pretending it is ordinary. Sometimes the quiet answers back.