Night Shift in the Icebound Ward
The hospital’s corridors slept under a pale fluorescent glow, and the morgue held its breath like a chamber of secrets. The Icebound Ward earned its name not from a sign on the door, but from the breath that slides along the glass, turning the room into a cold, patient winter. I took the night shift because the living rarely needed the cold, and the dead preferred it quiet. Silence, I learned, is a kind of warning that you can hear only when you listen closely enough.
The first hour passed with the soft hum of the freezers and the occasional clink of a tray against steel. I checked the monitors, and the numbers wrote themselves in frost: -16, -18, a stubborn -20 that wouldn’t stay still. A sheet rustled softly in coffin 3, though the room stood empty. The room’s air tasted of old pennies and old promises, and I reminded myself to move deliberately, to pretend I wasn’t afraid of the way the cold seemed to lift the hair on my arms and listen back to me.
- a tag that didn’t exist in the file, blinking a pale green on a corpse that shouldn’t have one
- an odd draft that curls around the ankles, like someone walking in slippers too large for a body
- frost patterns spelling a name across the inner glass, names I never learned to pronounce
- a soft tapping that began somewhere behind the cooling doors and traveled outward, as if the ward itself were breathing
- the quiet, stubborn confirmation that nobody leaves the Icebound Ward without listening first
“The cold keeps time for those who forget to listen,” a voice whispered—thin as ice, but patient as a watchful frost. I told it to stop, and it stopped only to return with more insistence later.
In the minutes before midnight, I found a procession of small, deliberate anomalies: a drawer opened one inch, a thermometer toggled from -22 to -15 and back again, and the pale glow of the wall clock blinked as if blinking out a memory. The door to coffin 7 sighed open by itself, revealing nothing but darkness and the faint scent of mint and metal. A cold breath skimmed my cheek, and in that moment it felt less like a room and more like a listening hall, where the dead kept their own counsel.
Then came the moment I could not unsee. The lid of the last coffin rolled back with a sigh of frost, and a figure stood there—an absence wearing a familiar face. I didn’t recognize the bravado in its eyes; I recognized the telltale quiet of a truth too old to pretend. The voice that came next was my own, older and thinner, saying, “What you hear tonight, you must remember tomorrow.”
By the time the first whistle of dawn woke the building, the ward had settled into an uneasy calm. I labeled the reason for the unease with the same careful handwriting I used for the living: exhaustion, shadows, the cold playing tricks. But the notes on my clipboard trembled when I set it down, and the glass between the chamber and the hall bore a new message, etched with frost: You listened. Now you stay.
Morning came with a brisk breeze from the vents, and the hall smelled less of antiseptic and more of a story waiting to be told. I locked the door, not out of fear, but out of respect for a night that refused to end. The Icebound Ward slept again—until it didn’t—and I knew I would be back to listen, to witness, and to fall into step with the cold once more. The night shift never truly ends; it just rests between breaths, waiting for the next listen.