Precision Like That

When I accepted the summer position at Fairview County Morgue, I told myself it was practical. A clinical environment. A line on my med school application. And yet, beneath that logic pulsed a darker thrill—something primal, something I didn’t yet have the language to name.

The ad was blunt:

Night Assistant Needed. No Experience Required. Must Be Comfortable Around Bodies.

I was twenty-one, broke, and desperate to distinguish myself in a sea of pre-med overachievers. I thought proximity to death might lend me gravitas. That’s what I told myself. But there was something else too—something I couldn’t quite name. The whisper of a forbidden door creaking open.

Dr. Harlan Graves conducted the interview in a refrigerated suite, standing beside a partially zipped body bag. He didn’t ask for my résumé.

“Do you flinch?” he asked instead.

“No,” I lied.

He smiled thinly, like a blade. He knew. But he respected the effort.

“You’ll adapt,” he said. “Or you won’t. The dead don’t object.”

That first night, I watched him work.

He moved like a conductor—each incision measured, almost reverent. His scalpel never trembled. His voice rarely rose above a murmur. “There’s a difference,” he told me, “Between dissection and desecration. Precision is the line.”

I was in awe of him. Not the swooning, girlish kind—something sharper. He was who I wanted to become. Unshakable. Exacting. Purposeful.

“You’ve got good hands,” he said once as I sutured a thoracic cavity. “Precision like that? That’s rare. Can’t be taught.”

The compliment lodged itself deep in my ribcage and stayed there, echoing.

I followed him like a shadow. If he noticed, he didn’t say. He simply taught. Quietly, methodically. No wasted words. No wasted movements.

We never embalmed. This wasn’t a funeral home. Graves handled only the “clinical cases,” as he called them—unclaimed bodies, Jane Does, the indigent, the mutilated.

“The forgotten,” he’d say, snapping gloves into place. “They’re the most generous. No legal red tape. Just science and silence.”

Each body was documented. Tagged. Organs removed, weighed, cataloged. Sometimes preserved in thick, viscous solutions I couldn’t name. Other times sealed in cryo containers and labeled for “institutional research.” The shipments were discreet—private couriers, never FedEx.

I didn’t ask questions. I was learning. I was trusted.

And trust felt like currency.

Then the girl arrived.

She looked young—seventeen, maybe eighteen. The intake form listed her as an overdose, name unknown. She still wore a hospital bracelet. Her arms were bruised, her nails chewed to the quick. Someone had loved her. Or tried to.

“Brain-dead on arrival,” Graves said, scanning the form. “No family. No claims. A tragedy—but useful.”

He handed me the scalpel. “You’re ready.”

I stared down at her. The skin at her collarbone was flushed. Too warm. Her chest shimmered faintly, as though with breath. I leaned in.

Her eyelashes fluttered.

Just once. A tremor. A whisper of life.

“I think—” I began.

“Residual nerve activity,” he interrupted. “Happens more than you’d think.”

And then he left me there.

The room was silent but not still. My pulse pounded loud in my ears. I watched her chest for ten full minutes. Nothing moved. I gripped the scalpel like a lifeline.

And then, against every instinct, I began the Y-incision.

I never finished.

That night, long after he’d gone, I pulled every intake record from the last six weeks. I was shaking, sweating. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for—maybe proof that the girl was dead, or that I was losing my mind.

But I found something else.

Names repeated. Impossibly. ID numbers duplicated. Other files—gone entirely. One in particular stood out: Lainey M. Torres. Age 24. Death by heart failure.

I remembered Lainey. Her intake photo was clipped to the file—soft smile, big eyes. But the body tagged under her name hadn’t matched. Different skin tone. Different build. Different everything.

The lies weren’t clerical. They were curated.

I broke into the back storage room—which is always locked. My hands were slick on the bolt cutters.

Inside, stainless steel trays gleamed under flickering fluorescent light. Each one held preserved organs—livers, kidneys, hearts—meticulously labeled. Some tags bore barcodes. Others were handwritten, numbers scrawled in red marker. Next to them sat cooler boxes lined with dry ice. The labels weren’t hospitals or labs.

They were destinations. Shipping routes. Cargo codes. International ports.

There was no research.

These weren’t donations.

They were inventory.

My stomach turned. I fell to my knees and vomited between two boxes labeled for Monaco and Luxembourg.

I understood, with a sudden clarity that felt like a blade: This place wasn’t a morgue.

It was a harvest site.

Graves wasn’t studying the dead.

He was selling them.

I ran.

The police station was sterile and too bright. I handed over the few things I could gather, files, flash drives, and photos. I signed a sworn statement, detailing every grotesque inch of what I’d found. Two detectives followed me back to the morgue.

It was immaculate.

No trays. No girl. No bodies. Every drawer was empty. Every file gone. Every drive wiped clean.

Graves had vanished.

His office was stripped to the drywall—except for one thing.

A single piece of paper, folded neatly on the surgical table.

My name was written on the outside, in ink too dark to be anything but blood.

Inside, one line:

“Precision like that… belongs to me.”

The police questioned me after that. One detective mentioned morbid fantasy syndrome. Another asked if I’d been taking anything. They called the university. I was suspended for “emotional instability.” My fellowship was revoked. My future—a chalk outline.

A month later, halfway across the country, I saw it again.

The same job ad. Same wording. Same font.

Night Assistant Needed. No Experience Required. Must Be Comfortable Around Bodies.

The morgue listed was in Ohio.

This time, I didn’t apply.

But some nights I lie awake, unable to sleep, picturing a new student hunched over a stainless-steel table, eager to impress, desperate to learn, scalpel in hand.

And a voice behind them, patient and cold, saying:

“Precision like that can’t be taught.”