Nature continues on its march unimpeded.

  Cows moo in the patties, crops drink in fresh water, flies buzz around corpses.

  Two corpses.

  The bones of more.

  The vilge children’s screams hold a tinge of real shock and horror, different from that pretended aspect present in make-believe.

  In between the burial ground’s holding house and the coffin maker’s shack, old blood paints the alley a muddy rust. Chunks of flesh rot in the seedy sunlight that manages to ripple into the crevice. For once, the butcher’s shop is made to seem clean and fresh.

  A young girl runs back to the vilge center market to fetch her father, terrified of the mess.

  An older daughter puts on a haughty smile, revealing only a small tremble and a twitch in the corner of her eye.

  “Ha! Some wild dogs must have broken into the mortuary st night”

  A timid boy-child flicks nervous eyes back and forth. “Sara, I don’t know that that’s what this is…”

  “Oooo~ you gonna tell her a scary story Momma puts you to bed with? Huh, loser?” a rogue-ish boy, identical in all but personality, quips back mockingly. “You gonna say that it’s ghouls? Monsters? Cannibals? Not those- no, maybe demons and ghosts?”

  Sara’s smile flickers more noticeably. “Come on, Nathan. Leave Danny alone. Teasing him is boring when he’s always scared anyway, just like little Adeline.”

  “Adeline had the right idea…” Danny mutters under his breath.

  Danny and Nathan’s mother is first on the scene, followed by the Sara and Adeline’s father. The girls’ mother duly accompanies him, clutching a tearful Adeline. Resistance fills the small child’s soul, but leaving her mother is more terrifying than the dead chunks of meat at the moment.

  The group is soon joined by the local w-enforcer, a well fed man not known for craftiness nor for speed; the vilge chief, the closest thing the backwater community has to a politician; and the town doctor, notable for being the only member of the vilge in regur contact with the mortuary’s undertaker.

  A more polite version of the children’s exchange occurs through the mouths of grown men and women.

  Roughly summing up the situation, half believe it’s wild animals, half believe it’s more worrying than that. Oh, and the doctor believes they ought to hear the mortician’s opinion. Of course, the doctor was there as a liaison anyway. The filleted human was much beyond saving.

  In a rather comedic endeavor to wake the sleeping undertaker, a night owl never easy to wake before the sun grows low, each of the adults attempt to knock on the mortuary’s door, toss rocks at the windows, and shout until hoarse.

  At the end of the useless charade, the doctor pulls out a skeleton key from her well-loved white coat’s pocket, and swiftly unlocks the door herself. Before the others are able to even whisper a word of compint, the doctor sms the door in their faces.

  The hoarse chorus of curses rings out into the early morning, Nathan noting down a few choice ones in the process.

  By now, the solemn and fearful atmosphere had all but evaporated. Leaving the doctor to her devices, the group takes the now calm children back home.

  Inside the mortuary, a dark and gloomy atmosphere that ought to have been oppressive transforms into a calming, dream-like state. The harsh white of the doctor’s coat is softened by the dim glow, as her gentle smile completes her face as looks down at the sleeping form of a tired, scrunckly person bundles in a mound of bnkets.