Chimney pot smoke swirled into the watercolour sunset. Night threatened, haunting Bluewood Mountain, reminding them all that it was just another day. Beneath the winter sun and red tile roofs, full glasses of this and that were poured and drank to ward off the morbid truth.

Meanwhile, under a roof of a different colour, Autumn’s corpse was almost alone. The infirmary had closed its doors to the public, leaving the venerable and impatient Dr. Square to happily work out-of-hours. The short man scurried through the building with his weasely hands stuffed into his candy-filled pockets. Square preferred the evening’s echoing corridors to the unsolicited geniality of his daytime colleagues.

“This girl was strangled,” he sniffed to himself as he rolled the body out of the morgue and into the candlelight of his workspace. “That much is obvious,” he insisted dismissively. The doctor scribbled as much in his report. “But,” he coughed, “it would be a dire, dire, dire dereliction of duty to leave a stone unturned.” Square licked his lips. “Especially,” he sneered, “in a murder case!”

Dr. Square tugged the leather strap on his busy magnifying goggles. “Yes,” he said fixing the buckles, “that’s it!” What the doctor meant by it was always a moving target. “It” was synchronicity, an alignment of things (any things) that felt perfect. In this case: the goggles were snug, visual details were enhanced, and his mood for slicing dead flesh had been aroused. So, the doc had found his vibe, his groove, his imaginary beat to jive to.

Square brought the lens of his goggles up to the dead girl’s cloudy pupil. Then, he pierced it with his scalpel. Blood squelched from Autumn Jack’s lifeless eyeball. The congealed liquid bullseyed Dr. Square’s magnifying lens. “Hmm,” he said while pulling the length of his apron up to his headset to wipe off the blood. “That’s a first,” he mused to nobody but the damp stone walls of his coroner’s chamber. He looked inside the open eyeball, nodded, and then swung back to his desktop notepad and jotted down his findings.

Every morsel of the young woman’s rigid body came under the skulking doctor’s magnifiers and knives.

“Time to drain the rest of the blood!” he bellowed with bucket in hand. From there, the viscous fluid was divided into tubes and flasks for a raft of tests.

Evening gave way to midnight, and the autopsy continued.

Autumn’s rib cage spread under the duress of Square’s rusty spreader. Then, pop, slop, pop, slop; every organ came out and ended up on the scales.

Dr. Square steamed ahead, driven by duty or lust, into the darkest hours of the night…