A Study in Asphyxia

Every cadaver tells a story. This one repeats itself.

May 17, 2026

Image credit: Pinterest

Harvard Medical School, 1948.

The clock slips into a torpid pace as rain pummels the roof. Every falling minute like an eternity and a half. It is the sleepwalking hour between late and early. Restler’s favorite time of the night or day—undecided moment.

The amphitheatre is vacant. Well, save for him and the cadaver spread on his table—insides pulled like grey, pinkish ribbons from the smile in the dead man’s belly. The scalpel chants, it chimes with grit when held between deft knuckles.

Restler cuts away. He weighs on a silver scale. He seeks the necrosis where black tendrils crawl, and he follows their river north, right where the ribs meet with sternum.

The subject is nameless—as is often the case for those who signed away their corpses for science. Restler read the file. A drowned man. Lips purplish, water in the lungs, sand under his tongue. And specks of asphyxia peppered about. A clinically typical case.

Boring.

Still, the poor sod has to be reduced to a string of numbers and circles on a drawing.

Boring.

Restler works. Not slowly, not particularly reverently. Just… thoroughly.

And when he is done extracting the left lung from its osseous cage, he weighs it before sundering the tissue open, preparing for the trickle of river water—

Nothing.

No water. Not the tang of mildew nor the brackish iron of blood. Just dry hives.

He frowns.

Scalpel back slides between the man’s lips, propping them open gently. No mud on his teeth, no sand under his tongue, not a kernel of wilderness rimming his gums.

Restler palms the file. And there, on a black line, the location where the dead man was found—face down in a creek, in a foot of water.

Surely, he would have swallowed some silt.

Restler peels the shroud from the man’s legs. Feet white as milk. His fingertips likewise. But, there has to have been discoloration by now; the lack of oxygen should have blackened the extremities.

Leaning closer, he smells it then—the sweet causticity of formaldehyde.

Head tilts in curiosity, scalpel hissing into skin when he frees the esophagus from its spathe. The chemical bite claws at the medicine student’s nares. His nose wrinkles with the scent’s acrimony.

The rain’s anger slams on the window panes. But Restler is elbow-deep in the strange discovery. Eyes appraise each blanched vale, and he notices a small incision under the man’s navel—something he nearly missed opening the abdominal cavity.

The scar appears surgically made. A flat line that knows no jagged hem. Not white with age, but rather pink with recency.

Lights flicker in the wake of thunder’s cry.

Restler is too absorbed to pay attention to the offended weather. Instead, he takes the man’s hand. His nails are caulked black. Dried mud? He scratches under the growth, but no sand loosens. The stain is stubborn. He gets closer. Ink?

Another stormy growl outside.

The lights blink once more.

And the acrid smell wafts ever stronger.

Restler recognizes it then: not formaldehyde, but embalming fluid.

His brows meet in surprise.

He reads the file again. Nothing that could explain the phenomenon.

Perhaps if he flips the man to examine his back?

So he does.

And there, along the man’s nape, a stitched gash, still bruised purple.

There is no need for an epiphany—the evidence speaks for itself.

The man has been dissected and embalmed before being dumped in the creek.

But who did it and why?

He goes back to the file, lifts it from the table.

A photograph falls from it.

Restler crouches to pick it up. And there, on film, a group of students—all smiles—in the amphitheatre where he operates.

And the same cadaver on the examination table.

The storm protests.

The lights go out fully now.

Restler doesn’t move. He still feels the film on the pad of his fingers.

And he hears a steady trickle.

The heavy plic ploc of water.

Except that the chemicals bite at the back of his throat.

It is overwhelming—conquering.

And when electricity relents his sight back to him, the drowned man is gone from his table, leaving nothing but a lung on his scale.

In a few days’ time, he will be found in the same creek, face-first, with no silt in his right lung, no sand between his teeth, no mud under his tongue.

Just a surgical scar racing along his stomach where Restler cut.

Author Notes

I don’t often write short fiction, but I wished to post something on here since it had been quite a long time since my last story. Given my recent history with migraines and ER visits, I wanted to touch on the depersonalization of medicine. It is subtle, but it is there. That being said, thank you for reading. It always means a lot to me.

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