New Flash Fiction: "Coroner"

Coroner

Call up a coroner at three in the morning and ask what’s going on over there.
“It’s dead as a door nail,” they’ll say everytime.
“Anything new?” you say, because you are on the overnight shift at the Daily News and it’s your job to call the coroner every few hours to see if anything new has happened. You are not at Halloween parties with your friends tonight, you have a career to get on with.
“No. It’s dead here,” they’ll say. Every time. Absolute deadpan.
“Not even a floater?” you’ll say, because you want a good story and a byline and to get on with your life and uncover something like Watergate and get off the Daily News which is the second-rate paper in town and maybe even be on TV with all the world watching your lively, pretty face.
Sometimes there is a floater. We’ve got a floater, he’ll say, the young coroner on duty most nights, without a trace of irony in his warm mollases voice, the very opposite of a cold steel table. A voice like maple syrup bubbling up out of the earth.
He must be from the south.
“Now isn’t that a killer!” he’ll say. They never change. Although sometimes there’s a crack in his deadpan and he tries not to laugh.
But there’s no body in the Bay. Not tonight.
And you picture this guy on the phone, the young coroner, whom you have never seen but you have talked to a million times, this human on the overnight shift, just like you. Surrounded by the white sheeted carcasses, like you are by the humming computers, turned off for now but ever ready to be resurrected.
“Any ID on that body from the dumpster two days ago?”
“No, nothing there but a dead end.”
Your conversations always go like this. But tonight is the night when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest. And outside are the revelers, the ghosts walking the streets, the candy, the orgy, the city, and you wonder if he can hear them too.
“Any vampires tonight?”
Young coroner pauses.
“Just me,” he says, and you hear him swallow.
And suddenly he’s in your mind, and you don’t care so much about the world watching your face, and you let yourself feel how lonely it is on the overnight shifta.
“You want to go get a drink?” you say, thinking of red wine.
And you finally get a rise out of him.
“They’re the same as us, you know,” he says. “Just like you and me. Nothing but crystals and atoms, dust and blood.”
No, no drink tonight. And he hangs up, embarrassed, there at the other end of the line, to have been so lonely and said so much, in front of the crowd of the dead.