It read 11:37.

And it was still ticking.

It did not prove he was alive; watches keep running on dead men.

But it meant something that made my skin crawl: it meant that no one had ever properly prepared his body.

No mortician had stripped him, dressed him, done any of the things done to the dead.

He had been moved from a warehouse to a casket, still wearing his own running watch, and no one had touched him at all.

It is a strange thing, how a single small detail can crack open a certainty that a whole day of grief had sealed shut.