​Blue lights flashing against the wet bark,
The low, static rattle of police radios,
CSIs kneeling in the mud, crowded, loud, alive—
And the victim lying quiet at her feet.
​She reaches into her coat pocket for her notebook,
Fingers brushing the cold, worn leather cover,
Ready to record the time, the placement, the blood.
​Then—reality snaps like dry bone.
​No stumble. No fall. No warning.
The woods, the rain, the noise vanish in a single, silent frame,
Swallowed whole by an absolute, suffocating void.
​Did I faint? Did I hit my head?
​She tries to blink the darkness away, desperate for a breath,
But her eyes open against a suffocating, familiar weight:
A coarse cotton surgical sheet pressed tight across her lips,
Sharp with bleach and formaldehyde, trapping the air in her chest.
​Underneath her spine, there was no mud.
Only the sudden, impossible bite of sub-zero steel.
​Panicked commands scream down her optic nerves to move—
To kick, to thrash, to tear the shroud from her face.
​She tries with everything she has.
She strains against the void, but her muscles are cold stone.
​The weighted cloth doesn't shift.
The freeze beneath her spine doesn't shift.
Her brain fires into dead, unyielding tissue. She cannot move.
​A harsh, gloved grip hitches the hem of the fabric.
The sheet is whipped back with a violent, airless snap.
​Blinding overhead fluorescents burn into her unblinking eyes.
Tiled white ceiling. The low, wet hum of the floor drain.
She isn't in the woods. She is on Table Three.
​To the right of the slab, a silhouette twitches—
Moving not like a person, but like missing frames on a corrupted reel.
It turns toward her in rapid, stuttering jerks, joints popping like breaking wood.
​For one terrifying beat, she stares into her own face:
Heavy winged liner, detached eyes staring down,
Tracing the smooth, unblemished center of her chest where the blade will soon fall.
​Then her reflection violently warps.
​The jaw snaps sideways with a wet crunch.
Before her eyes, the face reshapes into the victim from the mud.
On the figure, the horrific damage dissolves into flawless, pale flesh.
On her own body, the horror strikes.
​A white-hot, sizzling pain surges through the air, burning straight into her own skin.
Her stomach splits open in a clean, horizontal tear.
A sickening, dull pressure shatters against the side of her skull.
Sharp, deep lacerations slice across her forearms in real time, blooming dark purple and red against her pale skin.
​Every wound she had seen on that lifeless body now burns into her own living flesh.
​Standing over the table, the victim is whole.
No decay. No blood. No marks.
Only a wide, unnaturally split grin spreading ear to ear,
Black teeth gleaming under the fluorescent glare.
​They tilt their head at an impossible, broken angle,
Fingers curling around the cold handle of the scalpel with sudden, fluid precision,
Hovering the steel directly over her unmarked sternum.
​On the slab, bleeding, mutilated, and completely paralyzed,
She strains with every ounce of will to flinch, to scream, to stop the blade—
But her limbs remain frozen against the steel.
​The world didn't turn. It swapped.
She is not the pathologist anymore.
​She is the evidence—
And the Y-incision is about to be made.
