"Ma'am, over here!"

 

My hands clamped around the camera, knuckles tight against the grip. I didn't call myself a paparazzo—I preferred photojournalist—in here; speed was everything. You anticipate the shift, track the movement, fire hundreds of frames in seconds. The only thing that mattered was the exclusive MONEY SHOT.

 

The crush around the red carpet surged. A wall of lenses pushed against my ribs as dozens of voices competed for a single glance. Elbows slammed into my waist. My vision flickered—strobe white, pitch black, white again. The noise escalated into an underwater buzz.

 

My eyelids grew impossibly heavy, fluttering once, twice, before the world drowned in an icy-cold quiet room.

 

My eyes snapped open, expecting a sea of flashbulbs. Instead, my vision met a sterile, grey room bathed in dimmed light. The air was freezing, so cold it made my teeth chatter. There was no shouting, no elbows slamming into me, no lenses clawing for an angle. There was only a body, still and pale, lying on a stainless-steel table.

 

I tried to sit up, rubbing my eyes to clear the haze. But the hands against my face weren't bare—they were wrapped in tight black gloves, clutching a set of cosmetic brushes and a small palette of concealer.

 

"Kenna, Oi... don't zone out on me now."

 

A voice cut through the silence. I turned to see a woman in her mid-thirties wearing a high-collared lab coat, her own hands stained with restorative wax.

 

"It's six already. We've only got two hours before the family comes in for the viewing. Chop chop, alright?"  She sighed, checking her watch.

 

I didn't answer. I couldn't.

 

Stumbling toward the small sink against the wall, I looked up into the mirror. The face staring back was mine but wasn't entirely mine. Shiners beneath the eyes, and a surgical mask covered the lower half of the face. My hands flew to my neck, expecting a heavy camera strap. But my fingers caught on a lanyard holding a plastic staff card: Kenna—Senior Restorative Specialist.

 

I glanced over at the woman's chest tag: Anna.

 

"So...Anna," my voice muffled behind the mask. "What are we doing right now?"

 

Anna paused, raising an eyebrow at me like I'd lost my mind. "Kenna, seriously? We now put makeup on her. We make her look presentable—restore her face to how she looked before the accident. Now grab the tone palette and let's go."

 

I picked up the tone palette and finally forced myself to look closely at the body.

She was dressed in a simple white gown—the dress her family had chosen for her final viewing before cremation. Her skin was a ghost-like pale, stripped of all elasticity. Her lips were cracked and dry, flaking like peeling paint.

 

I picked up a cosmetic sponge and dabbed foundation onto her cheek, trying to smooth over a deep crease near her jawline. The touch sent a chill down my spine. Her skin didn't yield like a living person's; it felt dense and stiff, like cool stone. I had to mist her face lightly with setting spray just to keep the product from caking into the fine lines.

 

My hand trembled as I worked. I had never applied makeup to anyone in my life—not even a living person, let alone a corpse. Every gentle stroke felt surreal. The only sounds in the room were the quiet clinking of our metal tools against the tray and the brief exchanges between Anna and me.

 

Christ. I'm touching a dead body. The thought echoed in my mind, bringing a spike of fear. Can she tell if I'm rushing this? Does she know I have no idea what I'm doing?

 

Instinctively, part of my brain tried to retreat into familiar territory. Normally, if I saw a scene like this, I would have raised my lens and fired off a dozen frames without a doubt. In the back of my mind, a headline automatically assembled itself: NEWS FLASH—EXCLUSION IN THE MORGUE

 

But looking down at her now without anything in between, the impulse faded. The headline felt hollow. Instead, a heavy, quiet calm settled over me—a bizarre, conflicting mix of reverence and awe. For the first time in my career, I wasn't trying to capture a story. I was trying to preserve one. 

 

Applying blush to her cheekbones brought a whisper of warmth back to her complexion, making her look human again. Anna tipped a bold red lip gloss onto a fine brush, carefully accentuating her lip line to restore a sense of life. To fill the hollows left by the car accident, tiny tufts of cotton were layered inside her cheeks, restoring their soft natural shape. 

 

Cotton after cotton, product after product.

 

Slowly, the figure lying on the metal table began to resemble a sleeping woman rather than a corpse—except for the coldness radiating from her skin and the stillness that bound her every muscle. If you leaned in close, you could still spot the grey undertone pigment couldn't fully mask, but she was now, at last, presentable.

 

Anna glanced at her wrist, 7:55 A.M.

 

"Great timing. Just in time for the family," Anna whispered, stepping back to inspect our work. "Nicely done, Kenna."

 

I forced a faint smile and glanced toward the door, my heart beating in a strange but steady rhythm as we waited. 

 

"Are you tired, Kenna?" Anna asked softly, stripping off her rubber gloves. 

 

"It's just another day of work," I replied, the words slipping out of my mouth before my mind could even process them.

 

"That's true...though honestly, I don't know how you have done this for years," she murmured. "I mean, sure, the pay is great. But spending every single day facing death like this...isn't it depressing?"

 

"Depressing...?"

 

Knock. Knock. The sharp, polite sound against the frosted glass cut the air.

 

"Please, come in," Anna called out gently.

 

A middle-aged man in a tailored black suit stepped into the room, gently guiding an elderly woman who leaned heavily on a wooden cane. Their steps were small, hesitant, as if the floor beneath them might give way.

 

"We've finished preparing her," Anna said with quiet reverence. "Please take all the time you need."

 

They shuffled forward. The last glimmer of hope drained from their eyes as they confronted the reality of her death, but their shoulders eased when they saw her face. A soft, bittersweet smile touched the old woman's lips. She reached out to her painted cheek. 

 

Standing behind the tray of brushes, I realised this time nobody was ducking away from my presence. I wasn't an intruder stealing a moment they wished was private; I was the one who made the moment bearable.

 

The old woman leaned down, pressing a gentle kiss to her daughter's forehead. "She looks just like herself again," she whispered, her voice cracking with relief. "Thank you."

 

Those two words echoed in the cold room, louder than any camera shutter I have ever pressed. 

 

For years, my living came from chasing chaos and turning private pain into public noise. I never meant to bring peace to anyone, yet here I stood, watching them quietly grieve. What I could do in this room felt like a rare kind of magic. I looked down at my gloved hands, stained with pink pigment. I was here to guard their final dignity, giving the one last morning of farewell. 

 

As Anna softly closed the door to give the family privacy, I stepped back into the shadows of the prep room. I didn't reach for my phone; I just stared at the door. No... It's not depressing; it was an act of preserving what little remained before it slipped out of reach.

 

In the absolute silence of the morgue, I picked up the brush, cleaned off the remaining makeup, and let the quiet take over me.