The forensic examiners were kind enough to keep silent about any comments they may have had about the eerie grin, but all the same they avoided looking anywhere near the corpse’s face. This proved to be easy enough, for it had been established that the most noticeable about the body had to be the gaping cavity in its stomach.

In a commendable effort to restrain the disbelief that was seeping in his tone, they had decided that foul play was out of the question. The room was plainly furnished and void of any real personality, same as the rest of the apartment. It took them four hours in search of a murder weapon to conclude that there wasn’t one, and there weren’t that many places to look to begin with. Suicide was just as unlikely; neither had brought it up at all. Kevin’s hands were spotless. And even if he’d been mad enough to scoop out his insides with, say, a spoon, he wouldn’t have been able to. Not with his fingers curled up in the sordid way they were at the time of death.
At length, one of them voiced only what both were thinking. “Maybe it was a parasite or something. It burst out of him.”

“You mean burrowed out,” the other remarked. Nothing else was said, and between their silence it was understood that they were both in agreement. They gave their final condolences to Mother, whose shock made her deaf to their words, filed their report to the department’s satisfaction and left it for the tabloids to devour; wishing all the while that tomorrow would see the normal death of a normal person for once.

Flashlight in hand, a coroner took one last, lingering glimpse of the unnervingly clean hole that had been carved out of man’s flesh. The small beam of light appeared to be swallowed whole, lost inside the cavernous opening. From a purely objective perspective, it was actually a very well-made hole. The flesh was torn apart and hollowed out in the shape of a near-perfect circle. If the coroners had any speculations as to what exactly dug itself out of him, they could be sure that it did so with painstaking patience. The wound was deep and wide in diameter. About wide enough, if they had bothered to check, as a hand. And with the rest of the bloodstains on the sheets, they wouldn’t have noticed the clusters of five bloody spots leading towards the edge of the bed, either.