Loveday Writing

The brief of the AWC Furious Fiction – February 2026 short story competition was as follows:

• Each story’s theme had to be ‘EIGHT’
• Each story had to include two characters meeting for the first time.
• Each story had to include the following words: DISCOVER, NOTICE, SHEET

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An Important Service

Some people view my job as a medical examiner as either boring or gory.

I view it as an important service – I provide answers – answers to questions raised by families, doctors, medical boards, and sometimes, sadly, even the police.

But what was supposed to be another day at the office of perhaps doing an autopsy on someone’s life cut too soon needlessly by a career criminal, or a young person who was supposed to survive that routine procedure, or finalising someone’s life by signing their death certificate, turned into an extraordinary one when eight patients came in over the course of the day.

These eight patients weren’t like the many others that have come my way, they all died in the strangest ways I’ve ever seen in my career:

1. A young woman who tripped in her kitchen as she was packing dishes in her dishwasher and fell onto upright knives sitting in the dishwasher’s cutlery bucket.
2. A teenage girl who fell from two storeys after the bed sheet she used to abseil down the side of her house ripped.
3. A middle-aged man who died from an infection from a papercut that he didn’t discover until it was too late.
4. A young male athlete who didn’t notice that the J-hook had come loose on the weight rack at his local gym and ended up suffocating after the barbell landed on his neck.
5. An elderly man who succumbed to his wound in a golf cart crash whilst driving around his nursing home. This one was sad – to live as long as he did, only to die like that.
6. A woman in her twenties who died after being hit in the temple as she was kneeling to tie her shoes, by an eight-ball that was hit too hard off a pool table.
7. A man in his thirties who was laughing so hard at a local comedy show that his heart gave out. One cold comfort for his family would be that his last moments were full of joy (I guess).
8. A female CEO on the verge of retirement choking to death on a pen lid after mindlessly taking it off with her teeth, so she could write a to-do list for a tomorrow she’d never see.

The first of the eight patients I met that day was the man who died from the infection via papercut. I couldn’t provide his family answers as to how the papercut happened or why he didn’t notice the infection, but I could at least provide them with the answers as to how and why he died, and whether he suffered or not. I could also search for these answers with as much dignity as possible.

There’s nothing boring or gory about that.