Catherine Sequeira

Bear stares at the pool of blood, chest so tight he can barely breathe. They’d told him piking lumpers would be no big thing, that serving his sentence would be like hashmarks on a wall.

Dr. Josie Harjo never expected a dead police dog to haunt her dreams. The workweek begins with a steady flow of the usual sorts of dead bodies. Everything chugs along smoothly until the narcotics unit shows up with the body of a canine officer who died under suspicious circumstances.

The small college town of Stillwater has emptied for the winter holiday. There’s only a skeleton crew at the lab, and the steady stream of carcasses has slowed to a trickle.

Necropsy knife in hand, Dr. Josie Harjo is back and ready to cut up dead bodies. Senior rotations have begun and Josie is joined by a cadre of veterinary students.

Dr. Josie Harjo is used to cutting up dead bodies. As a veterinary pathologist at a state diagnostic lab, it’s her job to figure out the cause of death in a never-ending parade of various non-human species. Most cases are cut-and-dried, and rarely will a carcass roll in that gets her racking...

When looking back on the Before and the events leading up to the After, it was impossible to say precisely when everything went to shit. There were just two points in time, with a hazy space in between, leaving the carcass of the Before to be picked over by those in the After. Having lost...