Day 1,170

We weren't paid enough to bother checking the storage units and in all honesty we don't really care. Once in a blue moon somebody would come around 2AM, pay for a unit in cash and drag leaking bags there.Often we'd hear about so-and-so going missing the next day or month but it still wasn't our job to check what client's brought in.

I've lost count of just how many corpses have turned up in storage - human or otherwise. The latest was three days ago in a unit that was right on the furthest side of the facility, blissfully out of sight, out of mind and just far enough from reception that we never smelled a thing, let alone the fifty seven exotic birds that had been left there over a scorcher of a summer.

The senior staff say you never forget your first corpse and they're right. I don't just remember mine (eight day old infant, unidentified) I took a little piece of them away with me. The police never cottoned on that the missing hand was in my possession, let alone preserved and hanging from my charm bracelet. A little memento mori of my very own.

It helps me here, it truly does. I feel it tugging at my wrist whenever I pass by a unit that has a body inside it. Those are the ones I flag up for odour, fluids leaking past the door etc and lo and behold once the owners are contacted for "maintenance" they always come within an hour. When they leave my little hand usually calms down.

Sometimes it works itself up into a frenzy, scratching at my wrist until I call the police. Those are for multiples. Fresh multiples like the fifty seven birds or the nine cab drivers or the murder-suicide in unit thirty one. Now that was a fun shift to have missed.