The first time I saw a dead person up close was when I was twelve and I'd been roped into helping my grandparents replace their dining room carpet. I remember how their house had always smelled sickly sweet in a way that made me feel anxious but according to my dad it had always been like that, he'd been smelling that strange odour all his life and thought nothing of it.
The carpet was stuck down so tight we had to call in a couple of uncles for backup, the previous homeowners really didn't want anybody ripping it up and as soon as we'd managed to free the corners, we found out why. All underlays get stained over time with spilled drinks or vomit but this was different.
There, right in the middle of the underlay was clearly the outline of a body. All the material around it was stained like they'd been left to bleed out real slow. Of course we called the police soon as we'd recovered from our shock and much to my grandparent's dismay - they didn't want to bring anybody in, they just wanted the new carpet rolled on top and begged us to forget what we saw.
There's honestly no way to prepare yourself for the sudden realisation that your dear grandparents likely killed someone and hid the body beneath the same floors you'd walked across your whole life. When they saw that we'd realised they didn't bother to run or fight, they just sat down in the kitchen with a mug of tea and waited for the cops to arrive.
When the underlay was removed sure enough there they were - mostly paper-thin skin stretched over bones but there nonetheless. First corpse I ever saw and it was my great great grandma. They killed her before she could remove them from her will, before she could add a sudden death or disappearance clause, before she could tell the world that they'd killed before and would readily do so again.
They paid off their mortgage with the blood-drenched inheritance and never bothered to check how much she'd bled before rolling that dense carpet over her still-warm body and leaving the house til the worst of the rotting was done with.
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