Kali sat at her desk in her dorm room, two hands furiously typing away on her keyboard, one hand furiously jotting down notes in her notebook, and the fourth grasping a cup of ice coffee to bring to her mouth whenever she needed a caffeine boost to continue her furious typing and scribbling. It was a Sunday morning, meaning her party-loving Dullahan roommate would still be passed out from the previous night’s heavy drinking. It was the best time to get some damn work done.

She was in the zone, completely absorbed by her studying, until a knock at the door brought her back to reality. Sighing, she got up and answered the door, finding a girl she didn’t recognize holding a head with disheveled black hair that she very much did recognize.

“Does THIS belong to you?” the girl asked, lifting Ceanna’s head up.

“Hiiiii!” Ceanna said, smiling up at Kali.

“I suppose so.” Kali said, taking Ceanna’s head into her hands. The girl left without another word, so Kali closed the door.

“What’s her problem?” Kali asked, “and where’s your body?”

“Well you see…” Ceanna blushed with emarrassment, “I may have had a liiiitle too much to drink last night and lost track of my body. When I woke up and realized it was missing, I convinced a bunch of other people there to help me find it. They spent all morning looking and couldn’t find it and got all upset at me for wasting their time.”

Kali sighed, carrying Ceanna’s head over to the pillow-topped nightstand where the Dullahan rests her head during the night so her body doesn’t knock it onto the floor while it tosses and turns. She gently set Ceanna down on her cheek and returned to her computer, picking up right where she left off in her school work.

“So, uh, can you help me find my body?” Ceanna asked, “At the very least, I’m pretty sure we’ve narrowed it down to not being on campus.”

“But this report is due in 3 weeks! You know how I like to stay ahead of my schoolwork! I’ll help you find it after I’m done.”

Ceanna pouted, “I’m sure if you didn’t know where your tits, ass, pussy, or any of your vital organs were, you’d want to find them as soon as possible…”

Kali thought it over for a moment, then said, “I suppose that’s a fair point.” She closed her laptop and walked back to the nightstand where Ceanna’s head sat. She picked her up in two hands, using a third to ruffle her hair a little, “Though, I find it interesting that you say you don’t know where any of your vital organs are, yet your brain is right here.”

“Oh, ha ha,” Ceanna rolled her eyes, but then spied the cup of ice coffee Kali still had in her fourth hand, “Hey, can I have a sip of that, I’m hung over as fuuuuuuck…”

“Yeah, sure,” Kali moved cup towards Ceanna’s head so she could grasp the straw with her lips.

Ceanna began to sip until they heard that raspy gurgling sound a straw makes when there’s nothing but the dregs left to sip up, “Ah, that’s a little better, thanks.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Kali said in a tone that barely masked the fact that there was a problem with how much of her coffee she drank.

Ceanna, picking up on the tone, defended herself by saying, “Hey, I’m just a head right now, you could have stopped me whenever but you didn’t so I assumed that meant I could keep drinking!”

“Anyways,” Kali tossed the cup away and then asked, “Can you feel around your surroundings? It could help us figure out where your body is.”

“Okay yeah,” Ceanna closed her eyes and concentrated on her body. “I’m laying down in some sort of cot or stretcher… it’s not padded so it’s super uncomfortable… and this is awfully unsettling, but I’m definitely not wearing the same clothes I went out in last night, I’m in some sort of paper thin gown, I think…  I’m going to try sitting up.. OW!” Ceanna’s eyes shot open in pain, “My neck hit something.”

“What did it hit?”

Ceanna closed her eyes and concentrated again, this time lifting her hand to see what her neck bumped into, “Metal, there’s metal over my body… and on the sides, too. My body is in some sort of metal box! And it’s really cold in here, too!” She began slamming her hands into the sides of her metal prison until she felt her body sliding as the stretcher it laid upon was pulled out.

“GAAAAH!” Ceanna's eyes opened again as her flailing body rolled off the stretcher and onto the cold, hard floor. As she struggled to get her body standing, she felt a hand weakly grab her arm. She slapped it away, and said as if whoever it had been could hear her, “What kind of sick pervert steals a girl’s body, changes her clothes, and shoves her in a metal box! GET AWAY!”

She began to blindly swing her fists at the culprit, some hit, most didn’t. Kali, putting all the information she got from Ceanna together, set the Dullahan’s head back down on the nightstand and said, “I think I might know where your body is, I just need to look up a phone number…”

Ceanna wasn’t listening, though, she was too busy swearing at whoever had her body as she tried to cave their face in.

Meanwhile…

Jeremy the mortician’s apprentice was cleaning up the aftermath of the autopsy he assisted on while his master filled out some paperwork in the office. As he hosed the remaining blood into the drain in the floor, he couldn’t stop thinking about the headless Jane Doe that was brought in last night. Such a grisly murder of a young woman in a small college town like this felt like something straight out of a horror movie. ‘How could something like this happen in such a peaceful little town?’ someone would say before a supernatural psychopath went on a beheading spree for ninety minutes.

“No, keep crazy thoughts like that out of your head.” Jeremy told himself.

Then he heard a loud thud coming from the wall of lockers where they kept the bodies. He jumped, dropping the hose and creating a bigger mess to clean up, albeit out of water rather than gore. He turned off the water and then cautiously approached the lockers. Maybe he was wrong about being in a slasher flick, maybe it was actually a zombie movie.

“No, you’re just letting your imagination get the better of you, you’re just hearing things.” he told himself.

And then he heard non-stop banging from one of the lockers. Definitely a zombie apocalypse, then.

“No, idiot, it’s not impossible for a person to appear dead, end up in the morgue, and wake up later, that’s obviously what’s happening here.” he told himself.

And then he singled out the locker the noise was coming from and realized it was the one the headless Jane Doe was in.

“OH GOD IT REALLY IS A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!” he screamed.

He paced back and forth across the morgue, wondering what to do now that the end of the world was upon him. His first thought was just to leave the zombie stuck in the locker, but then came to the conclusion that if it didn’t have a head, it had no way to bite him and turn him. He could easily defeat the zombie and save the world! He would be a hero!

So, grabbing the nearest sharp object he could find, a scalpel, he took a deep breath and opened the locker with the headless zombie, slid the stretcher out, and braced himself. The zombie immediately rolled off the stretcher and onto the floor. It struggled to get up in what seemed like a very zombie-ish manner, so he grabbed its arm with his free hand and readied the scalpel in the other. In a decidedly un-zombie-ish manner, it immediately slapped his hand away and found its feet, startling him into dropping the scalpel.

The headless body began to swing its fists at him, a few shots landed, one hit his eye hard, and he fell over. He was seeing stars, but had a moment of respite as the headless body couldn’t see or hear him. The blow to the head left him slow to get up, though, and the body’s foot eventually bumped his leg, alerting it that he was right in front of her, and the assault continued.

The door to the morgue opened, and the mortician entered, his phone held up to his ear. “Hey, Jeremy, could you check the headless Doe? I have a dullahan on the line who lost her body and…”

The mortician observed the scene before him, Ceanna’s headless body stomping on his apprentice, who was curled into the fetal position on the ground.

“Yes, Miss Kali, we definitely have your friend’s body. Now, could you please tell her to stop kicking my poor apprentice.”

Later…

In the lobby of the morgue, Ceanna’s body now sat in a chair dressed once again in the clothes her body was brought in wearing, arms crossed over her chest, legs crossed with her dangling foot idly bouncing up and down. Jeremy sat on the other side of the room with an ice pack pressed against his black eye and his pride severely damaged. The door opened and a four armed woman carrying a disembodied head walked in.

“There’s my body!” Ceanna said, her body jumped out of the chair and walked over to Kali, taking her head into her own hands and hugging it to her chest, “Finally, I’m all back in one place!”

She then walked over to Jeremy and held her head at his seated eye level, “Hey, sorry about all the kicking, but you have to realize how it seemed from my perspective at the time, you know?”

“Oh, uh, yeah, I totally get that.” Jeremy said.

“And seriously, I know Dullahans aren’t the most common demi-human, but how can you look at my neck stump and think I’m dead! Look at it! It’s covered in normal skin, not blood and gore!” Ceanna leaned her body forward so Jeremy could get a close look at said neck stump.

“Well, it was late, and I just wanted to get home…”

“Also… since my body was changed into that gown, does that mean you saw me naked?”

Jeremy’s face reddened immensely, “W-well, yes, but I thought you were a headless corpse so I didn’t take pleasure in it, I swear!”

“Wow, you sure know how to compliment a girl.” Ceanna said dryly.

“I- uh, I mean…”

Ceanna laughed, and couldn’t help noticing how cute Jeremy was despite the black eye, “I was just joking, but still, you DID see me naked, so the least you can do is buy me dinner.” She walked over to the mortician’s desk and set her head down so she could grab one of the mortician’s business cards and write her number on it. She picked her head up, walked back to Jeremy, and handed him the card. “So give me a call when that eye heals up. As a Dullahan, I find death and the rituals surrounding it very interesting, so I bet we could have some fun conversations.” She moved her head right next to his ear and whispered, “And maybe you’ll get to see my naked body in a completely different light.”

Jeremy’s face was now so red it looked like it could burst as Ceanna tucked her head under her arm and rejoined Kali. “Okay, let’s get back to the dorm so you can finish that urgent paper that’s due in three weeks.”

“You know, distractions like this are the reason I try to finish all the work I can when I have the chance!”

Jeremy sat there with his jaw hanging open as the two women left the morgue, staring at the phone number with his good eye. It turns out the movie he was living in wasn’t any subgenre of horror, but instead a romantic comedy.