One Summer Night

No Coincidence One Summer Night, written by Ambrose Bierce, is a satirical story which involves a presumably dead man, Henry Armstrong, who was in fact comatose, being ironically killed by the shady caretaker of the graveyard. Irony is a recurring literary device in many of Bierce’s short stories and books, reflective of his time period where satire and sarcasm in stories was popular. Bierce is quite known for his similarities in plot outlines in his literature. In his most famous short story, An Occurrence at Owl Bridge, a prisoner who had escaped his hanging was finally free when the storyline takes a turn; as it turns out, he was dead the whole time and a great portion of the story was really the last moments of activity in his dying brain.
However, he was not dead. This was very common among patients in the 1800’s who had went into a coma, as doctors back then could not distinguish the difference between a dead person and one who was in a coma. After being buried, two medical students from a nearby university are on the search for a fresh cadaver to perform an autopsy on and experiment with, in order to further their studies on the human body and its anatomy. The cemetery which Armstrong has been buried in is nurtured by a black caretaker named Jess, who covertly sells the fresh bodies of those he’s supposed to be caring for. As the three men dig up the burial site, Armstrong is awoken by the noises and sits straight up when his coffin is opened, providing a good scare for the gravediggers. Following the shakeup at the cemetery, the students go into their examination room the next morning to discover Jess waiting patiently by one of the tables; along with a now dead Henry Armstrong, whom he killed by hitting him in the head with a spade. As the students stare in shock, Jess, with a smile on his face says he wants to be paid for the corpse who is really dead now and lying naked on their examination