Frontier boardinghouse life treated a corpse as ordinary furniture, to children’s and boarders’ alarm.

Evidence

I went into the parlor to get a needle, and the door of that room was open, and children were running in and out, and the landlady, who was sweeping there, called cheerily to me to come in for the needle, and there, to my horror, not even covered with a face cloth, and with the sun blazing in through the unblinded window, lay that thing of terror, a corpse, on some chairs which were not even placed straight. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 173

Categorization

• FICTION: The blithe landlady sweeping around an uncovered corpse while children run past is a ready-made scene of domestic horror told with a straight face.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — here the corpse is not ritual but daily economy, treated with a decorum of cheerful practicality rather than grief.