Another video game—very specific, its core game-loop only the duties of a mortuary assistant in tooth-aching detail. Digital incision forming the great glyph 'Y' on her chest, expansion by medieval ratchet rendered in foxed chrome, then exsanguination into a plumbed and grated trough in the floor, then venous reintroduction of a pink fluid that not only fixes the body's shape, not only prevents the saprogenesis and suppuration of the expired, but maintains the complexion as rosy & hale so that viewers are comforted by the familiar appearance of sleep. But are they comforted? Are they really convinced or is it one of those things no one wants to bring up in conversation? I don't know, I haven't seen a body before. 死体. 屍.

The body twitches and occasionally disappears. It speaks. It's gone! When it reappears I feel relief, and continue sewing the mouth closed, placing abrasive pads under the eyelids to fix them, cleaning and irrigating the body cavity and finally restoring the triplicate of dermal flaps that had, until then, been constituting a great carnal flower about her plexus. I am happy to be back to my job. High-poly and beautiful subsurface scattering effects. Unique oblate anamorphic flares and chromatic aberration and bloom. Very specific. A checklist on a clipboard full of items to be ticked, a series of charts, labels, forms, photocopies to be perused, text pop ups of my character's thoughts as they endeavor to continue doing their job in the face of what has clearly become an advanced haunting. A true geisterhaus.

My work disappears from the table again, she is gone again, and I miss her. She is in one of the cold lockers, #13, of course, looking up at me when I open the door among slithers of cryogenic fog. Come back to the table, I would write, if the game accepted text, but it doesn't, only clicks and arrows, so I go to retrieve three scraps of paper from different rooms in the rural morgue located some hours outside of Olympia, WA. For some reason I am working overtime during a storm, alone and unsupervised. Maybe I am trusted. Maybe I am the owner's niece and the job was nepotistically given and I don't deserve any of this. Outside of the windows it is raining and there are dense trees, thickets and underbrush, but I am not allowed outside; the game won't let me. I cannot go home, or maybe I do not want to. It has all become confusing and I begin to feel great attachment to the body in the way that a fire seeks out any oxygen in the room. Binaural screams and transient power failures try but do not succeed in preventing me from obtaining all three note scraps, which I tape together, and which say together: 'LET ME GO'. It is scary.

Like most horror games I am dragged away into the darkness by whatever had been inhabiting her body. I don't blame her. My heart was racing and I felt bad but there was consolation in having cleaned her before we both went: we made each other ready. There were a few items on the clipboard I had wanted to see played out though, because they seemed unusual, very specific, and because while playing I had felt a sort of organized focus and maybe even uppercase Love for the subject matter on the part of the gamemaker coming to me and wrapping me up snugly. I had wanted to understand better whether the gamemaker had in fact wanted to make a game in which one was just a normal mortuary assistant rather than a haunted and damned and ultimately dead mortuary assistant, but that this had been too dull a prospect to sell and so had been changed only for economic reasons, but that otherwise they had meant and delivered the Love, secretly and shamelessly anyway, clandestinely, which I had felt, or thought I had felt, now hundreds of miles away from where I was supposed to be, eyes wet.

I have distracted myself—I am lying to you even though you do not know me and so might think it impossible for me to say something untrue. Your assumption is wrong. I can. I can hurt you, immensely. I didn't have the stomach for the meeting. I paid a lot of money then and felt the moderately padded suede of a bullet train and then that of two more local trains, and then the back of a wooden chair of some contactless Airbnb up here in the boonies whose key was under a rock. It was awful, the meeting. Here is warm but I carried the awful with me like a terrible latent disease whose true damage is only revealed over decades. It is like incontinence and heartbreak. I honestly believe that the ignored can harbor grief so potent that its release is not only caustic but perhaps insidiously and permanently debilitating to be in the presence of. Parents have warned children about sitting in front of a microwave or TV but this is that for real. I believe that I cannot be hurt by the evident injuriousness of confessions, that I am somehow above it or incompatible with their shape, and yet I am anyway. I am so ruined by other people. I believe in expressions that can make an entire room anoxic while maintaining the rhetorical shape of love and considerateness and leave me in thrall and wrack me and me alone for no other reason than to convince me that I am unloveable and impossibly distant. That I might be empathetic but defectively so. I believe I might be a thing to be prepared and cleaned and sent 'onward.' I believe in radio incompatibility and severe parabolic muteness in a biological way. I believe I am uninfectable and yet I am incredibly immunocompromised and sickened all of the time and it sucks so bad. And while there is an obvious selfishness in blaming someone sharing the depths of their misfortunes when I am crushed by it, in framing their misfortunes insidiously and malefactorially, to posit their existence as only to alternately maim and recidivate me rather than as redemptive for them, healing for them, it does not seem fair that such communication can be allowed: that I should have to take it in and that the broken cannot retreat and live among themselves, mollified and benign and lazar-like, until quieted and embalmed. I could not stay at the meeting because language was not working there, because if I had spoken what would have been heard would not be what I thought I had said, I am sure, and I would have had to have been subdued until someone could be called.

Some people activate a gland in me that excretes nothingness, but I am not allowed to access nothingness, to metabolize or methylate it, and so I am pumped full of something horrible and neurotoxic. This is cruel and literally horrible but it clearly is not someone else's fault: I am the one with the gland.

On my computer are drafts of stories whose essential horror, I think, is tempered by humor that makes it impossible to be injured by them, though I myself can feel something like this injury by slipping inside of them, by knowing how I neutered them for protection. Reading them makes me feel worse because not only am I selfish enough to take damage from other's explication of personal pain, but I am also unable to dish out any of this pain seriously myself it seems, which might at its center indicate a sort of autoennucleative timidity or cowardice or docility.

And another.

The stories the members told at the meeting were somehow entirely unlike these. It was not that they lacked humor or implausibility, but that they were not uninjurous or amygdally shakeable or benign. An unsettling plurality of those in attendance had lost someone, it really did feel like some sort of sickness had marked the ward, though the mechanism of loss was revealed to be varied, only a tithe involving runaways or senile wanderers or freak accidents or cancer. And while the meeting had been intended as an update on a few community concerns, a slight rise in crime, the construction of a new bridge near an elementary school, the official docket was exhausted in minutes.

Unable to be stopped an unaided deaf woman whispered into a little microphone about having been abandoned by her husband, of having waited days thinking that he had finally become fed up with her and her total ineptitude in the kitchen, a hatred which she assured us she harbored and nursed more than she thought he ever could, or had thought before he had vanished, and then more weeks of her thinking that he had found another woman in a spurt of octogenarian virility, and then that it was two months entirely before she finally reported it to the ward office, having been guilted by the continued receipt of his welfare support and a critical reëvaluation of or epiphany about how much he had cared for her, especially after her father had gone bankrupt and they had lost their second child to a nasty protracted diphtheritic croup and she had stopped eating and her hair had started falling out in patches, and then another week again before she and the young clueless intern they had sent to take her report finally jimmied the lock of the second bathroom at the back of the longtime gated ancestral Taisho-era house, of which they had been for the past ten years using only a quadrant and then more recently an eighth or octavo, shrinking their domain toward a small and unwinnable endgame, in which (i.e., in the disused closet bathroom) had been the husband, long dead but not decayed or putrefied—the deaf woman had begun to yell, adding twice that her nose was as sharp as it had ever been, and that the bathroom had smelled only softly of hinoki cypress and dust—but instead dried and in more specific terms naturally mummified by the confluence of the season, the small size of the room, and a ceiling-mounted blower fan which had been left on and running at moderate speed, drawing cool dry air continuously over the body, which had already been mostly devoid of water by that time due to the husband's poor diet and heavy smoking. The coroner had reported all of this to her later, and she had written it in a notebook. The poor intern had lost his breakfast. The old woman had forbidden they remove the body until a monk from their local temple could recite the requisite sutras and decorate the doorframe with proper texts in brush pen, and said how shameful it had been that the monk had clearly appeared fearful and hesitant and unpracticed, considering that her husband had looked almost still alive she thought, and thus was in some sense not really gone at all. But he must have not looked right, I thought. How else could it have been?

I left after the eighth story: a woman who had forgotten her child in her car for the workday in June of the previous year and who did not care to omit the detail that the stelliform harness had burned her when she had tried to undo it, when she had realized what she had done and thrown open the door, as if it had drunken up the sun, and how angry she had been at the designer of the harness because it was supposed to be incredibly safe and supportive of the baby's midsection but could clearly be jammed not only by an accident but by the sun warming and expanding and warping its metal and plastic parts. She kept the little microphone held to her chest until an old man pried it from her and started by saying that his son, now missing, had, last year, committed arson against his (the son's) pregnant girfriend's house.

I left because I resented them for including details whose effect for them was the preservation of the story's serrated edge and shamefulness or horror but which were for me seemingly only obtuse metaphors intended for maximum lacerative pain, whose utility while cognizable was not incorporatable or actionable or even palliative. That I felt this way itself felt inexcusable, although the repulsion was impossible to suppress. I could no longer simply feel nothing, which was something I was incredibly good at—extremely good at, even—I instead was made to feel what nothingness was, what it implied, unimaginably so, like that I would be unable to ever not feel anything again. There was an essential humor in this too.

It became clear that the small line behind the current speaker, representing ever more speakers to come, each presumably with their own specific experience of loss or abandonment or unforgivable error, was only growing. That there was an in-principle empowering but in-actual horrible sympathetic psycho-social parthenogenic phenomenon occurring whose endgame was, I was pretty sure, confessions by some of the meeting attendees of premeditated murder or complex cuckolding scenarios gone awry or really involved exegeses on childhood bullying or the inability to properly parent and eventual institutional commitment of an increasingly violent and despondent child, the details of which I wasn't ready for. Each and all of them nodding in turn, one after another, each finding little connections and sympathies and comforts in the gross overspecificity and essential selfishness of each and every one of the confessions.

小村's roommate came in before the deaf woman's story, but had taken to the side of the room, by the coffee carafes. He had been taller than I expected, not just underfed but vitamin deficient, slightly kyphotic with straight hair to below his chin. He never made eye contact with me, giving the speakers full attention, eyes fixed, between speeches staring only into his paper cup of coffee, which couldn't have been more than six ounces. Considering he had invited me to come, I had expected he might be more generous, that he might share some secret knowledge with me about why I felt this way, maybe introducing me to some community leaders, or some homeless man who lived below the ward office in the sewers, or simply whomever brewed the coffee. Even against the horrible atmosphere of the room the smell of coffee remained fructal and strong and sweet. While not vegiform it was unclear if the roommate's gaze implied the existence of a soul. At minimum it was unclear if he, like the room, was comforted by the stories, or impaled by them. Or more plainly he appeared blank to me: like an object of furniture. Had it been expected that this would be the format of the meeting? Had such stories become commonplace recently, as whatever it was that affected the ward became more evident and cruel? And did he enjoy this, or feel that he needed to be privy to its essential cancer, or simply want to experience something unspecific but monumental, like a Matisse painting, while thinking about what to write in his endless emails to submissive college students?

I began to hate him too, this guy I had never met, though the hate was not tethered in anything observable, not like for the rest of the people in the room for whom I knew my hate was cruel and unjustified—though I am still hating him now, after so much distance, the hate up above my head in this Airbnb in the middle of really nowhere, at the outskirts of a city on the northern coast I am not supposed to be on, though I can just about hear the ocean, and all of the dishes have small fish painted onto them, and the futon covers are unwrinkled and freshly laundered, and I take a bath and am cleaned and made ready, and I know somehow I will sleep.