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It began with the smell of sulfur and smoke, faint but sharp, like something burning behind the walls. I checked the stove. Cold. Checked the outlets. Fine. Still, it lingered, a match just struck, not quite blown out.

That smell reminded me of my old man. He’d light matches to chase out the stench of whatever he was drinking. The smell of defeat with a whiff of denial.

He used to tell me, “Fire’s honest, kid. You know where you stand with it. Not like people.”

He wasn’t wrong.

I live alone now, on the third floor, with a peeling ceiling and a window view of a brick wall. You could measure time by the flicker of the neon sign across the alley: Lucky’s Pizza. The “L” never lit, so it just blinked ucky’s all night like a bad joke.

The landlord said no smoking, but I didn’t listen. When you pay rent on time, they leave you to your ghosts.

That night I’d just come back from the factory. Twelve hours on the line, hands black with grease and oil that never really washes off.

I cracked a beer, kicked off my boots, and there it was again, the smell of matches. It came from next door this time, Apartment 3-B.

I’d never seen the tenant, but heard the television sometimes, low voices, a laugh that sounded too careful. I knew a woman lived there. You can tell by the sound of heels clicking on tile, and how quiet the place gets after midnight.

I knocked. No answer. The smell was powerful now, like someone had lit a whole book of matches. I tried the handle. Locked.

I should’ve walked away, but something about it got under my skin. Maybe it was the quiet, or that I’d stopped caring enough to mind my own business.

I went down to the janitor’s closet, grabbed the master key. He kept it on a nail by the mop bucket and went back up.

The door opened easily.

The first thing I saw was her, sitting at the kitchen table in her slip, holding a candle. She didn’t look surprised to see me.

“You smell it too?” she asked.

I nodded.

“It’s been coming from the walls,” she said. “At night mostly. I think something’s alive in there. Something that likes an inferno.”

Her eyes were glassy, fever-bright. She had that look of someone balanced between fear and fascination.

“You should get it checked,” I said. “Could be wiring.”

She smiled, slow and strange. “Or something else.”

I didn’t know what she meant, but I felt it, that charge in the air, that thin, dangerous thread between us. It was the kind of moment where something always goes wrong afterward.

I left without another word, but the smell followed me.

That night, lying in bed, I couldn’t sleep. I kept picturing her sitting there with that candle, watching the flame like it was telling her secrets.

Around two a.m., I heard a soft pop, then crackling, then the faintest whisper of flame breathing through wood. When I opened the door, the hallway was an orange glow.

Smoke crawling low, someone screamed, maybe her. I didn’t go in. I just stood there, watching the flames eat through the walls.

By the time the fire trucks arrived, the blaze consumed the entire third floor. They said faulty wiring, which old buildings have.

I told them I smelled the matches before it started. They wrote it down, but I could tell they didn’t care. Nobody ever does when it’s about small things.

A week later, they let me in to collect what was left. The smell was still there.

Sulfur and smoke, faint yet sharp. I found a single match on my floor, unburned.

I kept it. Not as a souvenir, but more like a warning, because some things don’t burn out when they should.

A papercut.

Nothing dramatic, no cinematic blood spurt, just that tiny slice across the edge of my thumb when I was opening the damn gas bill. One of those quiet, invisible hurts that seems to whisper: this is the beginning of something bad.

I sucked the thumb, tasted a bit of iron, then went to the sink and let cold water sting it. It wasn’t even bleeding anymore.

The bill was worse than the cut. They wanted nearly double what they did last month.

I’d been turning the heat down, sitting in the apartment with two sweaters and a hat, but somehow I was paying more. There’s a math to the universe that punishes the already punished.

So I did what I always do when life taps me on the shoulder with its greasy hand: I went to Benny’s Bar.

Benny’s is the kind of place where the light never really lands. You drink in shadow, pay in cash, and keep your eyes low.

The air smells like sour mop water and warm whiskey. I like it that way.

I sat on my usual stool, wrapped a napkin around the papercut so I wouldn’t smear blood on the glass, and ordered a shot of rye with a beer chaser.

“Paper got you again?” Benny asked, wiping the counter with a towel that looked dirtier than the counter.

“Gas bill,” I said.

He nodded like I’d told him about a death in the family. “They’ll kill us all, those envelopes.”

I laughed, though not really. I drank.

There was a woman two stools down, with yellow hair like straw, and red lipstick that looked whitewashed on in the dark. She’d been coming around the past few weeks, always with that same tired look that said she’d seen better days and decided they weren’t coming back.

“You look like you’re losing an argument with life,” she said.

“Life’s been cheating,” I told her.

She smiled, slow, broken. “Ain’t it always?”

We drank in silence a while. The kind of silence that isn’t empty but heavy, full of all the things you’ll never say.

The papercut started throbbing again, sharp now. I checked it. Red line, a little puffed.

Infection, probably. Figures.

She caught me looking at it. “You’d be surprised what little things can take you down,” she said. “My ex’s cousin died from a splinter. Got infected. Blood poisoning.”

“Hell of a way to go,” I said.

“Yeah. They buried him with the two-by-four he got it from. Family thought it was poetic.”

The next day, the thumb looked worse. Swollen.

Pink creeping up toward the wrist. I told myself it was nothing, just irritation, but I kept watching it, like a snake watching its own tail.

I skipped work. Drank coffee.

Watched dust drift through the light like tiny ghosts. The city outside made its usual noises, sirens, arguments, and tires squealing on wet pavement.

Everything continues like always. That’s the thing about the world: it never notices when you start to rot.

By nightfall, I was sweating. Fever crawling up my spine.

I thought about the blond woman, the way she said “little things can take you down.” She was right.

I stumbled back to Benny’s, hand wrapped in a dirty rag. He looked up from the register.

“Jesus, you look bad,” he said.

“Paper got me again,” I told him.

He poured me a drink without asking. The whiskey burned like medicine, but it didn’t help. I felt the pulse in my thumb, a steady beat, like the world laughing at me.

I thought about all the ways a life unravels: a word said wrong, a step missed, a letter opened too soon. But a papercut, that’s the most honest of them all, small, stupid, and absolutely fatal in its own way.

I raised the glass, bleeding thumb and all. “To the little things,” I said, and drank.

The bell above the door gave a nervous jingle when the kids came in, five, maybe six of them, all loud and laughing, smelling of sweat and heat and teenage defiance. They spread through the aisles like smoke, their sneakers squeaking against the cracked tile, hands brushing bags of chips, energy drinks, and candy bars.

The cashier, a thin man with dark circles under his eyes, looked up from the register and then quickly back down, pretending to count bills he’d already counted twice. Behind him, the manager, a white guy in a cheap polo, stiffened and adjusted his glasses.

He whispered something that sounded like, “Here we go again,” but he didn’t move. He never moved when things started to stir.

The kids were talking, laughing, throwing the word around like a basketball. Nigga this, nigga that. It bounced off the shelves, hit the corners of the store, and crawled under the fluorescent lights.

At the counter stood a man, middle-aged, heavy around the waist, wearing a faded gray jacket and a look that had seen enough days like this one. He was black, too.

He had a small carton of milk in his hand and a cigarette tucked behind his ear. He stared straight ahead, jaw tightening with every shout that came from the snack aisle.

“Man, y’all shut up,” the clerk said, not loud enough for anyone to actually hear him.

Then the man at the counter turned. His voice came out low but carried through the store, slicing through the noise like a razor.

“Don’t use that word.”

The laughter died immediately. One of the boys, a tall one with a red hoodie, looked at him, confusion tightening his features. “Why not? We Black, too.”

“So what?” the man said. “You ain’t dragging me into the ghetto slums with you. Don’t include me in that shit.”

The air in the store thickened. Even the hum of the refrigerators seemed to dull. The manager looked up again, suddenly attentive, watching the scene like it was a TV show he didn’t want to miss.

The boy in the red hoodie gave a short laugh, though it didn’t sound real. “Man, it’s just a word.”

The man turned fully now, facing them. His eyes were bloodshot, not from anger but from the kind of tiredness that comes from a thousand disappointments.

“Words are never just words,” he said. “That’s how people keep you small. Make you believe that’s all you’ll ever be.”

No one spoke after that. The kids shuffled awkwardly, pretending to check the expiration date on a candy bar. One of them dropped a bag of chips, and the sound of it hitting the floor was louder than it should’ve been.

The man set his milk on the counter and fished a crumpled bill from his pocket. The cashier took it wordlessly.

As the receipt was printing, the man didn’t wait. He took his milk, pushed through the door, and was gone before the bell could finish ringing.

The kids stood there a while longer, unsure of what to do. Finally, the one in the red hoodie muttered something under his breath and led the group out, heads low, voices gone.

When the door closed behind them, the store seemed bigger somehow, emptier. The manager exhaled and said, “Guess that shut them up.”

The cashier didn’t answer. He was watching the milk man disappear down the street through the smudged front window, his shoulders slumped but his walk steady.

The man hadn’t been angry, at least, not the kind of anger that burns quick and bright. It was the quiet kind, the kind that simmers for years and never really cools.

Outside, the city went on, the cars, the horns, the endless movement. Inside, the hum of the refrigerators came back, and the store returned to its usual silence, the kind that pretends nothing had happened at all.

The wind along Highway 17 always smelled of rot. Not the clean, dry scent of desert decay, but something wet, like a landfill left to ferment. That was the smell that hung in the ditch outside Silver City the night Clay Brenner’s life came apart at the seams.

He’d been driving back from Dayton, headlights cutting through a steady drizzle that had turned the shoulders into black soup. His wipers fought a losing battle, smearing the rain and grime into grease streaks.

When the first shimmer of green caught his high beams, he thought it was just another tarp, plastic sheeting caught in the scrub. Clay slowed.

There was a lot of dumped junk out there: torn grocery bags, hubcaps, a mattress or two half-sunk into the mud. But something about the shape; it bulged wrong, too symmetrical, too heavy.

He told himself he was just tired. Still, curiosity made him ease to a stop.

The tarp wasn’t still. It fluttered once, as something beneath had exhaled.

Clay stepped out, boots sinking an inch deep. His flashlight beam jittered with the tremor in his hand.

“Hey,” he muttered, more to fill the silence than to call out.

The air was thick, humming faintly from the power lines above. Then a car came up the opposite lane, its headlights sweeping across the ditch.

The light hit the green mass dead-on, and it moved. The “tarp” unfurled like a wet umbrella, its folds peeling back with a slurp of mud.

Something within it rose, slowly, deliberately, until it stood as tall as a man. Its surface glistened, green and gray, like cabbages rotted by rain.

A bulbous head rolled forward from a stalk of matted tendrils, and beneath that head, faces. Not one, but dozens of human-like visages molded into the flesh, half-dissolved, their mouths stretched wide as if gasping for the last breath they’d ever take.

Clay stumbled backward, the beam of his flashlight catching on the creature’s eyes, if that’s what they were. Two milky orbs blinked open amid the folds, reflecting the light with a wet sheen.

The thing made a noise then, a drawn-out hiss that began deep in its throat and ended as a chorus, a dozen whispering mouths all speaking at once.

“Road…side…”

Clay didn’t wait for the rest. He ran.

The mud clutched his boots and tried to pull him down. He half-climbed, half-crawled up the embankment and flung himself into his truck.

The headlights showed nothing but churned sludge. Clay slammed the door, jammed the gearshift into drive, and tore down the highway, heart clawing at his ribs.

Behind him, something thudded against the rear bumper. He didn’t stop again until he hit the lights of Virginia City.

By morning, Clay convinced himself it was a hallucination. He hadn’t slept, the rain distorted everything, and he’d been drinking the night before.

He told no one. But he couldn’t shake the sound, that whisper made of too many voices.

A week later, a local sanitation crew found a body in that same ditch, or what was left. It was a man stripped of his clothes and hair, his skin patterned with greenish lesions that looked like plant growths. The coroner couldn’t explain it.

Then two more disappeared along that stretch. A hitchhiker. A woman searching for her lost dog.

Each time, all they found were scraps, bits of clothing, clumps of hair, and a few personal effects scattered amid the trash. The sheriff blamed coyotes.

Folks in town whispered otherwise. They said the ditch was alive.

Old-timers started calling it Pollutus sapiens, a local biologist’s term that made its way into the papers for a week before being quietly forgotten. “The Roadside Ghoul,” they said, a new species born of human neglect.

The idea was that all the waste, plastic, oil, rotting food, and the chemicals from decades of litter had seeped deep enough into the earth to wake something ancient. A self-aware colony of decay, mimicking the shapes it had consumed.

Clay knew better. He could still see those faces, all pressed together like reflections in a dirty mirror. One of them had looked familiar, cheekbones like his former boss, and the jawline like the man who owned the junkyard out by the interstate.

It wasn’t just a mimic. It was a collector.

He stopped sleeping after that. Every time headlights swept across his window, he saw the shape again, the slick folds, the green sheen, the whisper of the word “roadside.”

Weeks later, when the county finally sent a team to drain the ditch and pave it over, the workers found nothing. There were no bones, no fibers, no hint of the mud-born thing, but the asphalt refused to set properly; it bubbled, exuding a faint smell like sour cabbage.

People still drive past that stretch. Most don’t notice anything, not unless their lights catch the right angle. But sometimes, in the wet season, a driver will swear the puddles move, or that the heaps of trash look almost human in the rain.

And if you stop, if you slow down, just for a few seconds, something might rise, thinking you’ve come to stay. That’s how it feeds, how it learns your shape.

The red planet was never silent. Beneath the thin whisper of atmosphere, Mars hummed with a secret life no sensor could detect, at least, not until humanity listened closely enough to regret it.

Dr. Elias Mercer was not the first to set foot on the rim of Chryse Planitia, but he was the first to stay long enough to notice the dance. It began as a flicker on the horizon: tiny spirals of dust twisting lazily against the pale sky, no different from the countless vortices captured by orbital cameras.

Yet when Elias watched through the viewport of the Ariadne habitat, he thought, though he could not explain why, that the devils were moving with intent. Every afternoon, just before the long Martian twilight, the dust devils appeared in formation.

Three at first, circling one another in slow, deliberate arcs. Then five. Then seven. Their paths overlapped with geometric precision, as if tracing a pattern only visible from above.

Elias recorded everything. He measured wind speeds, electrostatic discharge, and soil particle motion, yet none of it justified the complexity he saw. The vortices seemed to anticipate each other’s movements, swirling closer, separating, then reforming in rhythm.

“They’re just dust,” Commander Ruiz had said during the daily comm window. “Air currents, nothing more.”

But Elias wasn’t so sure.

One night, long after the others had gone to rest, he replayed his footage at ten times speed. The dust devils flickered across the plain in a strange, sinuous waltz.

He leaned closer. Between the whirling columns, the Martian surface seemed to shimmer, as though the sand was becoming something smooth and reflective.

For a single frame, he thought he saw eyes. He scrubbed back the video.

Nothing. Only red dust and shadow.

By Sol 219, the dance had moved closer. Ariadne’s seismic sensors registered faint vibrations at twilight, rhythmic and regular, like footsteps from a great distance.

Elias stepped outside in his suit to watch. The horizon glowed with faint luminescence, pale tendrils of light coiling within the dust devils, tracing patterns across the plain.

“Ruiz, do you see that?” he whispered over the comms.

Static answered. The dust devils continued their ballet, silent and purposeful.

The closest one pivoted sharply, spiraling toward him with impossible speed. Elias froze as the vortex halted a few meters away, its outer shell of sand suspended mid-air. Within it, at its very heart, he glimpsed something darker than shadow.

A pulse of vibration shook through his boots. Then the dust collapsed, falling flat onto the plain as though nothing had been there at all.

The next morning, he woke to find the habitat coated in fine red powder. The filters groaned under the weight of it.

Ruiz’s voice crackled through the intercom, distant and strained. “Elias, you’ve been outside too long. Your suit logs show exposure to…”

The transmission broke off.

When he checked the communications array, every external feed displayed static. No data uplink. No Earth signal.

Only one file remained open on his console, a live feed from the exterior camera. The dancing dust devils had gathered again, dozens of them now, circling the Ariadne in concentric rings.

Elias pressed his hand to the glass of the viewport.

The dust shimmered, each vortex bending toward the habitat as if listening. Elias felt a vibration through the hull, a low hum, resonant and deep.

It wasn’t the wind. It was a tone, structured and deliberate, a frequency that resonated in Elias’s teeth.

When he tried to move away, his limbs trembled as though gravity had thickened around him. Then the lights went out.

He awoke, how much later, he couldn’t tell, to silence. The habitat’s systems were offline, but the faint red glow outside still pulsed in rhythm.

He stepped to the viewport. The dust devils were gone.

In their place lay seven perfect spirals etched into the Martian soil, each several meters wide. They shimmered faintly under the pale light, edges glowing with a strange phosphorescence.

From above, he imagined they would form a sigil, a massive design spanning kilometers, precise as a circuit board, incomprehensible as prayer.

Elias stepped outside once more. The spirals pulsed under his boots, each beat sending a gentle tremor through the ground. The hum returned, deeper this time, rising from beneath the crust.

He knelt and brushed his glove across one of the grooves. The dust shifted, revealing smooth black glass beneath.

It reflected not his face but a sky he did not recognize, one filled with stars that moved. And then he heard it.

A whisper, like static carried on a solar wind, threading directly into his mind, “We have waited for the air to move again.”

The ground convulsed. The spirals brightened, their light bleeding upward, coalescing into columns of dust that danced once more.

Only now, within each vortex, Elias could see shapes, elongated silhouettes twisting in synchronized motion, arms and torsos made of ash and wind.

They danced around him, enclosing him in their circle. He should have been terrified, but instead he felt a dreadful awe, as though standing at the threshold of something eternal.

The hum rose to a shriek that filled the sky. Then silence.

When the next crew arrived three months later, they found the Ariadne empty, with no sign of Dr. Elias Mercer. The habitat’s logs ended abruptly on Sol 220.

But from orbit, the survey drones captured something the human eye could not mistake: seven glowing spirals on the Martian plain, perfectly symmetrical, pulsing faintly as if alive.

And as the drones passed overhead, their sensors recorded a faint tremor, steady, rhythmic, unmistakably human, echoing from beneath the red dust of Mars.

The dance continued.

The news hit me this evening like a bad needle drop that Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir left us for that big stage in the sky. For a few quiet minutes, the music stopped me cold, and I was right back in Southern Humboldt, sitting in a little radio station that smelled like hot electronics, coffee that had been on too long, and redwood damp.

I met Bob back in the day at KERG, a small commercial FM station tucked near Redway and Garberville. The Urge, we called it. K Eel River G.

I was young, broke, and absurdly proud of my job. Three shifts a week, Tuesday through Thursday, from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Twelve-hour days for six bucks an hour. That was good money for radio back then, especially in the Emerald Triangle, where “time” and “schedule” were more like friendly suggestions.

KERG was a strange and wonderful beast. Fifty thousand watts of community voice blasting out into the redwoods, aimed squarely at the back-to-the-land crowd, growers, dreamers, and folks who had decided society worked better if you leaned back a little.

The station was part of the Grateful Dead in a way that felt both casual and cosmic.

It was commercial, technically, but “commercial” mostly meant one ad for poly-tubing, sold by the foot, essential for anyone trying to move water uphill or keep a quiet garden alive. We’d fire it off while flipping the LP, then slip right back into the groove like nothing had happened.

Dan Healy, the Dead’s legendary sound man, was the brain and backbone behind it. Jerry Garcia’s presence hovered around the place like weather.

Some people swore they worked for Jerry. Others said Jerry ran the station.

The truth lives somewhere in between, which feels exactly right for that scene. And then there was Bob Weir.

No big entrance or announcement. Bob just appeared.

One minute you’re cueing up another side of Europe ’72, the next minute there’s Bob on the studio platform like he might ask you where the bathroom is. He was friendly, low-key, and wholly curious.

No rock star nonsense. Just a guy in the room, listening, talking music, soaking up the vibe of this little outpost in the woods that somehow carried the Dead’s heartbeat.

Most shifts on-air were simple, with long stretches of Grateful Dead music, hours at a time, interrupted only by flipping a record. You learned how long an album side really was, learned patience, and that if you played the Dead long enough, someone out there was always listening, probably trimming plants or driving a pickup too fast on a narrow road.

KERG didn’t last. By 1987, it faded out, as so many things do. In its place came KMUD, a community radio that carried the torch forward and kept the voice local, weird, and alive.

But KERG mattered. It was a bridge, between eras, between music and place, between the Dead’s sprawling universe and a small community tucked into the redwoods.

So when I heard that Bob Weir was gone, for a moment, all of it came rushing back. The long shifts, endless records, and the feeling that music wasn’t just something you listened to, it was something you lived inside.

 

One night, my brother Adam and I were cruising through Crescent City with nowhere to be and all the time in the world. If you’ve ever been there, you know the drill: one-way north, one-way south, like the town itself is politely guiding you along, no detours, no surprises.

Back then, before every corner sprouted a stoplight like a weed, the streets were ruled by stop signs. Red octagons. Simple. Final.

Except not to Adam.

That night, Adam was so stoned he rolled up to a stop sign, came to a perfect, textbook stop, and just waited. Hands on the wheel. Eyes forward. Engine idling. A full, patient pause like he was doing his civic duty.

I finally looked over at him and said, “What the hell are you doing?”

He didn’t even turn his head. Just said, calm like, “Waiting for it to turn green.”

I laughed so hard I had to lean forward in my seat. Tears, wheezing, the whole thing.

Adam stayed serious for another beat, then cracked a grin as if he’d just realized he’d got caught being profoundly stupid. We drove on, laughing at nothing, laughing at everything.

That was Adam. Not a bad guy.

Not a genius either. Just wonderfully, spectacularly human.

On this date, he’s been missing from life for sixteen years now. Long enough that the world has replaced stop signs with lights and replaced people with memories, and long enough that moments like that feel sharper instead of softer.

I don’t miss the chaos he brought, or the trouble, or the worry. I miss the dumb stuff.

The unguarded moments. The nights when time didn’t matter and neither of us thought about consequences or endings.

When I remember him sitting there, waiting for a stop sign to change, I don’t laugh like I used to. I smile, shake my head, and feel that familiar ache in my chest.

And yeah—when I think of shit like that he did, I miss his sorry ass.

He spoke like a priest might, quiet and slow, as if the world around him had already burned down and he was reading its eulogy from a ruined pulpit. His words seemed pastoral, but they held razor blades of loneliness, indecision, and violence of choice.

He’d sit at the end of the counter in Maggie’s Diner every morning, drinking his coffee black and slow, turning the cup like a roulette wheel that never landed on anything but the same losing number. No one knew where he came from, or where he went at night.

They only knew he tipped exactly one dollar, no matter the total, and said, “Thank you, Maggie,” as if her name were the only word he still trusted.

Some days, he’d talk. Not much.

A few lines about the weather, the trucks that passed through town, or how the birds didn’t seem to sing as much lately. Maggie would nod, polite but guarded. She’d heard that tone before, from men who looked gentle but carried their own graves inside.

He told her about a woman he almost married. He said she loved books and quiet rooms and always smelled like fresh paint.

“We could’ve been happy,” he said, his voice breaking into something brittle. “But happiness is a thing you have to kill before it runs away. I wasn’t quick enough.”

Maggie didn’t ask what he meant. She just filled his cup again and looked away.

There was something off about him, something too calm, like a man rehearsing his own confession. He never smiled, but he wasn’t unfriendly either.

He was polite, steady, and restrained. A man trying very hard not to be seen, and failing at it.

Late one afternoon, when the rain had been falling for hours, he stayed after closing. Maggie was sweeping near the window, pretending not to notice.

“You ever think about leaving this place?” he asked, staring into his cup.

“Every damn day,” she said.

He nodded, still not looking at her. “I did. Left everything. Thought I’d start over. Turns out, all you ever start over with is yourself.”

The broom stopped. “That sounds like a sad kind of truth.”

He smiled then, barely. “Sadness is the only thing that sticks.”

When he left, he forgot his lighter on the counter. It was a cheap silver one, scratched and heavy.

Maggie picked it up and turned it in her hand. The initials carved into the bottom, E.D., were neat but not deep, like someone had pressed just hard enough to mean it.

The next morning, he didn’t come in. Nor the one after.

By the end of the week, his stool had stayed empty. The regulars noticed but didn’t ask. In towns like this, people vanished all the time, some by choice, others by accident.

Months later, a postcard arrived. No return address. Just a picture of a coastline no one recognized, and a single line written in that same careful hand: “Tell Maggie the coffee was always perfect.”

She kept the postcard behind the register, next to the lighter. Sometimes, when the morning light hit just right, she’d see her own reflection in the metal and wonder what kind of man could speak like a saint and bleed like a sinner.

And though she’d never admit it, she missed the way his words filled the air, gentle, poisonous, and holy in their own broken way. Some people don’t vanish, they linger, soft-spoken ghosts with razor-blade tongues, cutting you open long after they’re gone.

Everything vanished into the machinery of genocide, reduced to smoke and numbers. That’s what the archives said.

That’s what the professors said. But for Anton Keller, who catalogued the dead at the Ministry of Historical Continuity, it was all paperwork and cigarettes.

The human stain, gone before he showed up to sort the ashes. He sat in his small, gray cubicle, third floor, Room 312-B, surrounded by folders that smelled of mildew.

He never opened the windows; the air outside carried too many ghosts. The ceiling lights hummed, the radiator heater coughed, and somewhere down the hall, a clerk was crying quietly, but nobody said anything.

Anton had once been a poet, before the city decided poetry was a form of dissent. Now he worked with numbers.

His days were inventories, shipments of bones, lists of confiscated shoes, and meticulous death tallies. The Ministry wanted precision; precision was allegiance.

He’d learned to drink coffee like poison. Quickly, before it cooled, before he could taste it.

He had no friends. Friends asked questions.

He just had his desk, his ashtray, and the slow mechanical rhythm of forgetting.

The machinery ran without oil now. Everything squeaked and stalled.

Anton found it beautiful, in a detached sort of way, how even atrocity could become dull, and the monstrous reduced to bureaucratic fatigue. He supposed that was the real trick: making horror manageable by turning it into files.

One night, while sorting a new batch of files, he found a folder marked “Experimental Unit 47.” Inside was a name he recognized, Lea Rothmann.

They’d met years ago, before the city changed, before the walls went up. She’d been a painter, reckless and alive. He remembered her laugh, how it shattered the gray air.

The folder was thin. Too thin.

Just one sheet of paper, a number, and a date. No cause of death. No location. The machinery had eaten her, and this was all that remained: a line of digits and an unfiled memory.

Anton lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl upward. For a moment, he thought he saw her face in it, eyes half-closed, as if she were tired of waiting. Then it was gone.

He should have shredded the file. That’s what the protocol said, but he slipped it into his coat pocket instead.

He didn’t know why. Perhaps guilt, or that he wanted proof that Lea had once existed outside the system.

The next morning, the city was colder. His breath fogged as he walked to work.

People stood in lines for ration cards, silent and gray. He imagined them all as future folders, future smoke.

The thought didn’t disturb him anymore. It only made him tired.

At the Ministry, the supervisor called him in. Said there’d been a discrepancy, one file missing: Unit 47.

The supervisor smiled without warmth. “These things are sensitive, Keller. Misplacing them looks disloyal.”

Anton said nothing. He just nodded and left.

That night, he burned the folder in his apartment’s sink. It took longer than he expected; the paper curled, blackened, and resisted.

The flame danced weakly, as if afraid. When done, Anton poured the ashes into his coffee cup and stirred them in, then drank slowly, grimacing at the bitterness.

Outside, the sirens wailed, routine inspections, curfews, the usual noise of the city choking on itself. Anton sat by the window, smoking, watching the smoke rise into the night.

He imagined it joining the others, drifting over the rooftops, merging with the gray sky that had long since forgotten the sun. In the end, he thought, the machinery doesn’t destroy things.

It absorbs them, takes love, memory, guilt, and smooths them into dust. The trick is not to care.

He exhaled, and the smoke hung in the air like an afterthought, then even that was gone.

The building looked like it had been peeled straight off a postcard from 1986, back when neon was the future, and everyone believed in progress. Its pastel facade, once described by some realtor as “perfect for Miami Vice,” had turned to chalk and mildew. Now it stood as a monument to failed ambition.

The parking lot told its own story, with cracked asphalt, fissures filled with weeds clawing toward daylight. The cars were ghosts of commuters past, faded sedans, a sun-bleached van, a coupe with two flat tires.

The trees had grown wild, their branches draping over the sidewalks and swallowing the signage whole. Behind the building, tents and tarps leaned together in shabby solidarity, flapping in the stale breeze.

Homeless people lived there now, feeding off the building’s slow decay like parasites on a dying animal.

Every weekday morning, Martin trudged through it all with his key card ready, as if the motion alone might still mean something. He’d been coming here for years.

The same walk from the parking lot, same flickering security light, same smell of damp carpet and burnt coffee. There was comfort in the repetition, but it had soured lately.

The faces had changed. Most of them were kids now, polite but distracted, all earbuds and Slack messages. They looked at him with that faint pity people reserve for things that used to matter.

He’d once had a corner office. That was before “the restructure.”

Now he sat in a cubicle under a buzzing fluorescent light that hummed like a migraine. His title, Senior Systems Analyst, had long since lost its meaning.

He was the last man standing from his original team. Every Friday, he’d tell himself: Just a few more months.

Ride it out until retirement. But lately, that word didn’t sound like freedom, but erasure.

At lunch, he’d sit in his car, the air thick with the smell of sun-baked vinyl, and watch the others walk to the café across the street. The new crowd laughed too loudly, optimism staged.

He’d light a cigarette, though the smoke irritated his throat now, and imagine just driving away, heading west until the gas ran out, but he never did. He always went back inside, swiping that damned card, waiting for the green light.

One evening, he stayed late, the office emptied and silent, except for the faint rattle of the air conditioning. Outside, the sky was bruised purple.

He stared at his monitor, at the spreadsheet columns that had defined his life in microcosm, hours, dates, names. None of it mattered.

He shut it off and packed his things slowly. The photo of his ex-wife, a coffee mug from some long-forgotten conference, a dead plant he’d never thrown away.

As he left, he walked around to the back of the building. The encampment was still, shadows hunched beneath blankets.

He saw a man digging through a garbage bin, collecting cans in a shopping cart. Their eyes met briefly.

Neither looked away. For a moment, Martin felt the strange, magnetic pull of recognition.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his key card. The plastic rectangle that had granted him entry, that had tethered him to the illusion of purpose. He dropped it into the man’s cart without a word.

“Won’t open much,” Martin said, voice flat.

The man grinned, toothless, and shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It’s something.”

Martin nodded. He turned toward the street, hands in his pockets, walking past the cracked asphalt and the dead cars. He didn’t look back.

The building stood behind him, hollow and waiting, like an old stage set for a show no one filmed anymore. By the time the streetlights flickered on, he was gone, just another twentieth-century relic stepping out of frame.