Title image detail from If Women were Cryptids I by Tina Berrier, Acrylic on stretched canvas, 22″ by 30″, 2023.
Performative Normalcy During Times of Crisis
by Matthew Hand
Part One: Withdrawal
March 2020
The door made a noise she didn’t expect—low, deliberate, a vowel drawn out too long. Claire stood in the foyer with one hand on the knob, the other resting against her thigh, thumb flicking the denim seam as if it were a prayer bead. When it clicked shut, the whole house exhaled.
She could feel the silence adjust itself.
David had just finished sanitizing the last grocery bag. He took it seriously now. “It’s not panic,” he’d said yesterday, lining up canned goods to exert some control in this new reality. “It’s preparation.”
He coughed when he laughed, which made her flinch.
Claire didn’t reply. She stood at the threshold, newly locked in. Outside, the dogwood trees were just beginning their pink stutter. Inside, it smelled of antibacterial soap and onion skins and the remnants of David’s breakfast—toast and the old-people multivitamins that turned his urine electric.
They hadn’t had sex in over a year. Not that she was counting, not really, but she was aware of it the way one is aware of an unplugged lamp: the room’s still there, but it doesn’t glow.
Claire was 47. She felt older, not because of time, but because of noise. She had noise fatigue. Notifications, pundits, sirens, coughs, emails titled “Important COVID Update.” Her body ached in places she hadn’t given names to yet.
David was in the study—his “makeshift command center,” he called it, with mock gravitas. It was a repurposed guest bedroom that now held three monitors and a yoga ball he never used. He’d started referring to himself as a “remote strategist.” Claire let him. She preferred the fiction. Let him feel needed.
He wasn’t a bad man. He just always needed to talk through things. To verbalize his worry so she could co-sign it. Every evening, he would ask what she thought of the numbers. He meant the infection rates, the economy, his blood pressure. She gave him soft answers, calibrated not to provoke.
Their kids—Jillian and Milo—were in college states away, calling once a week, sometimes less. They had their own apocalypse to process.
In the mornings, Claire sat by the kitchen window with her phone on silent, reading threads on Twitter from nurses and epidemiologists and people she used to go to high school with who were now conspiracy influencers. She drank coffee she couldn’t taste and watched a squirrel attack the same bird feeder, again and again, failing each time.
Sometimes, David would come in with a fresh article to summarize. “There’s evidence it stays on cardboard for three days,” he’d say, holding up a box of cereal like it was ticking.
She nodded. She had developed a whole taxonomy of nods.
One night, he asked if she was okay. Just that: “Are you okay?”
And she said, “I’m fine,” in the voice she used to use when Milo scraped his knee but wasn’t actually bleeding.
That week, she stopped putting on makeup. The sweatpants were permanent. Time began to smear. Each day began with “What’s for dinner?” and ended with a YouTube meditation she didn’t listen to.
The door was shut now. The world outside was becoming optional. Claire, who once managed the local food bank volunteers like a small battalion, now watched dust settle in rays of afternoon light and wondered what the opposite of mourning was.
It wasn’t grief. It was stillness.
April 2020
The mornings began to elongate, like shadows do just before sunset. By April, the house was quieter—but not with peace. With the kind of reserved quiet that made your ears ring.
David had started narrating his dreams.
He’d emerge from the guest room in his bathrobe, a mug of herbal tea in hand, and announce, “I had this dream where I was in an airport but nobody had faces.” Claire would nod, eyes still on her screen, where a subthread of a subthread on Reddit was detailing mask efficacy with a kind of evangelical fervor.
Sometimes she responded. Most times, she let the silence do the work for her.
He was talking more. Not deeper, not more urgently—just more. Words now filled the space previously occupied by errands, dinner plans, traffic reports. He’d follow her room to room, narrating his work Zooms, the state of the basil in the garden, the dreams, always the dreams. It was like he’d forgotten how to be alone with himself. Or maybe he never knew.
She wasn’t cruel. She just didn’t have room. Not anymore.
Claire didn’t eat lunch most days. She’d make something for David—egg salad, a soup from a can—and then forget to feed herself. Or maybe she wasn’t forgetting. Maybe she was testing the boundaries of absence.
She skipped dinner, too, three nights in a row. When David asked if she wanted anything, she said she’d already eaten, and he believed her because believing her meant not having to notice.
His blood pressure meds started collecting in the dish on the counter.
“Did I take them already?” he asked one morning, eyes searching the bottle.
She was on the couch, phone up to her face like a shield. “I’m not sure,” she said, and didn’t look up.
She didn’t check. She didn’t set the alarm like she used to. She didn’t refill the prescription when it ran out.
In its place: the screen. Twitter, mostly. TikTok sometimes. She followed a woman in Italy who posted daily video diaries of her lockdown life, complete with operatic background music and dramatic captions like “Another day in the tomb.” Claire found it funny and not funny. She watched every one.
There was also someone—Elliot. A poet or maybe a podcaster. He had a newsletter about masculine grief and plants. He messaged her after she left a comment on a thread about loneliness. It wasn’t flirtation, not explicitly. But there was a rhythm. A back-and-forth that made her remember her twenties in a distant, underwater way. She never told him she was married. He never asked.
David started baking. He showed her his sourdough like a toddler shows a drawing. “It didn’t rise right,” he said. She nodded, said, “Looks great,” and went back to scrolling.
The lights stayed off during the day. The blinds stayed closed. Outside, the world was blooming in pastel defiance. Inside, the air was thick with sleep and screen light and the hum of a freezer she hadn’t opened in weeks.
Once, David put his hand on her back while she was at the sink. “You’ve been quiet lately,” he said.
She didn’t flinch. But she didn’t turn around either.
“I’m just tired,” she said.
That wasn’t a lie.
The first time he coughed, it didn’t register. Claire was on the back porch, blanket around her shoulders, staring at a post about ICU beds in Queens. The tweet had 400,000 likes and a video of nurses crying in PPE. The sun was setting, though she hadn’t noticed it rising.
David coughed again. From the kitchen this time. A dry, inward sound. Like his body was clearing something from somewhere deeper than his lungs.
“You okay?” she called, without turning her head.
“I think so,” he said, but softer than usual.
That was Friday.
By Sunday, his skin had taken on a grayer tint. Not dramatic. Just a shade too close to ash. Claire noticed it when he came in holding a thermometer, squinting at the numbers. “99.6,” he said. “Not technically a fever.”
She nodded, staring at his face but not quite seeing him.
“Probably nothing,” she muttered, to herself more than to him.
She hadn’t opened a window in two weeks. The house smelled faintly of Lysol, old toast, and whatever it was that lived behind the refrigerator. The fridge had started humming louder, or maybe she was just noticing it more. She couldn’t remember the last time music had played. There was no laughter. No arguing. Only the steady rhythm of news briefings and coughs.
David fell in the hallway on Tuesday. It was after lunch—or what passed for lunch now, a few crackers and another herbal tea. She heard the thud and then his voice: not panicked, just puzzled. “Claire?”
She stood in the kitchen, hand wrapped around her coffee mug, lukewarm and full. She didn’t move at first.
It’s probably nothing.
She counted to five. Ten. Then walked, slowly, to where he was sitting against the wall, legs splayed out like a puppet mid-collapse.
“I think I tripped,” he said, smiling like it was a joke.
She helped him up. Not quickly. Not gently. Just… enough.
He leaned on her more than usual. She noticed his breath was faster, his eyes glassier. But he stood. And walked. And sat back down on the couch.
“You should rest,” she said, already turning away.
She didn’t get him water.
That night, she left the bathroom light on by accident. The soft yellow spill of it caught his face as he slept on the couch, his chest rising unevenly beneath the throw blanket. She watched from the hallway for a long time, just outside the light.
He looked smaller.
She considered checking his temperature. She didn’t. She returned to the bedroom, closed the door, and let the silence press back in.
May 2020
The morning was already warm. That unseasonal, wet kind of warmth that made the air feel soured, like old breath in a closed room.
Claire woke to the sound of nothing. No cough. No kettle whistling. No David humming something tuneless while he wiped down counters that didn’t need cleaning.
She lay still, listening to the static hush of the house. The fridge murmured its usual hymn down the hallway. A crow called from outside, distant but certain. Somewhere a news anchor talked about case numbers and mask mandates. But there was no David.
She moved slowly, deliberately. No rush. Her body had already made a decision her mind was still circling. Her feet touched the floor. Cold. Solid.
He was on the couch, where he’d been sleeping for the past few nights. His head lolled too far to the left, his mouth parted slightly. One arm hung off the side like it had forgotten it belonged to him.
Claire stood in the doorway and looked at him for a long time. Not for signs of life. Not for confirmation. Just looked. She had never noticed how still the body could be—how convincingly it could masquerade as sleep until it went just a degree too quiet.
His chest wasn’t rising.
She walked to the kitchen. Poured herself a glass of water. Took a sip. The silence folded itself around her like thick wool.
She considered the phone on the counter. Its screen blinked—one notification from Milo, a photo of his roommate’s dog wearing a tiny mask.
Claire didn’t scream. She didn’t sob. She didn’t call 911.
Instead, she let out a sigh. Not grief, not relief. Something else. Something shapeless. The exhale of a woman who had finally run out of choreography.
She went back to the living room. Sat across from David. Studied his face, noticing there was still color in it—faint, but not gone yet. His hand, now curled slightly, had a half-moon of pressure from where it had pressed against the couch cushion.
She didn’t move him. Not yet. She just sat. Minutes stretched.
A breeze rattled the closed window, as if the air outside remembered how to move.
Claire waited until dusk.
She made a sandwich first, something bland—turkey on wheat with too much mustard. She ate it standing up in the kitchen while the sky went purple and the fridge clicked on and off. She didn’t look at David’s body, though she could feel it behind her like an echo.
When the stars came out, she went to the garage.
The freezer was old, the kind you could still buy in the ‘90s if you clipped coupons and had space in your suburban home. It sat flush against the far wall, half-full of forgotten frozen meals, bags of peas for sprains no one got anymore, and the ice packs from when Milo had his wisdom teeth out.
She cleared it out. Stacked the contents in the second fridge, the one they never used except for beer and overflow leftovers. The process was mechanical. Almost comforting. Organizing was something she’d once loved, before everything became an avalanche of tasks.
Back inside, she opened the hall closet. Trash bags, duct tape, the clear painter’s plastic David bought last spring when he thought he’d try an accent wall in the bedroom. She took it all without ceremony.
The body was cooler now.
She didn’t cry. There wasn’t time. Or maybe there was only time, and that was the problem. She moved methodically, wrapping him like she was preparing something fragile for a long trip. Each layer tighter, smoother. She taped the edges down with the care of someone sealing a package for return.
When she dragged him across the linoleum, the sound startled her. It was loud. Ugly. Like moving furniture in a too-quiet apartment. She paused twice, convinced a neighbor would hear. But no one did. No one ever came anymore.
The garage smelled of oil and cardboard. She opened the lid and arranged him inside, fetal and folded. He fit. Barely. He had lost weight since the lockdown and this had become to her advantage in this moment.
She closed the lid. It thumped shut like a book being closed in church.
Standing there in the half-light, the only thing she could think was temporary. This wasn’t a decision. Not really. It was an intermission. She would report it when the pandemic ended. When the hospitals weren’t full. When the world made sense again. When she had the words.
For now, she just needed space. Time. Quiet.
She wiped her hands on her jeans and unplugged the small chest freezer for just a moment. Then she plugged it back in, just to hear the low hum start up again.
She stared at it for a long time, listening to that hum. It sounded, improbably, like someone whispering.
Part Two: Ghost Maintenance
May – June 2020
Claire didn’t set out to impersonate him.
It started with an email. Simple. Reflexive. His phone buzzed one afternoon on the kitchen counter—an alert from his manager: “Just checking in. How are you holding up?”
She stared at the screen for a long time. Then picked it up and opened his email. No password needed; he’d once logged in to check a coupon code and never logged out.
She clicked “Reply.”
Hey man,
Still feeling rough. Gonna lie low this week. Appreciate you checking in.
Best,
D.
She hit send before she could think too much about it. It felt like scribbling his name on a permission slip. Like muscle memory. Like nothing.
They wrote back: “Take all the time you need.”
The next day, someone else messaged. Then another. Slack notifications. Project updates. Happy birthdays. Claire read through them all with a fond curiosity. It was like watching someone shout into a void and realizing the void was echoing back, just convincingly enough.
She started replying. At first, just short notes: “Thanks, I’ll loop back soon.” Then, longer ones. Casual. Breezy. Her fingertips learned his cadences—how he signed off, when he used an em dash instead of a period, the little joke he made about meetings that “could’ve been emails.”
She Googled how to schedule Slack messages. Figured it out in less than ten minutes. Sent one for 9:05 a.m. the next day:
“Hey all, just flagging that I’m out today—low energy. Let me know if anything urgent pops up.”
She felt a twinge of satisfaction watching the message post itself like an automated heartbeat.
By week three, she was checking his inbox before her own. There was something soothing about it—this digital puppet show. Keeping David alive in the only world anyone still occupied. Most of the emails only required an acknowledgement of receipt. If it was marked important, she forwarded to David’s boss as an FYI. She had reviewed his sent box for the past six months and determined that, on average, David sent out 18 emails a day. That was her goal. The wheel David spun kept spinning.
She replied to his sister’s birthday text. Liked a comment from an old coworker on Facebook. Forwarded a spreadsheet with no edits.
No one questioned anything.
Each lie made the next one easier. The impersonation wasn’t elaborate—it didn’t have to be. All it required was the world’s permission to believe in the illusion.
And the world gave it freely.
By June, Claire could go entire days without speaking aloud.
There were no knocks at the door anymore. No spontaneous drop-ins, no neighborly casseroles wrapped in foil, no solicitations. The pandemic had sterilized the suburbs, transformed every house into a sealed box of suspicion and screen light.
Groceries arrived in brown paper bags dropped on the porch by gloved teenagers who never made eye contact. Sometimes she waved through the blinds. They never waved back.
Jillian and Milo had stopped FaceTiming. They still texted, occasionally—a meme, a vague article, the obligatory “u good?”—but they’d stopped asking to see her face. They were adapting to their own forms of isolation, their own loops of news and sleep and microwaved meals. Claire understood. The world had gotten quieter for everyone, not just her.
The silence had a rhythm now.
She woke around nine. Checked David’s inbox first, then her own. Sent out a Slack message if the day called for it. Opened Instagram. Watched Stories. Sometimes posted a quote—something vague and neutral: “The days are long but the years are short.” It bought her time. She looked at David’s browsing history, both on his computer and on his phone, and discovered she was disappointed he wasn’t secretly viewing pornography or had a gambling problem. He was steady, boring, and made as much of an impact dead as he had alive.
She sat in the same sun-drenched spot by the window where the light hit the floor in the late morning, casting a rectangle of warmth she rarely moved from. She’d sit and scroll until her thumb hurt, absorbing the endless scroll of curated dread—infographics, trending hashtags, faces of the missing, collapsing cities she’d never visited.
The house was her entire ecosystem now. A few rooms she moved between like a bored zoo animal. Kitchen, living room, garage. Bedroom, occasionally. The hallway light stayed off. She preferred shadows.
Sometimes, she caught herself speaking aloud just to hear a voice.
“Refill oat milk,” she’d mutter. Or, “Find the Lysol.”
Once, she said, ‘I’m still here,’ to an empty room, and the sound of it made her laugh. Not joyfully—just an accidental exhale of sound.
She felt lighter. Like a coat had been peeled off. No small talk. No obligations. No traffic or calendars or committees. No pretending to be interested in other people’s lives.
And yet—somewhere beneath it all—something was thinning. A membrane. A connection. She wasn’t lonely, exactly. She was… unpeopled. Untethered.
The world didn’t notice. No one called twice. No one came knocking. She’d vanished behind a screen, and the absence had been absorbed like static into the noise.
She thought: So this is what it means to disappear gracefully.
She thought: Maybe this is what I wanted.
She thought: Maybe I’ve been gone longer than I realized.
It started with the hallway light.
A soft flicker, once, then again the next day—brief, hesitant, like the bulb couldn’t decide whether it belonged to the living world or not. She changed it. It kept flickering. Then it stopped. Then it started again.
The hum of the fridge, once background noise, now sounded inconsistent—rising and falling like breath. At night, she could swear she heard movement behind the walls. Not creaks or old-house groans. Something more deliberate. Scratchings. The whisper-drag of something small and alive making its way through insulation.
Rats, she told herself. The freezer could attract them. But she didn’t check. She couldn’t. The idea of lifting that lid made her stomach feel like wet fabric.
It wasn’t just the house.
One night, sorting through her phone’s message archive for something—she no longer remembered what—Claire found a thread from David she hadn’t seen in months. Old, pre-pandemic. Little nothing texts:
“Made you coffee. Left it by your book.”
“Remember the password for the taxes?”
“Miss you and you’re two rooms away. Stupid, huh?”
She read them again and again. Then, without thinking, she replied to one.
“I remember. It was your birthday.”
The phone didn’t ding, of course. But the thread moved up, refreshed itself. His name sat at the top of her screen again, like it was waiting for her to continue.
That night, her laptop pinged. Slack. A group chat from his old project team. They’d reactivated a channel for someone’s virtual retirement party. Claire watched the messages appear—memes, old inside jokes, people joining from vacation homes and home offices, their faces framed by Zoom backgrounds and artificial lighting.
David’s account was listed as “away.” A gray circle. She almost clicked it to change the status, to keep up appearances.
And then—one screenshot.
A goofy screen capture someone posted of the gallery view. “The whole crew,” the caption read.
But in the bottom corner, a square she hadn’t touched. Camera off. Username intact. But the shape was wrong. The light too bright behind the black tile. The faint suggestion of a face. Not detailed. Not photographic. Just… something.
Her heart ticked once, hard.
She blinked. Looked again. The image hadn’t changed.
The chat moved on without her.
She closed the laptop.
Later that week, Spotify played one of David’s old playlists through the smart speaker in the living room. She hadn’t opened the app.
She didn’t turn it off.
It was supposed to be a casual Zoom—“just a hang,” someone said in the email. His old team throwing together a Friday night happy hour with bad lighting and background filters and wine in mismatched glasses. Claire almost ignored it.
But something in her hand clicked before she could decide. She accepted the invite.
The laptop waited on the dining table, flanked by half-dead succulents. She pulled the curtains closed. Turned off the hallway light. Slid her chair back just enough so her face would stay in shadow.
She didn’t want to speak. But she also couldn’t sit in silence.
A week earlier, on a forum about home podcasting, she’d found a demo file—voice manipulation software designed to smooth over vocal imperfections. Tinkerers had turned it into something more: you could input enough samples, and the AI would give you a synthetic replica.
David had left hours of Zoom footage in the cloud. She had plenty to feed it.
It took three tries. The first attempt sounded too robotic. The second one stuttered.
By the third, she had something. Not perfect. But passable. Close enough that it startled her when she played it aloud.
She triggered it now, finger hovering over her phone just off-camera. A line she’d pre-programmed:
“Hey team—sorry, connection’s weird tonight. Just wanted to say hey.”
The sound of his voice—his actual voice—filled the room. A little tinny. Filtered. But him.
“David!” someone said. “There he is.”
Hearts filled the chat box. A joke about his flannel shirts. Someone toasted with a coffee mug.
Claire watched it all in stillness.
They laughed. They asked how he was doing. She triggered another response:
“Still recovering. Slow-going. But better, I think.”
They nodded. Smiled. Moved on to a story about someone’s dog getting COVID.
No one questioned it.
No one asked David to fix the lighting, to see his face… Presence was enough.
No one noticed the delay between voice and reaction.
They didn’t want to.
And that was the real horror—not that she was fooling them. But that they were eager to be fooled. That their belief required so little evidence. That presence, in 2020, had become so fluid—so optional—that even a digital shadow could pass for a man.
When the call ended, Claire didn’t shut her laptop right away. She sat there, staring at the black rectangle where his image should have been.
Then, softly, she triggered one last phrase:
“Thanks, everyone. Good to see you.”
Her voice trembled. But the room did not.
It was a Tuesday when the knock came.
Claire froze in the hallway, halfway between the kitchen and the garage, a mug of reheated coffee in one hand and her heart a stuttering pulse in her throat.
Three polite taps. Measured. Intentional.
She edged toward the peephole. Mrs. Keller. The neighbor with the twin bichons and a seasonal wreath for every holiday—even Arbor Day. She was holding a Tupperware. Of course she was. Claire hadn’t seen her since February.
Claire didn’t open the door.
“Hi sweetie,” Mrs. Keller called gently, voice muffled through the wood. “I made too much zucchini bread. Just thought I’d—well, I haven’t seen you and David lately. Everything okay?”
Claire swallowed.
“We’re fine!” she said, louder than she meant to. “Just… you know, staying safe.”
Mrs. Keller paused. “Of course. Of course. I’ll just leave this here.”
Claire didn’t speak again. She waited until the sound of retreating footsteps faded, then waited another two minutes before opening the door just wide enough to pull the container inside.
That night, she ordered blackout curtains online. Overnight delivery. Installed them first thing the next morning, the screws trembling in her fingers as she drilled into the drywall. Every window. Every room.
The house transformed, instantly, into a sealed-off bunker. No light. No visibility. A perfect tomb of curated silence.
Her phone buzzed. A voicemail from David’s coworker—a woman named Allison who always over-articulated her vowels. “Just wondering if I could swing by and drop off a little get-well basket for David! You guys still at the same address?”
Claire stared at the phone as if it had grown teeth.
She didn’t respond. Deleted the message.
Every shadow now held suspicion. Every knock on the wall felt like a test. She unplugged the smart doorbell. Turned off the porch light. Piled a laundry basket in front of the garage entrance, even though no one ever used that door.
She told herself it was temporary.
The lie was harder to maintain when the house began to smell—not the freezer. She checked. No leaks. This was something more ambient. Something woven into the air. Not rot, exactly.
It smelled like being watched.
Part Three: Reconnection
August 2020
By August, the world had color again.
People spilled back into coffee shops like flowers blooming out of cracked sidewalks. Restaurants reopened with mismatched patio furniture and hastily printed QR codes. Claire watched it all through a windshield as she drove—rarely, cautiously—to pick up groceries instead of having them delivered. She rolled the windows down just enough to remember the feel of wind.
Her inbox pulsed like a reopened wound.
“Can we swing by during Fall Break in September?” Jillian wrote. “Milo can get time off too.”
Claire stared at the message for a full hour before replying:
“That’d be lovely. We’ll have to see how your dad’s doing.”
She didn’t send it. She copied the text, pasted it into a new draft in David’s email account, and sent that instead. Jillian responded a few minutes later with a heart emoji and a joke about stocking up on hand sanitizer.
Claire exhaled too hard.
The next day, David’s old boss—Ron, the one with the boat and the artificial cheer—sent a group message: “Now that things are loosening up, thinking of doing a little team reunion BBQ! Would love to see you both. David, how’s your schedule looking?”
She stared at the screen and felt something inside her tip. Not a full collapse—just a shift in gravity, like the floor was subtly slanted.
The house was brighter now. The sun made it in through the blackout curtains, leaking around the edges like guilt. Everything had a faint golden sheen, like an old photograph trying to be warm again.
But the freezer still hummed.
Claire had managed to maintain the illusion for over four months. But the world was changing. People wanted bodies again. Wanted clinking glasses and shared air and hugs that meant something. Screens were no longer enough.
Her kids were coming home.
David’s name was appearing on guest lists.
She opened the door to the garage for the first time in weeks and let the light in.
The air smelled like something had waited too long.
It began with a darkened trail on the garage floor.
Claire noticed it by accident—an uneven glisten across the concrete, just beneath the freezer. It hadn’t rained. She knelt, cautiously, and touched it with a paper towel. It came up wet and tinged brown, like something halfway between rust and blood.
She told herself it could be condensation. Or maybe a spill from one of the old cans on the shelf nearby. But she didn’t believe it. Not really.
The next morning, the smell arrived.
It was patient at first. A low, sour fog that clung to the corners of the house and seemed to intensify after nightfall. Claire lit candles. Scrubbed drains. Blamed the trash.
But it grew.
Not like a scent. Like a presence.
By the third day, flies had found the edge of the freezer. Small ones. Curious, trembling things that hovered in place like they were listening. She killed one with a rolled-up magazine. Another replaced it within minutes.
In the kitchen, her phone lit up: a calendar invite. David’s work team had scheduled a Zoom for the following Monday. “Just a quick check-in. Nothing major. Might talk BBQ plans!”
She stared at the invite, the flies, the freezer. Everything felt like it was sweating.
That night, during a video call with Milo, he said it:
“You guys should come out this fall. Seriously. It’s weird not seeing you. And hey—Dad’s team wants to do an in-person thing soon, right? You guys thinking of going?”
Claire blinked. The ring light on her desk cast soft circles on her face, but she felt like she was disintegrating beneath it.
She smiled. Said, “We’ll see.”
But her hand, out of frame, was trembling.
After the call, she sat on the floor beside the couch, knees to chest, and imagined her options in two columns: Confess or Disappear. She even made a list. Wrote down what she’d need to do either—email drafts, a burner phone, a rental car, bleach.
She deleted it five minutes later.
When she tried to sleep, the smell was there, threading through the vents like a warning.
The hum of the freezer had changed. Louder now. Desperate, almost. Or maybe that was just her ears, tuned only to guilt.
Claire tried to get ahead of it.
She logged into David’s email and drafted a quick message to Ron:
“Hey—Claire and I are heading up to Asheville for a few weeks. Off-grid spot, no signal. Needed the break. Appreciate everyone being so understanding.”
She scheduled it to send the next morning, just to make it feel less desperate.
Then she dug through the junk drawer until she found his wallet. The driver’s license was still there, sandwiched between expired Starbucks gift cards and a tattered library barcode. She flipped it over.
Expiration: May 2020.
That was three months ago.
She hadn’t thought about mail. DMV notices. Auto-renewals. Identity expiration. His name was dissolving in quiet, administrative ways.
She checked LinkedIn next. His profile still existed, but the activity log showed nothing for over a year. No likes, no comments, no status updates. She stared at the blue circle around his avatar—once alive with presence—and realized it was now as hollow as everything else.
Then the tag appeared.
She got the notification while scrolling Instagram: @DavidEverhart you’d love this playlist. It was an old friend, someone from college who apparently didn’t know how silence should feel. Claire clicked the post. A beach photo, captioned with lyrics from a song they used to play in the kitchen.
Someone else commented: “Where’s David these days? Haven’t seen him in forever.”
That night, HR called.
Not a message. A real call. Claire let it go to voicemail.
“Hi David, this is Angela from People Ops. We’ve had some flagged items with payroll and benefits renewals—just needed to verify some things. Give us a ring back when you get a second.”
She didn’t.
She sat very still in the dining room, the phone face down on the table, and listened to the house respond. The pipes ticked once. The freezer buzzed again.
The lie wasn’t unraveling.
It was leaking.
Every little digital trace she had so carefully preserved was dimming, flickering, evaporating. People were remembering him now. Which meant forgetting was no longer something she could control.
She didn’t sleep that night. The walls felt thinner. The house smaller. Like someone had been folding it in around her, millimeter by millimeter.
By morning, the flies were in the kitchen.
Claire started writing on a Thursday.
She opened a blank document on David’s old laptop—the one he used before remote work became a permanent state—and titled it: “Incident Log.” Then she deleted that. She tried again: “Notes on the Quiet Year.” Deleted that, too.
Eventually, she just typed her name.
Then his.
And then the date.
The words came like water from a hairline crack in drywall. Slow. Reluctant. But they came.
She wrote everything. Not just the death. The delay. The stillness. The freezer. She wrote about the sigh, which was not a scream. About the voice emulator. About the ghost in the Zoom window. About the thread of rot and silence she’d braided around herself and called peace.
She wrote like it was a purge. Like if she could just get it all on the screen, she could step outside herself again. Leave the body behind.
By evening, it was twenty-three pages. Tight prose. Clear logic. No dramatics. Just facts, sequenced in the order of decay.
She thought: Maybe I’ll send it to Milo. He always liked puzzles.
Then she thought: No. Jillian. She’ll know what to do.
Then she saved the file to the desktop and didn’t name it at all.
That night, she set up her phone on a stack of books and recorded a video. The light was dim. Her face half in shadow. She looked older than she’d expected. Not tragic—just used.
She said his name out loud. Twice.
Then: “It wasn’t murder. Not really. It was erosion.”
She explained the freezer. The lies. The months.
At one point, her voice cracked—but only once. No tears. No apology. Just… unspooling.
She hit stop. Watched it back. Almost deleted it halfway through.
Instead, she uploaded it to an unlisted YouTube account she’d created five minutes earlier. No followers. No banner image. Just silence and metadata.
She copied the link into an email.
Subject line: “For when it matters.”
She entered no recipient.
And saved it to drafts.
Then she closed the laptop.
The hum of the freezer felt louder that night. Like it knew.
The freezer stopped working sometime in late August.
Claire didn’t fix it.
The smell had already fused into the drywall. No amount of bleach or vinegar or Pinterest hacks could undo what the house had become. So she simply… stopped noticing.
The email stayed in her drafts. The video remained unlisted. The truth hung in the digital ether, waiting for a click that never came.
David’s HR contact sent one more message, then nothing. His name quietly disappeared from the Slack directory, replaced by a line of ellipses and a blurred-out profile picture. LinkedIn archived him. Facebook remembered his birthday once, then forgot.
His college friend posted a tribute: “We lost a real one.” A photo of a hiking trip from ten years ago. Six comments. Three heart emojis. One typo-ridden eulogy.
No one called.
No one knocked.
No one asked why he hadn’t reappeared.
Claire’s kids visited briefly in September. She told them David was at a silent retreat in Maine. Milo laughed. Jillian rolled her eyes. “Classic Dad,” she said. No one questioned it.
And then they left again.
The house stood still. Quiet. Flies gone. Screens dim.
One morning, Claire opened the front door for the first time in weeks and stepped into the sun. It was sharper than she remembered. Not warm, but honest.
The street looked the same: empty garbage bins, a neighbor’s wind chimes, a kid on a bike with a mask dangling from one ear.
She stood on the porch and breathed, just once. No one looked at her.
The mail sat untouched at the end of the driveway.
Inside, the laptop was still open. Someone had stumbled upon her unlisted YouTube confession and commented in judgment, then shared the link to his many followers.
She thought, briefly, about mourning. About ritual. About the strangeness of performing grief for an audience that had already clicked away.
Then she smiled, barely.
And said aloud, to no one:
“No one even asked what kind of funeral services we’ll have.”
Matthew Hand lives in Cumming, Georgia, where he writes fiction that examines people who live under judgment—moral, divine, or self-imposed—and who find that mercy rarely arrives as comfort. A writer and community theatre actor, Hand approaches storytelling as both confession and performance, asking what faith looks like after certainty has failed. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Susurrus, Half and One, The Watershed Journal, Rock Salt Journal, Rooted Literary Magazine, Tales from the Crosstimbers, and NECKSNAP. His story “A Test of Our Bodies for the Resurrection” was nominated for the PEN/Dau Award, and Intimacy Coordination was longlisted for the 2025 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. When he isn’t writing, he can often be found on stage—or in the quiet after the curtain falls.
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