Lena’s still in the baby doll dress and Doc Martens she wore to Andrew’s house on the night she died. The floors in the House of Mourning are wet and sticky, like the rotting residue in some long-forgotten building, sucking at her boots as she walks the endless halls. There is only one door, but there are many mirrors. Some she can see into, some she can’t, though this is no fault of the mirrors. Most are cloaked in a darkness so deep Lena feels as though she could lean into it and be swallowed whole.

The mirrors hold the lives of everyone Lena has ever known. H er second-grade teacher. The bus driver from middle school. Her neighborhood best friend who moved and never wrote. They are on one side, whole and alive, and she is here, in the liminal space one finds themself after death comes calling. The mirrors, of course, are not just mirrors. They let in sound and scent and sight. The lingering threads of life float through the connection, calling up memories of the past. Lena passes them all without much thought until she finds something that stops her cold.

When I was younger than I am now, I was a traveler: a woman with short calves and bones too close to the soles of my feet. In my country, we all are, for a time. We are sent out with joy in our adolescence, and our parents hope we return with respect, calluses, and perhaps a child of our own, or someone to make one with. Perhaps one in ten does not return. Much to my parents’ dismay, I am one of these.

The rules are thus: you must go until not a single person knows your name, and you may only return once you have obtained one of their songs, one of their meals, and one of their hearts.

While Lorelai’s guests wait on dinner, a grim reaper automaton emerges from the clockworks above the fireplace. With staccato movements, it smites the bell three times with a scythe.

No one pays attention. Lorelai frowns. She spent all year planning the décor, the food and entertainment, hoping to give herself and the others a memorable reprieve. No one had expected the decline to advance so fast.

Shadows from the candle-lit chandelier flicker across the slumped figures gathered around the mahogany banquet table. None look at each other.

The tolling foretells an afterlife filled with either comfort or torment. A human concept, and an attempt to cleverly foreshadow the evening’s program. It’s not working.

After I retired I wrapped up my affairs as best I could and headed back to the section of woodland in the mountains that had caused me so much trouble years before.

I’m not going to say it “haunted” me — I wasn’t the kind of person to let a snafu like that ruin my life. But I thought about it often, how it had confounded all our efforts, how the old woman had guarded access to that forested patch with cunning and ferocity. Her opponents were young, smart, money-hungry. Developers, investors, politicians, people with expensive degrees and technology at their disposal. The modern world, in fact.

The angel falls in flames. I watch its descent through the smoked glass slits in my sun shield. Even then the brightness is too much, and I have to turn away or go blind. I take cover with the rest and hope this time the casualties will be minimal.

When it hits, it is like the end of the world all over again. Clouds of choking ash and smoke. Boulders raining like hail through the roiling miasma. Trees flung like spears. I take shallow breaths through my mask, crouched behind the flimsy protection of a bomb shelter, until the tempest passes.

After, we take a headcount of the survivors. We treat the injured as best we can. We lay the dead aside and mutter a hasty prayer over each body to bring them peace while they wait. It is all we have time for. Proper burial rites will be observed later.

Layla Scholtz heard the truck on her way home from school, squinting at it through grime-caked goggles as it emerged from a cloud of dust in the center of town. She was sure she recognized its colors but wanted to see the logo on its side to be certain. Visitors to Verdigre, Nebraska, were so rare, what else could it be?

The dust wasn’t just dirt kicked up from 4th Avenue by the vehicle’s tires. It was a persistent miasma of particles held aloft by the winds blowing in from the dead fields. Her school talked a lot lately about the Dust Bowl from the 1930s. More than a century and a quarter later, and here they were again. Not that the dust towered into thundercloud massifs like it had then; these days, it was limited only to the areas that wouldn’t do business with Grow Salvation.

I was nineteen when the first holes appeared, just on the cusp between thinking I knew everything and realising I knew nothing. Walking home from work with Mellie, we turned onto Chestnut Street and found our path blocked by a crowd of people.

“Sinkholes,” a woman was saying. “Like the ones in Guatemala.”

“Nah.” This from a man with a small child at his side, gripping his hand tightly. “Burrows. We used to see this kinda thing when I worked out west. Them critters’ll burrow the ground right out from under you.”

“It’s the damn city, that’s what,” said an older man. Permanent frown lines creased his forehead. “Tearing up roads with construction and digging gas lines and never telling anyone when or where. Irresponsible is what it is.”

We were finally able to push our way through the gathered ring of people to see what they were all looking at.

Antoni kneels on the cracked pavement and waves his hand over a seam. A weed sprouts from the desiccated earth beneath, spreading its jagged limbs in praise to him, its creator. He brushes its leaves, allows its bristles to graze and nuzzle between his fingers, the mounds of his knuckles. He hears the high frequency at which it chitters its pleasure to be alive because, even here, it is grateful for the chance.

And then he tears it up, root and all.

She slices open a vein, and out pours star-matter. Liquid and glittering, the iridescent mess drips from her arm into my cupped palms. And, for a moment, there is only this: breathing in duet (forte, agitato), her brow a slash of determination worthy of sainthood (she’s my religion, yes), and, too, the dumbass acolyte who made a promise they’re no longer sure they can keep (me).

Quicksilver catches in the open window’s breeze, splattering over my double-breasted suit.

The creak of the ship on open water, the dark sea below my feet. The infinite, so close, one false step away through the rotting side of the hold. One hatch opened in a storm, and I would be as good as foam.

The intrusive thoughts followed me everywhere, but especially on the ocean.

I had come here to meet those thoughts—I chose this fate every time a new boarding house turned me out to the streets. I’d learned the sting of salt could not scrape away the thoughts boiling through my skull. But I could change things. Be something more. The things I sought were larger than a life spent toying with unsuspecting, powerless people. Larger than thoughts breaking like a bloodied tide.