You died on a Friday. You died in bits over the pavement and a grimy wall a meter away. You died in pieces in a hundred places, for years before that: in the middle of barricaded roads and teetering on overcrowded bridges; crushed by hot, angry bodies; captured by hundreds, if not thousands, of devices, screaming, screaming yourself hoarse, pounding your chest and demanding more and better and longer.

The moment you died, I forgot my own name, or why we were even there. I forgot words. I forgot breathing. I didn’t know it was Friday and I didn’t know what a pavement was and I didn’t know who I was and where you ended. But I knew, visceral in my cells and vibrating in my very being, that something had ended. And you were the crux of it. Never again would I hear you. Never again would I hold you.

You landed by my feet. Already you receded. You were warm and heavy. After the numbness, my body’s native pain compounded. We floundered, the rest of us, under a canopy of explosions and gunfire—we could’ve easily followed you, and I’m ashamed to admit the thought did occur—yet I left you lying there as I ran, and ran, and life stretched before me as a chasm.

Every morning, I explain why the fridge is half empty. Why I no longer line the shelves with bottled milk tea. Why I refuse to order strawberries or baby carrots.

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” croons the fridge, steel-smooth and only faintly hissing. “You have my sincere condolences.”

Every night, the fridge forgets. So do the TV, the light switches, the thermostat, the ceiling fans, the sinks, the plant pots, and the trash compactor. For better or worse, nightly resets wipe complex relational matrices. The appliances remember occupants’ names and basic preferences and little else.

But the fridge asks every morning, without fail, why it is empty, because it cares the most about my consumption.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. Thankfully, it doesn’t deem the call important enough to prompt me to answer. I give it five bone-deep hums before the caller doesn’t give up and I, regretfully, answer.

“How are you holding up?” asks Elliot, his voice tremulous, almost as gentle as any smart-ish gadget.

I wish I had a brick or a benzo. “Fine. You?”

Elliot’s reply is cut off by rustling on the other end, followed by a muffled exchange, a cloyingly familiar Be nice, a playful smack before the phone is passed over. All our friends are paired up, more or less, leaving me as an animal outside the Ark; a sudden wetness splattering my face one second, alone and ankle-deep in grief the next.

“What are you doing?” demands Elliot’s partner, Mark.

“Hi,” I say. Actually answering the question would fill me with shame. “Sorry. About the last … week?”

“The last month.”

“I’m here now.”

“Yeah, sure. There. In your fancy house.” I can imagine him waving like he’s swatting flies. “You can’t keep doing this to us, Lexi. You just go radio silent and nobody knows if you’re alive or dead or in jail or sick.”

As if I go out enough to get arrested or killed; as if my presence is anything but a blip on anyone’s radar. And I am always sick, if not from the routine migraines or dizzy spells, then from grief.

“I know.” I bite my tongue.

They will not mention you.

There’s rustling at the other end before Elliot asks, too chirpily, “Have you written any new poetry?”

“No.” I can write up to three sentences before my scratchy, cramped handwriting disturbs me too much to continue.

“I found out who my fridge’s voice comes from,” says Mark, hurriedly changing the subject.

The vast majority of gigs require signing up through CoreCorp, which scrapes personalities from that information once workers die. Posthumous compensation to families is $0.00015 per syllable—a hard-won victory from people who wound up dead themselves, probably recycled into the same system they tried to equalize.

“An old lady who was a math teacher for forty years. But the speech patterns are the exact match of a fourteen-year-old girl who died last August.” He pauses. “She was shot. Maybe by a corporate drone.”

“Oh, no,” I murmur. This is the third time I’ve received a call about gun-related deaths, like I hold a piece to a puzzle, or like people forget. “Someone should do something about that.”

Implicitly, I’m saying, Leave me out of this.

“We’re trying,” says Mark. “We’re attending that CoreCorp protest on Sunday.” That probably excludes our other friends, who’ve been mysteriously busy for the past few months. “Are you going?”

“I’ll … think about it.”

I hang up before he can ask anything else. From the living room to the hall, the lights dim: ceiling, lamps, other electronics. It’s a weak balm to the migraine swelling for its nighttime appointment, and the dimness makes the light outside all the more stark.

“Porch lights off,” I say.

The light switch replies, polite and chipper: “Should I keep the lights on for the other occupant? When are they returning home?”

“There is no other occupant.”

“For five years and seven months, my logs have indicated two residents … ”

Regardless of the definition of “life,” appliances do have personalities, and though these nightly conversations exhaust me, I’d feel bad yelling. Worse than the meltdown at your funeral. I feel detached from my body, particularly my tongue. I am just a sluggish heart under a dry mouth. But I don’t know how to explain calmly: Now I am the sole occupant. I always will be.

So I only repeat, “Porch lights off.”

“I apologize for any distress caused,” says the light switch. “Please, let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

They aren’t “smart,” you would have said. They’re just things that talk. Personalities, memories, and speech patterns are a ploy to soften our stances on hypersurveillance.

Yet you never insisted that we disable the house’s smart system, just ensured that we ran an older version, before the worst of the upgrades. I like to think you respected my late mother’s whimsy, or that you couldn’t bear the thought of silencing so many personalities. More likely, you recognized the convenience when migraines swallowed my vision in blackness or the cold bit my bones.

The hallway is lined with framed photos. Your track and field medals before you quit over a dispute. Evidence of your short-lived oil-painting lessons. We framed my poems, too, though I’ve instructed the frames to switch to the default views of nonthreatening vistas far from here. For all its follies, the house works in perfect sync, undivided and attentive. I glance at another photo frame, frozen on you wearing a Phrygian cap.

“Make it darker,” I say.

The Sunday after that Friday, I found you in the car.

In the house, I was sorting through your knickknacks, debating saving or erasing the data on your devices before they could be scraped, when a bang rattled the frames along the hall.

I would’ve assumed it was an auditory hallucination—I’d been getting those more frequently—but the floor flashed red with alarm, warping the space around my feet in pulsating whorls.

“Impact event recorded in the garage,” said the central system. “Alerting police.”

Thankfully, it didn’t. You’d disabled that function.

In the garage, I stepped over beaten-up plushies and obsolete almanacs, the detritus of our life together strewn over the unswept floor.

A hole smoked in one wall.

Nothing else appeared. I listened for slow footsteps, another crash, any other signs of danger. I heard a mechanical whir. A laser sight skimmed my eyes and rested on my forehead.

I grabbed a baseball bat you’d bought for a Halloween costume.

“Hello?” asked a familiar voice, from the driver’s seat.

“What the hell,” I said.

The red dot disappeared. I opened the car door and patted around, blindly grasping. At first, I didn’t know what I was touching. My palms pricked from the contact. I brought the thing to my face.

“Don’t put me so close,” the gun boomed, in your voice.

I dropped you. I ran.

You caught my eye in college when you called the professor a dumbfuck for not acknowledging the pivotal role of American consumption in Chinese mass production. You didn’t call him that to his face, but you said it loud and clear in the hall: dumbfuck. I tripped laughing.

“People are too comfortable with the status quo,” you explained, over watery coffee and soft churros. “That’s why we need to make them uncomfortable.”

“Not just wearing the designated counterculture colors, spamming Instagram, and begging to be seen.”

“Exactly.”

Back then, I cared. My brain hadn’t turned to sludge.

You knew so much about revolutionary politics—I’d only ever skimmed Wikipedia articles. You admired my revolutionary ancestors while hating your own, complaining about the American Revolution. Though you smiled at our classmates, on our third date, you leaned in to confide your disdain. Cappuccino socialists, you called them.

Meanwhile you’d go from door to door to collectives and progressive third places with a resume more impressive than the one you submitted to jobs, saying, “Put me to good use.”

At the anti-CoreCorp protest near the CoreCorp headquarters, I want to die. The means don’t matter, only retreating as far as possible. Mark and Elliot can bear witness. I don’t care. The crowd has an air closer to a party than a revolution. An automated cop glides along the perimeter, flashing a red-and-blue kawaii-style face above its jingling handcuffs and its taser compartment. A petite, frizzy-haired girl slings her arms around her suited boyfriend’s neck and whispers sweet nothings before they kiss, snapping a selfie. She looks like she’ll write about it later, in a think piece or memoir essay I’ll accidentally click on while avoiding sleep. A blonde, statuesque mother wipes the red mouth of her sticky toddler, who’s getting sprayed with a fine mist from a portable smart fan playing “Baby Shark.” Mark is trying to befriend a woman next to us, but he’s failing because her voice is muffled by a bandana and he’s speaking too loudly.

I do not belong here any more than you do.

My phone vibrates with an incoming message from your father: Everything ok?

The built-in assistant offers to read the message in my mother’s voice. I ignore it. Your father reaches out at least once a month, asking your friends what he can do for “the fight,” but we only send polite replies and invitations to birthday parties.

“Sometimes,” says a woman in a bandana, “I wonder, should we even be doing this? I know it’s important. But there’s another protest happening nearby. Sure, scraping is unethical, but nobody has died because of it.”

“As far as we know,” Mark mutters.

Pressure builds behind my eyeballs, radiates to my scalp. It’s too hot. The crowd is too large to see what’s happening, and it would be unwise to coordinate over social media. I want hope back. I want the delirium of thinking I’m doing the right thing. I want your laughter, your eye roll.

A man in front of us snaps a panoramic photo with his smartphone.

“Is your phone jailbroken?” Elliot asks, hovering anxiously over his shoulder.

The man’s brow furrows in genuine confusion or brewing hostility. “What does that mean?”

“I mean,” Elliot says, “is it going to be a problem for us?”

People start watching the argument and murmuring among themselves. A cluster of red-shirted protesters act like they’re ignoring us, but one of them mentions federal agitators or would-be looters looking to cause trouble. They can’t trust us.

The man laughs nervously. “I could lose my job over this,” he says. “I’m putting my life on the line here. I think I’m entitled to a few photos.”

The argument escalates to encompass more protesters. Mark shouts right next to my ear. A truck backfires. Something shatters. The resulting panic attack buys me an excuse to leave early, too-tight shoes lancing pain up my calves, chest constricting, tears blurring signs into illegibility.

Nobody tries to convince me to stay.

Unlike the unwieldy pistols of yesteryear, smart guns are modular. They’re built blocky or sleek, programmable with vintage sounds and flashy firing effects. I’d say they look like toys—but now toys look like real guns. Real guns tend to look like smartphones.

You look like an old-fashioned, early twenty-first-century gun. Classic. Rugged. The gun people still imagine when they think of you. But there’s no way you’re a vintage model; they’ve all been snapped up by collectors, or destroyed.

“Hi,” you say, gleaming in the sliver of sunlight from the garage door cracked ajar, your voice metallic and strained. “Are you done freaking out?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just wasn’t expecting … you.”

I’m not surprised that you figured out how to upload yourself, just that you actually did it.

“Well, what did you expect?” you demand. Your anger makes me recoil, and I have to stop myself from dropping you. “I’ll explain in the house. I need to make sure my sensors are working.”

I pick you up. Once we’re on the porch, it occurs to me that I didn’t have to listen to you.

“Lexi,” you sigh—mostly affection, some exasperation—and the front door swings open at your voice. I take you inside. I wonder if you can sense my trembling fingers or detect my heartbeat; if you can feel me the way I can feel you. Midway through the pristine self-cleaning kitchen, I realize I’m holding my breath, cramping my ribs.

“Welcome home,” I say.

“Don’t sound too happy to see me.”

“Is your safety on? I can’t tell. You have one of those, right?”

“Oh my God, Lexi.”

You are cold, and heavier than you look.

You do not go off.

I place you on the dining table. It correctly identifies that you are not food or a decoration, so it doesn’t offer unsolicited advice. Attuned to my mood, the lights revert to a soft yellow, meant to calm my nerves—my mother’s touch.

“Don’t let me face you,” you chide, as I ask the kitchen for a comforting drink. “I liked your face. I’d rather you keep it. Now.” I can imagine you folding your arms. “Why didn’t you bring me to the protest?”

Because I didn’t want to? “It never occurred to me.” I pause. “Wait. You know I went?”

“Smart gun. Duh. Everything is connected.” I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, based on LLM agents spreading misinformation on social media and incriminating footage disappearing from phones.

With your steady voice under the fairy lights we strung up last Christmas, my cocoa in hand, and the sound system warbling retro game soundtracks, it could just be another Saturday night. You talk me through what model you are (AT-A5 Smartgun v.13, classic build, “family edition”); your range and firepower (more than you’d think); what precautious I should take to keep myself safe and keep you functional.

The details blur into a dull ringing in my ears, a throb in my temples. You did this. On purpose.

“It’s easy,” you say. “Let the scanner read your thumbprint. All the features will unlock. Then, you can use me.”

I don’t like how that sounds from a tinny voice encased in metal; how you can take an old line between us and turn it truly dirty. The cocoa feels cold on my lips. I wonder when you applied my biometrics; if you waved the gun in my face while I slept off painkillers or cheap booze.

I check my phone. One message from your dad, forwarding a news story about a racist smart shower. None from our friends. Deep in my apps, an unfamiliar icon smiles up at me, the red of alarm or lifeblood. It’s an app connected to you.

“There are earmuffs in a red box in my room, under my bed,” you say. “They’re connected to me, so we can still talk when—”

“Why would I need to use you?” I ask. “Self-defense?”

“Something like that.”

“I don’t know.” I flex my fingers, rigid from clutching the mug too tightly. “We’ll see.”

Under the lights, you almost seem to shine. “We will.”

We met our friends while ladling watery minestrone at the soup kitchen. You and Mark had much in common: missing moms, artistic aspirations, an uncanny love for penguins. You laughed at his jokes. Elliot liked my poems, even the bad ones. For months, we had dinner every weekend at their analog apartment.

“Gun crime is up,” said Mark.

All of our outings consisted of casual activities interspersed with horrifying news, dark murmurs punctuated by full-bodied laughter.

“It’s only natural,” you said, “given the political climate.”

Elliot sighed. “That’s what happens when you model guns after video games and action movies, then waive license fees.”

Mark’s jaw clenched. “What’ll it take to finally ban the stupid things?”

The pause stretched taut across the table: them on one side, you and me on the other. Your ankle tensed against mine.

“Gun control laws disproportionately affect marginalized communities,” you said, through gritted teeth.

Mark frowned. “Would you apply that to a nuke?”

You retorted, “Would you apply that to a knife?”

You glowered at each other until it was time to eat. A gummed-up piece of chicken adobo stuck between my teeth. We drained our plastic kiddie cups of wine. We played Mario Kart in silence.

As you drove us home, you ranted about the “liberal elite” and their cushy view of politics. Violence or not, no good ever came of removing rights. Mark was an idiot. And a coward. Also, his art sucked. And, you concluded, sweet, agreeable Elliot was enabling him.

“Imagine living under a fascist government and giving up your weapons,” you scoffed. “You might as well put on the handcuffs yourself.”

“Me?” I repeated, confused.

You waved me off. “People in general.”

I let you rant because when you got into a mood, there was no snapping you out of it unless you spotted something you loved past the point of obsession and into pure devotion. And there were no elephant shrews or Katipunan members at hand; just a disabled dashcam, a pine air freshener ironically hung upside down, and me. And I let you rant because I thought you had a point. The rage was a cushion, a cozy of white noise; at worst, a solid state. You were my world and I was content to let you be.

I asked, “So, do you own a gun?”

“No,” you said.

“It will be safer next time,” you say, “if you bring me.”

I’ve just finished telling you about how a self-driving cop car ran over an eighteen-year-old courier working three jobs to pay for their mother’s meds. The cops claimed it was an accident—then, when footage showed the car reversing, they tried to pin the blame on the personality in charge, an old mechanic with a shoplifting record, who died of cardiac arrest from diabetes complications.

I wasn’t there, but you assume I was, because it’s the “right thing” to do. You haven’t interfaced with my phone or watch to check my activity.

Mark thinks the sheer backlash will put pressure on CoreCorp and the government for greater regulations, but you disagree: “It will only get worse. They think we’re a bunch of weak, killable ninnies.”

I don’t know who you include in we—us, our friends, or some nebulous collective. “If I’m there,” you continue, “they’ll think twice before bringing out the tear gas and stun batons, or worse.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why?” Irritably, you add, “Don’t you feel like you can’t take it anymore?”

Look, I understand what needs to be done, how the proverbial walls are closing in. I daresay my great-grandparents bled more than yours. It’s just that my bones feel like lead; have felt like lead since I learned language. I haven’t been at ease since I was ten. My blood fizzes and I am sincerely surprised that anyone who touches me doesn’t get burned.

I ask, “Why haven’t you been repossessed yet? Don’t they have you on record?”

“I’m under your name. You’re the one who will use me the way you’re meant to.”

I understand revolution, conceptually. I understand its necessity, its inevitability. I think if someone else planned it, I would take part. I would at least bring lemon slices and cheer. If only I didn’t ache within and without. If only leaving bed wasn’t a battle in itself.

The fridge hums, literally. The coffee machine dribbles sugar into the black coffee it spat out. A photo of you fizzles, though its image is static.

“Haven’t you studied how empires collapse?” you ask. “It’s time for the day of reckoning. I’m not asking you to go out in a blaze of glory, but you need to act before they do.”

I wonder if you’ve become violent because you've become a weapon. Maybe you always were … a weapon, that is. Not violent, of course. You weren’t violent. No way. For all the contrarian aggression and talk of uprising, you liked no-contact sports and narrative-heavy visual novels. You wouldn’t have hurt a fly.

Then again, a fly wouldn’t have hurt you.

Does technology change the brain, the conceptual heart, the soul?

If I was placed in a drone, I could go anywhere. I could fly with birds of prey. I could capture stunning aerial shots of great plains, rainforests, mountains. Installed in a gun, I could shoot anyone.

But I could do that as a human, too. And I don’t.

“Let’s go back to the garage,” you say.

There, you instruct me to retrieve a target board hidden behind a cabinet. I don’t know when you bought this, or how you managed to hide it, but then, you managed to hide yourself.

“Grip me with two hands,” you say. “Feet firmly planted, wide stance. Take a deep breath … ”

It’s like anything else you’ve taught me—from fishing to resetting the house’s grid myself, like you showed me that same week I taught you how to win at Mario Kart. But with just a twitch, a panicked moment, I could kill, or at least seriously hurt someone.

When I pull the trigger, I gasp, clenching from my jaw to my pelvis. Gone are the inconveniences of recoil, deafening bangs, general fiddliness. It’s so, so easy—as easy as breathing, as blinking, as ruffling your hair or saying “I love you.”

“It would be better to practice at a shooting range,” you say, “but they’d scan me. The home system won’t automatically report gunshots as long as I log them.”

“You did your research.”

“Yes. I want you to put me to good use.”

Afterwards, when I put you away and the central system warns me it’s close to my usual bedtime, I check my phone. No calls or messages besides hourly spam and the bathroom systems offering to teach me how to save on bills.

I take two aspirins and uninstall the news app from my phone. My finger hovers over your app before I move it to its own folder.

“Lexi,” trills the fridge, a vocal evolution developed in the absence of resets, “would you like me to order white bread and sprinkles, so the kitchen can whip up some bread like your mother used to make?”

“I can’t ingest the current variant of bread.” And it’s too expensive, but the system doesn’t need to know that.

“Oh, no! I hope the issue is resolved soon.”

The devices are a friendly, agreeable chorus. My watch assures me I have enough time to while away on TV. My bicycle notes that my physical activity has decreased, “but,” it concludes, “you’re getting rest, and ultimately, you know what’s best.”

“Poor thing,” croons the central system, as I order every door to lock. “You can order in. You can watch TV for several hours, according to your usage patterns. Is that what you’d like?”

Yes, yes, yes it is.

The curtains shut themselves. The bed compliments me on catching up on lost sleep. I burrow into the blankets monitoring my vitals to cross-reference with the thermostat, under the ceiling fan that knows my grandmother’s middle name. And I do not dream of you.

“I am ringing,” the phone informs me, sensing that I’ve left the bed. “I’ve been ringing for five minutes.”

Between the intermittent sirens and multitude of voices shouting from the next street over, I wasn’t in the mood to answer. I only stumbled out of the bedroom and found my way to the kitchen because the fridge has been sending alerts about flash sales to compensate for toxicity recalls, but refuses to report on the safety of its own contents. All this, it conveyed in my mother’s voice, scraped and reconstructed.

The house hasn’t been reset in weeks. You haven’t realized, or you’re ignoring it in favor of bigger battles for me to fight.

“It’s Mark, a number you’ve ignored fifteen times in the past year,” says the phone. “Would you like to ignore it again? Perhaps ask the coffee machine to make hot cocoa, and the sound system to play your cozy comfort playlist?”

“No,” I sigh, “put him through.”

“ … not answering,” Mark snaps on the other end, “doesn’t want anything to do with us, I told you.”

“I’m listening, Mark.” I stare at the microwave, half willing it to explode and put me out of my misery. “Anything to report?”

“Oh, hello, Lexi. I found the woman who makes my dishwasher so peppy. She was a librarian. Died suddenly last month, from mysterious circumstances. I’m reaching out to her family, to see if they want to talk to her.”

“That’s kind of you.” If I ignore the strain in his voice, it’s good news, nice and uncomplicated.

“Lexi.”

“Yes?”

“We … miss you. Are you doing okay?”

Detecting my heartbeat, my watch quips, Ouch! Crush alert! Though it’s programmed for maximum awareness, it fails to mention the noise in the street.

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” I ask.

“You live alone,” Elliott chimes in, as if I’ve somehow forgotten. “You don’t check in. Things are getting … worse. If there’s anything you need—”

I need someone, anyone to look into me and see that there’s a void yawning inside. I don’t need anything to fill it. I just need someone to see it and confirm it’s there, so I can stop moping or wasting time and money on distractions and just pick up the gun with purpose and intent.

“Nothing,” I say. “Thanks.”

I put you on the kitchen counter, over a blanket I failed to finish knitting for a women’s shelter, because I don’t want you to be alone in the dark; because I don’t want you to suffer the same fate as the plushies or almanacs; because I miss you. That doesn’t mean I want to talk to you.

I am eating the extra cottage cheese the fridge ordered to cheer me up; I am eating it straight out of the tub with a slightly dirty spork, because I don’t want to bother the dishwasher, who possesses a nervous disposition to rival mine. The radio is playing a sad playlist generated by keywords and my recent activity. But I can barely hear it over your voice.

“The pen is mightier than the sword,” you’re lecturing me, “but only because they’ve moved on to machine guns.”

“Actually, I haven’t been writing. I don’t want too much of myself on record. I don’t know where I’d end up.”

“That’s a shame.” For the first time in your gun-existence, you sound almost as regretful as the fridge informing me of shortages. “Regardless, you can’t hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” as the auto-tanks bear down on you and everyone you care about.”

“You do realize I don’t have a militia on call? I thought this was about self-defense.”

“For you and your community.”

“You want me to mobilize four to five depressed people who can barely do their laundry manually?”

“I want you to care. Like you used to.”

“Dinnertime!” says the fridge, in the same cadence as my mother and, if I read into it, the same breezy passive-aggression.

I relax.

“Do we have more chocolate?” I ask it. “And vodka?”

I can picture your gawping through the muzzle, laser sight bulging like an eye.

“Are you serious?”

“Your order will arrive tomorrow morning!” says the fridge. “If you like, I can arrange for priority delivery, for a reasonable extra fee.”

“You’re having groceries delivered?” Fury tightens your voice. “The fridge is doing it for you? The supermarket has your address? A chain supermarket? And the people who own it?”

I refuse to debate a gun. I turn to the fridge. “Tell me more about—”

Heat blooms around me. My ears ring. I can taste lead in the air, from your scent cartridge.

You fire again. The sink spouts water to the ceiling, grazing the stress-strobing lights, the bullet hitting appliances faster than I can register.

For a second, I’m just another fixture, dripping water and sputtering.

As frustrated as you are, you haven’t snapped and shot me. I’m not sure how to feel about that.

The fridge smolders, one door hanging off its hinge.

I grab you. “What did you do?!”

“What was necessary.”

Too many thoughts ricochet, mental bullets: I hate you. Could you have done that the whole time? Just ignored your safety and programming, and gone off by yourself, untouched, anywhere? The yogurt will go bad. I hate you. Milk will go bad, too. I miss you. If you could do that the whole time, could they? Every smart device? Ignore instructions and take initiative?

I am staring at the fridge who spoke with my mother’s voice. “My—She was—”

“They aren’t alive,” you insist.

“Neither are you!”

“I’ve never suggested otherwise,” you say coldly. “Real people matter more than your comfort. Real people who bleed and suffer and die. Real people you aren’t defending because you’re too chickenshit—”

I slam you onto the counter, daring you to fire another shot. You click. Nothing happens.

“Lexi, why aren’t you willing to do what needs to be done?”

“You made the greatest sacrifice, did you? You gave your all to the glorious revolution?”

Even at their dimmest, the lights are too bright. My skin burns under my still-sopping clothes, the combination dangerously electric, but not quite reaching my heart.

“You're such a fucking coward,” you say. “People like you killed me.”

You died on a Friday.

You died, and part of me died. My poetry died with you. My capacity for caring died with you.

You died because you shouted for attention from nobody in particular, and you put the gun to your head, and you, you, you pulled the trigger.

A spokesman for a spokesman is interrupted by boos and breaking glass before the feed cuts and the TV apologizes on its behalf. Overnight, seven factory workers disappeared. The bearer of bad news, the reporter, sports a black eye poorly concealed by makeup. He stutters around his sentences.

Watching from the kitchen, I pick olives out of the fridge’s debris. I don’t trust the robot vacuum to clean without recording, and I don’t trust you not to annihilate the vacuum.

You are waiting on the counter. You whir. I tuck you into my bag under a ratty sweater.

“Where are you taking me?” you ask. “It better be somewhere important.”

“You’ll like it.”

Emerging for the first time in weeks, I almost hiss at the sunlight. We walk past a medium-security zone into your old neighborhood.

Your father is reading the newspaper, as he does every morning, the whole morning. He’s too intelligent for conspiracies, but the news regularly infuriates him; the shadow of your rage, or its progenitor.

It’s the first time we’ve been alone together since you died.

He clears his throat. “Lexi, you know you’re enough, right?”

I mean to be strong, cool, disaffected, like you used to be. What comes out is: “It sure doesn’t feel like it.”

He knows better than to push; to crowd with are you sure? and phone numbers to tapped hotlines manned by bigoted bots.

At the end of a long hallway, I open the door and step into a world of action figures and teddy bears shelved against a faded light blue wall, a framed Les Mis poster above a shrine to Hatsune Miku.

You sneer, “This is a baby’s room.”

I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s true that there’s a juvenile element to the decoration; to what you chose to display yet left behind when you moved in with me. The Camus next to the Game Boy boxes. The Beanie Baby weasel sitting on No Exit like a dragon on its hoard. After your death, your father set up a shrine of his own, centering your graduation photo beside fresh flowers and your earliest artwork.

I pull out a pair of earmuffs and affix them on my head—the ones linked to you, in case you have anything to say, though I hope you don’t.

I hold you out at arm’s length, feet planted in a wide stance, like you taught me. See? I did listen.

I aim at your smiling photo.

I fire. I hit you square in the face. I fire again. The next shot hits the silver frame.

The next splits the glass panel of your trophy case.

“God,” you warble, “that’s good.”

I fire and fire until you’re empty. Until shards cover the plush carpet and there are fresh holes in the false wall. Until my palms ache, hot and moist.

Your father knocks. “Everything all right in there?”

“We’re fine.”

The door doesn’t open. No alarms blare. My hands are shaking; if you were more lucid, you would warn me.

“I just wanted to protect you,” you say.

“I figured.”

“I don’t know how you can forgive me.”

Maybe I can’t. Possibly it’s better that way, without room for hesitation or sentiment.

When I close the door, the lights don’t turn off by themselves, nor does the lock activate. I shuffle down the static hall. I say goodbye to your father. His face has paled, hands slightly shaking around crumpled papers, but if he hadn’t knocked, I would assume he hadn’t moved since I arrived, his mouth upturned, eyes still glued to some disastrous headline. Your eyes. He doesn’t ask about the bangs and crashes.

You remain firmly in my hands while similar sounds echo in the distance.

“Remember what I said,” your father calls.

I take the long way back, past a convoy of police cars and two tanks. A clerk with a ripped sleeve locks up a convenience store. The road is stained red from a chemical agent. You’re quiet, not from malfunction, more like a pooped-out puppy or a toddler asleep in the back of the car. You will need a silencer, a sight, a better safety. Less cartoony, I think. Something tactile.

A siren shrieks. Then, several in tandem. It triggers a sympathetic chain of children wailing, though they’re hauled away by their worried mothers, to be shushed and hidden behind triple-bolted doors singing lullabies to cover up the noise. Traces of gasoline and loose sewage assault my nostrils. Uniformed men roam in a tight, loud pack, indistinguishable from drunkards save for their automated cops rumbling in anticipation as their screens blink in grotesque smiles. Across the street, two groups approach each other, grim-faced, fists closed around unknown objects.

I keep you close, and I carry you all the way home.

Editor: Austin Dewar

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors