‘You think she’s really in there?’
‘Nah. No.’
Felicity has her arms folded over the railing, chin pressed down so she can peer at the tannin river below. It’s hard to imagine jumping from there now, on a morning so cold.

My job is simple. I place the eyeballs in the skull, I screw them in the skull, then I insert the tear ducts to hide the screws. This is very simple. Although it took some getting accustomed to. That is, at first I was too slow because, as my manager told me, I was taking it all too seriously, taking the world on my shoulders and being a sook.

It will take more than a shrieking Geiger counter to deter him. Only once every three months, six hours at most. That’s all they give him. And she is out there. All day, all night, waiting for him.

She looked under the fig tree where he slept in summer, but he wasn’t there either. Then she decided he must be under the house, if not dead then too sick to come out. The small doorway hung open. It had hung open for thirty-five years, since her husband’s last attempt to repair it.

After, the silence is post-apocalyptic. I picture a world beyond human habitation, black canals, trash floes. I hear the downstairs door unlock, the hum of Ibu’s vacuum. It must be two already. I must be alive, after all, in a place of locks and electricity.