“Knock knock,” Eleanor cracked her brother’s bedroom door open and set an avalanche of tin cans rolling across the weathered hardwood floor. “Liam?”

She stepped into the dimness and observed the pyramidal stacks of empty cans arranged around the room’s perimeter. Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup, Del Monte Quality Gold & White Corn, Bush’s Best Original Baked Beans. The Green Giant looked up triumphantly from between her socked feet.

Liam sat on the dusty rug in the center of the room, staring deeply into the eyes of Worcestershire, one of the three senior greyhounds that their parents had adopted right before their deaths. Worcestershire stared back, still as a portrait. Liam picked at a zit on his chin.

“Bud, can you do me a favor and take some of these cans out to the recycling today? I’m worried about bugs.” Eleanor pushed some spilled cans around with her foot before, realizing that she had no direction in which to shove them, she let them lay.

She really was worried about bugs, perpetually. But if she was honest—which she was trying to be—the cans were spotlessly clean. She should know: she watched Liam scrubbing them for hours at a time every evening, meticulously removing every fleck of foodstuff while preserving the integrity of the labels.

The cult—of which Liam had been a dedicated member until its forced dissolution at the hands of the state six months ago—forbade members from eating anything that had not been industrially preserved. The stated logic of that stricture was too slippery to stay anchored in Eleanor’s memory. She assumed the actual reason was that food in tin cans was inexpensive to buy and easy to steal from the food donation bins at the grocery store. Even though the group had amassed several members’ worth of life savings, including Liam’s, in their decade of operations, money and its lack seemed a perpetual thorn in their side. It was the illicit getting of money that had taken them down, in the end.

The tin cans were a conduit to the spirit world, according to the cult’s dogma, which explained the intricate cleaning ritual and the stockpiling. Eleanor did not know why they left the labels on, and she had given up asking her brother to explain his actions after the seventh or eighth lecture about the similarities between sound waves and something they called postmortem radiation, or PMR.

“Mom says the exterminator came last week,” Liam said, without breaking eye contact with Worcestershire, through whose gaunt frame he was chatting with their dead parents.

“I told you that,” Eleanor reminded him. “Mom is dead.”

Liam’s therapist had advised her to kindly but firmly reassert the truth when his grip on reality frayed. She had not yet noticed a moment in which his grip on reality appeared to be anything but frayed, so the constant declarations of minor truths had turned into a kind of meditation for her. The doctor says you are malnourished. Our parents left us the house. There is no bleach in the mashed potatoes.

Liam had missed the deaths, of course, ensconced as he was on the cult’s compound, cut off from communication with anyone whose heart still beat in their chest. Eleanor had been the one to take them to their appointments; to sort their identical little pills into their identical little pill boxes; to check twice a day to make sure they swallowed everything they were supposed to; to move them into hospice; to—finally—make the arrangements. One after the other, Dad and then Mom, in such quick succession that they could hold both funerals at once. 

What the coupled death had cost in grief it made up for in expediency. Better to suffer it all at once, Eleanor had told herself throughout the entire eighteenth month ordeal: a mantra to affirm the trade she was offering. Unbearable torment now, untroubled comfort later. 

As of yet, the torment of now continued. Not a week after the tandem funeral, Liam’s cult had been raided and a couple of sheriffs had dropped him off at the doorstep of her studio apartment in town: thin as a broomstick, almost translucent, penniless, her responsibility, and still—as far as she could tell—completely brainwashed. With no room for him at her place, she had ghosted the realtor she’d been working with to list the house and moved them both into the spindly old Victorian full of spindly old dogs. 

She had, once again, within the space of forty-eight hours, completely rearranged her life to care for a family member—her last one, as it turned out. Her little brother had said maybe ten sentences that weren’t riddled with cultic jargon or claims of insight gleaned from the dead.

Why, she wanted to ask him, did you have to find out they were dead from me? If you can speak with the dead, shouldn’t they have told you themselves? But she didn’t ask him. Instead, she cooked him uncanned meals he didn’t eat, reminded him every once in a while to change his clothing, and watched him stare into the eyes of Worcestershire, Hoisin, and Aioli.

“Listen,” she said, pulling aside one of the blackout curtains to let in the slightly brighter light from the overcast sky. The dust motes shimmered in the air. “There was a fire at my office.” Kindly but firmly reassert the truth. “Actually, it was a bomb—a bomb went off at the office. It started a fire. Among other things.” Liam’s gaze did not shift from Worcestershire’s. “They asked us to work from home for a few days while they get things sorted out. So I’ll be here.” No response. “I’ll try to stay out of your hair.” Nothing. 

“Do you want food?” She asked Worcestershire. That got a reaction, at least. The dog turned his pinpoint face and stared at her longingly with cataract clouded eyes. “Let’s go.” She patted her leg and walked out of the room. The dog’s nails clicked on the floor behind her. 

The tall, skinny house had a steep, rickety stairway shoved onto its western side like an afterthought. Each step was a slightly different width and about eighteen inches high. There was a slender landing every five or six stairs on which you had to turn around 180 degrees to continue your journey to one of the seven narrow floors. Navigating the staircase required extreme concentration, even after spending an entire childhood and much of an early adulthood traversing it multiple times a day. 

Eleanor shook the dog food bag loud enough that the kibble would echo throughout the drafty rooms. Worcestershire followed her into the kitchen, and she heard the other dogs skittering toward her from above and below. By the time she had filled each bowl, they were lined up before her, poised and watching like a set of geriatric gargoyles.

“Go ahead,” she told them. Were they more hesitant to eat than usual? Liam had been advocating for a switch to Pedigree wet food, which came in cans and was twice as expensive per calorie as the discount kibble she had been buying for the past year. She’d checked. Perhaps he had convinced the dogs that she was poisoning them, just like she was poisoning herself by insisting on eating fresh and diversely-packaged ingredients.

She glanced at the oven. Through the decades of oil spatter encrusted on the clockface, she read that the time was 8:58. In two minutes, she would need to log on to her Professional Collaboration Platform so that the little dot next to her name and headshot would turn green and the rest of the people at her company could reasonably assume that she was working. 

While the dogs crunched away with their pointed little teeth, Eleanor cleared yesterday’s dishes from the drying rack. Liam had already transported his polished cans to his room sometime in the night.

She picked up the CutCo knife. It was the only thing that she had stolen after the split with her last serious boyfriend. He had been involved in a knife-centric multilevel marketing scheme and ended up with a massive collection of expensive cutlery that, as far as she knew, he was still moving around with him from one cheap rental to the next. The knife was perfect for every application in Eleanor’s modest cooking repertoire: not too big, not too small, a delicate serration, extremely sharp.

Today, on the side of the blade that had been face down on the drying rack, there sat an American cockroach the size of Eleanor’s thumb. She released a throat-tearing shriek and dropped the knife. It landed point-down, neatly piercing the knit wool of her sock and the delicate webbing between her big and second toes. She did not see where the roach landed.

Eleanor groaned from the bottom of her diaphragm as the pain and panic slowly registered through her body. The dogs pinned their ears back and glared as they continued eating. Liam did not respond.

“Okay-okay-okay-okay-okay,” she modulated aloud. “Okay-okay-okay-get it out-okay.”

Without looking, she grabbed the handle of the knife and yanked the blade free of her skin and her sock as a nasally whine leaked through her teeth. Fire seared across the top of her foot into her shin and locked her knees. The sock felt wet and heavy with her blood.

She threw the knife into the sink, scaring another cockroach out of the drain, and called out for Liam, who, again, did not respond.

“Okay-okay-okay-okay-okay.” She started moving toward the staircase with the half-formed idea that she needed to make it to the bathroom, where there must be something that would help to remediate this situation. The dogs, still eating, were between her and the landing. They did not move when she approached them dragging her bloody foot behind her like a dead branch. She hurdled their wispy frames and briefly put all of her weight onto the open wound.

At the staircase, she sat down and lifted herself backwards onto each step. She progressed slowly up to the bedroom—so recently her parents’—in which she was now sleeping and working. Its most luxurious feature was the ensuite bathroom into which Liam was not allowed.

All of the suffering now, she thought to herself. Just get it all out of the way. A trail of crimson droplets followed her up the stairs.

In the bathroom, she sat on the matted shag toilet cover and opened the cabinet underneath the sink. Among the dozens of nearly-empty containers of cleaning chemicals and medications, Eleanor found a finger of isopropyl alcohol and a bottle of Ibuprofen that had been expired for eighteen years. She swallowed four of the Ibuprofen with water from the tap and peeled the bloody sock off of her foot. She felt each fiber of wool as they came unstuck from the puncture, plucking her nerves like harpstrings.

There was too much blood to see the wound clearly. She shuffled over to sit on the edge of the bathtub, trying and failing to keep the blood from dripping onto the faded teal rug that her mother had bought from TJ Maxx over ten years ago and never, not even once, washed.

Is the pink-orange film that accumulates on bathroom surfaces mildew? Or is it mold? Something else? Should she make an effort to keep it out of her wound? Is it unhealthy to breathe? Is it what killed her parents?

The doctors were ultimately of little use in diagnosing her parents’ terminal illness. On the charts, they wrote “unidentified environmental toxin.” Because Mom and Dad were pretty much always together, and because the illness colonized each of their bodies at a similar rate, there hadn’t been a way to eliminate any of the environments they spent their time in as the source of the blight. They’d spent most of their time in the house, anyway.

Eleanor turned on the tub faucet, held her breath, and stuck her foot under the scalding stream. The sting was not as bad as she had expected. As the water sluiced the blood down the drain, it revealed the neat slit between her toes. She was briefly entranced by the rare sight of the underside of her flesh. With each pulse of her heart, the fresh pink cells released a surge of crimson. 

Every few seconds, she shut off the water to see if the bleeding had stopped, and she turned it on again when she saw that it had not. The part of her that was trying to be honest knew that this was a situation that called for stitches, but the idea of a needle working through the tender skin between her toes made her vision cloud over. Instead, she shut off the water, emptied the last of the rubbing alcohol into the wound, fought for consciousness through the agony that ripped up her leg, crammed as much toilet paper as she could between her toes, and slid her foot into a dirty sock she found hanging on the edge of her laundry hamper.

She stood up. She fainted.

Every other time she’d passed out, it had been in a semi-public space. Strangers in such places were always happy to shake her until she came around and hover concernedly until she got up and walked away to find a candy bar. This time, she woke to Hoisin’s wet tongue rooting around in her open mouth.

She jerked upright and found herself on the sticky tile floor, head throbbing. Hoisin lapped at the blood seeping through the sock. 

“Stop it,” she ordered the dog. She did not stop.

The floor was still rolling; the ridge between her eyebrows buzzed. She pulled her foot away from Hoisin and swapped the soiled sock for another one from deeper in the hamper. 

Her thumb brushed against the bristles growing in around her unshaven ankles. With her head propped against her knee, she unearthed a pair of tweezers from the cabinet and began plucking each leg hair, one by one, at the base. Every gelatinous, seed-like follicle that she extracted from her epidermis spread a layer of cotton over the static in her mind. Hoisin licked her lips.

Aioli clicked into the bathroom and glared at them. With the voice of Eleanor’s mother, she asked, “aren’t you supposed to be working?”

Eleanor stared at the dog, who seemed to be waiting for an answer. Her mouth hadn’t moved. Certainly that was a hallucination. She’d lost a lot of blood. She’d hit her head when she passed out. She was unwell.

But she was supposed to be working.

She crawled out of the bathroom to her desk chair and signed onto the Professional Collaboration Platform at 9:19. At 9:03, her boss had direct-messaged her to ask her to copy a few numbers from one spreadsheet into a different spreadsheet so that he could finish writing the monthly report. She clicked on the thumbs-up icon—had he figured out how to see the time stamps on those?—and obediently reproduced the information so that it could be reproduced somewhere else.

The light from the screen scrambled Eleanor’s internal processing. She found her way to the messages in the General channel.

(8:59am) R. A.: happy thursday everyone! so sorry to hear about the building 😞 but grateful that no one here was injured ❤️

(9:00am) A. P.: 💯

it really is a miracle that no one was hurt. all gratitude to first responders–they got the fire out in just a few hours!!! 🙏🙏🙏

At 9:02, Eleanor’s boss had shared a link to a story from the local news station featuring video of the burning building and speculation that the attack was orchestrated by a local fundamentalist group that objected to their company’s business model. Each post was peppered with a few dozen tasteful reaction icons. Eleanor added a green heart below A. P.’s message. She couldn’t recall who those initials belonged to, and the headshot rendered on her screen as an indiscernible caucasian smudge.

When she’d taken this job, she had been certain that it would be a phase that ultimately got shortened to a filler sentence in the longer narrative of her life. Oh, yes, I worked there for a spell before I . . . But somehow, between the loans and her parents and the knife salesman, nothing had come along to minimize her corporate servitude, and she’d been here for seven years. Well, she wasn’t often reciting the narrative of her life. 

The Professional Collaboration Platform interface was framed by targeted advertisements that assaulted Eleanor’s pulsing eyes. Since Liam had returned, she’d been bombarded with missives from canned food purveyors, each claiming to be fresher and cheaper and more BPA-free than the last. Last month, when inserting her menstrual cup had been uncharacteristically excruciating, she’d asked a search engine about ovarian cysts, and since then she’d been seeing ads for those underwear that absorb your period blood. Today, an unfamiliar orange and black rectangle flashed at her to announce that Halloween Express was hiring for the season.

Was it October already? A glance at the top corner of her screen confirmed that today was, in fact, Halloween. The year had really gotten away from her.

But why would Halloween Express still be hiring if today was Halloween? She guessed all of the synthetic gore needed to be sorted back into whatever warehouse it lived in for the other eleven months of the year. Maybe Liam could manage that for a few days.

Eleanor abandoned her halfhearted slog through email and spreadsheets and set her monitor to stay awake to keep the dot next to her headshot green. She embarked to encourage her brother to apply for a job.

She collapsed to the floor when she transferred her weight onto her forgotten injury. The impact sent a startled Worcestershire scampering from the doorway. Sprawled on the threadbare rug, she reflected that the floor was surprisingly comfortable.

She woke to the sound of knuckles rapping against her door. Liam’s skeletal figure loomed in the entranceway, staring down at her.

“Dad said you wanted to see me?” Liam gestured at Worcestershire, seated and docile at his side.

“Dad is dead,” she asserted mechanically. From her perspective on the floor, Eleanor noticed a pyramid of six empty cans of Goya Garbanzo Beans arranged underneath her desk.

“Did you put those there?” she asked Liam, pointing. He nodded, remorseless. He was not supposed to come into her room.

“I can show you how to tap into their PMR, if you’re ready,” he offered. “Your channels are very open.”

“No, thank you.” Eleanor pushed herself to a seated position. Why was she on the floor? The notifications from the Professional Collaboration Platform clicked incessantly from the speaker on her desk. 

Liam shrugged and turned to go.

“Wait.” She sat up and pointed at the garish orange flashing on her screen. “Halloween Express is hiring.”

“May I enter?” Eleanor nodded. Where had this courtesy been when he’d installed the chickpea pyramid?

Liam shuffled to the computer, Worcestershire at his heels. He stroked his unkempt beard as he stared at the screen.

Abruptly, he leaned over the back of her desk chair and grasped the mouse with the tips of his spidery fingers. He clicked twice, closed the window, and stalked out of the room without a word.

“Did you apply?” Eleanor called after him, still on the floor.

“He did,” her father said from behind Worchestershire’s milky eyes. Eleanor stared at the dog.

“I think I’m dehydrated,” she said aloud, to no one. Her tongue was a dry loofah in her mouth, two sizes too big.

“You are,” her father agreed.

Eleanor gave the dog a wide berth as she crawled out of the room toward the staircase, afraid to test herself again by standing. She lowered herself down the stairs to the kitchen under the watchful gaze of the wispy pack of greyhounds.

“This is a really big step,” her mother was saying within one of the dogs. “That’s the first engagement he’s had with the real world since he left that cult.”

He didn’t leave, Eleanor thought, reflexively. He was involuntarily extracted.

“Either way, he got out,” her father’s voice retorted. “And now he’s taking steps to rebuild. We couldn’t be more proud.”

Eleanor slowly pulled herself up to the kitchen sink and drank from the faucet. A cockroach peeked at her from inside the drain. She flushed it down and set a chipped plate over the opening.

“We do have glasses, dear,” her mother chided. Hoisin blinked up at her reproachfully.

“Please stop talking,” she said toward the dogs.

“I’m just so happy for Liam. I wasn’t sure this day would come,” her father ignored her, as he had in life.

Was it grotesque for Eleanor to envy her brainwashed brother in that moment? She didn’t think she yearned for the approval of the dogs, but wouldn’t it be soothing to submit an online application for a temporary menial job and have it counted an accomplishment? Wasn’t it easier to grow when you were starting over from nothing?

The grimy oven clock read quarter-after noon. How long had she been lying on the floor upstairs?

She picked at the dry skin around her fingernails and rehearsed the lies she would type to her boss if he had asked her for something while she’d been away from the Platform. Whoops, had my notifications off! Or maybe, Sorry about that, I was on a call with . . . 

Or—the tendrils of despair nipping at her heels sensed their opportunity. She could have a breakdown. No one could fault her, if she laid it all out for them. Maybe that would be the more honest thing to do. Maybe her company offered a special kind of leave for—

“Eleanor,” her father snapped. “Stop brooding. There’s someone at the door.” Aioli whined.

“I think we still have some candy in the pantry,” her mother added, via Hoisin.

Yes, Eleanor could definitely have a breakdown. It would be a relief.

The doorbell rang. All three dogs skittered across the hardwood toward the front door.

“Grab the candy, Ellie!” her mother called. “It’s a trick-or-treater!”

They never got trick-or-treaters. The house looked abandoned from the outside; and besides, there had never been children in this neighborhood, not even when she and Liam were growing up. It wasn’t that kind of place. And anyway, trick-or-treating is an evening activity, and it was only—

The clock on the oven flashed 5:16. The entire day had slipped away.

How in the—? Eleanor saw everything through a hazy sepia film. Her stomach contracted in a pang of hunger. She could think of nothing but water.

She leaned back over the sink and drank for what felt like hours. Slaked, she caught a cloying whiff of sweet potatoes in syrup. Beside her on the counter sat an open can of Bruce’s Yams. It was a favorite of Liam’s. The scent made her gag. She felt with certainty that if she didn’t eat something immediately she would lose consciousness again.

In deference to the sharp rim of the can, she tipped the contents into her mouth and let a few slimy lumps slide down her larynx. The syrup congealed into a thick paste on her tongue.

The dogs whimpered in the front hallway. Three sharp taps echoed from the other side of the wooden door and sent a pulse of ice through her veins.

“Liam?” she called. No answer. She tried to calm her racing heart. Why was her body so afraid of the knocking at the door? 

She opened the pantry and extracted the bag of PartySweet’s Buttermints, held closed with a flesh-toned rubber band. She hobbled toward the door, using the stained floral wallpaper to stay upright. 

“Back up,” she hissed to the dogs. She unbolted the door and peered out. An unsmiling blonde boy of eight or nine stood staring up at her with wide, ice-blue eyes. He held a navy pillowcase and wore the uniform of the United States Postal Service.

“Hello?” Eleanor asked, disoriented. Was this child delivering a package?

“Trick or treat!” the boy sang. Eleanor removed the rubber band from the bag of buttermints and scanned it for an expiration date. She didn’t find one.

“Where are your parents?” she asked as she dropped a handful of loose candies into the empty sack. The street outside was dark and deserted. The lone halogen streetlight cast the boy in an eerie silhouette and refracted through his almost white hair, shaven at the sides and coiffed at the top. Why didn’t white people realize that those haircuts made them look like Nazis? Hadn’t they seen the pictures?

“Where are your parents?” the boy asked, belligerent. The dogs were trying to push their pointed snouts around Eleanor’s legs to greet the visitor.

“They’re dead,” she answered with reflexive honesty. The boy discharged a high-pitched cackle.

“Happy Halloween!” he squealed as he scampered down the uneven steps. A large figure emerged from the shadows and laid a hand on his back as they disappeared around the corner, where Eleanor knew there was nothing but industrial wasteland to greet them.

As she wrestled the dogs out of the doorway, her good foot slipped across a scattered pile of papers. Her mother had had a phobia of the mail; she refused to acknowledge the existence of the postal carrier, and she would let envelopes pile up inside the slot until the front door was jammed. Every time Eleanor came to visit, she would gather the detritus and sort it into neat piles of bills to be paid, correspondence to be answered, and junk to be recycled. 

Now that it was her mail, she understood the aversion. After moving in, she’d spent untold hours contacting each company that sent them unsolicited mail with a template email requesting them to desist. The effort was moderately successful, which meant that the chaos below her feet was now composed primarily of her parents’ unpaid medical bills. At the top of the pile, she noticed one of the envelopes bordered in red. Boldface type announced, “URGENT: Home Inspection Results—Immediate Action Required.” She vaguely remembered the realtor she’d ghosted recommending an inspection before putting the house on the market.

Back in the kitchen, Liam was eating the rest of the can of sweet potatoes. The dogs ringed him in adoration.

“Did you feed them?” Eleanor asked. He shook his head no. They looked at her expectantly.

Her heartbeat pounded between her toes. She sighed and forced herself through the feeding routine, caching the rest of her strength to fill each bowl in turn. The dogs crunched contentedly as she surveyed the empty refrigerator for human food. Finding nothing, she sat across from Liam with a can of Dakota’s Pride Black Beans.

“Say what you will about your brother,” her mother said once the dogs had finished eating, “but at least he has a spiritual life. He’s open to new experiences that he doesn’t completely understand. That’s something to be admired.”

The grainy broth tasted like can. As Eleanor spooned the last of the shiny black nodules into her mouth, a vision of her life unfurled before her. The days would pass in this half-waking state of waiting; for Liam to go back to normal, for the dogs to die, for the house to sell. She would plug the time gaps with emails about meetings about projects about problems that had nothing to do with her and spend her energy making it look like she was working enough to justify the salary and health insurance that failed to cover the bills accumulating in the foyer. The invisible pestilence that had taken her parents would seep into her and her brother, and they would rattle around this drafty old house with the dogs until some merciful blow snuffed them all out.

“You’ll have to resign, hun,” her father said. Worcestershire stared at her, knowingly.

Eleanor couldn’t see how resigning would fix anything, but it was suddenly the only thing she could think about. When she hoisted herself back up the torturous stairs to her desk, she saw that her boss had left her a few unanswered messages, concluding with a polite request to videochat tomorrow.

If she were going to be fired anyway, she might as well beat them to the punch. She stayed awake deep into the night trying to draft the letter that would sever her from the company. She typed empty words about feeling gratitude for opportunities and pursuing growth elsewhere, but the dull lies hollowed her out. Kindly but firmly reassert the truth. She could articulate nothing more honest than, I do not feel like a real person anymore. 

It was possible, she knew, that this brash decision would cut her off from the only access she had to the world outside this house; that her bank account would run dry and the infection spreading up her leg would require a lengthy and expensive stay in the hospital; that whatever came next would be somehow worse than the now she was already enduring. 

“Go ahead, dear,” her mother said as the trio of greyhounds skulked into her room. “You took care of us. We’ll take care of you.”