Dune walked around the model until she was facing her mother and auntie, only then did they seem to see her. She said something to them, asked them how they were or what they were doing. They looked at each other, twins in motion, and then both started to answer her, but as they spoke, threaded needles appeared near their mouths and pierced, simultaneously, their lower lips. They didn’t pause as blood dribbled down their chins, both speaking incomprehensibly, while the needles threaded their mouths closed, right to left. Soon, their lips couldn’t move, the thread pulled tight. The women kept making sounds behind their sewn-up mouths and Dune turned to find scissors on the shelf, but there were none. Their mouths were wounds healing smooth. Her search got desperate, emptying the various bins and cups, rifling through drawers.

She woke up still searching.

Before she fell back to sleep, she made a note in her phone. “Cut through silence and lies.”

Dune’s grief came in the form of anger at herself. She had taken so much time for granted. She had wasted hours and hours of quality time with people that she could never see again. So often she had let her mother’s words wash over her, not asking questions, not allowing her mother to have honest conversations with her. She had gotten stuck in the prescribed dynamics of any daughter in her teens with a mother who confused love and control. Dune had thought she had time.

It’s not that she didn’t believe in death, it’s that she didn’t properly feel it. She didn’t understand what happened afterwards, for the people who lived. She’d grown up dabbling on the edge of systemic faith debates that focused on what happened for those who died. They went to heaven, they became nothing, they became everything. Debating that which could not be known didn’t matter much to Dune, so she had spent nearly no time worshipping. And she had spent no time exploring the challenge before her now: how was she supposed to survive? And how was she supposed to forgive herself for surviving?

This had been a problem before the syndrome ever came along. She’d had friends get sick, friends in accidents, friends overdose, friends die. Each time, she thought she would have more time with them. She thought they would live forever, or at least the forever of her life. But over and over again, each year since she was 13 years old, someone significant in her life had crossed over, often more than one person.

Some of that was just living in Detroit. It was a hard place to live, it was a hard place to make it through the winter.