“Go on, make a face like you’re dead,”

Said

HANNAH

The children tried to conjure up dead looks. Dull eyes staring at the ground. Slumped shoulders. For the sake of art. Hannah had decided to start a YouTube career. Maybe she’d turn out to be a born influencer. She was always searching herself for some sort of talent. Her channel was called: Life in the Cellar. Mostly she shot the others crawling around downtrodden locations—a fashion show with clothes from the Salvation Army, interviews with the homeless.

“How did you end up in this situation?”

“Well, I got sick.”

“Okay, got it, thanks a lot. Have a nice life.”

The earnest social reporting was not very successful. Not even a hundred views. There were far more clicks when Hannah convinced boys to glue their eyelids with superglue, get SpongeBob tattoos on their foreheads, or crash full speed into a wall on a stolen bicycle.

On the day they were all supposed to make dead faces, she recorded a makeup tutorial. Karen, Peter, and Don looked despondent, quasi hopeless, the light of a crummy afternoon seeped into the factory. Hannah made up the dead-looking children and filmed it.

Hannah looked like one those manga characters, the children who traipse around with bodies like Barbie dolls. Her hair now platinum blonde and one centimeter long, coupled with her odd, gangly body,

Just look at them,

Thought

KAREN

“A totally new world order is nearly upon us,” said Hannah into the camera, and Karen found herself in a really bad mood. If cartoon figures were going to explain the world now, she might as well just go home. “What do you mean,” asked Karen. “What new world order? You talking about the role of the Vatican? It’s said in the Book of Revelations that the Holy Roman Empire will rise again during the end-times. An orchestrated apocalypse in which the Catholics are left as the new world power, now that’s an idea. Speaking of which, did you guys know that there are now drones that are smaller than the palm of your hand? They can drop a small amount of explosives right on the forehead of the target and take them out.”

“Oh man, that’s just a fairytale,”

Said Don, and

“Um, no,” whispered

MI5 PIET

Though probably

KAREN

Was

Just in a bad mood that afternoon. She was increasingly moody of late, was nervous and anxious and dispirited and enraged, and all of those things alternating within minutes, and Karen knew what that meant. It was starting. “I have to go,” she said, because she couldn’t stand the others or herself, and went home. Well, that is, she went to where she lived. To the tower blocks. With tiny balconies where because of the constant rain, of course, nobody ever sat or grilled—what would they grill anyway, their own legs?