Despite the horror of it all, I sat blinking and turning my head, attempting to wrest the prior vision back into existence. I clambered onto my feet and like a shimmering heat mirage on an endless highway, Mercy transformed into Kathleen Blanchet’s corpse and the jacket was not a jacket but an anti-heart, one that strained to inflate and relaxed into its deflate, and fucking hell the face’s expression altered slightly (an arched brow, a narrowing of the eyelids) to communicate that I had its attention. Its lips writhed with a speed that was so unremittingly awful, involuntary whimpers, moans, and glottal chokes bubbled from my throat.

With the modest shortest-term goal of leaning against the wall, I reeled to my right, and as I did so I kicked Mercy’s shoulder bag, clanking it off the baseboard heater. Simultaneous to my movement, the TV room darkened, though not entirely, as a wispy cloud must’ve tissue-papered in front of the moon. In this darker dark, Mercy was not Kathleen but looked like a younger version of herself, a teenager like me, and perhaps this was the singular lie of the light that evening, or maybe it was a distant truth I wasn’t ready to confront. Either or any of the ways, I decided two things: I would wait for the cloud to pass, and I needed proof (that single inviolable, irrefutable, elusive syllable); Mercy’s version of proof.

I bent and rooted through her bag and pulled out her camera. That she hadn’t woken yet given my floor crater, heater clang, bag rifling, and various exclamations was, I grant you, improbable, narratively speaking. Though, given my back was killing me and my headache throbbed like a mini DJ was inside my gray matter thrumming the not-so-soothing industrial stylings of Ministry, maybe her not yet waking was very much purposeful.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?????

Regardless, I knew I would only get one shot, so I waited and watched with the camera held up to my face. Through the square viewfinder, the room brightened and dimmed as moonlight waves crashed and receded, but the horrific vision did not return and all the pieces I thought fit together no longer matched, but then I remembered the photo of the woman we buried and its hovering, green maybe-it-wasn’t-a-thumbprint blob, and how maybe the idea was to take a picture when nothing obvious was there or happening, and of course, that was how the inexplicable worked, like it had rules to follow too. With no plan beyond applying pressure with my digit, I pressed the shutter button.