If Found, Return to Hell

by Em X. Liu

and maybe life is just a toss-up between the agonies of routine and the agonies of happenstance.

Maybe it all blurs together, eventually.

What happens after that, well. That’s for future-you to decide, and now-you to shove promptly out of your mind.

“You look great,” you say, hearing the weariness drip out of your own voice like wringing a particularly gross wet rag.

The living and the dead are all plagued by the same thing these days. Bureaucracy, and the banality of stupid men.