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The Body Collectors

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The machine got all the credit, but the true genius of Agora was this: the logistics.

Jose rubbed the cold from his hands, cupping them and breathing hard into his palms. It smelled like cigarette smoke. I could really use another one. He thought, but they weren’t allowed on the job. He pulled the device from his pocket, tugging it roughly past the folds of the fabric. It was utilitarian, wrapped in thick industrial plastic with a cheap screen that didn’t work with gloves on. He dragged his finger heavily across it, scrolling to frame the building in front of him. West Village, Bank Street. He sat down and listened to the truck engine coughing. He coughed alongside of it, his clouded breath and the exhaust fumes intermingling like little storm clouds. The rear bumper felt cold against the small of his back. He sighed, looking outward, trying to put his mind as far from his grim task as he could manage while there was still time left for that. There was a quarter inch of snow on the ground. The city was quiet and dark. Street lights and windows glowed with eager anticipation. It should have been beautiful. His watch beeped. Midnight. Here we go.

He stared down at the monochrome outline of the houses before him, each labeled with a number. It was not their street number, it was the count of the bodies that would be expected inside. Jose waited, cold hands fingering a colder thermos, taking a sip of cheap coffee. Then, on the screen, lights flickered to life: green and amber and a few, distressingly, that were red. They looked like Christmas lights. They were the only festive seeming thing in sight, no one had bothered to decorate this year.

Two houses up from where they waited, the lights and number matched first: three. Three people for a house that big? Jose thought. He pressed two fingers against his lips and whistled loudly—a pitched shriek into the silent dark. His team turned to look, there were four of them on his truck: Manny, Mateo, Tito, and Tess. He pointed at the door, already on the move. Manny doused a poorly hidden cigarette against a streetlight. Jose glared at him. “What?” he asked. “It’s not like any of them are going to notice.” Jose held his glare. Manny held up both hands, “Alright, alright. I’m sorry.”

“It’s locked!” Tito said from the doorway.

“Already? you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Manny yelled back. “It’s not like they’re hard fucking rules.”

“Cállate,” Jose whispered, his frustration bringing out the Spanish he’d long been conditioned to hide in the hopes it might improve his station. Manny was right though, they were simple rules. Lights on, stove off, door unlocked. “There are still people who haven’t gone in. Do you really want their last memory of home to be your ugly bleating?” He shoved a bag into Manny’s hands. “Go pick the lock.”

Manny looked hurt. “I have a pretty voice . . .” he muttered quietly, “and I don’t think anyone wants to hear your stupid fucking whistle either. It’s like someone poured bleach down my ear canal every time. Every fucking time.”

In that moment he looked as young as he was. Weight and weariness—and an unfortunate choice to grow a mustache on a face poorly suited for one—had all aged his features prematurely. He was still just a boy. He’d been a burglar before Jose had hired him. He’d brought him in when he was freshly on parole. Prison had made an honest man out of him. Jose had kept him that way. He had learned how to recognize kids like these, to see the fear and the wounded hearts behind their brashness. He tried to get to them before the desperation set in— to give them a better path to walk than the one they had started down. Everyone on his crew was like that. It worked, most of the time.

The latches clicked and the deadbolt slid into place. Manny swung the door open, looking back at Jose with pride. Jose pointed toward the door and the rest of them went inside.

The gas lit fire roared in the fireplace. Bing Crosby crooned on their bluetooth speaker system. Betty straightened her favorite dress and looked around the house: at the way the light danced off the brick, at the curtains she’d loved that just never seemed to look exactly right next to the couch. Everything was perfect. She sat down next to her husband and patted the couch between them. West sat down where she’d suggested and she tousled his hair.

“Is it going to hurt?” He asked.

“No . . . No honey. Of course not,” she said, not knowing the answer. She took one last look at her family. Then she smiled, a brave wide-mouthed thing, with all the sadness forced out of it. She kissed her husband on the cheek and said goodbye to everything she had ever known.

All three were slumped over on the couch, leaning against each other, holding each other in a quiet half-goodbye. Two parents and their son: silver discs on their temples, placid smiles on their faces. They were so still that Jose, coming in behind the rest of his team, checked their dots to be sure they were still alive. All green. When he got closer he saw their arms twitching. He pushed two fingers against the boys eyelids, forcing them closed. He nodded to Manny and Tess, instructing them to do the same to the boy’s parents. Manny looked squeamish, but both did as they were instructed.

“I don’t understand why we gotta do that.” Manny said, keeping his voice low.

“Because if we don’t their eyes will dry out. And you don’t have to whisper, they can’t fucking hear you anymore.” Tess chimed in, fixing the mother’s dress, brushing her hair into a more manageable position, preparing her body.

“I fucking know that, Tess.” said Manny, a bit too loudly in retaliation, “I meant: why do we have to close them in the first place?”

“Because their brains are in the machine,” Jose said, “They don’t know to close them anymore. Let’s go. We don’t have time to waste.”

Tess tucked a hand under the mother’s shoulder and locked eyes with Manny. He looked nervous to be so near the woman’s breasts. Jose sighed, these kids were used to moving furniture. So was he. He’d seen Manny carry a two hundred pound refrigerator himself without breaking a sweat, but here he was stumbling over some wisp of a woman. They hoisted her up.

“Keep her upright.” Jose reminded them.

“Yeah we fucking know, Dad.”

They called him dad when they were annoyed with him. Tito and Mateo did the same with the father and Jose took the boy himself, hoisting him up by his armpits, his little feet swinging and kicking Jose’s knees. Bodies were hard to carry, especially when limp like these ones. Harder than their weight would suggest. No matter where you grabbed they seemed to slide away from you. Jose was prepared for that, but his team wasn’t. He heard a thud and a clatter in the next room. “No,” he said under his breath. The device in his pocket started beeping: fast, shrill, electronic yelps. He hauled the boy up higher, draping him over his shoulder and tugged at the baggy folds of his pants, staring into his pocket. One of the lights had turned yellow. “Fuck!” he said, running towards the sound.

“Muhhh…. Muhhh!!” the sound came from the woman, on the floor, writhing and half staring at everything and nothing. Her eyes locked with Jose’s but they were glass. “Muhhh!” she wailed.

“What did I do? What the fuck did I do?” Manny pressed the palms of his hands into his temples. Tess was backed into the corner, silent and stunned.

“Be quiet. Do you want to make it worse?” Jose yelled.

“You’re the one fucking screaming!” Manny screamed back.

“Muhhh…” the woman wailed, seemingly in agreement.

“What’s happening to her?” Manny asked.

“I don’t know,” Jose said, desperate to show calm despite his inner panic. “Here.” He pulled the boy off his shoulder and held him out towards Manny. “Take the kid and for the love of God, Manny, try not to screw anything else up.”

Manny acquiesced and Tess moved to help him, following along a half step behind him, holding one of the boy’s legs, unsure of what else to do.

Jose crouched by the woman and went through the checklist they’d given him. “Pulse . . .” He pressed a finger against her throat. “Check.”

“Muhhh?” The woman turned, sightless, toward his hand. He felt her breath hot on his skin.

“Breathing . . . Check,” he said. Then before he could finish he saw the problem. One of her discs had shifted. Not much, but enough to reveal a thin layer of white adhesive.

“Muhhhh.” The woman wailed, quietly.

“Muh.” Jose agreed, and slid the disc back into place. Her placid smile returned. Jose checked the device once more: green again. Thank God. He thought, bringing her outside.

They shoved the three of them in like sardines, front to back to front, the boy in the middle. Jose pulled a thick yellow strap around all three, fastening it back again, through a buckle attached to the wall of the truck, cinching it tight, pulling their bodies into an awkward embrace.

“Help me get their masks on.” He said. They would breathe on their own, otherwise none of this would have worked. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that once the back of the truck was full, there wouldn’t be enough air for all of them to breathe. So weeks ago Jose’s truck got retrofitted and the rules had changed: all the bodies got masks.

“Muhh..” said the man, quietly. Manny leapt backwards. “What the fuck was that? Did I do something wrong again?”

“No,” Jose said. “They just do that sometimes.”

The truck doors closed, the engine thrummed. Jose rubbed the cold from his hands, cupping them and breathing hard into his palms. It smelled like cigarette smoke. One down, sixty-three to go, he thought. He glanced down at the device. There were more yellow dots, more red, amidst what felt like an endless number of green. He pointed toward the house next door.

“One down, sixty-three to go,” he said.

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Death

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When the body collectors come, I’ll be in my home. This place is older than me, older than any human has ever been. As best as anyone can tell, it was built before the Civil War. Living in a place this old, letting it seep into my bones has been a humbling experience. It’s symbiotic. I care for it and it cares for me. It’s mine and yet it’s not mine and it will outlive me just as it did the people who built it, and the ones that came after and after and after. It will outlive all of us, because in a month’s time death will be at our doorsteps.

When the body collectors come, I’ll be with my wife, a woman I’ve loved for long enough to forget what that means. We filled our home together and it is hers as much as it is mine, a melding of tastes, an enriching argument. She will look up at me from her phone on all the days that remain where she can pretend that life is still the way it once was, and god-willing I’ll be present enough to catch every last time that it happens. I have always been a man easily lost in the tunnels of his own imagination. I have missed so many of those errant glances and I regret each of them. A moment of connection slipping away into past, one of the last few we have left.

When the body collectors come, my heart will still be beating, neurons firing, but I’ll already be gone. This me that walks this earth and lives in this home whose oldness makes me feel impermanent—who loves this woman in a way that feels the opposite of impermanent—will be no more. All of us will be undead. Alive and yet not ever truly alive again. Here and yet not ever truly here again. They will come for my body. They’ll put me in one of those vats of Vaseline. They’ll preserve me like some great Pharaoh, just as they will for all of you. By the time they are done, a part of me will be older than my house. A part of me will have lived for longer than any man ever has. A day will have passed and I will be one hundred and eighty five years old. Will this part of me still love my wife? Will this part of me have found a home that makes him feel death’s breath on his shoulder? Will it matter when that death is tens of thousands of years away?

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Iona

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The bedsheets scratched at Iona’s skin, raising faint red welts on her shoulder blades and the sides of her belly. Everything did that—irritated her, raised her skin. When she was younger she’d gone to a dermatologist. He’d called her sensitive. That had irritated her too. He’d been pointing at her skin when she said it, but she could hear it in his voice. It wasn’t her skin that he thought was the problem.

Once, in what felt like another life, she’d had a set of sheets that felt soft on her skin, like sleeping on a cloud, but Asteroid, her dog, had torn them apart. She’d named him that because he ruined everything. Replacing them would have cost money she didn’t have, so she’d gone back to the cheap, scratchy stuff.

Now she stared up at the ceiling, waiting out her alarm, in her hot, itchy, uncomfortable bed. Asteroid huffed and stretched, pushing her leg off the mattress. She sighed. “You know, most people have their dogs sleep on the floor,” she said, pointing.

Asteroid looked down at the floor and back at her and blinked.

“Yeah, exactly.”

He huffed again and jumped toward her face, knocking the wind from her lungs and tickling her cheeks with his whiskers as he sniffed her ear. She felt her phone buzzing on the windowsill. “Alright, I’m up,” she said, trying to forget that she’d been awake for several hours.

Scratchy bedsheets off, scratchy clothes on, she thought, pausing before she put on her shirt. She turned to the left and right in front of the mirror, noticing the way her skin sagged. Her eyes drew back toward the empty half of the bed. She smirked, pushing away whatever it was that she was feeling. Black polo, khaki skirt, yellow apron, feed Asteroid, lock the door. Up and out and gone before the sun had even peeked above the horizon.

The car door slammed, jolting Iona’s mind from its half-sleep haze. Her keys jingled against her side, then her wrist, then the steel frame of the door. The bolt sliding into place shook her palm with a satisfying thunk. She craned her arm into the dark and flipped a switch. The fluorescent lights buzzed, bathing the back room in unnaturally blue light. She pulled seven bananas from the freezer. They’d be brown mush before long, but it was summer, and everyone loved brown mush blended up with their artificial flavors and colors. She stacked those and all the premade pastries and plastic-wrapped microwavable breakfasts between her arm and her chin. Making her way to the boxes of oatmeal, she kicked one, just so, and it tumbled off the shelf and fell gently open. Empty. Her eyes darted to the schedule on the wall. “Sven,” she whispered, with a loathing most would reserve for a sworn enemy. “Of course.”

With the bananas and breakfast burritos and everything else still pinched between her chin and forearm, she tried to squat down to open a new box. She dropped lower, and a banana shifted. She froze, then adjusted her chin, sliding it back into place. Grabbing the edges of the cardboard, she pulled, and . . . It’s that thick tape! she thought, her fingernail catching on the strings laced across it, which made it impossible to open.

The tower of food tucked beneath her chin tumbled and clattered to the ground, leaving only a solitary bacon sandwich in her outstretched hand. “Sven,” she repeated, this time louder than a whisper. The bells attached to the door jingled. Iona looked at the clock. We don’t open for another ten minutes, you asshole, she thought.

“I’ll be right out!” she said, forcing a smile across her face in the hopes it made her sound happier. She tossed the bananas and pastries in the trash, scooped up the individually wrapped meals and brought them out into the dimly lit café.

Iona froze as soon as she saw that it was her. Smooth, jazzy saxophone filled the otherwise silent space between them.

The air was filled with the sounds of students on the common, muffled through the brick and mortar. The building wasn’t old, but it was designed to look it. They thought it gave them prestige, being surrounded by books and leather and walnut.

The board stared at her, hunched, mustached, pale skinned and spectacled. They remained silent, fixed in their decision regardless of what she said. It was quiet enough to hear the scratching of one of their pencils.

Her body burned with fury. She took a breath and let her mind trace upward, through the clouds and atmosphere, pushing through to what lay beyond. She was no longer a person, on petty earth with its petty concerns.

She was a micrometeorite, the size of a fist, drifting aimlessly through the endless void. Small enough to be completely invisible. Large enough to shift the cosmos. Galaxies illuminated before her, each containing multitudes. Stars, those forges of creation beaming out their light, burning, in a moment more than the sum creation of humanity. The spaces between them were vast enough to be incomprehensible. But there were so many. In each of them were planets, and on each of those planets innumerable mountains and valleys, each enough to be their own discovery, their own adventure. She drifted onward, mindless,infinitesimal. A shadow loomed above her, blotting out the sun.

All of this was meaningless in the face of that scale. All Iona, and every other person in that room, would ever be was one tiny blip of light in the darkness. A single pixel illuminated for a fraction of a second, forming a fragment of a fragment of a frame of a picture. A grain of sand in a mandala, soon to be wiped away. None of it mattered, so why did it matter so much?

“Iona?” Nora said, and her voice landed on Iona’s heart like an autumn breeze. There was confusion in it, which was earned, and a trace of judgement, also fair, but none of it diminished its warmth. “It’s good to see you,” she added, and she meant it.

“It’s good to see you too.” Iona reached underneath her sleeve and scratched her upper arm.

Neither of them spoke. In another life, they had known each other, tasted each other’s lips and everything in between. They had loved like only the young can love, wild and with abandon, without the sense to protect their own hearts. Even then Iona had known that, to Nora, she was an academic fascination, something to be learned and experienced and set aside. Yet Iona had let herself fall completely, hurt ruinously. The part of her heart that still felt hope still hoped for Nora, and here she was, looking as radiant and beautiful as she remembered. Age only heightened the things about her body that made Iona’s mouth water with anticipation and delight.

“How have you been?” Nora asked, her eyes sad and curious. That she had stumbled upon Iona here, rather than anywhere anyone who knew her would have expected, answered the question well enough.

“I—” Iona started. The bells attached to the door jingled.

“Nora, what’s going on? We need to get going. Look, see? I told you, they’re not even open. We’ll get some food at the airport, okay?”

Nora looked back over her shoulder at Iona once again. She smiled a sad, friendly smile, and then she left.

The smooth, jazzy saxophone played louder. Iona looked down at the individually wrapped sandwiches in her hands, only just now noticing how cold they were. She sighed and put them in the refrigerator under the display stand, then made her way back to the beaming fluorescent light of the back room and into the freezer, where she sat down on a half-empty box. She took a breath and let her mind trace upward, through the clouds and atmosphere, pushing through to what lay beyond. She was no longer a person, on petty earth with its petty concerns.

She was a micrometeorite.

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