As the title says I was just hired as an Access Control Security Officer in California for a Microsoft Datacenter and I was wondering if anyone had an insight or information on the shifts or anything on how it works over there?
I'm the senior deckhand on a sixty-eight foot trawler called the Margaret Ann. I have worked this boat for fourteen years. The crew is six. Captain Hal, first mate Donny, engineer Pete, and three deckhands. Me, Manny, and Reuben.
Six.
Hold onto that number while I tell you the rest of this.
I do the headcount before every dredge. That's my job as senior deckhand. Before we lower the trawl, before we haul it back, before we open the codend, I count. Six men, accounted for, all in their right positions. It's a safety thing. The codend can swing when it comes up full, and if we're missing a man we don't know about, he could be in the water.
I have done this headcount on this boat for fourteen years. The number has always been six. I want you to remember that I am the one who knows.
Three days into the trip, we set the trawl over a section of bottom Hal had marked on the chart. Eight hundred feet. The kind of depth where the haul takes nearly an hour and the cable hums under the load.
We started bringing it up around 2 AM. Hal called down asking what we had, and Donny said the sonar was reading a mass that wasn't fish. Just a single dense object in the codend, big as a small car.
Manny said it was probably a container. Lost cargo from a freighter. We've pulled up tires, refrigerators, an entire fiberglass dinghy once. Whatever it was, we couldn't dump it back. The net was tangled around it and the cable was straining.
We winched it onto the deck.
The codend hit the planks with a sound I had heard before.
Eleven years ago I worked recovery on a ferry that capsized in fog. We pulled fourteen people out of the water that week. They all sounded like that when we set them down on the deck. Not a thud. A wet weight. The way a body sounds when it has been in cold water long enough to take some of the cold with it.
I had not heard that sound in eleven years. I was hearing it now.
We did not open the net.
Hal came down from the bridge. He looked at the codend for a long time. He told us to lash it down where it sat, leave it under the tarp, and not open it until daylight. He said he wanted Pete to look at it first.
I did the headcount. Six. Hal back on the bridge. Donny on the bridge with Hal. Pete coming up from the engine room. Manny lashing the tarp. Reuben holding the spotlight. Me at the rail.
We went to bed.
In the morning, we opened the net.
There was nothing inside.
The codend was empty. Not "the catch fell out" empty. Empty. The cinch line was tied. The mesh had a gap.
It was a small gap. Right at the seam where the cinch meets the body of the net. The cordage was unravelled, not torn. It had come apart. Like fingers had worked at the knots from the inside until the seam gave.
I stood looking at the gap for a long time before Hal called me over to help with the deck.
I did the headcount. Six.
We started cleaning up. I was coiling the lazy line when I saw it.
There was a handprint on the deck where the codend had been resting.
Five fingers, palm flat, the heel of the hand pressed into the planks. The size of a man's hand. Already drying in the morning sun.
The wood around the fingers was wrong. The grain was raised, splintered slightly, lifted away from the surface. Not pressed down. Pulled. The handprint hadn't been left by something resting its weight on the deck. It had been left by something dragging itself across the deck, fingers digging in for purchase, the wood resisting and giving way in small fibers.
I scrubbed the print with a deck brush before anyone else came back to that side of the boat.
I don't know why I did that.
We kept fishing.
The next day, the catch was thin. We dragged the same bottom and pulled up almost nothing. Hal said we had spooked the fish. He moved us thirty miles east.
That night, around 1 AM, I came up from the bunk to use the head and Reuben was sitting at the galley table.
Reuben does not work the late watch. Reuben should have been asleep. Reuben works the morning watch with me; we both come up at 4 AM.
He was sitting at the galley table with his back to me. He was not eating anything. He was not on his phone. The galley was dark except for the small light over the stove.
I said his name.
He turned around.
It was Reuben. His face. His shape. But he was looking at me like he didn't know who I was, and his eyes weren't focusing on mine. They were focusing somewhere about six inches behind my head.
I said, "What are you doing up?"
His mouth moved. The shape of his mouth made the words. I'm hungry.
The sound came a half second later. The voice was Reuben's voice, but it arrived after his lips had already finished the sentence and gone still. As if the words had to travel from somewhere else to reach me.
There was nothing in front of him. No food. No plate. No cup.
I stood there for a few seconds. He turned back around and faced the dark wall again.
I went to the head.
When I came back through the galley, he was gone. The chair he had been sitting in was still pulled out from the table, not pushed back in. I put my hand on the seat. The wood was warm. Body warm.
I went down to the bunkroom. Reuben was in his bunk, asleep, snoring the way he always snores. I checked. I shook his shoulder. He woke up enough to swear at me and then went back to sleep.
I stood in the bunkroom and counted.
Hal in the captain's cabin. Donny in his bunk. Pete in his bunk. Manny in his bunk. Reuben in his bunk. Me, standing.
Six.
I went back up through the galley. The chair was still pulled out. I put my hand on it again.
Still warm.
I went to bed.
I came up at 4 AM for my watch. I walked through the galley on the way to the deck. The chair was still pulled out. I put my hand on it.
Still warm. Same temperature it had been at 1 AM. Body warm. The chair had been warm for three hours, and the wood was old, and the galley was cold, and nothing should have stayed warm that long.
Whatever had been sitting in that chair was warming it from inside the wood.
I worked my watch. I came back through the galley around 6 AM. The chair was still pulled out. The wood was cool now.
Whatever had been sitting there was finished.
The next day Reuben did not remember being in the galley. I asked him. He said he had slept through the night.
I asked Manny if he had heard me come up. Manny said he had not heard anything.
I started counting more often. Every time I came up on deck. Every time I went down to the bunkroom. Every time I passed someone in the corridor. The count stayed at six. The count was always six. I am writing that down because I want it on the record that the count was six right up until it wasn't.
Day six of the trip, Hal called everyone to the wheelhouse for a quick meeting about the route home. We stood in a half circle around the chart table.
I counted heads. Six.
Hal talked for about three minutes. He told us the bottom east of here had been dead, and we were going to pack it in early and run back to port a day ahead of schedule. Then he told us to get back to work. We started filing out of the wheelhouse.
The rest of the day I worked the deck. We were stowing gear, breaking down the trawl, washing salt off the winches. I counted three times that afternoon. Each time I came up at the same number.
Five.
I did not register that the number had changed. I want to be precise about this. I counted five, and I wrote five in my head, and I did not feel the count was wrong. I just kept working.
It was sometime around dinner that I realized I had been counting five for hours, and that an hour ago I had been counting six, and that no one had left the boat. We were a hundred and fifty miles from shore. No one could have left.
I went to Hal and asked him who else was on the boat.
Hal looked at me for a long moment. He said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "How many of us are there?"
He said, "Five. Always been five. You feeling okay?"
I went back to my station. I did not finish the evening's work. I sat with my back against the rail and tried to remember the name of the sixth man.
The name would not come.
I have worked with him for fourteen years. I should know his name the way I know my own. But when I tried to think of him, I could only think of his place at the rail. His hands on the cinch line. The way he laughed at one of Hal's jokes once, on a calm day, four trips ago.
I could see the place where he should be. I could not see him.
I went down to the bunkroom. There were five bunks. I had never noticed there were only five bunks. I would have sworn there were six. The space where the sixth bunk should have been was wall. The wall was old. The wood matched the rest of the bunkroom. There was no seam, no hinge, no evidence anything had ever been there.
I am writing this from my bunk. I have been here for about an hour. The crew is treating me normally. They keep asking if I'm feeling okay. They think I'm having a breakdown.
I just got up and looked at myself in the small mirror over the sink in the head.
It is my face. Every detail is right. The scar above my left eyebrow from the winch cable in 2019. The way my hair grows in two directions at the crown. The chip in my front tooth from a fight in 2014.
I stood and watched the face for a long time, looking for what was wrong.
The face was breathing slightly behind me.
When I inhaled, the reflection inhaled a quarter-second after. When I exhaled, the reflection exhaled a quarter-second after. The chest rose late. The chest fell late.
I held my breath. The reflection held its breath. I tried to catch it not breathing when I wasn't breathing. I couldn't.
But the timing was wrong.
I came back to my bunk. I sat down. I was looking at my hands.
They were my hands. The scar across the right knuckle from the winch accident in 2019 was there. The ring of paler skin on the left finger from where I'd worn a wedding ring for the four years before the divorce. The small permanent stain of net tar on the right thumb that no soap has ever fully cleaned off.
The hands looked right.
I pinched the back of my left hand with my right hand. Pinched hard, the way you would to wake yourself from a dream.
I felt the pressure but no pain.
I pinched harder. I twisted the skin between my fingernails. I watched the skin redden and crease.
Nothing.
I bit the side of my hand. I bit hard enough that I should have broken the skin. The skin did not break. My teeth pressed into something that gave like meat but did not bleed and did not hurt.
The hands look right.
But whatever they are made of is starting to forget what hands are made of.
I took out my phone. I have a photo from before we left port. The crew standing in front of the boat at the dock. I keep it as my phone background.
I opened the photo.
There were five men in the photo. Hal, Donny, Pete, Manny, Reuben. I counted them three times.
Five.
I have been looking at this photo for eight days. I know this photo. I was at the dock that morning. I remember Hal making a joke about the weather. I remember Manny's mother dropping him off. I remember standing on the left side of the group, between the cooler and the bollard, with my hand on Reuben's shoulder.
I am not in the photo.
The cooler is there. The bollard is there. Reuben's shoulder is there, and there is no hand on it.
I have been at the dock. I have been on this boat. I have been at this rail and this wheel and these winches for fourteen years.
I am being unmade.
The thing we pulled up from eight hundred feet did not come onto the boat to live here. It came onto the boat to take my place. It worked the knots in the codend from the inside until the seam gave. It dragged itself across the deck on its hands. It sat in my chair in the galley and warmed the wood from the inside. It wore Reuben's face for a few seconds at 1 AM to see how a face was worn.
It is wearing my place now. Hal does not see me anymore. Hal sees five men, and one of them is in my spot, doing my job, with my hands on the lazy line. Hal is concerned about the man who keeps asking strange questions, but Hal does not know that man's name, and tomorrow Hal will not see him at all.
I have been trying to remember my own name. I had a name an hour ago. I was using it in my head, like a word you wear. I just tried to write it down and the letters would not come. I tried to write the name of my mother. I tried to write the name of the town where I grew up. I tried to write the name of my first dog.
The shapes are slipping.
Hal. Donny. Pete. Manny. Reuben.
I know those names. I have known those names for fourteen years.
One of those names was my friend.
One of those names called my name across the deck on the morning the photo was taken.
I do not know which.
The trip ends in two days. There will be five men walking off the boat in port. They will not be missing anyone, because by then there will be no one to miss.
If you are reading this and you remember me -
Please.
Tell me my name.
I'm posting this from a gas station off Route 6. I'm waiting for the sun to come up. I have about ninety minutes. I want to write this down before I drive back, in case I'm wrong about which rule I broke first.
My name is Sam. I'm twenty-eight. I drive the transport van for a funeral home in a county I'm not going to name, somewhere between rural and "actually rural, the kind of rural where the nearest stoplight is forty minutes away." I've had this job for eight months. Before this job I was an EMT. Before being an EMT I was studying to be a paramedic. I failed out of paramedic school in my last semester, which is a long story I'm not going to tell here, except to say that I'm good at the field part and bad at the test part and the system doesn't care which.
Nobody else would hire me with a paramedic-school washout on my record. Mr. Harman did. Mr. Harman owns the funeral home. He's seventy-one and his hands shake a little and he takes his coffee with three sugars. He hired me because I knew how to handle a body without panicking and because his last transport driver had quit two weeks earlier and he needed somebody fast.
The job is exactly what it sounds like. People die at home. Somebody calls the funeral home. I drive the van out, I bring a stretcher in, I bring the body out, I drive the body back to the funeral home. That's the entire job. I work nights mostly because that's when most home deaths get reported — overnight families call in the morning, evening families call before bed.
On my first day, Mr. Harman sat me down at the kitchen table in the funeral home's back office. He had a sheet of paper with eight rules typed on it. He said the rules were old and that he didn't know who first wrote them. He said they came with the funeral home when his father bought it in 1971. He said his father followed them, and his grandfather hadn't owned the place but the previous owner had followed them, and the previous owner had told his father that the rules went back further than that.
He said I was going to laugh at some of the rules. He said it was fine if I laughed but that I had to follow them anyway. He said the last driver got fired for breaking rule six, and the driver before that got fired for breaking rule three, and the driver before that just stopped coming to work after a pickup and never came back, and the rules were the only thing that had let Mr. Harman keep this business running for forty-some years and his father keep it running before him.
I'm going to type out the rules exactly as they were written. I have a copy of the sheet in my glove compartment. I'm looking at it now.
Transport rules. Read once. Follow always.
That's it. Eight rules. Mr. Harman watched me read them. Then he asked if I had any questions.
I asked him what happens if I break a rule. He said it depended on the rule. He said rules one and two were the most important and that breaking either of them was the kind of thing he'd fire me for. He said rule three was about respect and that breaking it wouldn't get me fired but it would mean I wasn't right for this work. He said rule four was the rule the last driver had broken and that was why he'd been fired. He said rule five was a rule his father had added in the eighties and he wasn't sure why his father had added it but he'd seen things go wrong when other drivers had broken it. He said rule six was the one the driver before the last driver had broken and that one had been bad enough that Mr. Harman had taken a year off from hiring after it. He said rule seven was an old funeral-home rule from before transports were even a separate job, and rule eight was the one that mattered most because it was the only one the deceased could hear.
I asked him if he believed all this. He said it didn't matter what he believed. He said his father had followed the rules and his father was the most rational man he'd ever known. I asked him about the driver who'd just stopped coming to work. He said he didn't want to talk about that one. He said the rules existed because of that one and a few others before her.
Then he gave me the keys to the van and a phone number to call when something went wrong on a pickup. He said something always goes wrong eventually. He said when it does, call the number, don't try to fix it yourself.
I was twenty-seven and I needed the job and I had spent six years putting needles into people's arms in the back of moving ambulances so a list of eight rules from a soft-spoken old man did not feel like a hard ask.
I'm going to tell you about the job because the rules don't make sense without it.
Most pickups are quiet. An old person dies in their sleep. The family found them in the morning. They call the doctor, the doctor confirms by phone or comes out, the doctor signs the paperwork, the family calls us. By the time I get there the family is in the kitchen drinking coffee and the deceased is in a bedroom and somebody walks me back. I do my eight rules. I bring the body out. The family hugs each other in the driveway. I drive away. The whole thing takes forty minutes.
I count things. I want to mention that because it'll come up. I count steps from the front door to the body. I count the seconds between when the family leaves the room and when I begin moving. I count the breaths I take while I work. It's something I started in EMT school as a way to keep myself calm and it became how I do everything now. My boyfriend says it's the most neurodivergent thing about me, which it might be. He's not wrong about most things.
I've done forty-seven transports in eight months. The first forty-six were ordinary in the sense that nothing about them violated the rules I'd been given.
Some of them were sad. Most of them were old people. Two were younger — a thirty-four-year-old man who died of a heart attack while cooking, and a twelve-year-old girl who died of a brain tumor everyone had known was coming. The twelve-year-old was the hardest one I'd done before tonight. Her parents had set up a little chair beside her bed and they took turns sitting in it. When I came in, the mother was sitting there. She didn't get up when I knocked. She nodded at me and said her daughter's name out loud the same time I did, which was rule two, and which was the only time on any of my pickups that someone has done rule two with me. I'll remember that until I'm dead.
I followed every rule on every pickup. I never broke one. I never even came close. The rules became the shape of the job for me — the thing I did to mark my own behavior as professional, the way I used to count breaths in an ambulance.
Until tonight.
Tonight's pickup came in at 11:14 PM. Mr. Harman called me himself. He said the family had requested an immediate transport and that the location was farther out than usual. He gave me an address that was almost an hour from the funeral home, deep in the part of the county that doesn't have streetlights and where the GPS gives up about ten minutes before you arrive. He said the deceased was a woman in her sixties named Ruth and that she'd died a few hours ago and that her husband was the one who'd called.
The drive out was the longest one I'd done. I counted twenty-three minutes between the last lit intersection and the turnoff to her road. The road was gravel. The house was at the end of it.
I'm going to describe the house because it matters.
It was a small two-story farmhouse, white, with a porch light on. Two cars in the driveway, one of them a pickup truck about my van's age. There was a dog tied to a post next to the porch. The dog watched me pull up but didn't bark. There was a single light on in a downstairs window. The rest of the house was dark.
I parked. I got out. I went around the back of the van and pulled out my stretcher. I walked up the porch steps. I counted four steps. I knocked three times on the front door, which is rule one.
The door opened on the third knock. Before the third knock landed, even. The man inside opened it as my fist was still moving. He was an older man, mid-sixties, in a flannel shirt and jeans. He didn't say anything. He just stepped back to let me in.
I want to flag something here that I didn't think about at the time but I keep thinking about now. He opened the door before I finished knocking. Rule one says to knock three times before entering. I had knocked twice. He opened the door on the second knock and I finished the third knock against open air, which technically still counts. I think it still counts. I'm trying to decide.
I followed him in. The house smelled like old coffee and something faintly chemical that I associated with a sickroom. He led me through a small living room — TV off, a recliner with a folded blanket on it — and down a short hallway. There was a closed door at the end of the hallway. He stopped at it.
He said, "She's in there."
I said, "I'll need you to open the door for me, sir." That's rule four.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he opened the door.
The bedroom was dim. A single lamp on a nightstand was on, casting yellow light. The bed was against the far wall. There was a woman in the bed, on her back, her arms folded over her chest. Eyes closed. Mouth slightly open. Mid-sixties, gray hair, a quilt pulled up to just below her shoulders. Ruth.
I stepped into the room. I said, "Hello, Ruth," out loud. That's rule two.
The husband stayed in the doorway. He didn't come into the room with me. That was unusual but not against the rules. Some family members can't stand to be in the room with the body. I've seen it before.
I want to say something about the room. There was a small clock on the nightstand, the old kind with two bells on top that an actual hammer hits. It was ticking. The ticking was loud enough to count, which I did, because I count things. I counted twelve ticks while I unfolded my stretcher. The ticking was steady. The ticking was the only sound in the room besides my own breathing.
I prepared the stretcher. I'm not going to walk you through the procedure of moving a body — it's not the point. I did what I was trained to do. I did not check her pulse, which is rule three. I positioned the stretcher next to the bed. I prepared to transfer her.
This is when I noticed the second sound.
It was very faint. It was coming from underneath the bed.
I want to be specific. It was a sound like breathing. Not Ruth's breathing — Ruth was not breathing. Something else. Something low and slow, with the rhythm of breath but not the texture of it. No wet sounds. No nasal sounds. Just air moving in and out at the pace of a sleeping body.
I stopped. I listened. I counted the breaths. I counted six breaths in fifteen seconds, which is the rate of someone deeply asleep.
I looked at Ruth. Ruth's chest was not moving. I looked at the husband. The husband was still in the doorway, watching me.
I said, "Sir, is there an animal under the bed?"
He said, "No."
I said, "Is there anyone else in the house?"
He said, "No."
I listened again. The breathing was still there. It had not changed pace. It was still six per fifteen seconds. It was still coming from directly beneath where Ruth was lying.
I'm going to be honest about what I was thinking at this point. I was thinking that there was an animal under the bed and the husband didn't know about it because the dog was outside. I was thinking that I'd reach down and shoo it out and we'd all have a slightly weird story to tell. I was thinking I'd been on this job long enough that nothing genuinely strange was going to happen and this was probably going to turn out to be a possum or a cat that had snuck in through a window.
I looked at the husband. He was very still in the doorway. His hands were at his sides. His face was the kind of polite blank that older men get when they don't know what to do.
I asked him to move so I could go to my van and get a flashlight. That would have meant leaving the room without Ruth, which is rule six.
I almost did it. I almost broke rule six. I had my hand on the bed rail and I was about to stand up and leave.
What stopped me was the clock.
The clock on the nightstand had stopped ticking.
I don't know when. I had been counting it earlier, but I'd lost the count when I started counting the breathing under the bed. I looked at the clock. The second hand was not moving. The minute hand was on the eleven and the hour hand was on the twelve. The clock said five minutes to midnight, which was about right for the time. But the second hand was frozen.
The breathing under the bed was still going.
I'm going to walk you through what I did next slowly because I want to be honest about it.
I did not leave the room. I remembered rule six.
I looked at the clock again. The clock had stopped, which made me think about rule five. Rule five says do not turn off anything in the room that's making sound. I had not turned off the clock. The clock had stopped on its own. I don't think that counts as breaking rule five but I'm not sure.
I knelt down next to the bed. I'm going to describe this carefully. I knelt. I did not put my hand under the bed. I did not look under the bed. I lowered my head slowly to a point about six inches above the floor and I tilted my ear toward the underneath of the bed.
The breathing got louder.
It got louder in a specific way. It got louder as I got closer, which is what a real sound would do. But it also slowed down. The pace dropped from six breaths in fifteen seconds to four breaths in fifteen seconds. Then to two. By the time my ear was six inches off the floor, the breathing was happening at the rate of someone holding their breath between breaths — the kind of long pause you get from someone who's trying not to be heard.
I stayed there for a long time. I'm going to estimate I stayed there for forty seconds. I don't know exactly. I lost track of my counting again.
The breathing did not start back up.
I sat back on my heels. I looked at the husband. The husband had not moved. He had not said anything since I'd asked him about the animal. His eyes were on me but they weren't focused on my face. They were focused somewhere just past my shoulder.
I looked at Ruth. Ruth was unchanged. Eyes closed. Mouth slightly open. Hands folded.
I'm going to tell you what I did and then I'm going to tell you why.
I stood up. I walked to the bedroom door. I asked the husband to step into the hallway. He did. I closed the bedroom door behind me with Ruth still inside it.
That broke rule six.
I walked the husband to the front door. I opened the front door. I asked him to please go sit on the porch and wait there until I called for him. He went. He didn't ask why. He sat on the porch steps next to the dog. The dog still didn't bark.
I went back to the bedroom door.
I didn't open it.
I knocked three times.
That broke rule one in a different way than rule one usually gets broken. Rule one is about entering. I had already entered the room. I had left it. I was about to enter it again. I knocked because the rule felt like it applied even though Ruth couldn't hear it and even though the room was empty of family.
I opened the door.
The room was the same. Ruth was the same. The clock was the same. The second hand was still frozen.
There was no breathing.
I want to be clear: I listened for thirty seconds before I moved. I counted the seconds. There was no sound under the bed. Nothing. The room was completely silent except for my own breathing, which I was holding sometimes and not holding sometimes. I kept counting.
I went back into the room. I prepared the stretcher again. I transferred Ruth to the stretcher. I did this carefully and respectfully and exactly the way I was trained. She weighed about what I expected her to weigh. She had been dead for several hours and her body was at the temperature you'd expect.
I rolled the stretcher to the doorway. I walked her out feet first, which is rule seven.
I rolled her down the hallway. Through the living room. Out the front door. Past the husband on the porch steps, who watched me without standing up. Down the porch steps. To the back of the van.
I loaded her into the van. I closed the back doors.
I had broken rule six. I had not yet completed rule eight.
I stood at the back of the van with my hand on the door I had just closed. I said, out loud, "Goodbye, Ruth."
That's when I heard the breathing again.
It was coming from inside the van.
I'm at the gas station now. I drove here directly without stopping. The drive took fifty-one minutes. I counted. I counted seven hundred forty-three breaths during the drive. None of them were mine.
I have not opened the back of the van since I closed it.
I called Mr. Harman. He didn't answer. I left a voicemail. I told him where I was. I told him that something had happened on a pickup and I needed him to call me back as soon as he heard the message. I did not tell him which rules I'd broken. I'm going to tell him in person. I want to see his face when I do.
I keep thinking about the order. I broke rule six when I left the room without Ruth. But I also broke rule one in spirit when the husband opened the door before I'd finished knocking. And I might have broken rule five, depending on whether a clock stopping on its own counts as turning it off. I don't know. I don't know which one was the first one I broke or which one was the worst one.
I keep thinking about what Mr. Harman said. He said the rules existed because of the driver who just stopped coming to work. He said he didn't want to talk about her.
I keep thinking about the husband. He didn't ask why I was making him wait outside. He didn't ask why I left the room. He didn't ask anything. He just sat on the porch steps next to a dog that didn't bark and watched me drive away. When I pulled out of the driveway, he was still sitting there.
I keep thinking about the breathing.
Mr. Harman, if you read this before I get back, please call me. I am at the Sunoco on Route 6, the one with the broken sign. I am not going to open the back of the van. I am going to wait until you tell me what to do.
If anyone else is reading this, and you are reading it because something has happened to me and I'm not posting anymore, I want you to know two things.
The first is that I followed seven of the eight rules. I did the best I could.
The second is that whatever is in the back of my van, I think it's been breathing the whole time. I think it was breathing under the bed and now it's breathing in the van and I think it has been waiting for someone to give it a ride.
I said goodbye to Ruth. I said her name out loud. The breathing didn't stop when I said it.
I don't know whose name I should be saying.
The sun is coming up. I can see the pumps now. There's a man at the pump across from me who's filling up his truck. He waved at me a minute ago. I waved back.
I don't think the man at the pump is real.
He hasn't moved since he waved. The pump handle is in his truck but the numbers on the pump aren't going up. He's still looking at me.
I'm going to stop typing now and call Mr. Harman again.
I'm going to keep counting.
There is one rule for the man who comes in at 3:17 every Tuesday.
I have worked the night shift at the 24-hour pharmacy for eleven months. I have counted him sixty-eight times. He always arrives at 3:17. He always buys the same things. A bottle of distilled water, a pack of unscented baby wipes, and a single latex glove, size large, sold individually because we keep them at the counter for diabetics who run out.
He pays in cash. The exact amount, every time. He never speaks. The cash is always damp.
The training video did not mention him. My manager mentioned him on my second night. She did not call him a customer. She called him "the Tuesday." She said, "If you see the Tuesday, ring up his items, take his money, do not look at his hands." She would not say more. When I pressed her, she said, "I worked here three years. The girl before me worked here two. Don't ask what happened to her."
I obeyed.
I developed a system. I would count the items as I rang them up, very softly, the way my grandmother taught me to count my breaths when I was a frightened child. One bottle. Two wipes. Three glove. I would count the cash. Twelve dollar. Forty-three cent. I would count his footsteps as he walked to the door. One. Two. Three. Eleven steps to the door from my counter, every time.
Counting kept my eyes where they belonged.
I noticed things while I was counting. I had to. The brain wants to look. The brain wants to know what the rule is hiding. So I would notice the things I was allowed to notice, to give my brain something to chew on while my eyes stayed disciplined.
His shoes were always wet. The store was always dry. There were no puddles where he stood.
His shadow was the wrong shape. Not dramatically. Just slightly. Like the angles of his arms did not match the angles of the shadow's arms. I noticed it on the fourth Tuesday and I made myself stop noticing it.
He smelled like the inside of a freezer. Cold and clean and a little metallic.
He did not blink. I do not know how I know this, because I never looked at his face for more than the time it took to nod. But I know.
By the fortieth Tuesday I was good at it. By the sixtieth Tuesday I was proud. I thought maybe my manager had been dramatic. I thought maybe the rule was just an old-store superstition, the kind every long-running business accumulates.
Tonight was the sixty-eighth Tuesday.
He came in at 3:17. He gathered his items. He brought them to the counter. I started counting.
One bottle.
Two wipes.
I reached for the glove.
The glove was alone on the counter. Palm up. Fingers extended, full, bulging. The palm rounded.
It looked like a hand wearing the glove from the inside. There was no wrist. The glove ended at the cuff and there was nothing past it.
The fingers moved. The smallest twitch. The way a hand settles when it is resting on a surface it intends to push off from.
I tried to count. One glove. One. One.
I could not move past one. My voice would not produce a number after one.
I looked up at the man's face.
I had broken the rule by accident. I had only meant to look at the register, to find a number for my mouth, but my eyes went up and they could not come back down, because his face was not his face.
His face was a hand.
His real face had been the hand all along. What I had thought was his face was a glove. The glove had been pulled tight over something else, and I could see through it now, the way you can see through plastic wrap when the light is right. I could see the fingers underneath, folded and pressed against the inside of the latex. The thumb where his nose should have been. The palm where his mouth should have been. The lifeline running across his cheek.
The palm opened.
The mouth that was a palm said, very quietly, "You looked."
I understood everything in one piece, the way you understand a sentence in a language you forgot you knew.
He had been buying the gloves for me. The wipes for me. The water for me. Sixty-eight Tuesdays of preparing this counter for the moment I would finally fail. The damp cash. The cold smell. The wrong shadow. The wet shoes from a place I cannot imagine.
He had been the night shift, once. He had looked, once. The girl before my manager had been the night shift, once. Then she had looked. Then my manager. Then me.
The rule was not protecting me from him. The rule was protecting him from the next one. Every Tuesday for as long as the store had stood, there had been a person at this counter doing what I had done. Counting. Holding their eyes in place. Postponing.
The hand on the counter began walking toward me on its fingertips.
The man behind the counter held out his real hand. It was small and pink. It looked like a child's hand. It was the only part of him that had ever been a hand at all.
He said, with the palm where his mouth should have been, "Take it."
I am not going to count this time.
I think the next person at this register will be ringing me up.
Before I get into this I want to say two things up front.
First, my wife is alive. As I'm typing this in the spare bedroom of our duplex, Sarah is downstairs at the kitchen table pouring herself a coffee, and she's humming, and that's the part that scares me the most.
Second, if you share a digital calendar with anyone in your life - your spouse, your roommate, a coworker, anyone - I need you to put your phone down for a second after you read this and check it. I'll explain why.
I'm not going to use last names. I'm not going to give you the city we live in. I had a long argument with myself about whether I should even post this, and I decided to, because if there's anyone else this is happening to, you need to know what to look for and what not to do.
OK. Let me back up.
Sarah and I have been married for seven years. We met at her sister's wedding. I do operations for a regional freight company, she does paralegal work for an immigration firm. We have a normal life. We rent the upstairs of a duplex on a quiet street. We have a cat named Mortimer who is a moron. Both of us work weird hours, so about three years into our marriage we set up a shared Google Calendar so we'd stop double-booking ourselves on date nights. It worked. It was boring. For three years it sat there doing what calendars do.
About six weeks ago, on a Sunday, Sarah looked up from her phone over breakfast and asked me what I was doing on Tuesday at 9 PM.
I checked. My calendar was empty. I told her so.
She turned her phone toward me. There was a single event blocked off in dark blue. The name of the event was just one letter: "M." It was scheduled from 9:00 to 9:45 PM, and there was a small loop icon next to it indicating it was set to repeat every week.
I told her I hadn't put it there. She laughed and said I must've added it half-asleep and not remembered, which - and I want to stress this - is something we both did sometimes. There's no evil in that explanation. We just chalked it up to a sync hiccup and moved on.
Here's where I should've paid more attention.
The next morning, the event was gone from her calendar. Like, fully gone. Not in the trash. Not in any history log. Gone. But when I opened my own phone, it was sitting on my Tuesday at 9 PM, just the letter M, exactly the way it had appeared on hers.
I deleted it. I figured one of those weird Google sync things had double-loaded the entry. No big deal.
Two days later it was back, but only on Sarah's phone again.
This is the part that started to get under my skin. We tried everything. Sarah unshared the calendar from her end. The event came back. I deleted the entire shared calendar from my account. The event appeared on a calendar I hadn't yet recreated. We tried logging out, logging back in. We changed passwords. We called Google support, and a guy with a soft voice on the other end of the line told us he had never seen anything like that before, and that he could not reproduce it on his end. He told us to take screenshots and send them in. We tried.
The screenshots came out blank.
I want to underline that for you, because it's the moment I knew this wasn't a tech problem. We were holding a phone up, taking a picture of it with another phone, and the picture would come out wrong. The event was clearly visible to the eye on the screen we were photographing. The image file would not contain it. The pixels were just gone.
The whole first week of this happening, we treated it like a joke. We started calling the event "Mr. Eldritch" between us. By the second week, neither of us was laughing.
Tuesday night came. The first Tuesday after we noticed the event. I was on the couch watching some show I don't even remember. Sarah was upstairs in our bedroom.
At 9:00 PM exactly, I heard the bedroom door open.
She came down the stairs already with her keys in her hand and her coat on, and she walked through the living room toward the front door without looking at me.
I said her name. She didn't turn.
I said it again, louder. She paused at the door, halfway through it, and looked back at me. Her face was completely blank. Not annoyed. Not confused. Blank. Like a piece of paper. She said, in a voice that was hers but somehow flatter, "M, remember?" and then she walked out and shut the door behind her.
I sat there for a second. Then I got up and went to the door. Her car was already pulling out of the driveway.
She came back at 9:46 PM. One minute late. She walked in, hung the keys up, took her coat off, sat down on the couch next to me, and asked what I was watching.
I asked her how it went.
She looked at me with what I can only describe as polite confusion - like a stranger trying to be friendly - and asked me how what went. She had absolutely no recollection of leaving the house. The keys had been hung up. The coat was on the rack. Her shoes were back in the hall. But when I pushed her on it, she said, "What do you mean, I've been upstairs reading."
I checked her phone while she was in the bathroom. The event was gone. So was the location data for that 45 minutes. Google Maps Timeline, which usually tracks her every move because we both have it turned on, just had a blank gap. Like she'd been turned off.
OK. I want to pause for a second here, because I know how this sounds. I know what you're thinking. I had the exact same thoughts. Affair. Sleepwalking. Some kind of stress fugue. Early-onset something. I have spent six weeks turning this over in my head trying to find an explanation I can live with, and I have not found one. Just keep that in mind as we go.
The next week, the events multiplied.
It wasn't just M anymore. There were entries with names like "Pickup at Eldridge." "Second meeting." "Bring the file." The timing always landed in the late evening or early morning, never during work hours. Each one only ever appeared on one of our phones at a time, and only ever in the future. Never in the past. Never in a way that could be checked.
The Tuesday after that, Sarah went again. Same blank face. Same minute-late return. Same total amnesia.
That weekend, I told her we needed to take her to a doctor. I'd been keeping notes in a Word document on my work laptop, and I tried to show her the notes. She read them with a polite, almost amused expression. When she got to the part where I described her leaving the house and not remembering, her face changed - not into fear, but into something more like recognition. She said, "Oh. That's strange. I don't remember any of that." And then she stood up, walked into the kitchen, and started loading the dishwasher.
That night, around 2 AM, I woke up because Sarah wasn't in bed.
I got up to look for her. I checked the bathroom. The living room. The kitchen. Nothing. Then I noticed the door to the spare bedroom was cracked open, and there was a faint glow inside.
I want you to picture this exactly the way I saw it.
She was sitting on the floor of the spare bedroom in the dark, with her back against the wall. Her legs were straight out in front of her, like a doll. Her phone was open in her lap, screen on, and her face was tilted down toward it. The glow was lighting her face from below.
She wasn't moving. She wasn't tapping anything. She was just staring at the screen with her face about six inches from it, and her mouth was moving like she was reading something out loud, but no sound was coming out.
I said her name from the doorway. She didn't react.
I said it louder. Nothing.
I crouched down next to her and looked at the screen. The calendar was open to an empty week. Nothing on it. Not a single event. She was staring at a blank schedule and reading it like a book.
I put my hand on her shoulder. Her skin was cold. Not skin-temperature cold. Full-on cold-pillow cold. I shook her gently. She blinked. She looked at me. She said, "What time is it?"
I told her. She said, "I have to be up early." Then she stood up, walked back to bed, and went to sleep.
In the morning, I asked her about it. Of course, she didn't remember.
That was the moment I decided to follow her on a Tuesday.
But before I could - and this is what tipped everything into something I couldn't pretend was normal anymore - last Saturday, an event appeared on her phone in the middle of the day. That was new. Saturday afternoon, 2:00 PM. The event was called "Open Group."
I made up an excuse to be out of the house when she left. I parked two streets over and watched her car pull out of our driveway at exactly 1:47 PM. I followed her at a distance.
She drove forty minutes out of town. Past the suburbs. Past the highway exit we usually take. Past everything I recognized. She turned off the main road and into the back lot of a closed strip mall. One of those dead retail plazas where the only thing left is a Dollar General and three empty storefronts with brown paper in the windows.
There were eight other cars in the lot. They were already parked, evenly spaced, and the drivers were already standing outside of them.
Sarah got out, locked her car, and walked to the center of the lot. The other people walked toward the same spot. They formed a loose, irregular circle, maybe fifteen feet across. Nobody spoke. Nobody made eye contact. They just stood there.
I parked across the street, behind a dumpster, with my engine off and my lights off. I had a pair of binoculars in my glove box from a camping trip last year. I used them.
I want to describe to you what I saw, because I am still not entirely sure what to make of it.
For about an hour, those nine people stood in a circle and did nothing. They didn't sway. They didn't shuffle. They didn't speak. They stood like mannequins. Their breath was making fog in the cold air, but otherwise they could have been dead.
At some point - I want to say around the fifty-minute mark, but my sense of time was gone by then - one of them, a man in a tan jacket, took one step forward into the center of the circle. The others didn't react. He stood there for maybe thirty seconds. Then he stepped back into his place in the circle.
That was it. That was the whole event.
At exactly 3:00, all nine of them turned around in unison, walked to their cars, got in, and drove away. None of them looked at each other. None of them said goodbye. There was no signal that I could see. No one checked a watch. They just all turned at the same second.
I followed Sarah home from a long distance. She got in around 3:42. When I came in fifteen minutes later, pretending to be returning from errands, she was making lunch. I asked how her day was.
She said, "Quiet. I just read."
I went into the bathroom and threw up.
That night I went back through every photo on my phone from the last three years. I was looking for clues. Anything I'd missed. Anything that would let me believe I was wrong about what I'd seen.
I found two things that I cannot explain.
The first: in a photo from our anniversary dinner two years ago, Sarah is sitting across from me, and her phone is sitting face-up on the table next to her wine glass. The screen is on. There's a notification banner at the top. It's a calendar reminder. I zoomed in until the image went grainy. The event title is one letter, and although I cannot be one hundred percent sure, I am ninety-five percent sure it's M.
Two years ago.
This has been happening for at least two years.
The second thing is what made me stop sleeping.
I went all the way back. Photos from before we got married. Photos from when we were dating. There's one picture, taken at a brewery on what I remember as our fifth date, where Sarah is laughing at something off-camera. In the background, sitting alone at the bar, there's a man.
He's wearing a tan jacket.
I have looked at that photo a hundred times over seven years. I have shown it to friends. It was my profile picture for a while. I never noticed him before. He is looking directly at the camera. He is not laughing. He is not drinking. He is not doing anything except looking at the lens with a flat, patient expression.
It's the same man I saw in the parking lot last Saturday. The one who took the step.
He was at our brewery on date five.
I don't know how long this has been going on. I don't know if Sarah was scheduled before I met her. I don't know if our entire relationship was scheduled. I don't know if I was scheduled too and just don't remember being told. I don't know if she'd recognize me if the calendar told her not to.
This morning, a new event appeared. It's on my phone for the first time. Not hers. Mine.
It's tonight. 9 PM.
The name of the event is "Last."
That's all it says.
I am writing this from the spare bedroom. Sarah is downstairs humming. My keys are on the dresser. My coat is on the back of the chair. I have not put either of them on. I am staring at them right now, and I am not sure if I am the one who put them there.
If you share a calendar with anyone, please go look at it right now. Look at every recurring event. Look at every single one. If there's anything on there that's just a letter, or a single word, or a meeting you don't remember making - don't delete it. Don't even acknowledge it. Don't ask the other person about it. Don't take a screenshot.
And if you read this and you feel a small pull, like you should be standing up, like you have somewhere to be -
Sit back down.
It's 8:34 PM. I have twenty-six minutes.
I'll update if I can.
Hi everyone,
I'm a U.S.-based (California) writer and researcher with a Business Economics background and a working command of modern AI tooling. I take on writing, editing, and document-production projects across a wide range of categories and I also build small custom tools when an off-the-shelf solution doesn't exist.
Below is everything I offer. If you don't see your exact need listed, message me anyway — if it touches words, documents, or repeatable workflows, it's probably in scope.
What I do
Career documents
Résumés • ATS optimization • federal résumés (USAJobs, KSAs, GS-level keyword tuning) • LinkedIn rewrites (headline, About, experience) • cover letters tailored per job posting • personal statements and SOPs (MBA, med, law, grad school) • veteran-to-civilian translation • career change pivots
Business and finance writing
Business plans (SBA loan, investor-ready, E-2 / EB-5 visa) • pitch deck narrative and content • 3-year financial projections and pro formas • grant proposals for small nonprofits • RFP responses and capability statements • case studies • white papers • B2B thought leadership and exec ghostwriting
Content and technical writing
Long-form SEO articles for B2B SaaS, fintech, cybersecurity, professional services • newsletter ghostwriting (one-off or monthly retainer) • technical documentation, API docs, README rewrites, user guides • landing page and email copy • developmental editing and substantive proofreading • ebook and lead-magnet production
Custom-built tools — the differentiator
Most freelancers don't offer this. If you have a repetitive document or workflow problem, I can build a small custom tool — usually a Python script, a simple web app, or a Google Sheet with a custom backend. Examples I can scope and ship in 3–7 days:
Turnaround
I quote a deadline before we start and I hit it. Genuinely urgent? I can compress timelines further on quote.
Rates
Hourly: $40/hr. Most work I quote as flat-rate fixed-price so you know exactly what you're paying upfront — no surprises, no scope creep on my side.
| Cover letter intro pricing | |
|---|---|
| Résumé tailoring (existing résumé → 1 specific job) intro pricing | |
| LinkedIn headline + About refresh intro pricing | |
| Résumé rewrite (full) | $150–250 |
| Federal résumé (USAJobs format) | $250–400 |
| Personal statement / SOP | $150–300 |
| Business plan | $400–1,200 |
| Pitch deck content + narrative | $300–600 |
| Long-form article (2,000–3,000 words) | $150–400 |
| Newsletter retainer (4 issues/month) | $300–800/mo |
| Custom tools and automation | scoped per project |
Risk-free guarantee
Not happy with the first draft? Full refund, no questions asked. You walk away with the result, I keep the risk. I can offer this because the AI-assisted workflow lets me revise quickly, and it keeps me honest about taking on work I can actually deliver.
How I work
About me
Business Economics degree with active research in cybersecurity certifications, federal civil service hiring, and small-business finance. Strong research skills, comfortable with technical material, and used to producing structured deliverables under deadline. New to r/forhire happy to take a small first project at a reduced rate in exchange for a written testimonial.
Contact
DM me here on Reddit with a short description of your project or simply request my email. I'll reply within a few hours during all hours (Pacific time) with one of three things: a quote, a clarifying question, or an honest "this isn't a fit, here's who you should ask."
Portfolio samples available on request. Thanks for reading.