The thing about a corpse is that it isn't a goldfish.

You don't just watch a corpse go away, grim-faced and maybe a bit teary eyed if you were too soft. Too weak. You don't just lay it down and press a button, wrapped up in tissue paper and left unnamed. Corpses had names. Corpses had names and faces and lives, and no two were quite the same. Some had long gashes that stretched from chin to chest, exposing the pale grey worms of their esophagi. Some were ripped at the joints, torsos wrapped in brown paper and tied up in twine like a holiday roast. Corpses had memories longer than fourteen seconds, and they stared up at you from gouged, maggot-filled sockets because they remembered exactly what you did.

You couldn't flush a corpse, because a corpse would not go quietly. A corpse would scrape at the rim and drag itself out, breaking brittle nails against the skin of your throat. It would fight back and tell you that no fresh meat could ever replace it. No new friends could make you forget it had ever been there. Surrounding yourself with a dozen warm bodies would not let you forget those cold, clammy, broken hands. A corpse would not be coaxed into the darkness by dirty pipes and cold water, but would remain floating there in sight.

Floating.

They floated on a sea of oil, thick as coagulated blood and smelling just the same. They were arms and legs and torsos, some with heads, some even with noses. They were missing their lips, some their teeth, almost all had two shallow pits for eyes, sockets like thumbs pressed into dough. They slid over one another, pushed up and sucked down by the boiling, twisting mass.

Jenny stared down at the bodies that were barely bodies at all. Her grandmother's quilt was laid out over a beach of ash, faint embers still glowing beneath the surface. She had made it when Jenny was ten, stitched together from pieces of her favorite outgrown dresses, stuffed animals beyond repairing, and fabric-printed photos from various yearbooks. The edges were burning, but the flames were still, complacent and content to chew upon the edges of the fabric. Jenny's fingers wrapped around the handle of the tea pot and poured one thick, curdled cup of milk. It clogged in the stem, was shaken out, and fell into the Disney collectibles replica of Chip with a soft plop.

Charys Murphy sucked in one rattling breath, oil and blood filling the lungs that leaked out of her open ribs as she bobbed to the surface, “Stupid girl.”

“Stupid, stupid girl,” Charlie Boyle echoed, and then he was sliding under a half-collapsed skull that was growing mouse brown into a field of glacier blue.

“Well,” Jenny said, and she felt slightly offended as she set the tea cup down upon the quilt. It gave way to nothingness, slipping through a sudden square-shaped hole in the world roughly the size of her fist. Darkness stared up at her through the empty square. Jenny stared back, briefly, before shaking her head, “That's very rude, Charys Murphy.”

Charys knew she was being serious. Charys knew she was being serious and she exhaled oily bubbles, opened a toothless mouth to suck in the sludge, “You let me go.”

“I did not!” Jenny snapped, defensive, “You let go. I tried to s-”

“Ran away,” Ray sighed, and his shoulder filled the space where Charys' mouth had been. He rolled, an armless and legless log of a torso floating on the churning surface, “Always running... away.” His grin was terrible, teeth falling inward and pulling the rest of his face with it. First lips crept in, and for a moment he may have been pursing his lips. Pursing, pursing until his mandibles crept past the corners of his mouth and he swallowed his nostrils whole, until his eye sockets were dripping over his cheekbones like broken yolk. Ray Gordon pulled in on himself until he was only a vortex in the sludge.

Another square fell through the earth. Pink fabric from her first (and only) child beauty pageant. It was hard to win a pageant with no front teeth.

“I did everything I could,” Jenny protested, staring at the swirl as it slowed, “It wasn't enough.”

“Stupid girl,” Charys sighed again, and her nose had been eaten away by the centipedes in her skull, “Could have save us all.”

“Should have saved us all,” bubbled Rays voice, escaping word by word in the air that popped softly at the surface.

A picture of her face from her seventh grade yearbook fell into the world, and Jenny edged away from the expanding darkness. She smoothed her skirts, her familiar fuku in Alice In Wonderland blue.

“Could have saved us all,” Nora agreed. She agreed again and again until she drifted towards her missing hands, fingers crawling like a spider to shove one fist into her mouth. She issues muffled accusations around it, but their words were masked by the loud crack of her expanding jaw.

It was Charys who began to rise, pushed out of the shifting black ocean by a half dozen hands that were not her own. Her legs were mostly there, muscles chipped away here and there in jagged, cubic chunks.

Her eight grade prom dress detached and crumbled in, leaving another empty square. Jenny pulled the lace of her hem away from the edge as the tea pot tumbled down. Charys was pulling herself upright, dragging trails of black slime as she took her first steps out of the water, a corpse of a tadpole taking its first awkward steps on land. She had a hand extended, white grub worms stretching from her fingers. Together, they gave a chorus of soft, harmonic sighs.

“I tried.”

“Coooooward.”

“No, I did.”

“Kiiiiiiiiller.” They sang again, and Jenny was turning to face the water as another piece of fabric fell away. To either side was a beach of burning ash, Charys before her, and her back to a slowly expanding hole into the center of the world. Jenny inched closer to the hole, and her first bib broke away beneath her fingers.

“Charys, I tried. I couldn't fight them. They were-”

“Too strong,” she said, and the grubs echoed her with soft melody, “Too strong.”

“I wanted to help-”

“Coward,” she was not sighing now, her tongue draping from between her clavicle bones, having slipped from her opened throat. Somehow she spoke, lurching forward, “Coward.”

“I'm not.”

“Coward.”

“I tried, Charys. I did!” Jenny protested, and she was crying now. Charys' foot gave a terrible squelch as the shattered bone of her leg stabbed through her flesh and into the edge of the blanket. A scrap of her baby blanket hissed and sizzled away from the blood, corroding as though touched by acid. Charys jerked the bone from the ground. She stepped closer, and Jenny perched on the edge of that pit.

Her left foot rested on a square of fabric that had never been there, a square of pale cream lace that had come from her fuku. Her right rested on the pink tulle of her prom dress. They wobbled with her weight, tiles balanced on the edge of nothingness. Each shifted, as though daring the other to give, daring the other to break so that one might try to support the full weight of her existence. When one gave, the other strengthened, as though there could be no coexistence.

Charys was reaching for her, and behind all she could here was the soft plink, plink, plink of tiles falling away into the void.

“Coward.” Charys said again with finality, and Jenny meant to speak, but her throat was locked. “Coward,” she repeated, and lurched one step closer. Her hands were so close that the wormy white fingers could almost reach out. They had little black eyes and rows of sharp, needle-like teeth. They let out a soft siiiiiiiigh. Jenny stepped back.

The darkness swallowed her whole, but never had anything felt so little like falling. The world seemed to tip up on an axis beneath her feet, looping the void over her head like a slow-time jump rope. Charys Murphy vanished, but the tiny white worms still hovered in front of her. She couldn't move her arms, found it impossible to turn her head away.

“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,.” One said, and it popped like a pustule.

“Your house is on fire and your children are gone,” The second followed, and it fizzled into nothing. There was a white light in the darkness, a bubbly haze that she willed herself towards.

“All except one and that’s little Anne,” The third compressed until its tiny black eyeballs popped. The light rushed closer, and Jenny thought she could see sky on the other side.

“For she crept under the frying pan..” The fourth shriveled like a pruning fingertip, and she emerged into the putrid, metallic scent of a black and bloody sea. Another face, another floating body. Jenny sucked in sludge, and rolled the eyes that no longer existed to that last white grub.

“He knows,” it said, before it unzipped its skin and its guts fell out.