“Hey,” he says without looking up from darning the sleeve of a sweater belonging to one of Cheryl’s innumerable grandbabies, and the part-timer makes a little movement of acknowledgement over their phone. Half an hour of companionable, customerless silence being unceremoniously broken would be enough to make anyone touchy, probably. Nothing to take personally, and he doesn’t. “What’s it called when you see a word over and over and it stops meaning anything?”

The part-timer pauses. “Semantic satiation,” they say, and it’s probably a balm to their annoyance to be asked a bit of trivia in confidence that they would have the answer, and to in fact have it. It is good to be known, even by your slightly annoying coworker.

“Is there a word for like - like, that, but with an idea? Like obviously you know everyone around you has a life and, and - ********, what’s the word, not agency -”

“Interiority?”

“Yeah, that one. But it’s so obvious you don’t think of it until one day you smoke too much weed or zone out too hard on the bus and you’re like, whoa, every one of these people’s got all kinds of s**t going on, and it feels like you’ve never thought of it before even though obviously you have? Or like when you notice powerlines for the first time in a while and you’re like, whoa, someone had to sit in an office and plan a ******** power grid one day. They went to school for that.”

They are silent. “I don’t think that’s the same type of thing. Maybe?” they say at last, skeptical. They do not ask him why, as he had known that they would not. Both of them, then, glance at the clock, and he feels the weight of its unmoving minute as he snips the thread and smooths the mend with his fingers.

Not enough sleep. Another nightmare, the kind you remember. Sometimes they come banging down your door in the middle of the night; other times you’re at work and you go quiet in front of a dozen watchful, bewildered eyes. Probably when you cry in your jumpsuit in the dock people think that it is grief for your own life thrown away. It’s not even grief for someone else’s. It’s relief. At least you didn’t get away with it.

That’ll never happen now. Have to wonder, don’t you?, if you ever told anyone - whoever it was that left that perfume-cologne smell on the collar of an old coat (if it wasn’t you, yourself); whoever it was that provides a buzzing blankness at the end of the occasional mental sentence, even now. Can’t wait to tell - who? Can’t wait to go home to - who?

Stupid. Of course you didn’t. How could you?

Or how couldn’t you? The desperate temptation to thrust it into the awful light couldn’t have been less then, and must have been more. Perched in the back of your mouth all the time with all those ******** unshed tears while you pretend it’s the smoking that’s making your throat ache all the time. Maybe some wonderful idiot loved you enough to pretend you had a reason, and didn’t know enough to make the nightmare of the banged-down door real anyway.

Brush your teeth, feel the strange gaps where the stitches were, and you murdered someone. Try a new thing with your hair, need a haircut, and you murdered someone. Freezing rain and snow on the way to work, and you murdered someone. Some old woman’s thirty-year collection of romance novels to sticker, and you murdered someone. Laugh with the part-timer over the bodice ripper covers, and you murdered someone.

Has it stopped meaning anything yet?

New episode from that vintage tech YouTuber you like, and you murdered someone. Watch it while you eat chili-lime cup noodle that doesn’t taste like anything, let alone chili or lime, and you murdered someone. Sidewalks wet and half-melted on the way home, and you murdered someone. Deep purple and blue of the evening punctuated by the sharp green of a traffic light reflected on the cement, very beautiful, and you murdered someone.

You murdered someone. What about now?

No such thing as a day off with Elaine breathing down your neck, and you murdered someone. You appreciate that she wants you to stay too busy to destroy yourself, and you murdered someone. Desperate craving, and you murdered someone. Striking out on Hinge on the bus, and you murdered someone. Getting amiable feedback on your shoddy footwork from a coach who likes you a lot and says so, and you murdered someone. Gym shower stinks; somehow your nails keep surviving the gloves; collar of your coat doesn’t smell like anyone but you anymore, and you murdered someone.

Sated is a good word, all right. Full up on it. Fat on the banality of knowing you murdered someone. Lazy and indulgent and satisfied on Elaine’s leftovers even though you murdered someone. Striking out on Grindr in your dark apartment, and you murdered someone.

No nightmares this time. Not even the kind you don’t remember, when you wake up with your hands flexing or trembling, your heart racing in silence, and which you assume is your body beating down a track that it, too, finds entirely familiar even if your brain can no longer afford the landscape through which it runs. Not tonight. Sleep the sleep of the just, as the saying goes.

Good fit today, and you murdered someone. Remember when shawl collars were supposed to stay in style forever, between now and that time you murdered someone? Pilfered cologne sample, and you murdered someone. God, it’s a beautiful day, and you murdered someone. Dance with an old lady on the corner while you wait for the bus like you often do - she likes you; she thinks you’re adorable - and you murdered someone.

Stand in the sun, which isn’t warm but is warmer than it has been (you murdered someone), and rock on your heels in your very fine coat (does it mean anything? that you murdered someone), and know that you look good and smell good and that the sky is very blue and very clear and it is good to be alive, and watch three women laughing on the opposite corner and -

think what it would be for two of them, if the third did not come home. There’d be phone calls - who would call who first? And then someone would have to write a eulogy, and they’d do that thing in the middle where they laugh and cry at the same time at some remembered anecdote. At least two people to think “I can’t wait to tell -” and reach a buzzing blank space where a third person’s name ought to have been. There's a cold case file somewhere in the Destiny City archives that'll be cold forever.

Did your hands shake when you did it? Did you tremble and cry while you waited for the hammer to fall, or had it already fallen? Was there the shedding of blood or was it that silent death of your hand in their ribs, crushing, in your palm, the hopes of someone alive, who even now sat waiting for someone dead to get home so they could tell them about a shitty customer at work?

Are you sated on it? Have you forgotten what it means by now? To speak with the mouth of a friend to a dozen strangers a day who don’t know what you are and never will? They like you a lot, all those strangers. Got away with it, didn’t you?, in the end, you rascal. You fiend. You killer. Except those days that the guilt comes and hangs around you, stubborn, to make you think about a thing that you can never atone for and will never get away with, and remind you of the loose ends of your own life that will never be tied up. It’ll pass, for a while.

“I found out,” says the part timer as he walks in the door, “that the French call it jaimas vu.” And they see his blank expression and add: “Semantic satiation. I was reading about it, after the other day.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Funny thing, I was reading about it so much that it lost its meaning. Meta,” they say, with a little laugh.

“It’ll come back,” he says, hanging up his coat and smoothing the collar down with his steady, deft hands that move like the confident paws of some clever little creature. “When you’ve had time to stop thinking about it. That’s crazy.”

“Yeah.”

Hello, he thinks in weary greeting of the friend that is familiar to him now. It’ll pass for a while but good God, in the meantime, what a relief in itself to feel hungry again for the real relief that will never come.