Alisabeth “Alice” Hara (she/her, he/him) has no one and nothing now. Her life has consisted of the misty green-black of the cemetery owned by her father, Chester Hara: of cheap concrete tombs facing weathered marble obelisks, of daily processions and glimpses into the lives of the strangers who shun the psychopomps they are, and of the blunted edge of the old shovels she has been set out to dig with by her father for as long as she can remember. It has only been by his death that she has now finally gotten a break—though a break haunted by the impending deadline for the burial, which she must take up herself.

It is now the eve of that deadline. The night is not very cold, but it is shrouded in fog, a fog menaced and made alive and squirming by the glint of the moon. It flits with shadows like circling carrion birds.

Alice should have dug the grave already, but she simply couldn’t bring herself to it. But she has to now.