Something is killing people. We noticed them missing too late, pretending as if all our friends and coworkers had decided to visit their childhood homes, far off in foreign-sounding cities, but forgot to tell us they were leaving. Except no one’s on vacation. They’re gone. Our newly developed neighborhood is nearly empty now. Sometimes cars never return to freshly paved driveways. Sometimes they never leave. Miss Wendy’s yellow jeep next door wears four flats. Her hound whines over our chain-link fence. I push him scraps of my TV dinner through metal lace as I listen for the electric purr of my husband’s car returning to the driveway. He substitute teaches science classes for the local middle school. I beg him to stay home, to take a long weekend—to work remote—but he claims his job is more essential now than ever. Most teachers have quit and the students aren’t self-disciplined enough to learn cell-division without supervision. Still. I pack his lunch each morning with an extra grilled cheese sandwich and post-it note begging his early return.

+

Someone’s got to pay the bills, my husband tells me when he arrives. He kisses me on the forehead and tosses his keys on the kitchen table. I put water on the stove to boil.

+

In the afternoons while my husband works, I sit by our bedroom window, set up a tri-pod video camera, and record videos of myself counting every living thing I see. As if it to convince my husband the world is ending. As if to prove I’m not crazy. 

One black bird. 

One fly 

—spinning wildly on the sill. Pesticides. Dead sooner than later. 

Miss Wendy’s dog jumps the fence and excavates our front garden like an archeologist on the hunt for mummies. I consider counting the baby mole wiggling between his jaws but can’t decide if it’s alive or dead. It doesn’t matter. Every day the number of living things is fewer than the day before.

A baby mole.  

I spend the next four hours without seeing a single creature. My husband pulls into the driveway holding a dozen rose bouquet, petals withering off stems. I kiss him on the cheek, drop flowers in a vase of water, and wait for them do die. 

+

My husband informs me insect populations have declined by 75% in the past decade. 

The average person would never notice, he says, unless they’ve been paying attention. Now kids can’t distinguish a caterpillar from an earth worm. 

When did you first notice? I ask. It’s Friday night and we’re sitting in bed, sharing our last bottle of wine. 

I guess whenever I stopped seeing the butterflies, he says.  

I think of the last time I saw a butterfly and my memory comes up empty. He shrugs, 

Everything’s got to end someday, he says, even the butterflies. 

Even you

—even me. 

+

A moth beats against the floodlight above our garage door. A fox screams in the woods beyond the half-developed houses at the edge of our neighborhood, bloated with darkness from lack of street lighting. Miss Wendy’s dog returns a howl. My husband snores into his pillow. I bite the inside of my cheek, relieved to taste myself. 

+

Mondays have always met me too early. Even when I held a cushy job as a secretary, which demanded little movement and less effort, I struggled to greet the new week. I sleep through morning to find my husband left without his lunch. 

At eleven past noon, there’s a knock at the door. I turn off the video camera and take a break from counting. Miss Wendy stands by the front door wearing a faded blue bathrobe and no slippers. Red polish chips from her toenails. She holds a ‘Lost Dog’ flyer with a faded image of her hound. At first, I think she’s a ghost. Then she speaks and I smell her breath perfumed with tequila. 

Have you seen him? She asks, pointing to the flyer. I shake my head. 

Not since Friday, I say. 

Her tiny, black eyes narrow and she looks behind me, past the foyer and into the living room where half-folded laundry spills over the couch and onto the carpet. I catch the apology between teeth before it escapes. 

Well, you have my number if you do, she says. 

I take the poster from her, and as soon as she leaves, I toss it in the trash. 

+

Miss Wendy’s dog returns to our yard the next evening reeking of pond water and infested with fleas. I watch from the doorstep as my husband carries the dog across our driveway and rings Miss Wendy’s doorbell. He knocks hard when she doesn’t answer. Then, after waiting another fifteen minutes, he returns, Miss Wendy’s dog drooling over his shoulder. 

I guess she doesn’t miss him that bad, my husband says to me back in the house, we can watch him for a few days. 

We take turns kneeling over the bathtub and lathering his fur with the last of our expensive, salon-quality peppermint scented shampoo. 

No replacing that again anytime soon, I say. My husband nods sadly but keeps lathering. I lose count of the fleas as they swirl down the drain. 

After the dog is dry and fed and mostly free of fleas, we make him a bed beside our own using the spare guest towels. 

We don’t mention Miss Wendy again.

+

Two fleas crawl above my socks and latch onto the red knob of my ankle as I sit beside the bedroom window and count. A V of geese cuts across the sky.

Geese. Three.

The dead fly haunts the corner of the windowsill. Miss Wendy’s dog slaps his tail at my feet. My eye catches the shadow of something slithering in the grass, but as I look closer, I realize it’s a trick of light passing through clouds. I release my breath. 

The yard boy disappeared last summer. My husband noticed when the neighbor’s lawns had all spilled over the curbs and onto each other’s driveways. 

Where’s the Homeowners Association when you need them? I joked. 

Lawns are pesticide polluted wastelands, my husband said, it’s better if we all stop mowing anyway. 

At first, we assumed the yard boy simply wasn’t as diligent as he had been before—too easily distracted by the young girls who moved in up the street, rolling up the hems of their jean shorts as they squealed barefoot through rainbows thrown from their front-yard sprinklers. But then we saw his school picture on the 5’oclock news titled ‘HAVE YOU SEEN ME?’ in bold red font. A local tragedy. The silver lining is that he went missing earlier than everyone else—early enough that people still made ‘missing’ posters and held candle-light vigils and organized search and rescue parties. Early enough people still cared. My husband and I even joined the initial searching, echoing the yard boy’s name across the woods bordering our still-developing neighborhood. No luck. And then another kid went missing a week later, one of the sprinkler girls. Then another. And another. Until soon, there was no one left to search the woods. The missing posters blew in the streets like confetti. And when it rained, they dissolved into wet wads and washed away. 

+

Once, there were dinosaurs, I imagine my husband lecturing to a sea of middle-schoolers, their cheeks warm and puffed from a morning of crying over a cold school breakfast, and then those dinosaurs died and became fossils. That’s how we know what they look like, even if no one has ever seen a dinosaur alive. 

My husband informs me middle schoolers are still suspicious of what they haven’t experienced. Of what they’re not old enough to understand. A smaller boy in the back raises his hand. 

But what if those fossils were made up as a trick? asks the boy in the front row with a runny nose, my cousin told me so, he adds quieter. 

I imagine my husband holding back a laugh, like he’s doing now as he recalls the story over our fourth grilled-cheese dinner in a row. 

Can you imagine, my husband says, a team of people paid to bury bones all around the world? And then standing back to watch as people spend their whole lives digging them back up again? How silly would that be, huh! Would you want that job?

The front-row boy in my imagination nods enthusiastically at my husband’s question. The boy in my imagination loves to bury things. The boy in my imagination has already buried his father and mother. His younger sister and both pet hamsters. If he could get his hands on a shovel, the boy in the front row would dig himself to the center of the Earth and never back out again. 

What did he say? I ask my husband as he inhales a mouthful of melted cheese. He shrugs. 

The kid just asked me if he would turn into a fossil too when he dies. 

Do we? I ask. 

Do what?

Turn into fossils? 

If we die outside, I suppose, my husband says casually, like dying outside is the most natural thing in the world—like people aren’t supposed to die in hospital rooms and in childhood homes and in their cars without seatbelts. I picture my husband and I dead in our front yard, surrounded by yellow weeds, nothing but the blue sky to carry our souls into the void, like mutinied pirates tied to an anchor by their crew and thrown overboard into the sea. I laugh. 

What’s so funny? asks my husband. 

Just thinking of death, I say. 

He smiles and shakes his head. 

Who isn’t? he says. 

+

The human body is composed of 36 trillion cells and 39 trillion bacteria. When there’s no more life to be counted past my bedroom window, I close my eyes and start tallying what’s inside. I start with my hands. I think of all the bacteria crawling beneath fingernails. I think of the blood pooling beneath my palms. I scratch the corner of my eye and remember the eyelash mites who live their entire lives on the edge of my eyelid, unable to understand what’s happening in the world beyond my body.

It’s 9pm and my husband hasn’t returned home yet from work. 

My eyes open and close, close and open. 

I envy mites. 

+

My husband isn’t home when I wake up. I knot a makeshift leash using a necktie and take Ms. Wendy’s dog in the front yard to pee. I don’t wear shoes outside. I want to feel the ghosts of insects crawl between my toes. I want to feel the poison of pesticides seep into my bloodstream. This is how I confront denial. An animal. Barefoot and shivering in morning frost. 

I walk up and down the sidewalk, searching the streets for any sign of my husband’s car. Anyone’s car. Anything. The dog begins to whine after we round the same three blocks for an hour straight. The only thing I feel between my toes is a sliver of stray glass from a broken beer bottle. Fresh blood sponges to the surface with each step. 

Where do you wanna go, boy? I ask the dog. I untie his leash and he gallops away as fast as his squat legs carry him. I follow. 

We walk past Ms. Wendy’s house, past the house that burnt down in the middle of the afternoon when no one could get the fire department on the other end of the line, the house with the blue door where yard boy lived with his grandparents, the house with miniature decaying flags staked in the lawn from last Memorial Day, my favorite house with the sloped roof and neatly trimmed Crepe Mertyl trees wrapped in flickering white lights every Christmas, the house that’s nothing but a frame of yellow wood and construction tape. At last, we reached the end of the houses. A dark patch of trees marks the boundary between our neighborhood and wilderness. Ms. Wendy’s dog vanishes beyond the tree line. The light within is filtered black.

+

If the Earth were sucked into a black hole, we might not notice until we were past the point of no return. Even as our planet tips over the Event Horizon’s invisible lip, the side facing away from the hole would see nothing but blue sky. The microscopic mites feeding on my dead cells would still feast. The bacteria swimming beneath my tongue wouldn’t hear my scream. It would be just like any other day, until it wasn’t. It would feel the same as the day before, until it didn’t.

I step off the sidewalk and into the wet of decaying leaves. I don’t look back.  

+

Last month an ant crawled cross the kitchen counter.  

I haven’t seen an ant in a long time, I told my husband digging in the fridge behind me for something he wouldn’t find. He looked over my shoulder. 

That’s not an ant. That’s a spider, he said, Look closely at the antennae. Those are legs.

He was right. The closer I looked, the more I couldn’t believe it had tricked me in the first place. 

Weird how many things look alike. 

It’s even weirder than that, my husband laughs, that spider eats ants. It’s just pretending to be one to make eating them easier.  

Unease lit within my stomach. When I looked back at the counter, the spider had vanished. My husband returned to the fridge. 

Maybe the animals aren’t dying, maybe they’re just blending in, I said, evolving.  

My husband tips the last of the milk down his throat, straight from the gallon. He wipes his upper lip with the cuff of his sleeve. Smiles. 

+

Ms. Wendy’s dog reappears beneath a berry bush a mile or so into the woods, tail thwacking against the leaves. A hail of red berries fall to the ground. I kneel in the soil and scratch him behind the ears. Mud lodges beneath my nails. 

You’re a good boy, you know that?

He whines. His fur smells like expensive shampoo and something rotted, but I bury my face in it anyway. When I look up again, a shadow stands over me. 

How about me? The shadow says with my husband’s voice, am I a good boy?

The shadow sounds like my husband. It smells like my husband. It’s wearing my husband’s white tennis shoes with the black scuff marks biting the rubber toes from dragging his feet. When I throw myself in its arms, its chest feels firm beneath my head, just as my husband’s had. I listen for a heartbeat beneath his blue cable-knit sweater. I hear a faint humming, like that of a distant trumpet. 

Let’s go home, the shadow says. 

When I look at its face, I’m amazed by how similar it looks to the real thing. It has my husband’s crooked nose, bent slightly to the left from a drunk driving accident in high school. Its eyes, the same mud color. Its breath feels hot on my brow. I can smell the grilled cheese from two nights ago—or was it three? Close enough, I decide. Close enough. 

I take his hand and follow. 

+

One cicada half emerged from its brown-paper skin on the side of a tree.  

One deer carcass vivisected cleanly in half. Fresh dead.  

No birds. No flies. 

Ms. Wendy’s dog rolls in the crinkled mess of the deer’s bowels as a mimic of my husband leads us deeper into the silent woods.  The cut widens between my toes. The dog and I both trail blood in our path.

+

The spaceship is a solid sphere of polished glass. No lights. No bolts. When we approach it from the edge of the clearing, I look for our reflections, but see only trees warped around its surface. The air throbs in harmony with my foot. Ms. Wendy’s dog barks no sound. My husband’s mimic undresses. My teeth ring metallic when I open my mouth to call out to him; to ask if he knows where all the birds and insects have gone; to scream. 

+

Inside my gut, clumps of bacteria dance, divide, and die. 

The mites on my eyelashes feed. 

Blood pushes through the tubes of my veins faster.

The black hole on the edge of our solar system inches a second closer. 

+

The mimic is naked. Its skin, transparent beneath his clothes. I see organs folded within that have no resemblance to my own. A cluster of black, grape-like sacs crowd the space where his heart should be. What I assume are lungs fold and unfold in complex origami. Gray blood flows within the lace of its veins. My teeth are on the verge of shatter. The pain, proof of my living. 

One human, I count inside the silence of my head.

One dog.

The mimic steps towards me. I close my eyes. 

One alien

—species unknown. But in that unknown erupts possibility. A place in the distant universe teeming with life. Billions of blind cells collecting to form a community of organisms. A planet infested with clear-skinned humanoids who navigate the cosmic Christmas lights of star clusters and nebulas. Eyelash mites cocooned like a million tiny crystals within the follicles of their hair. I imagine sitting at a bedroom window millions of light years above, naming new creatures until I run out of alphabet. Run out of sound. Only then will I count. 

A black hole kisses the milky way’s edge. 

The air splits.

The spaceship lifts. 

Cells consume; divide. 

+++

Lauren E. Osborn was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Currently, she serves as the 2025 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. Her debut story collection, Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl, is forthcoming with Dzanc Books in 2026.