All Our Accumulated Sadnesses

by Andrew Kozma

I was crying. I was crying in a room full of scattered bodies, each body with its own gun in hand. I was crying because there was a gun in my hand, and it wasn’t my gun, and this wasn’t my body. No, that wasn’t quite right. All the bodies on the floor were my bodies. All the guns were not my guns. There was a click as the door opened behind me and I turned to see another me enter with another gun. 

“What are you doing here?” he asked, then said, as if to himself, “What am I doing here?” 

“Good question, Will,” I said. 

“Two is too many of us,” he said, and shot himself in the head. 

My first thought was that there wasn’t enough blood. A spattering like a puff from one of those ball mushrooms. His body collapsed, the gun clattered, and I had to accept this job wasn’t a typical insurance scam like I’d suspected. I was still crying. There were tears of blood on what was left of his face. 

The gun felt comfortable in my hand, all curves. I hated it. I didn’t own a gun, and I’ve never used one, not in all my years of investigating, helping, coercing. I avoided fights if I could help it, and I was too short and skinny to be intimidating. Involving the police was always a lost cause, and a hospital bill could erase all the money I’d make, and really, I was just distracting myself. The gun was in my hand. It felt comfortable. I knelt to put the gun on the concrete floor with the others, but when I stood I found the gun still in my hand. 

The doorknob turned, and another me entered. It was me, but I’d never wear a Hawaiian shirt or crocs. He held a gun, so I didn’t comment on the horrible fashion. He looked at the t-shirt and jeans I was wearing as if he’d never seen something so shamelessly ugly. Then he noticed all the bodies, all the guns, the gun in his own hand. 

“This is not what I was expecting,” he said. 

“Not your typical insurance scam,” I said quickly, afraid he might kill himself like the other one had. 

He shook his head. “Not your typical illegal exotic animal breeding ring.” 

“Where are you from?” I asked. “I have a theory.” 

“I have a theory, too.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Two is too many of us,” he said and aimed his gun at me, his eyes already overrun with tears. I dove to the side and shot first, somehow clean through the chest, and in those seconds he took to die, he cried. 

Two different cases. I was getting an idea of what was going on. A slithering came from the other side of the room. I turned to look and a door had opened up in the previously blank wall, a stocky, bald man stepping through and grabbing the legs of the body closest to him. 

“Hello,” I said, voice thick with tears. 

The man froze like a deer, his eyes roving wildly around to try and find me, but I was just another body in a room of bodies. I’d been hired to investigate an insurance scam, one where people found their signatures on documents they never remembered reading and woke with nightmares about all the lives they could’ve lived inside those lost memories. I was hired to deal with the supernatural, and here it was. 

The bald man yanked on the body’s ankles and it slipped towards him. He never stopped scanning the room. The body’s arms vanished beyond the door and the door slid shut. Quietly as I could, I crept over to that hidden door, struggling to find floorspace clear of dead mes. Each one of my corpses looked a little different. A pierced ear. A blinded, milk-colored eye. A belt with a rancher-sized buckle. 

My tears fell loud in the silence of the room, mixing with the slurry of blood and bodily waste on the floor. The gun in my hand, it felt natural now. A part of me, even if it was a part of me I hated. The door had no seams, but I pushed where I knew the left edge was and it slid open silently, frictionless as a lie. 

The next room was crowded with tables, the walls lined with fridges, medical or restaurant grade. On the tables were bodies, their stomachs open, organs gone, eyes gone, bodies emptied of everything useful. The bald man stood at a table with a bone saw in hand. 

“I god-fucking hoped you fuckers had stopped coming,” he said. 

It clicked. It didn’t make sense, but it clicked. 

“You’re harvesting organs.” 

“Sure. And no one gets hurt.” 

I looked at the bodies. 

“Well,” the man shrugged, and another piece clicked into place. 

“Alternate universes.” 

The man shook his head. “Alternate possibilities.” 

“No one gets hurt.” 

“It’s perfect,” the man said, talking now as if he’d not talked to anyone in years. “One magic ritual with twins and stem cells and then DNA we get from people through another scam and poof, right? As many organs as we can sell. Usually not so many at once, though. Do you know how tiring harvesting is?” 

I was still crying. Alternate possibility emotion. Loss of what I’d never never experience. 

The man’s eyes narrowed. He looked at my gun. “You want a cut? No room for another share. Already got the mob involved, and overhead is a bitch, so—” 

“No thanks,” I said, shooting him. 

I disabled the ritual with a smear of salt and spit. Every dead body stayed where it was. I realized I was probably an alternate possibility. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be. 

I tried to put the gun down. My hand wouldn’t let go.