The cameraman shifts the stand, focusing the camera on the news host as she speaks. Sweat beads his brow – he wipes it away.


“– Roberta! Tortured by Excel sheets? This friend of yours must really be something!” The news host grins wide and bright, though there’s something peculiarly strained about the corners of her mouth and eyes. “Well, it’s been great to have you here today and –”


“Yes, I do have one last thing to add.”


“Oh?”


Roberta turns to the camera and the cameraman has to force his hands steady. Already one slip up today, another could get him fired.


“I want to remind everyone of the function of graveyards and ancestral shrines.” She pauses, looks them over. ‘Do not trap the dead with those ridiculous clocks and flowers. They don’t remember you, most of the time. If they did, you would be dead.” She brings a finger up to signal a pause and coughs into her elbow. A red spot glitches across her face.


The host blinks.


Roberta continues, rolling her eyes, “Besides, they get whiny. They give me a headache. Grieve, mourn, whatever you want, but let them go. They can’t do much but be a nuisance, anyways.” She stares into the camera. “Hear that, Sam?”


Her last words make the lights dim and brighten, and by the time the room is reliably flooded with light again, Roberta is gone, only a dramatic red stain on the spot where she was sitting left behind.


The host blinks at the stain, then at the cameraman. She opens and closes her mouth four times, before finally, “Does anyone else think she looked a bit like the Mona Lisa?”


*


Twenty thousand homes look at their clocks. Ten thousand snort and switch the channel – the others shrug and get the hammer.

In an apartment strewn with flower petals blown in by the wind, a grandfather clock ticks stubbornly on. On the couch, a woman looks up from her knitting and listens in trepidation. Nothing happens, silence reigns in the room – her gaze shifts to her empty phonebook.


She stands, passes the clock, and puts the kettle on.


That night the creature, bored out of its mind, stops recounting the few stars too bright for light pollution to obscure just long enough to make note of a single candle lit on the windowsill beyond the ruffled Forget-Me-Nots. Behind it, lit by the candle’s dancing flame, winks an unfamiliar face from a paled photograph.


Rolling its eyes, Sam looks away. What use is a candle’s warmth to one with no body?