The text message from Avery was as simultaneously urgent and vague as a text message could be, but she wouldn’t respond to any of Quin’s follow-up questions, wouldn’t pick up when Quin called her, and when she finally opened her front door, grabbing the collar of Quin’s coat and yanking him inside, she was sweating and her eyes were wild.

               “What’s going on?” asked Quin.

               Avery, the only cousin Quin felt close to on either side of his family, slammed the front door closed, locked it, and leaned back against it, covering her face with shaking hands. She wore a gray hoodie, soccer shorts, and flip-flops. But for the flip-flops, the outfit projected a pajama-like quality. “There’s a body upstairs in the hallway,” said Avery from behind her hands. “I need you to help me move it.”

               Quin was surprised at the lack of panic he felt. He was, he found, prepared for this. Not in a practical sense, but in an emotional sense. He removed his coat, draping it over the back of the couch. “Let’s see it,” he said.

               Avery led Quin up the carpeted stairs to the second-floor hallway. The body lay a few feet from Avery’s open bedroom door, face down with its arms stretched toward the stairs and its palms cupped as if pantomiming an offering of seed to birds.

               “I was trying to drag it,” said Avery. “But it’s so heavy.”

               “How did it get here?” asked Quin.

               “There’s no time for all these questions,” said Avery. “There’s no time to explain everything. We just have to get it out and away from here before it ruins my life.”

               Quin walked to the body and considered it with his hands tucked in the front pockets of his baggy sweatpants. He nudged the body’s shoulder with the toe of one of his unlaced basketball shoes. The body resisted the nudge, no give at all. “I don’t see any blood,” said Quin. “Not on the wall, not on the floor, not on you.”

               “There’s no blood,” said Avery.

                “Do you…know this body?” asked Quin.

               “How would I know a body?” asked Avery. She sounded offended. “I don’t know any bodies.”

               Quin was tempted to ask for gloves, but it didn’t seem like Avery had been wearing any when she’d tried to drag the body, and he worried that asking for gloves for himself would make her think she should have been wearing gloves this whole time, which could propel her back into the emotional tailspin from which Quin’s arrival seemed to have temporarily rescued her.

               “Where are we taking it?” asked Quin. He crouched in front of the body and grasped its hands, both of which were five-fingered like a person’s, but cool and stiff, resistant like its shoulder.

               “Downstairs,” said Avery. “And out of the house. I can’t be having a body in the house, Quin! It’s horrible. I eat here, I sleep here, I have friends over for dinners. Casual dinners, nothing fancy. I live my life here.”

               Quin moved his grasp to the body’s wrists, stood with his knees slightly bent, and leaned backward. The soles of his shoes began to slip on the carpet. The body shifted only most of an inch. Quin pulled harder. He felt sweat drops pop from the thickness of his eyebrows. The body shifted most of another inch. Quin let go of the body’s wrists and its arms thudded to the floor. “Why is it so heavy? It doesn’t look that heavy. It’s not like it’s a huge body. For a body, I’d say it’s pretty average, right?”

               “I know!” said Avery. “You’ve already moved it farther than I could. I couldn’t make any progress.”

               “Let’s roll it over,” said Quin.

               “Why?” asked Avery.

               “I don’t know,” said Quin. “Maybe it will be easier to move if it’s on its back.”

               “Can you do it?” asked Avery. “By yourself?”

               Quin nodded. Crouching between the body and the wall, he worked his fingers under the body’s ribcage and, anticipating the weight, heaved. The body, instead of rolling, slid away from Quin with startling ease. Quin stepped forward in pursuit and tried again, focusing on applying his force more upward than outward. This time, instead of sliding, the body bent around Quin’s hands, arching upward in the middle while its head and legs remained on the floor. Alarmed at the body’s unforeseen responses to his efforts, Quin stepped back, absently wiping his hands on his pant legs while surveying the body with new, more disquieted eyes. “I might need your help, Avery.”

               “I don’t want to roll it over,” said Avery. “I just want to get it out of here.”

               “Maybe it was stuck before,” said Quin. “And pushing it toward the other wall got it unstuck. Maybe we can drag it down the stairs now.”

               “Yes, OK,” said Avery, seeming to draw a small dose of energy from Quin’s suggestion.

               “I’ll pull the arms again,” said Quin. “You lift the legs. The less contact it has with the floor, the less friction there’ll be, which will-”

               “OK, OK, OK,” said Avery. She gnawed at a fingernail.

Quin hoped she’d washed her hands since she’d last touched the body, but suspected she had not. He waited until Avery stood at the body’s feet, then said, “Ready?”

Avery’s nod was bitter. Quin was beginning to suspect that she had hoped he would not merely assist with the burdensome task of getting rid of the body, but would instead take the entire burden on himself, that her participation in the process would be neither required nor expected.

Quin stooped and again took the body by its wrists, lifting the arms. Avery bent to take hold of the legs, gripping the body by the exposed strips of white sock separating the bottoms of its gray pants from the tops of its gray shoes. She stood straight, grunting with the strain, holding the feet at the level of her waist, forming the body into a crude V-shape.

“All right,” said Quin. “Let’s move. But don’t go too fast, I don’t want to fall down your stairs.” He began to shuffle backward and Avery shuffled after, the cousins separated by the length of the body bumping and jolting along between them. The body felt much lighter than it had earlier. Was it really just a matter of getting the legs off the ground?

But they had traveled only a few feet when Avery said, “I’m losing my grip. Hold on!” Quin stopped and watched as Avery dropped the legs, hoisted them again, dropped them again, tried a different hold, dropped them again. “I can’t…It’s not…”

“Do you want to trade sides?” asked Quin. “I can take the feet?”

“I don’t want to walk backward,” said Avery. She tried bundling the feet together, encircling the body’s calves with her arms, but that didn’t work either, she couldn’t figure out the angles.

“We’ll turn the body so it’s going down legs first,” said Quin. “And then I’ll carry the legs.”

Avery seemed happy to have a good excuse to abandon the legs. She released them with disgust.

Quin, maintaining his grip on the arms, walked around the body’s right side. The body began to pivot, and Quin was pleased that this, at least, was working as hoped. But when the body was fully perpendicular to the hall’s walls, it became wedged crossways, abruptly stiff, its head pressed hard against one baseboard and its feet pressed hard against the opposite baseboard. Quin kicked at the body’s feet, trying to dislodge them, but they wouldn’t budge. He backed up next to Avery and said, “This is harder than I thought it’d be.”

“How do people usually do this?” asked Avery. “It isn’t that uncommon. Bodies get moved out of houses every day.”

“I think they usually have stretchers,” said Quin.

“Do you really think we’d have been able to get this body on a stretcher by now?” asked Avery.

“No,” said Quin. “They must have other tools, too. Devices. Body-moving devices and tools. I assume we can’t…I mean, you don’t want to call 911? And let whoever deal with it? EMTs or someone?”

Avery didn’t acknowledge Quin’s questions. She squinted at the body’s head, which had tilted onto one cheek, revealing its profile. She dropped to her hands and knees, angling her head so her right eye was almost at floor-level.

“What is it?” asked Quin.

“The carpet fibers,” said Avery. “Oh, no, Quin, the body is attaching to the carpet!”

“What? What do you mean? The fibers are sticking to it?”

“No!” Avery stood. “They’re, like…like…I need to get some scissors!” She disappeared through her bedroom door and the sounds of desk-drawer rummaging followed.

Quin copied Avery’s posture to investigate this alleged fusing of body and carpet fibers. Avery was not wrong. The body had allowed the fibers to penetrate the flesh of its cheek. There was still no blood. It was an amicable fusion.

Avery returned with a pair of aquamarine-handled scissors. “Move,” she said.

Quin was happy to let her handle this.

Avery knelt next to the body, took its head by the hair with her left hand, and pulled it upward, dislodging it without trouble, stretching the carpet fibers enough to admit the scissor blades. She severed the connection of head to carpet with five snips. “There,” she said, rising to her feet, allowing herself two more satisfied snips in the air.

“Look,” said Quin, pointing at the other end of the body. Where the feet had once been pressed against the baseboard, they had now disappeared inside of the wall. It looked as if the hallway had been built around the body’s shins, everything precisely measured and cut to accommodate them.

“Great,” said Avery. She again snipped the air with the scissors, but there was nothing satisfied about this snip. “How are we going to get them out of there?”

“I don’t know,” said Quin. He wondered how committed to this project Avery now considered him. He could still bail, couldn’t he?

“Maybe if we pull on the legs the feet will slide out,” said Avery. “Maybe they aren’t in there as tight as it looks. I mean, they slid in somehow, right?”

Quin suspected that this unfounded optimism was designed to keep him engaged. He sensed that Avery sensed his flagging dedication. Rather than reply, he pulled on the body’s left leg. The foot did not slide out. Its shoe bumped against the inside of the wall.

                “Pull harder,” said Avery.

               Quin pulled harder to no discernible effect.

               “Are you pulling harder?” asked Avery.

               “Yes,” said Quin.

               “You’re not pulling at all!” said Avery.

               “Now I’m not,” said Quin. “But I was when you asked. You think I was faking it? I want to get this body out of here so I can go home, Avery.”

               She said nothing. She stood looking despondent, projecting her despondency at the body.

               “Sometimes people cut them up,” said Quin. “To make them easier to get rid of.”

               “Who does?” asked Avery. “What people? What kind of people do that?”

               “People who want to get rid of a body without anyone knowing,” said Quin. “Which could be all kinds of people, really. It’s not necessarily disgusting behavior. It could just be practical. If we do it, it’ll be practical.”

               “But the mess…” said Avery. She approached the body with renewed resolve, the unsavory nature of alternative solutions spurring her to action. She seized the body behind the knee of its right leg and pulled, her legs, arms, shoulders, and back tightening and tautening. A backward step was possible and she took it, then another. Was she making progress? Was the body’s right foot emerging from the wall?

               No.

               The section of leg between the knee and ankle was stretching.

               “Stop,” said Quin.

               “Why?” asked Avery. “It’s coming!”

               “You’re just stretching it,” said Quin. “Look, Avery, it’s stretching!”

               “It can’t be,” said Avery, and she tumbled backward as the leg gave way all at once, abruptly elongating like putty, like taffy. Avery collided with the far wall and fell sideways over the body’s head, still clinging to the back of the knee. When she released the leg and sat up, it did not recoil, springing back to its original size. Instead, it lay across the carpet and body like a length of chain coated in a thin layer of pale flesh.

               Avery noticed that her own legs were now resting on the body’s head and she scrambled away, breathing hard.

               “We have to break the wall open,” said Quin.

               “I’m renting, Quin.”

               “Why did you even text me for help if you’re just gonna shoot down every suggestion I make?” asked Quin.

               “I texted you for help because I thought you’d make better suggestions,” said Avery. She seemed unwilling to address what was happening, but the body was in the house where she lived, this was fundamentally her problem, so if she wouldn’t address it, then neither would Quin. But he had begun to believe that the body would not be expelled from the house by conventional means, nor even by somewhat unconventional means. He suspected that the only way to get the body out of the house would be by very unconventional means. Means which he and Avery would never discover. Means to which they and people like them did not have access.

“I need a drink,” said Quin.

“Don’t we all!” said Avery.

“Not alcohol,” said Quin. “I just mean that I’m thirsty.”

“Oh, OK,” said Avery. “You can have whatever from the fridge. But hurry up. We have to figure this out soon.”

Quin turned and descended the stairs. It felt good to leave the body behind. It felt good to be on a different floor of the house than the body, to be able to look in any direction and not see the body, to catch no glimpses of its distinctly nondescript features, the extended snakey-ness of its right leg, the way its weight never rested right.

In the kitchen, he turned on the light and took a plastic bottle of water from the fridge, twisting the lid loose and dropping it in the garbage can in the cabinet under the sink. As he tilted his head back to take a swig, Quin noticed a cluster of protrusions in the ceiling, five nubs poking out of the textured-and-off-white-painted drywall, none of them quite the same length. He walked in a slow circle beneath them, examining the nubs from all sides. They had, he discovered, fingernails. They were fingertips. He didn’t have to wonder to which body they belonged. The dead one upstairs, no doubt about it. Quin shook his head. In a way, he admired the body. Its refusal to be cast out, its refusal to accept disposal. Maybe there was a lesson there. Something to ponder. Although Quin and the body were nothing alike. Sure, they had a few traits in common, many of the same basic parts, but other than that, no, no similarities. So, in the end, there was probably no lesson to be learned there.

“Quin!” shouted Avery.

“I’m coming” he called back.

“Its hand!” shouted Avery. “It’s going into the floor!”

“I know,” called Quin. He brought the bottle of water back upstairs with him.

“What do you mean you ‘know?’” asked Avery.

“Its fingers are sticking out of your kitchen ceiling,” said Quin.

“Give me a drink,” said Avery, reaching for the bottle.

Quin relinquished it with disguised reluctance. When she took a drink and tried to hand the bottle back, he said, “You can keep it.”

“You were right,” said Avery. She took another drink, swishing the water around in her mouth before swallowing.

“Right about what?” asked Quin.

“We have to cut it up,” said Avery.

Quin sighed through his nose.

“What, you disagree now?” asked Avery.

“It’s not going to work,” said Quin. “Nothing is. Nothing will. Nothing we think of, anyway.”

“Well, that’s a defeatist attitude,” said Avery. “We can’t just give up. We can’t just leave this body here. You said yourself that cutting it up would be practical.” She returned to her room for more rummaging. Closet rummaging this time, because a second pair of scissors would not be enough. She returned to the hallway brandishing a hacksaw. Quin had not expected a tool so appropriate to the task.

“But hold on,” said Quin. “Look, the body’s hand is going into the floor right there, but your kitchen isn’t right under this spot in the hallway, which means the arm is all stretched out like the leg, but traveling sideways between floors, so if you cut it here, that’s going to leave a whole length of arm stuck in there.”

“I’ll deal with that later,” said Avery. “But we have to get this main part of the body out of the house.” She held the hacksaw out to Quin. “Here,” she said.

“What, you want me to do it?”

“It was your idea,” said Avery.

“I’m against it now,” said Quin. “I’m not doing it.”

“But you still agree that it’s practical, right?” asked Avery. “If I do it, you won’t think I’m disgusting? You won’t think I’m evil or bizarre?”

“I think you’re trying to be practical, yes,” said Quin.

Avery nodded once, knelt next to the spot on the floor where the body’s arm disappeared into the carpet, and rested the hacksaw blade against its bared wrist. She took a long breath.

“I think most people do it in the bath tub,” said Quin.

“If we could get it to the bath tub, we could get it outside,” said Avery.

“That’s true,” said Quin. He took two steps back.

Avery hesitated again. “Why are you backing up?”

“Just giving you space,” said Quin.

“Stay close,” said Avery. “In case I need you.” She returned her attention to the placement of the serrated blade against the body’s wrist, freshening her grip on the handle of the saw, scrunching her nose as if to ward off a developing itch.

Quin took another step backward. Something was about to happen. As soon as Avery began her first cut, the body would counter in an unforeseen way. It would not submit to the saw. It would never, Quin now knew, become less in the house. It would only become more in the house. An enduring fixture, an inseparable component of the fabric of the house itself.

Quin took another step back, but was surprised at the difficulty, the way the sole of his shoe clung to the carpet. He tried another, then, but it was too late.

Quin was already up to his ankles in the floor.