A girl and her family move her uncle’s dead body to the only room with a working AC. That night, the girl’s brother wakes her up because the uncle is haunting him. He was so afraid that he peed the bed. She changes him into new pajamas, lets him sleep with her. In the morning, the girl tells her mother that the body is scaring her brother, and her mother says the earliest a morgue can take the body is the next day. The girl reflects on the rapid danger Covid has been, how her uncle has succumbed to it. When her mother leaves for work, the girl pulls an iPad off the shelf. After she attends school virtually, she goes to the bathroom and finds her brother crouched there. He says he can hear their dead uncle. The girl asks their housemate to watch her brother for a while. After some hesitation, the woman says she will.

The girl goes looking for bottles. As she passes a corner, she remembers when she saw a car crash there. “The front half was ripped open. A piece of Styrofoam shaped just like the front fender lay in the street, although its black casing was nowhere to be found. The car’s intestines, wires and jagged pieces of white plastic, spilled on the concrete below.” This is where, in the present, she finds a green glass bottle. “Green would work but blue, cobalt blue to be precise, would be better.” She’d “learned that in the Congo people hung shards of broken ceramic plates and cups from the trees, drew evil spirits to them. Down South slaves had turned the ceramics into bottle trees. They hung blue-and green-colored glass bottles from the myrtle tree’s branches….Once inside, they couldn’t escape the narrowed necks and were burned away by the morning sun.” She goes searching for a blue bottle. Finally, when she is digging in the trash behind a French restaurant, someone comes out and, once he learns what she’s looking for, gives her two blue bottles of water. He also gave her a burger and fries. The girl goes home and shares the burger with her brother. Afterward, they line the bottles up in front of the door of the room where the uncle’s body lies. She imagines, behind that door, everything has “gone black, the sheet-covered body on the table sucking out all of the room’s light.”