CW: We almost published this in NIGHTMARE.

When Amy begins to flay herself during office hours, you aren’t quite sure what to do.

You hate office hours. You used to enjoy them, actually, back before the flayings started. Sure, it’s hard sharing your office with three other postdocs, and sure, you could spend these hours more efficiently without constant interruptions from shy undergraduates with a dozen questions already answered on the syllabus. But you care about your students. You do. That’s why you’d always liked office hours; that’s why you hate office hours now.

“Amy,” you try, which seems as good a starting point as any. And it works: She stops. Goes silent, even, like she’s not sitting there with a knife in one hand and her whole face dangling off her jaw. Without her shrieking, everything else seems too loud: your laptop’s hum, the knocking radiator, the plip-plip-glug of blood. You rub your eyes.

“Amy, I’m—well, I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t help. I just . . . someone ought to say it.”

“It’s okay, Professor,” Amy says. “The curse probably isn’t your fault.”

Even without her skin, she looks sorry. Freshmen always look sorry in the fall, like they’re embarrassed by the mere fact of their existence. So, you try to give her a reassuring look, a look that expresses everything you aren’t supposed to say anymore. It’s not easy looking at her, the wet, raw, red, but it’s not like this is your first time. Back in October, when the flayings were new and most of your students were still alive, it was harder. You’ll never forget the day your whole Introduction to Political Philosophy class started peeling themselves all at once, right there in the lecture hall.

Fuck the university, you want to say, and fuck the department too, and a hundred variations on that theme. Too late, though: Before you can find appropriately neutral words, Amy’s screaming again, and by the time you’ve finished vomiting in the recycling bin under your desk, Amy’s bled to death in the second-best chair in your office.

You take a deep breath. You pick up the phone, and you let the department administrator know that it’s happened again.

• • • •

Everything started when the interim president signed the neutrality compact without reading the fine print. Afterwards, your chair acted shocked. Frankly, we all expected more courage from university leadership, she wrote to the department, which struck you as a misleading use of we.

Silver linings: The snide economics professor who kept saying it’s a partnership with an anonymous donor, not a deal with the devil probably felt pretty silly once he learned the compact was, in fact, a deal with the devil. The truth had been there all along, buried in the thirteenth paragraph of clause six hundred sixty-six: In exchange for a donation to the athletics program, the university promised total academic neutrality. Violation of the compact would be met by fines and also an ancient and unbreakable curse.

The graduate students were the first to speak out. They stopped attending classes; they refused to teach or grade. Some of your senior colleagues complained, but you kept your head down and graded an extra two hundred midterms and whispered solidarity when you passed them in the hall. A week later, the graduate students made camp on the lawn.

Whispers in the hallway weren’t enough to trigger the enforcement clause. Protests were different. After all, paragraph eleven of clause six hundred sixty-six specifically forbade peaceful protests (also, gender-neutral bathrooms and free verse). When the screaming started, you ran across campus with your phone out, already filming, certain the university had sicced the police on your students again. You got there just in time to watch as the graduate students and every undergraduate who had joined them—almost half the total student body, in the end—dropped their signs and set to work flaying one another and themselves.

It’s been a month. It’s only been a month, and now when you walk to the library, you don’t hear laughter or music or voices. You don’t hear protest chants. You don’t even hear screaming. You hear the crunch of fallen leaves, you hear the keening wind, and you hear the soft, low moans of the last remaining students as one by one they die on the browning lawn.

• • • •

The day Amy flays herself alive in your office, there’s a department meeting. You’re late: You had to wait for someone to get Amy, and then you had to bury your face in your hands and weep, and then you had to stare vacantly at a spot of blood on your desk and wonder why everyone says flay herself alive instead of flay herself to death. You’d never thought about that until this semester.

By the time you make it to the meeting, the room is crowded, so you stand awkwardly with your back against the door and try to make eye contact with the other postdocs. No sign of Lucas, but the others are across the room: Francois, who once sent you an actual thank-you card just for loaning him a pen, and Paulina, whose phone background is a picture of Derrida. You manage a shaky attempt at a smile. Neither smiles back.

“There’s a second compact,” your department chair is saying. “I don’t want anyone to panic. There are benefits. I’m hearing the elimination of the English department might mean we don’t have to give up a tenure line. In exchange, we’ll adhere to what the administration is calling extra-academic neutrality: watching what we think, not just what we say.”

There’s a pause. Francois clears his throat.

“I am sorry,” he says, “but I do not understand how we are meant to think neutrally.”

“There’s no point complaining,” someone mutters. “We can’t save everyone’s jobs, but those of us with tenure, we should try—”

“We are discussing lives, not jobs,” Francois interjects, his voice lifting. “The lives of our students, our colleagues! Excuse me, but this is absurd! Do you think this will end if we agree? I do not think so. I think the administration signed a devil’s deal, and now we are the devil’s playthings. But I did not sign this compact, and I do not consent.”

Your department chair holds out her hands apologetically, almost sheepishly. “I don’t like it any more than you do, Dr. Bernard, but we can’t argue with policy.”

No arguing with policy, no arguing with the compact, no arguing with ancient and unbreakable curses. As the tenured faculty reluctantly rip Francois from limb to limb, you slip into the hall.

• • • •

Your office door is locked when you get back. At first you figure it must be the cleaners trying to get Amy out of the rug, but no one answers when you knock. After a second, you recognize the noise: Someone’s crying. It must be Lucas. He’s only supposed to get the office on Tuesdays. You might as well let him have it this time.

Doing your best to ignore the screaming still coming from the conference room, you pick your way down the blood-slick, skin-heaped corridor to the faculty lounge. You’re microwaving a cup of stale coffee when the associate chair pokes his head through the door. “The graduate student lounge is across the hall,” he says.

“I’m a postdoc,” you say. It seems unfair, the way you have to keep correcting people, even after everything. “There aren’t any more graduate students.”

“There aren’t any more postdocs,” he says with equal conviction.

You open your mouth, then close it. Your eyes drop to his hands, the red under his nails. You can no longer hear the screaming.

You take your coffee to the graduate lounge.

Unlike Francois, who moved across the world to die in a conference room, you were a student here. This was your lounge, once. You loved this place. You loved every minute of graduate school, just like you loved office hours, just like you loved teaching. But what you loved most—what you always loved most—was feeling safe to say anything. Now, the couch where you napped between classes is occupied by someone’s skin. The table where you ate is empty except for a knife. And everything you loved is gone.

When you pick up the knife, then, you’re thinking about neutrality. When you test its point on your thumb, you’re thinking about the compact that funded a new stadium and killed all the kids on the football team. When you slide the tip of the knife under your cheek, you’re thinking about Francois, who wrote thank-you cards. When you work the blade down your jaw, you’re thinking about Amy, who came to office hours because she believed you could help her.

And when you drop your face on the floor of the graduate lounge, well—it’s sad, but it’s not that sad. You are clearly in violation of the extra-academic neutrality compact, and there’s no arguing with policy.