The Bureaucracy of Ghosts¶
He arrived at the cemetery when the fog was still drunk on dawn. The gate hung like a slack jaw, rusted hinges groaning as he shouldered through. Headstones leaned in conspiracies, their names worn to whispers. Piotr lit a cigarette, the match hissing like a small, angry secret. He’d been sent to find a plot that didn’t exist, a grave that breathed. The memo had been typewritten, of course—carbon paper smudges blurring the coordinates. “Standard procedure,” his superior had said, polishing glasses with a cloth that smelled of vodka and despair.
A crow cawed. Piotr exhaled smoke, watching it coil into the mist. He’d seen things in seventeen years with the Ministry: a forest that marched westward every autumn, a river that flowed upside down on Tuesdays. All filed under “Geographical Anomalies (Non-Existent).” The forms were always the same—triplicate, signed in triplicate, burned in a brass urn that reeked of cinnamon and regret.
“Looking for the new section?” A voice, rough as burlap. Piotr turned. A man in a frayed parka, shovel slung over shoulder. No face visible, just a smudge where features should be, like a photo left too long in developer.
“Depends,” Piotr said. “Does it have paperwork?”
The man chuckled. “Only the kind that eats itself.” He gestured to a path that shouldn’t have been there, leading to a stand of birches with silver bark. “They told me to wait for you. Said you’d get the joke.”
Piotr crushed his cigarette. “I don’t do jokes.”
“Then you’ll love this.” The man spat, the glob hitting a headstone and hissing. “Follow the flags.”
Piotr did. Yellow ribbons tied to twigs, leading deeper into the fog. The air thickened, sweet with rot and machine oil. Then he saw it: a building that was a door. Just a frame, no walls, no roof, hanging in the mist like a bad idea. A sign hung from it: Office of Cartographic Rectification. Please Knock.
He knocked. The wood split, as if it had been waiting.
Inside, a woman with a beehive haircut and glasses too large for her face looked up from a typewriter that clacked without ribbon or keys. “Ah. Piotr Szewczuk. Seventeen years, three months, and a day late.” She smiled, a crack spreading across her lips. “Your report on the disappearing village in ’53? We archived it under ‘Fiction.’”
Piotr’s throat tightened. “That village—”
“—doesn’t exist. Of course not.” She tore a page, fed it to a shredder that spat out daisies. “But the forms! So many forms. Each one a little death.” She leaned forward, her voice a conspirator’s. “We process the unprocessable. File the unfileable. Last week, a man tried to register a cloud as a historical landmark. His forms were… creative.”
Piotr’s hands shook. “I need to see the map.”
The woman sighed. “The map is the problem. It redraws itself. Last Thursday, it ate Budapest.” She slid a document across the desk. It was blank except for a stamp: CLASSIFIED (DO NOT UNCLASSIFY).
A clock ticked, though there was no clock. Piotr lit another cigarette. “What’s the protocol?”
“Protocol?” The woman laughed, and the doorframe shuddered. “We make it up. Daily.” She pointed to a trash can overflowing with paper. “Yesterday’s policies. Today’s confetti.”
Outside, the crow cawed again. Piotr glanced back. The path was gone.
He exhaled smoke. “So I’m stuck here?”
“Stuck?” The woman’s crack-lips smiled. “Darling, you’re promoted.”
The door vanished. The fog swallowed the birches. Piotr stood in the cemetery, cigarette ash falling on a headstone that read HERE LIES NOTHING. BORN? DIED? He ground out the cigarette, reached for his pocket, and found the memo—now written in his own handwriting.
He lit another smoke. Somewhere, a typewriter clacked.
“Typical,” he muttered, and walked toward the gate.
The crow flew off, carrying a daisy in its beak.
The end.