Mum buys a new fridge on Monday and moves the old one into the basement, so now we have two fridges and Janice is dead. This isn’t the first time Janice has died. This isn’t the first fridge Mum has replaced.

Our Janice isn’t the only Janice that has died since March. Mrs. Raymond from across the street dragged hers from the lake three weeks ago. Patricia Slauch’s Janice went missing on Easter weekend, and was toiled up with the potatoes that grow in the Denbys’ backyard four days later. We only find out our Janice is dead when Mum tells us she’s been sunbathing by the poolside since yesterday. Mum is going to take care of it, but we aren’t allowed anywhere near—she says the Janices are poisonous, invasive, contagious. We’re too young to know what any of these things mean.

Sunbathing shouldn’t lead to death, that’s why we have SPF—this is what one of us says this morning—but at some point between noon yesterday and noon today, Janice stopped thumbing through the magazine, stopped rubbing her wrist with the paper perfume samplers, stopped adjusting her sunshades so they’d stop pinching her nose, and died.

No one knows where the Janices come from. We don’t know how they reproduce, or why they’ve stayed. The intro-biology students at the community college think it might be a genetic mutation. The high-schoolers who sit on the cathedral’s steps think they’re made in a factory we just haven’t found yet. We watched the news coverage with Mum when the outbreak started last year. The senator declared each home would have a live-in Janice, like a back-up mother. Mum threw the remote at the TV.

We now watch Mum through the basement window, our bodies hidden by the bush of magnolias she planted last spring.

Mum’s a migraine, one of us says.

That makes no sense. You can’t be a migraine.

But Mum is, the littlest of us says.

She fans herself with a magazine and bites into a block of gorgonzola. Mum eats cheese when she’s having a breakdown. We all know this. She used to load the shopping cart with Monterey Jack. Maybe Mum is a migraine.

She disappears out the basement door, the gorgonzola cupped in her palm like a golf ball. We don’t see her for many minutes.

She’s probably moving Janice now.

You don’t know that.

She’s going to put her in the fridge.

But she can’t put her in the fridge. The pot roast could be in there. That’s sacrilegious.

The basement door opens again. We don’t see Mum at first. We don’t see Janice. We only hear clanging, the drag of a garden hoe against concrete.

Don’t you think that’s sad?

What’s sad?

What Mum does to the Janices.

Mum doesn’t do anything to the Janices.

Then why does she have a garden hoe? We don’t have a garden.

And this is true. We don’t understand why Mum told the delivery men she didn’t need help moving the old fridge to the basement when they dropped it off this morning—we still don’t know how it got down there. We don’t understand why Janice is dead.

We had other Janices—a seamstress, a party-planner, a meal-prepper—but they’re all dead now. First it was dressmaker Janice—crushed in the driveway after she sewed each of us mittens for Christmas. Then it was party-planner Janice, dangling from the chandelier after she hand-frosted our birthday cake. The most recent was meal-prepper Janice—foaming at the mouth after she bought us chocolate-dipped cones from the ice cream truck. Mum found all their bodies, just like she found our current Janice an hour ago.

This Janice was our sculptor. Once, she made Mum a flower pot for the kitchen and a Smiling Buddha for the living room. Three days ago, she left a terracotta cat on top of the toaster oven with a note that said for the kids. We later found it smashed in the sink. She stayed silent through the night, and ate clay from between her fingers every other day. We saw her mostly when she sat by the pool on her day off. Sometimes she sipped mimosas from a technicolour goblet, sometimes she nipped the tips of her fingers with tweezers, sometimes she dipped her toes in the pool, one by one, like she was nervous it would pull her under.

Mum materializes again, and flicks on the step light. She doesn’t know we watch her through the barred window, or that we’ve been waiting here since the second fridge was delivered.

You can’t even see her.

See who?

Janice.

There’s two of them down there.

Don’t be a conspiracy theory.

If Mum is in the basement, Janice is too.

And this is right. Because when Mum stoops down and tugs on something, out comes Janice from the shadows.

Janice looks the same dead as she looked alive. The only difference is that she blinks less, and eats clay less, and we’re sure even dead Janice could do both of these things if she wanted to. Her hair pastes to her skull and reminds us of Mum’s party wig—the one she wore on Halloween. Mum once said she liked Janice’s hair—crow-like, and long to her hips. Mum now wears yellow rubber gloves that hit her elbows, and coveralls the colour she painted the living room—rust. Something shimmers, and we see it—Mum’s garden hoe, power washed last weekend by Candy Ruvolo a block over. It takes Mum three tries to spread Janice’s hands and legs so she starfishes. Like she’s one of those frogs we saw dissected on the science network.

I told you Janice was down there.

Mum is a butcher.

She could be a mortician. I heard the senator is looking for morticians.

We don’t look because our stomachs are upset and we know Mum forgot to buy more Gravol. The window is closed so we hear nothing but a liquified thud, and one of us thinks it could be Mum’s gorgonzola, but we remember she only had a bite left. We cover each other’s eyes and plug each other’s ears, and only stop when the thuds quiet and Mum is locking a Tupperware container, sitting on it when it doesn’t snap in place.

Do you think she…

It’s probably the pot roast.

She didn’t make that much pot roast.

I told you she puts the Janices in the fridge.

Mum sits on the Tupperware, fingers glinting, and stays like that for a few minutes. We don’t move from behind the magnolia bush. We don’t know if she sees us. We don’t know what’s in the Tupperware even though we know what’s in the Tupperware. Mum turns and pulls out a ball of saran-wrap from her coveralls. She stands, then lifts the container off the ground.

Mum jars the fridge open with her shoulder and sets the Tupperware on the biggest shelf. From the freezer, she pulls out an identical container. She shuts the door, and wipes her hands on her coveralls. She finishes unwrapping the last bite of gorgonzola and pops it in her mouth. She chews. She swallows. She yells that it’s time for dinner.

Rachel Lachmansingh is a Guyanese-Canadian writer from Toronto. She writes mostly fiction, and is currently pursuing her degree in creative writing.

Image by nrd @nicotitto