The resin smelled like gasoline. That was the first thing Ray noticed. He was sitting on the floor of the apartment with his back against the wall and a beer in his hand and a bathtub in front of him that was full of something that used to be a woman and was now something else entirely. Pam was in the tub. Or what was left of Pam. The mortuary had done their job—made her look like she was sleeping, which is what they're supposed to do, according to the guy who'd handed Ray the claim check. Small plastic tag on Pam's big toe. Ray had put it in his pocket and then forgotten about it and then remembered it and then taken it out and put it back and then taken it out again. The bathtub was old. Yellowed, actually, with cracks along the bottom that had been patched with caulk at some point and the caulk had turned yellow too and then cracked and now the whole thing looked like a map of something Ray couldn't identify. He'd dragged it from the bathroom to the living room because the bathroom was too small and the living room was big enough to contain whatever this was, even though "whatever this was" was something Ray still didn't have a name for. The resin came from a five-gallon bucket he'd taken from the auto shop where he used to work before they closed it down like everything else in Youngstown. It was industrial stuff, the kind they use for sealing cracks in engine blocks and Ray didn't know if it was safe to put next to a human body or not but he'd stopped caring about safety about six months ago when everything started falling apart and there was no point in being careful about anything when nothing was going to stay together anyway. He'd poured three gallons so far. The resin was thick and amber-colored and smelled like something from a different century, a century before Youngstown had a name and before the factories had been built and before they'd been closed and before Ray had lost his job and his wife and his self-respect and the ability to look at himself in the mirror without looking away. The resin covered Pam's dress. Then her hands. Then her neck. Ray stopped before it reached her face. He couldn't do that. He could cover everything else, he could seal the tub and he could move the thing—if it could be moved, which was beginning to seem unlikely—but her face, he couldn't cover her face. She needed to be able to see, even if seeing was something dead people didn't do. He sat on the floor and drank the beer and watched the resin settle. It was cooling. He could tell by the way it had stopped moving, by the way the surface had gone from liquid to something that was almost solid. The tub was getting heavy. He'd tried to push it an hour ago and it had moved maybe half an inch, the resin inside shifting like honey in a jar, redistributing its weight, finding a new equilibrium. He'd pushed again and again until his arms hurt and the resin had cooled enough that it was less like honey and more like glass. He couldn't move it. He couldn't move the tub. He couldn't move Pam. He couldn't move anything. Tyler was in the bedroom watching TV. Ray could hear the sound coming through the wall—cartoons, the kind of loud, colorful nonsense that had nothing to do with the room next door where a dead woman was sitting in a bathtub full of resin. Tyler was twelve. He'd known his whole life that his mother was sick, that she worked long hours at Walmart, that she came home tired and went to bed early and got up before the sun and went back to work and did it all again the next day and the day after that and the day after that until the day didn't come again. Tyler knew. Kids know things. They don't have the language for it and they don't have the framework for processing it, but they know. Tyler had known for three years that his mother was tired. He'd known for six months that she was sad. He'd known for four days that she was gone. Ray had told him that morning, standing in the doorway of the bedroom with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor, "Your mom's dead, Ty. She had an accident. It wasn't anybody's fault." Tyler had paused the TV. He'd looked at Ray with eyes that were too old for his face and said, "Mom died, Dad." Not a question. A statement. The way a kid says something like that when he's been expecting it for a long time and the actual moment of hearing it is less important than the fact that it's finally happened. "Yeah," Ray had said. "She died." And that was it. That was the whole conversation. No crying, no screaming, no dramatic collapse. Just two people in a room with a paused TV and a dead woman in the next room and nothing to say that hadn't already been said a thousand times in a thousand different ways. Ray went back to the living room. He sat on the floor. He looked at the tub. He looked at the resin. He looked at Pam's face, pale and still and untouched by the thing that had killed her—a truck on I-70 with bad brakes and a driver who'd been behind the wheel too long and a road that was wet from rain that nobody had noticed until it was too late. Not anybody's fault. That's what the police had said. Not anybody's fault. Just an accident. Just bad luck. Just the kind of thing that happens when you live in a town that's falling apart and the roads aren't maintained and the trucks are old and the drivers are tired and nobody cares enough to fix any of it. Ray had accepted the police report. He'd signed the papers. He'd picked up the body. He'd done all the things that a man is supposed to do when his partner dies. But then he'd come home and he'd found a bucket of industrial resin in the garage and he'd had this idea—this crazy, irrational, impossible idea that if he just sealed Pam in the tub, if he just preserved her exactly as she was, then she wouldn't be gone. She'd be right there, in the living room, in a bathtub full of amber-colored goo, and she'd be right there forever, and nothing else could take her away because she'd already been taken care of. It was a stupid idea. He knew it was a stupid idea. But it was the only idea he had. The resin had cooled. The tub was heavy. He pushed and it didn't move. He pushed harder and it didn't move. He pushed until his hands were raw and his shoulders ached and the resin had hardened into something that was less like a liquid and more like stone. He sat on the floor and drank another beer and watched the gray light come through the window and change the color of everything in the room from yellow to gray to a gray that was slightly less yellow. Tyler came into the living room. He stood in the doorway and looked at the bathtub and looked at Ray and said, "What are you doing?" Ray said, "I'm trying to move the tub." Tyler said, "You can't?" Ray said, "No. I can't." Tyler said, "Why not?" Ray didn't have an answer for that. He didn't have an answer for a lot of things. He didn't have an answer for why the factory had closed. He didn't have an answer for why his wife had died. He didn't have an answer for why he was sitting on the floor of his apartment watching a dead woman sit in a bathtub full of resin and he couldn't move her. "I don't know," he said. And that was the truth. He didn't know. He didn't know anything. He just knew that the tub was heavy and the resin was hard and his arms were tired and the beer was warm and the TV was still paused in the bedroom and the world was gray and nothing was going to change and nothing ever would. Tyler went back to the bedroom and unpaused the TV. The cartoons started up again, loud and colorful and completely indifferent to the fact that a dead woman was sitting in a bathtub three rooms away. Ray finished his beer. He set the bottle on the floor next to him. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes and listened to the cartoons and the wind and the distant sound of a train that was probably carrying something from Youngstown to somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't here, because nothing in Youngstown stayed here anymore. Not the factories. Not the jobs. Not the people. He sat there all night. He didn't move. He didn't speak. He just sat on the floor with his back against the wall and his eyes closed and the sound of cartoons coming through the wall and the smell of resin filling the room and the weight of a bathtub that would never, ever move. OTMES v2: DRT-2003-OHIO-NOHOPELSS-4ACT-1300W-NO-SUP-PER-1PL-LIM © 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- パスポート番号[ちゅうごく] 중국 여권 번호 Номер паспорта หมายเลขหนังสือเดินทาง Passnummer رقم جواز السفر CHN Passport) The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED (BRN74685111) all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement. Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication. To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net Based on the pending patent application document (202610351844.3), creationstamp.com has calculated the tensor feature encoding of this article: OTMES-v2-UNKNOWN