Absolutely adore this 🙏
Thank you Rey!! And thank you for the last minute feedback.
I didn't expect to feel much from such a small piece, yet I was quite wrong.
Shows very well that aspect of post-apocalyptic survival of the Backrooms where respect, love or humanity are strapped away for survival. The parts are touching or disgusting when they need to be. Great one!
So let me get this straight: Olivia finds another person, they go into some cold level and run out of food, he dies of unspecified causes, then Olivia takes his things, buries him, and walks away, just to walk back and uncover him? So… why bury the other person in the first place? Why'd she not take his body with her, especially if she's going to use it as food anyway?
I get that she's disgusted by what she's doing to the body, but surely she should keep the only food source around with her? She seems to be entirely focused on her own survival now. She also doesn't seem to show any regret for stealing the clothes the man was wearing.
Is there context I'm missing from something else here?
I will send my message here too to help clear up confusion others may have.
this guy is implied to be a father figure to her. The reason she didn't take him to eat is because she didn't want to eat him. She buried him out of respect the way you do and then ran out of food and had to return to the grave or starve
One thing that's important to note is that this is a person focused tale. These aren't experts or survivalists, these are just two ordinary people thrown into a very unordinary world.
As for the clothes. He is dead, he does not need clothes. I also hoped the father figure thing would imply he'd want her to take his clothes. Taking the clothes of the dead and eating the body of the dead are two hugely different things. It is not just cannibalism but the added layer of this being someone she loves. The cold preserved his body so physically he looks as he did when he died.
Hope that helps.
It does a little, but there are still a few things that don't fit for me. So this father figure person gives Olivia the advice to take his equipment if he died, yet doesn't for his body? I get that Olivia wouldn't want to turn to cannibalism, nobody would, but she could bury this other person later if she got out safely, or use the unethical but available food source along the way, if she'd carried his body.
Also, it says that Olivia didn't even go that far from the grave, partly because of instinct telling her to eat the body. She didn't even really go out looking for alternative food sources, and that instinct could have told her to follow my idea. I still think it would make more sense to go that way, sorry.
You are very much underestimating how much it fucks someone up to have to eat the body of someone they love. Also, it's not that she stays nearby cause she's hungry and considering eating him, its that she can't progress far because she's too weak from hunger. She's kinda stuck near his grave because she doesn't have the strength to move far far away.
I'll quote from the page "Olivia hadn’t drifted far from his grave, tied to its side by a mixture of wistful sorrow and predatory hunger." To me, that implies that she's spent the whole time considering this other person as a food source to "prey upon". My assumption from this wording was that it's an anomalous effect of wherever they are. I do get the explanations now, but the page itself doesn't seem to have provided me with them.
We both should really be asleep now, anyway.
Too many tears!
I might comment later.
Your friend and colleague,
Goerman
http://backrooms-wiki.wikidot.com/goerman