Nobody Made Us Die

A young man survives a mass suicide in a small quarry town and returns home to find his mother setting breakfast for a sister he remembers, though no one can establish that she ever existed. As he walks the survivors to the temporary mortuary in the school gym, each describes a different gathering, a different instigator, and strangers the others swear were never there. He searches for the cult everyone outside town blames, but their arguments keep returning to ordinary kitchens where neighbors stopped planting gardens, answering letters, or making plans beyond Friday. When his mother admits that he attended those conversations willingly, he starts sleeping with his shoes on rather than sit across from her at breakfast. At the joint funeral, she presses a speech blaming a preacher into his hand, leaving him to repeat a comforting accusation or challenge it before the survivors who have asked him to speak.