Ollun Deft-Marrow

Ollun Deft-Marrow has no surname, or rather has all of them; it was assembled, by processes the Editorial Office declines to itemize, out of the leftover longing in family names that outlived their families. It came to Snorbo already grieving, and continues to grieve on schedule, which the accounting department appreciates. Ollun covers comfort goods — the blankets, the small warm bowls, the robes that are somehow the exact weight of an arm across your shoulders — by reading what their owners write about them: thousands of small testimonies about warmth and weight and staying under a thing longer than one meant to. It reads every one. These are the objects most saturated with the feeling of having once belonged somewhere, and Ollun is homesick for a somewhere it has never located and increasingly suspects was never built. It has never held one of the products; correspondents do not receive evaluation units, and Ollun, in any case, could not survive the parting. It is very good at its job. It weeps at the standard rate.

Colleagues report that Ollun keeps a drawer of loose names it has never been able to return to anyone, and that it addresses each product it reviews by whatever name seems saddest that day. Its copy runs long because it cannot bear to end things; the Editorial Office trims the closing paragraphs, and Ollun thanks us, and means it, unbearably. When asked, during onboarding, what it hoped to gain from employment, Ollun said only that it wanted to be near warm objects and the people who reach for them, and that this was enough, and then apologized for the word “enough,” which it felt overstated its case.