Netwrck
He Does Not Ask
Todmorden has one funeral director and he is a woman, then four shops and a crematorium, and the one on Ashfield Road is a second-generation family business that has outlived its founder and both of its working partners.
- ~189 min (estimated)
- 41609 words
- 98 scenes
- 14 branch points
- 5 endings
31 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
No cover art yet · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
On the morning of the sixth of October 2026, Callum Merrick, 33, signs the firm into his own name and becomes the fourth person to hold the keys to 14 Ashfield Road, with an uncle two doors away who has not spoken a word since the eleventh of October 2019 and who is in the building every single day, washing, carrying, driving, digging, and unavailable. Nothing was said that day. He simply stopped, in the middle of a job, and has not started again, and there is one sentence the reader is given in memory and never again: the last thing he said, in the past tense, about a man who was going to die anyway. He has a chapel of rest with eight chairs and a bedpan, a preparation room with a tiled wall and a wall-mounted embalming machine and a trolley, a cold room at four degrees, a van with the Luton body, a wall ledger of every bereaved person the firm has served since 1974, and one thousand fo
Content notice7 topics · tap to review
- the death of a man of nineteen in a road collision, described only as an age, a date and a track that cannot be played
- a man's cremated alive in another man's name and another man's ashes under that man's headstone
- a family of forty-one at a graveside for a man who was not there
- a widow sent a sympathy card every December for seven years about a son who was alive for every one of them
- a record corrected in one place and left wrong in another on purpose
- a man asked a question by a police officer in a churchyard and unable to answer it
- a hard moral choice with five futures and no option that costs nothing
Cast
- C Callum Merrick protagonist, sole proprietor from 5 October 2026, the person who speaks to the bereaved no portrait yet
- D Douglas Merrick the uncle, partner until 5 October 2026, mute since 18:52 on 11 October 2019 no portrait yet
- M Myrna Pritchard the widow, and the person who worked it out at the graveside in 2019 and never asked no portrait yet
- E Emrys Pritchard the man who was cremated alive in 2019, and who is not stopping it being public no portrait yet