• Stabler and Benson investigate the murder and castration of a New York City cab driver. They discover that the victim assumed the identity of another man years before because he was wanted by police. In the end, Stabler discovers that the stolen identity of the man in question was also stolen, and he and Benson have to begin the investigation all over again.
• Benson and Stabler investigate the murder of a young woman who is initially believed to be a prostitute and the latest in a long line of victims. “I hate this goddamned city,” Benson says to Stabler, dabbing her eyes with a deli napkin. Stabler rolls his eyes and starts the car.
• The second time the basketball team covered up a murder, the coach decided that he’d finally had enough.
• They found the boy in Central Park, looking like no one had ever loved him. “His body was crawling with ants,” Stabler said. “Ants.” Two days later, they arrest his teacher, who as it turns out had loved him just fine.
• “It’s not that I hate men,” the woman says. “I’m just terrified of them."
• Benson never goes to Brooklyn, but she agrees. She rides the train late at night, so late that there is only one man in her car, and he is sleeping on a duffel bag. As they shoot through the tunnels, the man looks blearily at Benson, then unzips his duffel bag and vomits into it, almost politely. The vomit is white, like cream of wheat. He re-zips the bag. Benson gets off two stops too early, and ends up walking through Crown Heights for a very long time.
• “It was dark,” says Stabler’s wife. “I was walking home alone. It was raining. Well, not really raining. Spitting, I guess. Misting. It was misting and the light from the streetlamps was all pooled and golden, and thick, even, like it was a solid. And I was breathing deeply & it felt healthy, healthy and right to be walking through that night.”
• She gets out of bed and tries to push them away, but her hands and upper body go through both of them as if they are nothing. They taste like mildew in her mouth. She remembers being eight and kneeling before the humidifier in her room, taking in the steam like it was the only way she could drink.
• Her apartment is so crowded with ghosts that, for the first time since she can remember, Benson stays at someone else’s place for the night. Her date is an investment banker, a boring and stupid man with a fat, piss-mean tabby who tries to suffocate Benson with her bulk. Benson hates him, but what else can she do?
• “It was misty,” she says. “It was spitting.” He hears the banging again, the tone, sounding from somewhere in the house. “Yes, I know, I know,” Stabler says. “The light pooled around the lamp posts.” “There were so many iron gates. I walked past them and ran my fingers over their loops and whorls, and then my fingers smelled like metal.” “Yes,” said Stabler. “But then what?” But his wife is asleep.
• They send policemen to Central Park to chase people off benches like they are pigeons, or the homeless.
• Benson rides the train. Eventually, she has seen every stop at least once. She is beginning to memorize the murals, the water stains, the smells. 59th Street smells like a urinal. Cortelyou smells, unnervingly, like lilacs.
• “Stolen”: First it’s a candy bar. The next day, a lighter. Stabler wants to stop, but he has long since learned to choose his battles.
• “Rooftop”: “Just tell me what you remember, Father.” Click. “She hated water and grass, so we picnicked on the top of her apartment building. She lived in that building with her mother. I loved her. I lost myself in her body. We lay a blanket over the gravel. I fed her orange slices. She told me that she was a prophet, and that she had a vision that one day, I would take an innocent life. I said no, no. She climbed up onto the cement wall that bordered the roof. She stood there and declared her vision again. She said she was sorry. She didn’t even fall like I expected. She simply knelt into the air.”
• Benson accidentally catches a rapist when she Google-stalks her newest OKCupid date. She can’t decide whether or not to mark this in the “success” (“caught rapist”) or “failure” (“date didn’t work out”) column. She marks both.
• Benson leaves her handsome date at the table, in the restaurant, waiting for the drinks. She walks down an empty side street. She takes off her shoes and walks down the center of the road. It is too hot for April. She can feel her feet darkening from the blacktop. She should be afraid of broken glass but she is not. In front of a vacant lot, she stops. She reaches down and touches the pavement. It is breathing. Its two-toned heartbeat makes her clavicle vibrate. She can feel it. She is suddenly, irrevocably certain that the earth is breathing. She knows that New York is riding the back of a giant monster. She knows this more clearly than she has ever known anything before.
• The phrase “run the gauntlet” is stuck in Stabler’s head, like water dipping and sluicing around his inner ear. He presses the muscles at the hinge of his jaw and cracks it. The crack takes the place of the single syllable of “run.” He does it again. Crack the gauntlet. Run the cracklet. Run.
• She drives her car to a grocery store in Queens and buys three hundred dollars worth of produce. It will make her fridge look like the garden of Eden. She will not eat it while she gnaws on chewy French toast in the Styrofoam container from the diner. The produce will, predictably, rot. Her fridge will smell overwhelmingly like dirt. She will collect it in garbage bags and throw it in the public trashcan near the station before her next trip.
• “You don’t understand,” says Father Jones to Benson. There are dark curves under his eyes, sacs the color of bruised apples. He is wearing a terrycloth bathrobe that says “Susan” in machine-stitched cursive letters on the breast pocket. “I can’t help you. I’m having a crisis of faith.” Benson puts her hand on the door. “I’m having a crisis of function,” she says. “Tell me. What do you know about ghosts?”
• Benson doesn’t know how to explain to Stabler the heartbeat beneath the ground. She is certain that she can hear it all the time now, deep and low. [...] Benson takes taxis to far-away neighborhoods, gets down on her hands and knees on the street and the sidewalk and once, in a woman’s vegetable garden that took up her entire postage-stamp lawn. She can hear it everywhere. The drumming, echoing, echoing in the deep.
• “Silence”: Benson and Stabler grab beers at a pub down the street from the station. They hold the frosted mugs in their hands, leave handprints on the glass that look like angels. They say nothing.
• Abler and Henson respond to a report of a rape in Central Park. They examine the mutilated body. “Cult,” says Abler. “Occultists,” says Henson. “A cult of occultists,” they say in unison. “Take the body away.”
• The children make pancakes. The hardwood floors are flooded with pools of light.
• For three days in a row, there is not a single victim in the entire precinct. No rapes. No murders. No rape-murders. No kidnappings. No child pornography made, bought, or sold. No molestations. No sexual assaults. No sexual harassments. No forced prostitution. No human trafficking. No subway gropings. No incest. No indecent exposures. No stalking. Not even an unwanted dirty phone call. Then, in the gloaming of a Wednesday, a man wolf-whistles at a woman on her way to an AA meeting. The whole city releases its held breath, and everything returns to normal.
• She slams the door so hard a flowerpot jumps off the porch railing and lands in the lawn.
• “Juvenile”: “Five-year-olds murder six-year-olds,” Benson says dully, the skin beneath her eyes dusky ash from lack of sleep. “People are monsters, and we are all lambs just waiting to be killed. We are monsters and victims at the same time, and only experience will tip the scale one way or the other. This is the world we live in, Stabler.” She sips noisily on her Diet Coke.
• “Rotten”: Some crazy person keeps leaving sacks of perfectly good produce in a trashcan. Henson frequently finds herself pulling it out, taking it home, scrubbing the beets good and hard. How crazy. What a weird thing to go to waste.
• “Mercy”: The gunman lets all of the hostages go, including himself.
• “Pandora”: Benson is lonely without the bells. Her apartment is so quiet. She stands in her doorway, staring down at the white line. She takes her big toe and probes it. She remembers being at the beach with her mother when she was a child and burning her feet on the hot, smooth sand. She pushes her toe, breaking the line, and says, “Oops,” but doesn’t really mean it. The children come rushing at her like a flash flood rolling through a narrow gorge. Their bells ring chaotic, gleeful and rapturous and angry, like a swarm of euphoric bees. They tickle her skin with their desperation. She has never felt so loved.
• The phone buzzes in his hand like an insect.
• Benson is holding her gun in her hand. She unloads three bullets into each of them, not expecting much. They keep moving as if nothing is happening except the funny foxtrot of their feet.
• “Soulless”: “Father Jones,” Benson says, her forehead pressing into the rough carpet in his foyer, “something is really wrong with me.”
• “Tragedy”: Miles away from the precinct, a teenage boy and his seven-year-old sister drop dead in the middle of their walk home from school. When they are autopsied, bullets are pulled from the purple meat of their organs, though there are no entrance wounds on either of their bodies. The medical examiner is baffled. The bullets clink clink clink clink clink clink in the metal dish.
• Stabler looks up from his desk, where the manila envelope is resting, so anemically thin he wants to scream. He looks over at the mother of his children, the hollow at the base of her throat, the fine fringe of her eyelashes, the fat zit on her chin that she is probably minutes from popping.
• “Loss”: “You have to understand,” says Father Jones. “I loved her. I loved her more than I have loved everything. But she was sad, so sad. She couldn’t bear to be here anymore."
• The woman crumples. Her blood runs down a storm drain, and she dies with her eyes half-open, an interrupted eclipse. Benson and Stabler feel the beat at the same time, down beneath the pavement, beneath the screaming and the panicked crowd and the signs and the woman dead, dead, there it is, the one-two, and they look at each other. “You can hear it, too,” Stabler says hoarsely, but before Benson can answer, the shooter takes out a protester. Her sign falls facedown in the blood.
• The DA rolls down the hill in her dreams, stumbling, tumbling, rumbling down, down in the deep. In her dream, there is thunder, but the thunder is the color of rhubarb and it comes in twin booms. Every time the thunder sounds, the grass blades change shape.
• “Escape”: The girl staggers into the precinct with nothing on her body but a burlap sack. She tries to talk, but the words that come out are nonsense. Stabler gives her a cup of water. She drinks it in a single gulp, and then vomits onto his desk. The contents: said water, four nails, splinters of plywood, and a laminated slip of paper with a code on the side that seems to indicate it came from a library book. She keeps talking. Words tumble out, but in an order that makes no sense. The words are long, and real, Stabler discovers, flipping through a dictionary. But the sentences make no sense. None at all.
• “Brotherhood”: Stabler only ever wanted daughters when he first married his wife. He’d had a brother. He knew. Now, he is paralyzed with fear for them. He wishes they were never born. He wishes they were still floating safely in the unborn space, which he imagines to be grayish-blue, like the Atlantic, studded with star-like points of light, and thick, like corn syrup.
• Benson sticks her hand deep into the turkey’s guts. Her fingers push through gristle and meat and bones and close around something. She pulls. Out of the turkey comes a string of entrails, on which are suspended tiny bells, slick with blood. The meal is a great success. There is a photo of it on Stabler’s hard drive. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is having a very nice time.
• He cannot see Benson, though. Something shades his vision. She is smoke, elusive.
• “Criminal”: A man in a ski-mask robs a bank with a plastic gun and gets fifty-seven dollars. The teller saves the day by slicing off his face with the machete that he keeps under his counter.
• She shifts in her chair. She crosses and uncrosses her legs. On the way home, she stops at the drugstore on the corner. In her bathroom, she squats. She walks carefully to her bed and gets horizontal. She feels the bullet melting inside of her, making her better.
• “Obscene”: Benson buys twice as much produce as normal, and doesn’t even wait for it to rot. She throws a ripe vegetable in every garbage can in a twenty-block radius. It feels good to spread it out like this, the wasting.
• “Outcry”: Only after the sixth small black girl goes missing does the police commissioner finally make a statement, interrupting the season finale of a popular soap opera. The enraged letters start coming soon after. “Are you going to tell me if Susan’s baby belongs to David or not, Mister Police Commissioner??????” says one. Another person sends anthrax.
• Father Jones feels forgiveness melting down the back of his own throat.
• “Weak”: Stabler works out three times a day, now. He insists on jogging to crime scenes instead of using the squad car. Whenever he takes off from the station, his button-down and tie tucked into bright red running shorts, Benson goes and gets herself a coffee from the bodega, reads a newspaper, and then drives to the crime scene. Stabler always arrives a few minutes later, his fingers pressed against his pulse, shoes striking the pavement in an even rhythm. He jogs in place while they interview witnesses.
• “Haunted”: On the subway, Benson thinks she sees Henson and Abler on a train running the opposite direction. They blast past each other in a blaze of butter yellow light, the windows flashing by like frames on a filmstrip, and Henson and Abler appear to be in every one, moving jerkily like they are rotating through a phenakistoscope. Benson tries to call Stabler, but there’s no signal below the earth.
• “Contagious”: Benson stays home with swine flu. Her fever reaches 103º; she hallucinates that she is two people. She reaches over to the opposite pillow, years empty, and feels for her own face. The girls-with-bells-for-eyes try to make her soup, but their hands pass through the cupboard handles.
• “Ghost”: A prostitute is murdered. She is too tired to become a spirit.
• Benson is curled up in the corner of her mind, and she sees through her eyes distantly, like they are windows on the opposite side of a lengthy living room. Benson-who-is-not-Benson walks around the apartment. Benson-who-is-not-Benson takes off her nightgown and touches her grown woman’s body, inspecting every inch. Benson-who-is-not-Benson puts on clothes, hails a cab, and knocks on Stabler’s door, and even though it is 2:49 a.m, Stabler does not look even a little bit sleepy, though he is confused. “Benson,” he says. “What are you doing here?” Benson-who-is-not-Benson grabs his t-shirt in her hand and pulls him toward her, kissing him with more force and hunger than Stabler has ever felt in his own mouth. She releases his shirt. Benson cries into the darkened walls of her own skull. Benson-who-is-not-Benson wants more. Stabler wipes his mouth with his hand and then looks at his fingers, as if expecting to see something. Then he shuts the door. Benson-who-is-not-Benson returns to her apartment. Benson looks up from her knees to see the girl-with-bells-for-eyes standing in front of her. “Who is driving?” she asks thickly. The bells ring. No one. And indeed, Benson’s body is lying heavy as an unanimated golem on the bed. The bells ring. I’m sorry. The girl-with-bells-for-eyes sinks her fingers into Benson’s head, and
• “Night”: Benson wakes up. Her head is throbbing. She rolls over onto the cool side of the pillow, her dream ebbing away from her like a rubber duck bobbing gently out to sea.
• “Parts”: “Is it me, or is this steak kind of gamey?” Benson’s date says to Benson. She shrugs and looks down at her scallops. She prods one with a knife and it parts a little in the center, like a mouth opening, or worse. “It’s just… a weird flavor,” he says.
• “Goliath”: Stabler takes another long pull of his whiskey. He slumps in his armchair. Upstairs his wife sleeps, sleeps, dreams, wakes up, sleeps more, hates him, wakes, hates him, sleeps. He thinks of Benson, the way she stood there, the way her clothes looked put on funny, the way she drank from him like she was dying of thirst, the dreamy way her hand ran over the metal fence, over the iron-tipped gate like she was asleep, like she was high, like she was a woman in love, in love, in love.
• “Demons”: Shadows pass over the marbled halls of justice, through the police station, across crowded and empty streets. They slide up walls and through grates and under doors and arc through glass windowpanes. They take what they want, leave what they want, and some cry, and some don’t. Life is created and destroyed. Mostly destroyed.
• “911”: “Look, it’s just that I’m walking around feeling like I’m going to vomit out my own toenails, and I want to die, and I want to kill someone, sometimes, and I feel like I’m on the verge of dissolving into a puddle of organs and slop. Organ slop. “Um, that’s…that’s…I’m sorry. Look, I just called to report a vandal in my neighborhood.”
• “Raw”: At Benson and Stabler’s favorite sushi restaurant, they have stopped using plates and started using models. Benson pinches a red swatch of tuna from the hipbone of a brunette who seems to be trying very hard not to breathe. The owner stops by the table, and seeing Benson’s frown, says, “Cheaper than plates, you know.” Stabler reaches for a piece of eel, and the model takes a sudden breath. The meat eludes his chopsticks—once, twice.
• “Fault”: In her dream, Benson hears the heartbeat. She is on an empty New York City street. There is no breeze. The pavement does move, though, like something is breathing. Benson begins to follow the sound of the heartbeat, down the street. She sees a dark doorway, a sign above it that reads “Shahryar Bar & Grill.” Inside, the counters are polished and gleam dark red. The bottles and glasses gleam like the surface of a river, and every time the sound comes they shake slightly. There is a door tucked in the corner, a strip of light glowing beneath it. Laughter. Benson thinks it sounds like it did when she was a girl, and her mother had a cocktail party and Benson had to sit in her bedroom, a plate of tiny appetizers and half a cup of apple juice resting on her nightstand. She nibbled a mushroom that was full of something melted, and then drank her juice, and she could hear laughter on the other side of the door, glasses clinking, voices going loud and soft and loud again. She tried to read a book but ended up in her bed in the dark, listening to the voices that were so far and so close, picking out her mother’s bray in the din like pulling a loose thread of elastic from the band of your underpants, pulling, tightening, ruining them. That is what she feels now, the voices on the other side of the door. She reaches for the handle, the distance between her hand and it halving with each passing nanosecond, the metal cold even before her hand touches it. When Benson wakes up, she is screaming.
• “Fat”: “Just one more bite,” Stabler begs his oldest daughter. “Just one, baby. Just one carrot. Let’s start with one carrot.” He sees her being carved away, the way the wind shapes a dune into nothing. “One. Just one.”
• “Web”: Benson Googles. <<dead girls bells eyes missing hammers>> <<girls bells eyes>> <<girl ghost bells eyes>> <<ghosts broken>> <<what happens if I see a ghost?>> <<what makes a ghost?>> <<ghost fixing>> For months, the ads in her browser try to sell her: brass bell sets, ghost hunting equipment, video cameras, CDs of bell choirs, dolls, shovels.
• “Informed”: Benson is sure that her smartphone is smarter than she is, and she finds it deeply upsetting. When it gives her information, she puts it close to her face, says “NO,” and does the opposite.
• “Cage”: The rapist is raped. The raped are rapists.
• “Burned”: Father Jones senses the demon, though he cannot see it. From his bed, he smells sulfur, he feels the evil sitting on his chest. “What do you want?” he asks. “Why are you here?”
• Benson sits in her wicker chair, her hands resting on her knees. “All right,” she says. “Come in.” And they do. They walk into her, one at a time, and once inside she can feel them, hear them. They take turns with her vocal cords. “Hello,” Benson says. “Hello!” Benson says. “This feels really good,” Benson says. “What should we do first?” Benson says. “Now, wait,” Benson says. “I’m still me.” “Yes,” Benson says, “but you are legion, too.” In the distance, sirens tear up the night.
• “Philadelphia”: Evan the intern was annoying everyone in hell, so the demon sent him back. He overshot his target, though, and accidentally deposited him in Pennsylvania. Evan decides to stay. He never liked New York anyway. Too expensive. Too sad.
• “Sin”: Father Jones absolves the blooming trees and flowers. As their pollen is carried off, and begins to clog people’s lungs, Father Jones smiles. The coughs of redemption.
• “Closet”: The DA steps out into the sunshine, blinking, shielding her face. She almost bumps into Benson, who is strolling down the sidewalk. Benson smiles at her. “Haven’t seen you around in a while. Have you been sick?” The DA blinks and reflexively wipes her mouth, catching the smear of lipstick that doesn’t belong to her. “Yes,” she says. “No. Yes, a little.”
• He is disturbed by how easy it is. He thinks about his daughters, his wife. His brother, suddenly, his baby brother. He struggles to remember his baby brother, who flits through his synapses like a sketch. Suddenly certain of something, Stabler runs out into the street and stares up at the sky.
• “Cold”: Stabler meets Benson in her apartment. She is sitting in a pile of wood chips that used to be her kitchen table. She takes a long, languorous swallow of beer and smiles a watery smile. “My theory,” she says. “Our theory. Our theory is that there is a God, and he is hungry.”
• "You fight to put names on all of your dead, but not every victim wants to be known. Not all of us can deal with the illumination that comes with justice.”
• “Babes”: All of the Hooter’s waitresses get pregnant at once. No one will say why. “This is not really a case,” Benson says, exasperated. Stabler doodles on his pad—a picture of a tree. Or maybe it’s a tooth?
• “Wildlife”: Deer, raccoons, rats, mice, cockroaches, flies, squirrels, birds, spiders, all of them, gone. Scientists take notice immediately. The state pours money into research. Where are they? Where did they go? What does it mean that they are missing? What would it take for their return?
• “Persona”: Benson likes her date, but the girls inside her screw it up by referring to themselves in the collective. “It’s the royal ‘we’!” she howls after his retreating back.
• “PTSD”: Every night, Benson dreams about the girls’ deaths. She slips in and out of stabbings and shootings and stranglings and poisonings and gags and ropes and No, no, nos, all lucid, and cut with Benson’s normal dreams: sex with Stabler, apocalypses, teeth falling out, teeth falling out of Benson onto Stabler while they fuck on a boat as the Flood wipes everything away.
• “Smut”: The DA watches the 24-hour news networks for 24 hours.
• “Hothouse”: Benson covers her apartment in flowerpots and long troughs full of black dirt, laying them among the destroyed remnants of her furniture, her list, her rules. She plants basil and thyme and dill and oregano and beets and spinach and kale and rainbow chard. The sound of pattering water released from a watering can is so beautiful she wants to cry. Time to make something grow.
• “Lead”: When she is tired, Benson lets the girls take over. They run her body all over town, buying hard lemonades and shimmying her chest at bouncers and, once, before Benson can take over again, kissing a busboy sweetly on his mouth, a mouth that tastes like metal and spearmint.
• “Selfish”: The medical examiner can’t bring herself to admit that sometimes, she’s the one who wants to be cut open, to have someone tell her all of her own secrets.
• She probes her memories, and only comes up with dreams.
• “Zebras”: Benson wakes up in the zoo again. She scales the wall, not caring that she trips the alarm, not caring that as she runs, cop cars are cruising, flashing, looking for her and only her. She is barefoot, her feet bleed, the street breathes, the street heats, the street is waiting, and what else is waiting? Beneath, beneath, beneath.
• She tries to pick up the hammers, and they dissolve in her fingers like fog.
• “Perverted”: “You can’t stop me,” the note, pinned to the body, reads. “I control everything. —THE WOLF.” Benson and Stabler start a new file.
• “Anchor”: They can’t prove the naval officer was responsible because the evidence isn’t waterproof.
• “Confidential”: “It’s been nice having her come around,” Benson says to her plants, referring to the DA. Benson hates diaries. “She’s really great company. Really great.” She imagines that the plants are arching toward her voice.
• “Spectacle”: On a Wednesday, they catch so many bad guys that Benson throws up seventeen girls in one afternoon. She laughs as they spill out of her, tumble into her vomit like oil slicks, and dissipate into the air.
• “Bully”: The last girl clings to the inside of Benson’s skull. “I don’t want to be alone,” Benson says. “I don’t, either,” Benson says, “but you need to go.” Stabler comes into Benson’s apartment. “Her name is Marcela Tietra. She was twelve. She was raped by her father, and her mother did not believe her. Her father killed her. He buried her on Brighton Beach.” Inside, the girl shook her head, as if to dislodge the sand in her hair. “Go,” Benson says. “Go.” The girl smiles and doesn’t, her bells barely rocking. “Thank you,” Benson says. “You’re welcome,” Benson says. There is a sound—a new sound. A sigh. And then, she is gone.
• “Bang”: A bomb goes off in Central Park. It was beneath a park bench the whole time. No one is sitting on the bench when it detonates, and the only casualty is a passing pigeon. The serial killer sends a note to Benson and Stabler. All it says is “Oops.”
• “Delinquent”: Benson and the DA are both late to work, and smell like each other. Stabler sends in his resignation by express post.
• “Smoked”: The DA and Benson roast vegetables on the grill, laughing. The smoke rises up and up, drifts over the trees, curls past birds and rot and blooms. The city smells it. The city takes a breath.

details -

• a 2013 weird fiction novella by Carmen Maria Machado, told in the form of 272 capsule synopses for the first 12 seasons of the police procedural, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; first published in The American Reader, in May 2013
• Synopsis:
  • As Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson investigate standard cases of horrific depravity and cruelty, they gradually find themselves enmeshed in a mysterious situation involving alien abductions, ghosts with bells for eyes, and — perhaps most disturbingly — the appearance of Abler and Henson, two doppelgängers who are living Stabler and Benson's lives better than Stabler and Benson are.