So what kinds of things did you see?

It's crazy how often people still ask me that, even though it's been sixteen months since I left Hexa. People just won't stop trying, and if my answer doesn't live up to their expectations—too vague, not shocking enough—they simply repeat the question, putting it slightly differently. "But what's the worst thing you ever saw?" Gregory, my new colleague at the museum, asks me.

"So what exactly are we talking about here?" That's my Aunt Meredith, who for years I would only see on the anniversary of Mom's death, but who has suddenly gotten into the habit of calling me on the first Sunday of every month to ask how I'm doing, and oh yeah, what exactly it was that I saw.

"Why don't you choose one video, one image, or one post that really affected you." And there's Dr. Ana. "Tell me what you thought and felt at the time. Go ahead and make it into an image in your head ... Yes, a mental image of yourself sitting there and seeing that upsetting image"—and then she pulls out some sort of rod with a light flashing back and forth inside of it.

And now you've joined in too, Mr. Stitic. You call me almost every day now. "Please get in touch when you have a moment, Ms. Kayleigh."

Do you even realize that Kayleigh is my first name? You don't, do you? Of course you got a hold of my details from my former colleagues, who don't know my last name, and now you're asking me: "So, Ms. Kayleigh, what kinds of things did you see?"

People act like it's a perfectly normal question, but how normal is a question when you're expecting the answer to be gruesome? And it's not like any of those people are asking out of concern for my well-being. Maybe that's not so strange—maybe questions don't stem from interest in the other person so much as curiosity about the lives we might have led ("Gosh, Mr. Stitic, civil law ... what's that like?"), but with Gregory and Aunt Meredith, and even with Dr. Ana, I can't help but suspect a certain amount of lurid fascination, an urge that compels them to ask but that can never be fully satisfied.

I saw a livestream of a girl sticking a much-too-dull pocketknife into her own arm—she really had to jam it in there before a decent amount of blood would come out. I saw a man kicking his German shepherd so hard that the poor animal slammed into the fridge, whimpering. I saw kids daring each other to eat dangerously large amounts of cinnamon in one go. I saw people singing Hitler's praises to their neighbors, colleagues, and vague acquaintances, publicly, unabashedly, out there for potential partners and employers to see: "Hitler should have finished what he started" below a picture of a group of immigrants crammed into a small boat.

But those are all cop-out examples—you know that, don't you? Those things have all been in the papers, culled from accounts by other former moderators, though that doesn't mean I didn't encounter them too: the abused dogs, the Nazi salutes—and the girl with the knives is a classic, there are thousands of them, one on every street, or at least that's how I picture it: That house where the bathroom light is still on at night, that's where she's sitting alone on the cold, hard floor. But that's not what people want to hear. They want me to give them something new, things they'd never dare look at, things that are far beyond their imagination, which is why Gregory asks, "But what's the worst thing you ever saw?" rather than "How is that girl doing now? Were you able to help her, by any chance?" God no, people have no idea what my previous job actually entailed, and that's partly your fault, Mr. Stitic. After all the news about the lawsuit you're filing on behalf of my former colleagues, people believe that we all sat there in front of our screens like zombies, that we didn't know what we were doing, had no idea what we'd gotten ourselves into, that out of the blue we were bombarded with thousands of sickening images that short-circuited the synapses in our brains almost instantly—well, it wasn't like that. At least not entirely, and not for everyone.

Excerpted from We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets. Copyright © 2022 by Hanna Bervoets. Excerpted by permission of Mariner Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.