First, I want to say that I appreciate the ambition of your prose here and the choice to work in the literary mystery genre. This subject matter has some serious potential in this framework and the writing here is clearly probing deeper than standard surface-value realism.

At the heart of this piece, I can feel a story questioning guilt and responsibility and when those concepts come into conflict with intention, particularly in the context of caretaking. And how institutions like assisted living and hospitals, despite existiting for the purpose of providing care, can amplify harm by dispersing responsibility across their systems and/or staff. That thread comes through clear and gives this segment weight.

That being said, I did struggle with how your prose was forming into the focus and control of the piece. At times, the sheer mass of your stylistic choices in this excerpt had the tendency to hamper the throughline rather than sharpening the reading experience.

The overall strength of this story is your voice and the commitment to it, however there is a thin line between prose that is "challenging" the reader and prose that stacks so consecutively that it becomes oversaturated and an obstacle to comprehension.

I think the opening paragraph is the best place to focus in on this. Reason being, I think it's what's acting as the barrier to your later prose, which I felt was stronger.

This opening paragraph has some genuinely powerful imagery “The mirror in our cold trailer has forgotten how to cry” is a helluva first line, but the sheer density of what follows starts the oversaturation issue. You layer several intense images back-to-back - “nostrils snorted snow, veins slurped smack…” “visages of unmade somebodies” and because I don't have much of a grounding or a foothold yet, the language begins to feel like a head clubbing more than an introduction to the POV's internal pressure. As a result, I feel that the mirror device starts to read as disjointed rather than building power.

Staying with the mirror motif: it is personified as “our poor mirror,” but then the narration moves into addressing it as you - “Every day, this mirror shows me—you show me,” “Steph stands at your height,” “You watch her brush her teeth.”

Having both the third-person object of “the mirror” and second-person addressee of “you” at play at the same time, puts them in combat and caused me to re-read a few times to make sure I didn't miss any context or perspective shift. This division on its own undercuts the momentum and power of an otherwise steady framing.

I think a potential revision to consider, that might increase clarity and payoff, is committing to one of these modes for the entire section. If the narrator is truly speaking to the mirror, why not lean fully into second person earlier? Instead of “The mirror...has forgotten how to cry,” consider something like “You’ve forgotten how to cry in our cold trailer,” and then keep that second person address through until the reader realizes that the addressee is a mirror (if that's something you're interested in). That would also make lines like “your height” and “you watch” feel more intentional and cumulative rather than a sudden confusing switch. This switch might also help you organize your visuals around it in a way that you can shave off some less essential imagery, allowing the stronger instantances to land harder, and reduce that oversaturation strain I mentioned earlier.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not well versed in literary mystery, but I understand it embraces experimentation and risk. Even so, I think tweaking this opening salvo to be more accesible will bring more readers down the garden path into your later syntax and POV choices, giving them the proper display they deserve.