Searing photographs, etched into post-COVID corneas. In one, the Old Seemapuri crematorium in Ghaziabad, Delhi, simmers (Figure 2.1); in the other, phantom figures clad in personal protective equipment (PPE) resolutely witness a cremation (Figure 2.2). The two images are part of the sprawling archive in feature photography documenting the manmade disaster that was India's COVID second wave (April–May 2021). But this is not any feature photography. The photographs were taken by Danish Siddiqui and Adnan Abidi, both credentialed Reuters photographers based in New Delhi, who were among four Indian journalists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 2022. Later in the chapter, I will turn to a third prize-winning photographer Amit Dave's documentation of medical oxygen shortages. But I start with this genre of images, ‘crematoria images’, because they persist as the afterimage of India's COVID experience. To be sure, the airborne disaster that was COVID galvanized a whole slew of ‘air-breath’ images. Yet, aesthetically placing the viewer at an eschatological threshold, the crematoria images were particularly haunting as a constant reminder of death become quotidian in the city. Like iconic images that accumulate sensory-affective intensities in circulation, the crematoria images began to quilt together all other air-breath images: they have come to function as the lasting impression, an afterimage burned into the cornea. Even today, post-COVID, post-catastrophic mass death from acute infection, these images continue to induce fear, anxiety, even foreboding, about losing air-breath, losing community, losing creaturely existence.