Ella Grimsdottir was nineteen and a couple months fresh out of highschool, yet she looked in the mirror and it seemed to her as if her soul had already left her body. She had woken up somewhat shaken having had a nightmare in which she and Selim, a long time acquaintance, were pursued by armed men in suits and killed.

  To calm herself, she looked at the mirror a bit longer, and appreciated her features. In her dream, her hair was styled in a bob with long bangs running on the sides of her face. That was the haircut that she had when she was a student, but now her reflection sported a wild, spiky mane. Just like in her dream, her reddish and white spotted hair remained. Her eyes were sunken and their lids were greyish and slightly swollen. Her lips were colourless and dry.

  “Well, everything else seems to be in the right place” she muttered to herself and went off to get ready.

  She made herself a single toast for breakfast, but when she realized she had nothing to spread on top of it, she sighed and decided to leave it. So now that she was on her way to work, her stomach was rumbling like crazy.

  “Stupid, stupid girl. Stupid, boring toast” she repeated to herself with a pained look on her face.

  For a while, work went on without much of a hitch. The boss, a young entrepreneur who had a modestly profitable fund with some friends, owned several businesses around the neighbourhood, and so he didn’t always show up, and when he didn’t, Ella could breathe a sigh of relief, for she found him the most annoying man in the world. It wasn’t a lot of relief, however, because even if she didn’t have to put up with the owner, the manager was still around. And that woman was the kind of woman that reminded Ella that there were people that were born to rule over others. Her hawkish eyes could perceive even the most minor mistake, and her stern mouth held back a deep, penetrating voice that Ella had learnt to avoid hearing.

  In any case, ‘without a hitch’ hardly meant that the day had just gone by. Ella handled several chores to take care of at work, and every single one felt like it took hours. She worked eight hours, officially, at least, and it was still nowhere near lunch break, but she could have sworn she had been at it for a whole day. The minutes felt like hours. And the days felt like weeks. And the weeks felt like forever. No wonder she had the eyes of an old lady.

  She was mopping the floor when the trance she was in was interrupted by the sound of the doorbell ringing. It wasn’t a client, it was too early still for that.

  “Fuck” she thought to herself. She knew exactly who it was.

  “Ah, Ella, the most productive creature this side of town.” The man uttering those words with a bored look in his face had thick rimmed decorative glasses, and sported an English style mustache. There wasn’t anything else about him that was worth describing.

  “I’m busy, go bother someone else” she said back.

  “Could have fooled me” he answered and walked to the manager past the freshly mopped floor, leaving dirty steps all over it.

  Ella looked at all the new work that had just spawned in front of her and remembered that Greek myth she had read about back in school, but couldn’t remember the name of the central figure. She could only remember the rock sliding down the slope of the mountain.

  Later that day, late enough for there to be clients, but not enough for lunch break, she overheard a lady complaining loudly at one of the tables about how she had lost tens of thousands of euros. The mention of money made her ears perk up. She sneakily approached a nearby table and pretended to be occupied picking up leftovers while she continued to listen.

  It seemed that the lady had lost that money betting on an app. But tens of thousands…? She began to think “how come dumb people like her have so much spending money? I’ve always known better than to try to get rich by betting, so why am I not rich? If monied people want to part so badly with their cash, why don’t they give it to me? How could I fleece people like that?” Unknowingly, she began brainstorming ways to get a scam going. And time might have begun to slip by normally at some point during that, because suddenly a voice she knew plucked her from her fantasy and froze her to her core.

  “Ella Grimsdottir.”

  Something primeval stirred within her when she heard that voice.

  “So work has run out, huh?”

  Ella turned around like she was spinning on a rusty hinge. And when she was finally facing the source of the question, she saw a figure she was all too familiar with. The manager looked almost small when she sat in the corner of the shop overlooking the employees, but when she stood next to you she seemed to tower high above.

  “N-no ma’am, I just… Got distracted” Ella muttered as she spiritually curled up into a ball.

  “Luckily we all have home to get distracted at, don’t we? Yet you choose to be here, it must suit you. A poor and withered soul clings to whatever it can keep. It must be so sad to know exactly what you were made to do, and still be so undeniably bad at it.”

  Ella looked directly at the floor. The words hammering away at her mind on repeat.

  “Or am I wrong, Grim?”

  “No, ma’am… It is pretty sad…”

  “The bar, Grimm. Clean it up. Now.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Yes ma’am…”

  She moved on to the bar with a deflated posture, and sitting at it she found the owner drinking some drink from a gaudy cup and scrolling on his phone.

  “But if it isn’t my gloomiest employee” he said.

  “Sir, I’m not gloomy. I couldn’t be happier to get a paycheck from what is clearly a failing venture” she clapped back.

  “Is that so?” he said, arching an eyebrow slightly, but still looking bored. “Why, you must be so good at making money, I just got a three hundred percent return on a stock short, but clearly I should be employing myself in small, failing businesses and make money from nothing. You are a genius!”

  “H-how much money did you say you just got… Right now… With your phone?” she said with a concerned expression.

  “More than you’ll see in the next ten years, snipe. Now clean the bar, it’s almost as dirty as you are and is so much more expensive.”

  In that moment Ella saw herself grabbing a knife from the bar and puncturing the owner’s throat and carotid repeatedly. She had such intrusive thoughts on occasion, but they didn’t bother her when they killed this guy.

  “In a better world” she thought “the law wouldn’t protect people like you from me.” And then she smiled. The vivid mental image manifested the bright red clearly, adorning her hands, the thick, warm liquid wetted her dry skin and ruined her cheap clothes.

  The pleasant thought accompanied her until the end of her shift, when the spell broke. She was walking home when she thought.

  “What the hell am I doing with my life?”

  Now it wasn’t imaginary blood running down her face, but another, saltier liquid.

  Her small apartment awaited her dark and still, she couldn’t afford one with windows and the lights were off as electricity had been cut for lack of payment. She sat in the dark and started to feel hungry. Earlier at work, during the lunch break, she realized she had left her wallet at home and couldn’t get anything to eat, so she just sat at the table trying to get her mind off the rumbling of her stomach.

  Sitting in the dark, two thoughts came to her mind. First: how did she manage her way to the table in the dark without stumbling into anything. And the second was: why’s there cold toast conveniently sitting at the other end of the table for her to curb her hunger with.

  “I’m the luckiest gal” she thought and attempted to go after that bread.

  But she couldn’t. Her legs didn’t answer her.

  She started to sweat. Suddenly she wanted that piece of stale toast more than she ever wanted anything in her life. Unable to get up, and getting more and more desperate, she flopped atop the table and attempted to crawl her way to it. But the table was so long, why? She couldn’t afford anything that big, let alone fit it inside her tiny apartment. So why did the snack sit comfortably out of reach, even after she dragged herself to it for what seemed like minutes, with such ferocity that she ripped her fingernails off.

  She fell back into the chair, fingers bloodied and legs still numb, and realized then why she could see. For all along the room had been illuminated by a faint light that seemed to come from nowhere, a light so faint that she could’ve fool herself into thinking it was just her eyes used to the dark. Looking back at her price, her eyes slowly started to drift upwards, following the silhouette of something that rejected that spectral light. She had seen it before, but couldn’t recall when. Her eyes kept going up the featureless presence until they locked up with what seemed like eyes.

  But surely they couldn’t be. The white reflected no light, nor did it allow any shadow to be cast on it. And the cavernous depths of the holes in the centre of those whites couldn’t possibly look back. But they did.

  “What do you want?” she asked, suddenly gasping for air.

  “...What… do you… want…”

  Those were her words it repeated back at her, distorted, but still recognizably her voice. And so she realized it was pointless to try and communicate. This wasn’t a thing she was looking at, it wasn’t something that existed. Her words meant nothing. And it was then that a word, or rather a concept was projected into her mind.

  Vanish.

  And she realized that she would… Get that toast… Or vanish. She knew it so certainly, and it sunk her mind in the depths of despair.

  “How do I get to live? How?” the question flashed in her mind, her thoughts racing “no… That’s not quite right. I shouldn’t be thinking about how to survive, but how to get what I want. I get what I want and I get to live.”

  It was simple, the answer was so suddenly so clear, but not because of its clarity was it any more possible. What she wanted was far away, and her body would not budge.

  “Fantastic idea, jackass” she said to herself, “it’s always some brilliant plan with you, you’ll somehow get rich doing as little as possible and live like a queen. Not a single one of my ideas has any substance. So now I get to get erased by a creepy thing from another dimension, while everyone that took advantage of me get’s to live a happy and profitable life.”

  Tears started running down her face.

  Vanish.

  “Get out of my thoughts!” she yelled while striking her thighs “just move, you fat, useless things!”

  She cried and hit her legs like that for a while. And when she stopped, she somehow knew that no time had passed.

  “So it isn’t just a dream, huh? You are not going to go away, are you?” she said with a raspy voice.

  “...Away… away…”

  “How do these fuckers manage to get so much money anyway? It’s like the world bends itself to their whim.” She smirked meekly. “If this is a nightmare that I can’t get up from, then at least let me make it more like a dream. A dream in which I can do anything, just like them.”

  So armed with some strange resolve, she stretched her hand towards it. “It’s impossible, don’t you know? Getting what I want, that is. So you better let me get away with a little fantasy, even if a slightly dark one.”

  And so it started, first with a small ache coming from within her forearm, then mind-shattering agony. A small bone appeared between the muscle fibers of her forearm, then another one, and another one. The osseous clump pushed and tore her muscles, veins and arteries started to redirect and flow into the growth. Then muscle started covering those extra bones, as the starters to stretch outwards and in the direction of the toast. She felt every single fiber snap, and when the muscle was out of the way, it started to stretch her skin. It stretched it so hard she thought it would rip, but it never did, and when the growth had the shape of a hand it started to move and grasp for the bread.

  But it was too far away.

  So then a small protuberance appeared in the center of the new hand, it kept growing with the same pained effort that had spawned the new appendage until they looked like fingers, and then a little more, until it was yet another hand.

  But it was still too far away.

  So another hand sprouted from the new one, and then another one. Ella had never experienced such an amount of pain, but still her eyes remained wide open looking at her shifting flesh. She looked at the thing’s eyes, if only to see if she could share her amazement with anyone, but those eyes displayed no emotion at all. She smiled at it.

  But it felt nothing.

  Before she knew it, she had begun to enjoy this new sensation. Humans don’t get to experience that much pain without going into shock so clearly, everything was fine… Or she just wasn’t human. She was about to lose herself in that extreme sensation when the charred texture of the toast at her fingertips snapped her out of it. She just thought that she wanted some toast, and the growth of hands began rapidly compressing back into her forearm with the toast in its grasp.

  And before she could react the cold toast slapped her in the face and fell into her lap.

  She touched her forearm to see if any of the growth remained and winced in pain as her bloodied fingers touched her skin.

  “Right, I ripped off my fingernails” she thought.

  But her forearm was normal, nothing about it had changed. Her legs had regained their feeling too, and could move, she noticed when the feeling of the toast resting on top of them started sinking in. She grabbed the toast, the annoying sting on her injured fingers frustrating her, and looked at the toast wondering if it was worth all the grief. And then her stomach grumbled, so she bit into it. It was bland and stale, for it was only seasoned with her tears.

  She chewed the bread happily for a bit while looking around in the darkness. The faint glow was gone, so she couldn’t actually see anything.

  But in spite of that, she knew there was nothing there.