Sadie stepped into her lonely apartment and reached into her tight denim pocket for a crumbling chunk of leftover cake. Grease had stained the napkin, seeping through the fabric, but she didn’t care.

  She sprinkled the crumbs near the wall where Big Mac lived. A faint skittering echoed from within the plaster, and she smirked. “The fatty’s gonna have a nice surprise when he waddles out come morning,” she thought, the slight affection in her chest enough to startle her.

  Afterward, she hurriedly peeled off her top, the fabric clinging stubbornly to her rain-damp shoulders, and carelessly tossed it onto the floor. It landed half-curled like a shed snakeskin.

  Collapsing onto the bed, her face sank into the soft purple sheets—still faintly smelling of lavender from the last time Zahya washed them—while her legs dangled over the edge, toes almost skimming the threadbare carpet.

  In the realm of sleep, Sadie never encountered dreams; her slumber was a pitch-black void, airless and infinite. It was as if she dissolved each night, atoms scattering into a tranquil, silent emptiness that felt more real than her waking hours. More honest.

  This stagnant perception persisted until dawn, when the sun would inevitably invade. Its relentless rays breached the fractured blinds, slicing across her face, tormenting her delicate eyelids with needle-sharp precision. She’d writhe then, as a cockroach struggling under a boot, convinced her carapace was cracking open to let the light scald her inners raw.

  She felt like a captive, trapped in a drugged haze—perpetually deprived of rest, subjected to recurring torture designed to keep her teetering on the edge of collapse. It seemed she’d never be granted the mercy of death, only forced to serve as a plaything for some sadistic deity’s amusement.

  With each cycle’s end, she braced for the reset.

  Every day began with the same Sisyphean ritual: dragging her animated corpse upright to face another gray, grinding existence. Same as the day before. Same as the day before that.

  But this time, the pain didn’t wait for consciousness.

  It struck mid-void—a white-hot fork plunged into her ribs. Spasms coursed through her sides, relentless and excruciating, as if her organs were twisting on themselves. Her eyes flew open to darkness. The clock glowed 2:45 a.m.

  Sadie's body reacted to the pain, and she found herself drenched in sweat, the torment evident on her contorted face.

  She managed to stagger out of bed, her feet slipping on the soft catskin carpet before she collapsed into a crawl toward the bathroom. The cold bite of the floor seeped into her palms, mingling with the clammy sweat already slicking her skin.

  The harrowing symptoms were all too familiar to Sadie—a searing flare of Crohn’s disease, a foe she’d battled for years. Her insides tortioned excruciatingly, coiling tighter with every inch she dragged herself forward.

  Her blurry vision snagged on the half-open medicine cabinet above the sink, its contents barely illuminated by the flickering bulb inside. The mirror behind it reflected a fractured version of her face—deathly pale, gaunt, lips cracked and stained with flecks of blood. Sickly like everyday, but more than usual.

  As her trembling hand reached for the anticonvulsants, spasms ripped through her without warning, crippling her movements as though a blade had been plunged into her gut by some invisible, merciless hand.

  A guttural groan tore from her throat, echoing off the bathroom tiles like the wail of a wounded animal.

  The bottle slipped from her grasp, pills scattering across the floor near the toilet. She collapsed onto her left arm, knees striking tile, immobilized by pain that now rendered her nearly insensate. One pill rolled toward the drain, its white lustre winking at her. It was just within arm's reach. She extended her fingertips to try and grab a hold of it.

  But a violent cough racked her body, splattering red phlegm between ragged breathing, as if a demon were clawing its way out from her ribs. Dark blood pooled beneath her fallen head while her arms trembled, buckling beneath her weight.

  Creeping paralysis tightened its grip. Her heart hammered wildly, its rhythm throbbing in her ears. At the frayed edges of her vision, a figure coalesced in the shadowed corner of the wall—a smudge of darkness that shouldn’t have been there.

  Hallucination, she told herself, clinging to the lie even as the shape gained density, its presence swelling with each ragged breath she took. Agony pinned her to the floor, yet some primal instinct forced her to twist toward the wall. Her joints screamed in protest, tendons straining.

  A low, mournful moan slithered from the corner, icing her veins. What she saw there stole the air from her lungs. The shadows themselves seemed to writhe, peeling away from the walls to coil, forming long limbs.

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  Clinging to the ceiling with ghastly claw-like nails was a creature whose face twisted into a grotesque mockery of a sloth’s—sagging flesh, milky eyes, and a jaw hanging slack as if unhinged. Its unnaturally matted fur constrasting with the plaster of the wall.

  Terror pinned Sadie in place, yet she met its lifeless stare with feverish defiance. The creature tilted its head, and time itself seemed to warp, the world slowing to a nightmare crawl. The bulb above flickered once, twice, then bursted, plunging the room into a blackness that throbbed with the sound of its ragged, wet breaths.

  She could see it still.

  With seemingly imperceptible movements, it began to creep along the ceiling corner, pulling itself upwards as if its long nails were eerily trying to dig into the darkness of the corner.

  Unable to tear her gaze away, Sadie grappled with the surreal notion of what was occurring right before her eyes, was she suffering from sleep paralysis?

  She struggled to even take notice if the sloth-like creature was making progress in its movement or hanging dead and merely being animated by the strong winds. Amidst the obscurity, lone its beady, blind eyes stood out, holding a faded color reminiscent of a lifeless animal, eyes that seemed to reflect a surrender to extinction.

  The longer she stared, the more the pain receded. A heavy calm seeped into her limbs, the numb surrender of prey yielding to the predator’s jaws. Her thoughts frayed, dissolving into a trance.

  Then—

  She was no longer in her body.

  ***

  15,000 years ago. Late Pleistocene.

  Sadie hunched beneath a cloak of sun-cured hides, her feet bound in sandals of knotted reeds. A stone spear weighed in her grip, its shaft carved with twin flutes running from base to tip.

  Around her, nomadic hunters murmured in guttural tones. Their leader—a man with skin like wind-scoured leather—crouched to inspect colossal footprints stamped into the mud. He gestured westward, toward a land where grasslands frayed into marshes choked by snarled trees and thorny undergrowth.

  Sadie followed.

  The earth grew spongy beneath her sandals, sucking at each step. Mud oozed between her toes as they waded through shallow channels, cattails bowing around them like silent sentinels. Dragonflies, wings blued by twilight, darted over reeds trembling in the stagnant air.

  A water snake, striped crimson and black, slithered past her calf. Sadie froze, but her attention snagged on another footprint ahead—a gargantuan impression which swallowed her own foot whole when she stepped into it.

  Amongst the subdued tones of green and brown, yellow pitchers with purple lids and variegated purple veins caught Sadie's eye. She cautiously reached for one, curling a finger into its slick throat—

  Upon closer inspection, she noticed a toad frantically struggling to escape from its confined space, its webbed feet sticking to the slippery rim.

  The toad took countless half-jumps in an attempt to climb the smooth walls of the pitcher, but with each effort, it only slipped further down.

  The more it struggled, the more entangled it became in the sticky substance, which also happened to be digestive fluid.

  "Life consuming life." Sadie whispered, as the pitcher's operculum veiled the process of digestion. The other hunters were already making their way out of the swamp, deftly pushing the dancing reeds aside. Feeling a sense of urgency, Sadie hurried to catch up with them, not wanting to risk getting entangled in the treacherous embrace of the slimy swamp herself.

  The nomadic group continued to carefully follow the traces of the creature, broken branches and claw marks affirmed they were getting closer. Suddenly, their leader, intrepid and composed, motioned for everyone to remain silent as he crouched and tightly gripped his spear.

  An animal with a lumbering gait became increasingly apparent as they observed it from a safe distance, hiding among bushes. At first glance, it bore a resemblance to a bear, but as Sadie focused on its features, she noticed the peculiar hooked claws, more akin to those of a sloth.

  One of the men, restless and acting precipitously, disregarded the leader's signal and impulsively hurled his spear at the slow-moving beast in an attempt to subdue it.

  To his shock, the spear proved ineffective against the creature's seemingly impenetrable hide. This audacious move drew immediate attention to their presence, alerting the massive animal to their existence.

  As the confrontation unfolded, the sloth twisted and arose upon its thick hind limbs, its formidable claws upraised in a defensive pose as it confronted its trackers. Its infant sloth scaled the fur of his standing stout mother to take shelter up a timbery limb.

  The humans, following the strategic directive of their chief, approached cautiously from multifold directions, endeavoring to encircle the beast and divert its focus from any one of them.

  Step by step, the fellow nomads closed in from all four sides, their hearts hammering with adrenaline as they aimed to surround the creature and confuse it from charging them. The strain in the atmosphere was palpable, and Sadie, too, was intently approaching with them. Yet, her attentiveness was momentarily diverted when she noticed the infant sloth embracing a tree limb, defenseless and innocent behind the behemoth.

  Her inattention has cost a life.

  Before Sadie could react, the situation took a horrific turn. With a sudden outburst of unanticipated velocity, the sloth giant lunged at one of the men, its powerful claws ripping his gullet open in a savage attack. The fellowship gasped in shock at the gruesome sight.

  The rest of the hunters, driven by a mixture of dread and hatred, seized the chance to retaliate. They coordinated their endeavours and struck back, driving their weapons into the sloth's exposed stomach, delivering deadly blows. The once mighty creature now fell to its knees with crying groans, its imposing presence diminished to a huge corpse.

  Heartrending cries emanated from the trees, the infant sloth was mourning the death of his carer, and Sadie wondered what was to become of it. Her answer came with the speed of the wind, as a spear whizzed past her and into the crying sloth.

  The tiny creature, which had been an innocent bystander in the confrontation, now lay motionless on the branch, its once sparkling eyes hazy and dim.

  The ambience around Sadie seemed to darken, and flickering lights cast Sadie into a familiar room.The lifeless baby sloth fell from the darkness, landing heavily on Sadie's chest, its claws digging into her spirit.