Estimated reading time — 33 minutes

The apartment was quiet at 5:47 in the morning. The kind of quiet that sits in a room like a held breath, broken only by the quiet drone of the refrigerator and the distant moan of traffic on the street below. Clarissa moved through it the way she always did, on autopilot, her body running the morning routine while her mind was still somewhere between sleep and waking. She padded into the bathroom in her socks, clicked the light on, and reached for her toothbrush without looking up.

She looked up eventually. She always did. She has a habit of smiling at herself in the mirror to brighten her own day every morning.

At first she thought it was a trick of the light. The figure in the mirror was her, clearly her, same dark circles, same tangled hair, same big cheesy grin, same worn t-shirt she had been sleeping in for three nights. But something was wrong with the timing of it. When she raised the toothbrush, the reflection raised hers a beat later. A fraction of a second. Almost nothing. Clarissa blinked and leaned in closer, studying herself the way you study a word that suddenly looks misspelled after years of writing it. She moved her hand again, slowly this time. The reflection moved slowly too. Slowly, and late.

She stood there and watched it happen. She tilted her head left and the mirror tilted left, one second behind her. She raised two fingers and counted in her head before the reflection raised two fingers back. The delay was growing. She could feel it the way you feel a fever climbing, a steady creeping wrongness that the body registers before the mind is willing to name it.

By the time the gap had stretched to something close to two full seconds, the toothbrush was clattering into the sink and her breathing had changed entirely.

She backed out of the bathroom doorway and into the hall.

Kate’s door was at the end of it, closed, a strip of darkness underneath. Clarissa crossed to it in four steps, knocking once before deciding that knocking was not sufficient and pushing it open. Kate was a lump under a comforter printed with small yellow flowers, one arm hanging off the side of the mattress, completely and perfectly asleep.

Clarissa grabbed her shoulder and shook, while Kate made a sound back that was not language.

Clarissa shook harder. “Kate. Kate, get up. You need to come. Something is happening.”

There was something in her voice that cut through. Kate had known Clarissa for sixteen years and knew all the registers of that voice, the tired one, the joking one, the quietly furious one she used on difficult customers. This was none of those. Kate sat up, hair across her face, and looked at her.

“What. What happened.”

“The bathroom. Just come. Please.”

Kate came. She followed Clarissa down the short hall with the stumbling gait of the recently woken, and stepped into the bathroom and looked at the mirror. Clarissa was already standing in front of it. Staring at it. Her face had gone the particular blank of someone who has moved past active fear into something more like paralysis. She was not looking at anything, because there was nothing to look at. Where her reflection had been, (delayed, wrong, and frightening) there was now simply absence. The mirror showed the bathroom. It showed the towel rack and the toothbrush holder and the light fixture. It showed Kate, blinking, rumpled, and confused.

Clarissa’s eyes filled without her meaning them to. She pressed her lips together and failed to stop the tears.

“What is going on?” Kate said. She was looking at Clarissa with genuine worry.

Clarissa told her. She told her about the delay, how it had started as almost nothing, how she had watched it grow until her reflection was moving two seconds behind her, and then how it stopped appearing at all. She spoke quickly and precisely and with the slightly too-even tone of someone fighting to sound reasonable.

Kate looked at the mirror.

Then she looked at Clarissa.

“Is this…” She stopped. “Are you messing with me right now?”

The question landed wrong. Clarissa stared at her. “What?”

“Because it’s six in the morning and I’m…” Kate gestured vaguely at the mirror. “I’m standing right here and I can see you fine. In the mirror. I can see both of us.”

Clarissa turned back to the mirror. She knew what she would find. The same empty glass without her reflection. She could see Kate’s reflection looking back at her with an expression caught somewhere between concern and suspicion.

Something in Clarissa’s chest came loose then. Not dramatically. Quietly, the way things give way that have been holding for a long time. She began to sob.

“Have you slept? Like, properly slept?” A pause. “Clarissa, are you taking something? Or… Did someone give you something?”

“No.” The word came out harder than she intended. “No. Absolutely not. I’m not. No.”

“Okay.” Kate held up both hands, palms out. “Okay. I’m just asking.”

Clarissa heard herself agree that it was fine, that she was fine, that it was probably just her eyes, early morning, low light, she didn’t know. She heard herself walk it back in real time, watched Kate’s face loosen with relief at having the normal explanation offered to her. Kate squeezed her arm once and went back down the hall. The bedroom door clicked shut behind her.

I watched Clarissa stand there alone in the bathroom light, bewildered while looking at the place where she wasn’t.

She did not move to look away. She did not look down at her hands to reassure herself she was still there, still solid, still real. She only looked at the mirror. The mirror gave her nothing.

Then she finished getting ready, turned off the light, and left for work.

Kate laid in bed for a while after her alarm went off, staring at the ceiling with a particular stillness. The pattern of morning light thrown across her ceiling from her shades. The water stain on the ceiling that looked like the state of Idaho. She had looked at both of these things a hundred mornings and today she was not seeing either of them.

She was seeing Clarissa’s face in the bathroom light. That blank, wet-eyed stare directed at something Kate could not see, aimed at a mirror that had looked completely ordinary to her. That was the part that kept snagging. Not that Clarissa had been upset. It was that whatever she had been looking at, or looking for, Kate had been standing right beside her and seen nothing wrong at all.

She got up. Made coffee. Stood at the kitchen counter and drank half of it before accepting that she was not going to think her way out of this alone.

She called her mom.

Her mom picked up on the third ring, already sounding awake and pleased about it, the way she always did. Kate skipped the preamble.

“I’m worried about Clarissa,” she said. “Something happened this morning and I don’t know what to do about it.”

She told her. She told her the whole thing, and her mom listened without interrupting, which was one of her better qualities. When Kate finished there was a brief silence on the other end.

“That doesn’t sound like her at all,” her mom said. “That really doesn’t.”

“I know.”

“Clarissa is the most…” Her mom searched for the words. “She’s always so bright. Every time I’ve seen that girl she has a smile going before she’s even through the door. Although…” A small pause, and Kate could hear the shift in her voice before it came.

“Although what?”

“Although the one time I saw her without the smile was when we all stayed at the lake house. I came down at six in the morning and she was sitting at the kitchen table looking like she was ready to commit a crime.”

Kate laughed before she could help it. It came out of her sudden and genuine, and she pressed her hand over her mouth for a second. “She is not a morning person.”

“She looked at me like I had personally offended her by existing.”

“She does that. She does that to me every single day.”

They laughed together for a moment, the easy laugh of people who love the same person. It felt good until it faded, and the quiet came back.

“I just don’t know what to do,” Kate said. “I don’t want to push her and make it worse. But I also don’t want to just leave it.”

Her mom made a soft sound. “I honestly don’t know either, honey. It’s a strange thing to know what to advise on… Just… keep your eye on her. Be around…”

The second call came in before her mom had finished the sentence. Kate recognized Josh’s name on the screen and asked her mom to hold on.

“Hey. I just stopped at Clarissa’s station to fill up.” Josh’s voice had that careful neutral quality it got when he was trying not to alarm her. “She seemed. I don’t know. Off. She looked right at me and it took her a second to even recognize me, and then she kind of smiled but it wasn’t… It wasn’t her regular smile.”

Kate switched back to her mom long enough to say goodbye, then gave Josh the full version of the morning. He listened quietly.

“She needs a decent lunch at least,” he said, when Kate had finished. “She probably went to work without eating anything.”

“She definitely went to work without eating anything.”

“So let’s bring her something. I can meet you.”

Kate agreed and they settled on a time, and after she hung up she stood for a moment in the kitchen feeling something that was not quite relief but was adjacent to it. The small comfort of a plan. Of something to do with the worry rather than just carrying it.

She went and got ready. Moving through the apartment with a briskness that was partly her nature and partly intention. She did her hair. She found her jacket on the hook by the door.

And then she stopped at the bathroom.

She was not entirely sure what she expected. She stood in front of the mirror for a long moment, studying it the way Clarissa had, looking for the thing Clarissa had seen. Her own face looked back at her, immediate and perfectly timed. Every small movement answered at once. There was nothing wrong with it. Nothing off, nothing delayed, nothing absent.

I made sure of that.

Kate exhaled slowly and picked up her keys.

She had grocery shopping to do before lunch, and she was not going to solve anything by standing in a bathroom staring at her own reflection. She locked the apartment door behind her and headed down the stairs into the pale morning.

The door opened at 6:14 in the evening. Clarissa came through it carrying the exhaustion of someone who has spent an entire workday pretending to be fine. She had it managed well enough on her face. The smile she gave Kate and Josh was real, or real enough, assembled from the parts of her that had decided, somewhere around the fourth hour of her shift, that she was going to hold herself together through sheer stubbornness.

Josh was on the couch with his arm around Kate, the television throwing blue light across both of them. They looked up when she came in and there was a beat of assessment that Clarissa felt but did not acknowledge.

“There she is,” Kate said. “How was the rest of your shift?”

Clarissa dropped her bag by the door and took off her shoes. “Not too bad, actually. I started feeling better after you guys came by. That food really helped. Thank you again, seriously.”

“Kate picked the sandwiches,” Josh said.

“Then thank you, Kate.”

“Any time,” Kate said.

“I am tired though,” she said. “Really tired.”

Clarissa headed off to the bathroom.

She had been doing this all day. The small negotiation with herself every time a reflective surface came into view, the careful angling of her body away from the mirror above the sink at work, the particular study she had given the backs of her own hands instead of looking up. She had checked once, early in her shift, steeling herself in the employee bathroom with the door locked. Nothing. The mirror had given her back the soap dispenser, the paper towel holder, and the yellowish light, but no Clarissa at all. She had stood there for a moment, then unlocked the door and went back to work. She did not check again.

Now she stood in her own bathroom with her back to the mirror for a moment, the familiar smell of her own shampoo and Kate’s collection of products lined along the edge of the tub, the small comfort of a known space. She breathed in. She turned around.

She was there.

Her own face, complete and immediate, looking back at her with the same tired eyes she had been wearing all day. She moved her hand and the reflection moved with her, instant, synchronized, entirely normal. Clarissa let out a breath that felt like it had been stored somewhere deep and inconvenient since she had woken up that morning.

She stood there and looked at herself for a long time. Looked at the ordinary fact of her own face in a mirror, something she had done every day of her life without a second thought, and felt something close to grateful for it. Her mind turned the morning over again, examining it from a small distance now that the immediate fear had drained away. The delay. The growing gap. The disappearance. She could not account for any of it. She could not fit it into any explanation that did not make her sound like someone who needed to sit down with a professional and answer questions about her sleep schedule.

She hoped, with a thoroughness that approached prayer, that it would not happen again.

She went back out to the living room, dragged her bean bag chair from its corner, and settled into it with her knitting. The television was showing something with a lot of dramatic music and quick cuts between faces; she let it wash over her without really watching it, her hands moving through the familiar rhythm, the soft click of needles, the slow growth of something blue and undefined in her lap. This was the part of the day she had been waiting for. The part where she did not have to be anything in particular.

After a while Kate stretched and looked over at Josh.

“We should go out,” she said. “Stellar Beller is playing at the bar tonight. The local band I like.”

Josh agreed immediately in the way he agreed to most things Kate suggested.

“Come with us,” Kate said, turning to Clarissa. “You can knit when you’re dead.”

Clarissa smiled without looking up. “I’m so tired. I really can’t. You two go.”

Kate studied her for a moment with the expression she used when she was deciding whether to push. She decided against it. She got up and found her jacket, Josh found his jacket. They moved through the apartment with a cheerful noise before the front door closed and Clarissa was alone.

She put on music. Something low and familiar, the kind she had been listening to since she was seventeen. She knitted. The blue thing in her lap grew another inch. She got up eventually and made dinner, something simple, pasta with the jar sauce she kept in the back of the cabinet for nights like this, and she ate it standing at the counter because sitting at the table alone at night had always felt too deliberate to her. She washed the dishes, dried them, put them away, and wiped the counter down. She put on more music and went back to the bean bag chair and knitted some more, and for a stretch of time that felt genuinely peaceful, Clarissa was just a person alone in a small apartment on a quiet evening, doing nothing of any consequence.

At half past ten she decided that was enough and went to shower.

The bathroom light hummed on. She reached into the shower and turned the water on to let it heat up, then straightened and reached for the hem of her shirt before pulling it off.

She looked in the mirror.

Her reflection was already looking at her.

It was wearing her face with an expression she had never made. Flat and still and direct. Looking at her.

Clarissa’s hands dropped her shirt.

She moved left. The reflections body did not move. The eyes did.

She moved right. Same thing.

She waved both arms in short sharp motions, the panicked gestures of someone trying to startle a response from something that will not respond. The reflection stood. The face did not change. The eyes did not blink. All it did was stare at her.

Then, slowly, it began to raise its hand.

Clarissa stopped moving entirely.

She watched it. The hand came up with a kind of deliberate patience, steady and unhurried. As it rose the expression on the reflected face began to change. The flatness shifted. The corners of the mouth drew back. Gradually, the reflection smiled. It was wider than any smile should be by the time the hand was fully raised, palm out toward her. The smile, it was built from her own mouth and her own teeth and yet it looked like nothing she had ever felt.

This was my moment.

The hand waved. Sudden and violent, a sharp motion that was nothing like the slow rise that had preceded it.

Then it was gone. The mirror showed the bathroom wall. The towel rack. The light.

Clarissa screamed.

It came out of her all at once. She was moving before the sound had finished leaving her, out of the bathroom, down the hall, across the living room, the door handle in her hand, then the night air on her bare chest and the door swinging behind her as her feet landed in a hurry on the concrete outside.

The apartment was dark when Kate got back. All of it, every room, the thin line under Clarissa’s door as black as the rest. Kate stood in the entryway for a moment and let her eyes adjust, reading the quiet of the place. Nothing alarming. Just dark and still and smelling faintly of the pasta Clarissa had made earlier.

She noticed the knitting first when she turned on the living room lamp. The blue project was not folded or set aside the way Clarissa usually left it. It was tangled across the bean bag chair in a knotted, collapsed heap, needles askew, as if it had been the subject of Clarissa’s anger. Kate looked at it for a moment, then looked at the kitchen.

The kitchen was something else entirely. Every pot Clarissa owned appeared to be involved. Both large pans, the small saucepan, the colander that was in the drying rack pressed back into service. Dishes stacked but not washed, the counter crowded with the evidence of an elaborate effort for one person at ten o’clock on a Tuesday night. Kate stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment and tried to reconcile this.

She went to Clarissa’s door and knocked, gently, with two knuckles.

From inside came a low groan, the deeply annoyed sound of a person pulled partway out of sleep.

Kate eased the door open. The room was dark and Clarissa was a shape under the blankets, fully buried, one corner of the comforter pulled up over where her head would be. Kate kept her voice low.

“Hey. You okay in there?”

“Yeah I’m okay,” I said to Kate in Clarissa’s voice. “Sorry about the mess. I’ll clean it up tomorrow.”

Kate smiled a little in the dark. “Don’t worry about it. Get some sleep.”

She pulled the door closed behind her.

She stood in the hall for another moment before deciding to do Clarissa a favor. It did not take long. She worked through the stack of dishes methodically, the water running warm, her phone playing music from the windowsill providing company. It was nearly one in the morning and the building around her was fully settled into its nighttime silence. She was just setting the last pan in the drying rack when the knock came.

She turned the water off and stood still for a second. Listened. It came again, three measured knocks.

Kate dried her hands and went to the door. She looked through the peephole.

A uniform. A badge catching the hallway light. A face she did not recognize beneath the brim of a cap, patient and official.

She opened the door.

The officer was young, with the careful neutral expression of someone delivering news of uncertain weight. He looked at her with a slight pause.

“Is this the residence of a Clarissa Thompson?”

“Yes,” Kate said. “What’s the problem?”

“I found a young woman in Calloway Park about forty minutes ago. She was in some distress. Partially undressed. She gave me this address and says her name is Clarissa Thompson. I offered her a ride to the hospital, she just said she wanted to go home,” He glanced past Kate into the apartment with practiced casualness. “We’ve been sitting out front for a bit while I tried to determine where to bring her.”

Kate stared at him.

“That’s not possible,” she said. “I just checked on Clarissa. She’s asleep in her room. I talked to her less than half an hour ago.”

The officer’s expression did not change in any dramatic way, but something in it reorganized slightly. “Well, the individual in my vehicle identified herself as Clarissa Thompson and provided this address as her home.”

They looked at each other across the threshold for a moment. Then Kate said, “Hold on,” and turned back into the apartment.

She went to Clarissa’s door again and pushed it open without knocking this time. She reached in and found the light switch.

The bed was empty. The blankets were pushed back in a loose pile, still holding the rough shape of someone recently inside them, but the room was otherwise still and unoccupied. The closet door was open the way Clarissa always left it. Her phone charger was plugged in on the nightstand, cable hanging loose and unattached.

The window was open.

Kate crossed the room to it. The screen had been pushed outward and was still attached at the top hinge but was bent out from the bottom. Three floors down, the narrow strip of concrete that ran alongside the building sat empty and pale under the parking lot lights.

Kate stood at the window for a moment. Third floor. She looked down at the concrete and thought about the distance and could not make it make any sense. She then stopped trying to make it make sense because the officer was at her front door and Clarissa was apparently in a police car outside and neither of those things were going to wait for her to work it out. She bent the screen back, went to Clarissa’s dresser and pulled it open, grabbed what came to hand, a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt.

She hit the light switch on her way out, and the empty room went dark again behind her.

The officer was still in the doorway. Kate came to him with the bundle of clothes in her arms and her keys already in her other hand.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ve got some clothes for her, let’s go.”

The door opened just past two in the morning and Kate came through it first, Clarissa behind her, softly sobbing. Kate locked the door behind them and turned to look at her.

“You need to text someone about your shift tomorrow,” she said. “Or call. Just get someone to cover it.”

Clarissa stood in the middle of the living room and shook. Her eyes were focused somewhere that was not in the room.

“Clarissa.” Kate kept her voice even. “Your shift. Someone needs to cover it.”

Nothing.

Kate made a decision and moved on. “Okay. You need sleep. That’s the first thing. Come on.”

She put her hand on Clarissa’s back and guided her down the hall. Clarissa moved where she was directed. Kate pulled back the blankets and Clarissa lay down without being asked, still in the sweatshirt and leggings brought to her by her best friend. Kate pulled the blankets up over her and stood at the edge of the bed for a moment.

“You’re home,” Kate said. “You’re okay. You’re in your room and you’re safe and you’re going to sleep.”

Clarissa shook. The blankets moved with her.

Kate crouched down to be closer to level with her. “Can you tell me how you got out the window? We’re on the third floor. Can you just tell me that?”

Clarissa’s eyes were open and wet. The shaking continued at its steady low frequency. She did not answer.

Kate sat with her for another few minutes, and then stood and went to the window and pulled it firmly shut, twisting the latch closed. She stood there a moment with her hand still on the latch. Then she turned off the lights and went to her own room.

She lay on top of her covers in the dark with her shoes still on, staring at the ceiling, and the worry sat on her chest like a physical weight. Not the manageable kind she had been carrying since this morning. Something larger and less shapeable. She turned it over for a while and arrived at the only conclusion that felt like solid ground. Tomorrow. Doctor tomorrow. She was not going to debate it with Clarissa and she was not going to let it be optional.

She closed her eyes and eventually, without meaning to, slept.

Clarissa’s alarm went off at 5:40 in the morning.

She silenced it and lay still for a moment, and something on her face moved through the various positions between sleep and waking and landed. She got up. She went to the living room and found her phone where she had apparently set it on the end table at some point in the night, and she sat on the edge of the couch and started going through her contacts.

She called three people. The first did not answer. The second did not answer. The third picked up on the fourth ring with the groggy irritation of someone woken before six, and Clarissa explained, as calmly as she could manage, that she needed coverage today. She heard the explanation from the other end before it was spoken. Prior engagements. Already had plans. Really sorry. The call ended and Clarissa sat with the phone in her lap.

She cried for a minute. A contained, exhausted minute, one hand over her eyes.

Then she simply stopped and started getting ready for work.

The sound reached Kate through her bedroom door. The particular quality of someone crying while trying not to, the familiar shuffle of Clarissa getting ready for work. She was up and in the hall before she had fully decided to be.

She found Clarissa in the kitchen, dressed for work, eyes red.

“No,” Kate said.

Clarissa looked at her. “I’m the manager. I can’t.”

“Call the owner.”

“I don’t want to call the owner.”

“I understand that. Call the owner.”

Clarissa looked at the floor. Kate crossed her arms and waited with the particular patience of someone who has already decided how this ends and is simply allowing the other person time to arrive at the same place. It took a few minutes. There was some back and forth that covered nothing until Clarissa picked up her phone and made the call.

The owner answered on the second ring and listened. They said they would figure it out, the coverage, it would be handled. But the voice beneath the words was holding an obvious tone of annoyance. Clarissa thanked them and ended the call and stood very still for a moment.

“Knitting or nap,” Kate said.

Clarissa blinked at her.

“Those are the options until I can get you a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. You pick.”

Something in Clarissa’s face loosened slightly. Not relief exactly. Something closer to the feeling of being caught before you hit the ground. “Okay,” she said.

Then she hesitated.

“Can I ask you something weird?”

“Yes,” Kate said.

“Can you cover the mirror? In the bathroom.” She said it looking at the middle of Kate’s brows rather than her eyes. “I need to use the bathroom and I just… I can’t look at it. I know that’s…”

“Done,” Kate said. She did not make it a thing. She went to the bathroom and took the spare towel from the rack and hung it from the top of the mirror’s frame so it fell across the glass in a flat curtain of pale green terrycloth. She smoothed it once and stepped back.

“All yours,” she called.

Clarissa came in. She moved along the far wall, keeping her eyes on the floor and then on the far wall and then the ceiling. She could feel the covered mirror the way you feel a dark doorway in a dark room, not seeing it, just knowing it was there. She used the toilet with her eyes fixed on the grout lines between the floor tiles.

She knew she should leave. Her hand was already moving toward the door.

But something shifted deep in her chest like a tide going out, and she couldn’t help but turn.

Of course I wasn’t going to let her leave without looking. She needs to look.

The towel hung there, flat and ordinary and pale green against the mirror’s frame. Clarissa looked at it. She watched in horror as her own hand reached out as if it belonged to someone with a different agenda entirely, fingers finding the bottom edge of the terrycloth before lifting it.

The bottom of the mirror was red.

A deep, wet red sat against the glass from the inside, as though the other side of whatever dimension the mirror opened into was coated in it. Clarissa’s hand kept lifting. The sink came into view in the reflection, and the sink was not clean. The reflected sink was streaked with handprints, palm and fingers dragged in long arcs across the porcelain, layered, more than one pair of hands or the same pair more than once. Blood red. And more was dripping in from above.

Her hand kept lifting.

The reflection of the room revealed itself in sections. There was her reflection, standing where she stood, but it was moving. A small, violent, close movement. The reflected Clarissa was bent slightly forward and her arm was working in a short rapid back and forth. There was something in her hand, and there was red on the mirror from the inside, red on the reflected sink, red on the reflected floor below in a spreading dark pool.

Clarissa’s hand lifted the towel the rest of the way.

The kitchen knife. The one with the wooden handle she had used for years. The reflection held it at its own throat and sawed. The expression on the reflected face was not blank the way it had been when it waved, and it was not smiling. It was terrified. It was the face of someone in the grip of something they could not stop, eyes wide and desperate and looking directly out through the glass with an expression of pure pleading, the face of someone watching themselves do something they could not stop.

Kate was in the kitchen when Clarissa came out of the bathroom. She looked up from her phone.

“Feel a little better?”

Clarissa looked at her. Her face was composed. Still tired, still pale, but settled in a way Kate had not seen since before any of this started.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think I just need to sleep. I’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

She went to her room and closed the door. A few minutes later the sounds of movement ceased, and the apartment was quiet.

Kate did not sleep like Clarissa did.

She lay in her bed for an hour after Clarissa’s door closed, staring at the ceiling and running through the inventory of the last two nights with methodical anxiety. At some point she stopped trying to sleep and simply accepted that she was awake, got up, and made coffee. She sat at the kitchen table in the early grey light to wait for eight o’clock.

She checked on Clarissa at 6:20. She turned the handle slowly and eased the door open an inch and looked. Clarissa was in the bed, face visible above the blankets this time, not buried under them. Her expression in sleep was unguarded and still. Peaceful was the word that came to Kate, and she held onto it.

She checked again at 6:50. Still there. Still the same quiet face.

At eight she called the doctor’s office. She had used this practice twice since moving to the city with Clarissa. She remembered the receptionist’s voice, efficient and pleasantly brisk. Kate explained that her roommate needed to be seen today, that it was important, that there were some concerning behaviors she did not want to get into over the phone. The receptionist found a noon slot. Kate took it and wrote the time on the back of a receipt from her jacket pocket.

She called Josh after; told him about the park, the police officer, the empty bed, the open window. She told him about the third floor and the bent screen and the concrete below it. Josh was quiet for longer than he usually was, and when he spoke his voice had the quality it got when he was genuinely unsettled and trying not to show it. He asked if she needed him to come over. She said she would let him know.

She called her mom after that and told her the same things. Her mom listened without interrupting, and this time when she finished there was a long silence on the other end.

“Kate,” her mom said.

“I know.”

“That’s not… Honey, that’s not something a doctor’s appointment is going to.”

“I know. But it’s somewhere to start.”

She checked on Clarissa again at 9:15. Still there. The peaceful face, the slow rise and fall of the blankets.

At 9:40 she needed the bathroom.

The smell reached her before she got to the door. She stopped in the hallway and stood there for a moment, trying to identify it, and then identified it and wished she had not. She pushed the door open.

The towel was on the floor. Not folded or dropped; it had come down hard, still attached to the small strip of frame it had been tucked into, but the frame had come down with it. The products from the shelf above the toilet were distributed across the floor. The drawer under the sink had been pulled fully out and set aside, its contents thrown across the counter. Cotton rounds, hair ties, and the small accumulated miscellany of two women’s bathrooms were strewn everywhere without pattern. The cabinet under the sink stood open, the cleaning supplies inside joined with the chaos surrounding it.

The vomit was the worst part. When Kate’s eyes found it was everywhere in that bathroom, she made a sound she had not planned on making, a short involuntary thing. She then turned around, walked back into the hall, and stood there with one hand over her nose, mouth breathing through her fingers until the immediate urgency of her own stomach passed.

She stood in the hallway for a full minute.

She thought about the sounds she had heard this morning. Coffee brewing. Her own phone calls. The ambient quiet of an apartment with one person sleeping and one person laying on their bed, listening to the other. She thought about the bathroom door, which she had not heard open or close. She thought about Clarissa going in after the towel was hung, two minutes at most, completely silent, and coming out looking calm enough to go to sleep.

She could not make it fit. She tried and she could not.

She went to Clarissa’s door and pushed it open.

The room was silent. The bed was empty. The blankets held their shape, the impression still there, the pillow still dented. Kate crossed to the window immediately and checked the latch. Locked. She checked the screen from the inside. It was unbent, flush against the frame.

Kate turned around and looked at the empty room for one moment, and then she went to the living room.

Clarissa was in the kitchen.

She was standing at the window above the sink with her back to the room, perfectly still, looking out at whatever the window showed at this hour; the narrow alley, the brick of the building opposite, the pale late-morning sky above it. She was wearing the same clothes she had gone to sleep in. Her hair was loose.

In her right hand, held down at her side, was the kitchen knife with the wooden handle.

Kate stopped at the edge of the living room. She took one breath and then she made her voice come out even.

“Hey. What’s going on?”

The figure at the window did not move.

Kate took a step closer. “Are you feeling okay? The bathroom…” She paused, choosing. “Are you feeling sick? Do you need to go to the emergency room?”

Nothing. The shoulders did not move. The hand holding the knife did not move.

Kate took another step. The kitchen was small and she was close enough now to see the knuckles of the hand holding the knife, the particular whiteness of a grip held too long and too tight.

“What are you doing with the knife, Clarissa?”

The figure at the window was still.

Kate took one more step. She was nearly close enough to touch her. She kept her voice as level as she had ever kept anything in her life.

“We need to go to the hospital. Right now. I’ll drive, we’ll go together, we’ll get you sorted out.”

“That can’t happen, Kate,” I said slowly, my voice echoing through the apartment. “I need Clarissa to stay for a little while longer.”

Kate ran.

She did not decide to run. Her body made the decision and she was already in the living room, already at the front door, the handle turning under her hand, the door swinging wide into the hallway outside. Her keys were on the counter. Her phone was on the kitchen table. She left both of them. The door was left swinging open behind her as she ran.

The door gently drifted in and out of its frame for a while after Kate left. The hallway outside was empty; whatever neighbor eventually came to close it did so without announcement, just a quiet click of the latch that the apartment received without response. After that the silence was total. Kate’s coffee mug on the table with an inch still in it. The receipt with the noon appointment written on the back beside it. The TV off. The bean bag chair with its tangled knitting still unresolved from last night.

Kate’s phone lit up on the table at 9:53. It buzzed four times against the wood, each call a few minutes after the last, and each time the screen showed the same name. Eventually the screen went dark again and the silence resumed.

Josh arrived a little before eleven. He had Kate’s spare key and he used it, but noticed that the door was already unlocked. He entered.

“Kate?”

The living room held nothing. He moved through it and down the hall, checking rooms with a methodical quiet, pushing each door open and reading what was inside. Kate’s room, bed made with a hasty approximation. Clarissa’s room, bed empty with the shape of a body still pressed into the mattress. He stood in Clarissa’s doorway for a moment and then went to check the bathroom.

The bathroom was ordinary. Towels on their rack. Products in their places. The mirror clean and unobstructed, reflecting the empty doorway and a slice of the hall behind it. Josh looked at it without knowing what he was looking for and found nothing. He pulled the door mostly closed and went back to the living room.

Kate’s phone was on the kitchen table. Her keys were on the counter beside the bowl where she kept them. Josh picked up the phone and looked at the screen, then put it in his jacket pocket. He stood at the counter and worked through it methodically, without rushing to conclusions. Her phone. Her keys. Her car in the lot; he had seen it pulling in, recognized the small dent above the rear wheel. None of it gone. Yet she is not here. Something is terribly wrong.

He was turning toward the door to go, thinking about the gas station, thinking about whether Clarissa’s coworkers would know anything, when he saw the note.

It was taped to the back of the front door at roughly eye level. A torn piece of notepaper, the kind Kate kept in the kitchen drawer, covered in her handwriting, the particular looping print she used when she was writing something meant to be read by someone other than herself.

He read it.

Kate and Clarissa had gone to get something for him. A surprise. They would be back shortly. He should wait.

Josh stood and looked at the note for a while. Then he peeled it carefully from the door and folded it and put it in his pocket with the phone. He went and sat on the couch and turned the television on and found something to fill the eerie silence.

The back of his mind was saying something he was not quite ready to hear yet.

He was still sitting there twenty minutes later when the knock came. He opened the door to Kate’s mom, who was holding a covered plate of cookies.

“I thought I’d catch them before the appointment,” she said, looking past him into the apartment. “Are they not here?”

Josh told her. He told her about the keys and the phone and the car in the lot. He showed her the note. She read it twice.

“This doesn’t sound like Kate,” she said. Her voice was even but something behind it was not.

“I know,” Josh said.

“Kate doesn’t write notes like this. The way it’s worded.”

“I know.”

She looked at him over the paper and he looked back at her, and neither of them said what was sitting plainly between them because saying it would mean something they were not ready for yet.

She asked if she could wait with him. He said of course. He moved to one end of the couch while she sat on the other end. He found something on the television that was inoffensive and they watched it without watching it. The apartment stayed quiet around them.

Almost an hour passed. The television moved through its program and started another one. Neither of them commented on the time out loud, but Josh checked his phone every couple minutes.

At 12:22 Kate’s phone rang in his pocket.

He looked at the screen. The doctor’s office. He answered.

The receptionist’s voice was politely neutral with a layer of professional patience beneath it. She was calling to confirm whether Clarissa Thompson was still planning to come in for her noon appointment, as they had not heard and wanted to give the slot to another patient if needed.

Josh told her that he did not think they were coming. That they were, in fact, trying to locate them. The receptionist offered brief and genuine sympathy and ended the call.

He told Kate’s mom. She set down the cookie she had been holding without eating it.

They looked at each other and arrived at the same place at the same time.

“We should go look,” she said.

“Yeah.”

They stood and gathered themselves. Josh put Kate’s phone on the kitchen table, setting it in the same spot he had found it with a care that felt important for reasons he could not have explained. He thought about locking the door and then thought about Kate’s keys still on the counter, the fact that she had nothing to get back in with, and left it unlocked. Kate’s mom covered the cookies with their wrap and left them on the counter as if the gesture itself carried a promise of return.

The door closed behind them.

The apartment settled.

On the kitchen table, Kate’s phone screen lit up and began to buzz again.

Then from down the hall, a door opened. Clarissa came out of her room, crossed the hallway to the kitchen table, and picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

What came through from the other end was not a voice arranged into words, not at first. It was the sound underneath sentences, the raw material of a person’s animal instincts. And then words began to surface from it.

Kate’s voice. Kate, calling her own phone.

“Please, Clarissa. Please…” A sob that swallowed the next few words whole. “I don’t want to die. Please. Please, Clarissa, put the knife down. I don’t want…” Another break before Kate’s voice became even more panicked “Please, please, I don’t wanna die, please…”

Clarissa stood in the kitchen and listened. Her face was wet. The tears moved down it in steady tracks and her expression did not change around them.

“Don’t worry,” I told Clarissa softly. “There’s still some time left. You’ll see her again soon.”

Clarissa ended the call. She set the phone down on the table with a strange gentleness. She stood there for a breath or two, her wet face composed and empty.

Then she turned and walked calmly to the bathroom.

The evening came and began to slowly cloak the apartment in darkness.

Josh opened the door and stood in the frame for a moment before entering.

He moved through the apartment the way he had that morning, checking each room with the same methodical quiet, but finding nothing. Something inside of him told him what to check next.

He came back to the kitchen.

He stood at the counter and looked at the knife block. It had five slots. Four knives. The largest slot empty, the dark gap of it sitting in the row like a missing tooth.

He looked at it for a moment. He reached out and took the second largest knife from its slot, the one with the black composite handle, and he held it at his side and turned toward the hallway.

The scream came from behind the bathroom door. Clarissa’s voice, unmistakably; a high and desperate sound that had no specific shape to it, only urgency, only the raw signal of something gone terribly wrong.

Josh moved quickly.

He covered the hall in a few steps and pushed the bathroom door open. He went in with the knife raised and his whole body prepared for something he could not have specified.

There was no one inside.

He stood in the doorway and looked at the room. The walls. The floor. The edge of the tub and the tile surround and the small window above it. Every surface held the same dark evidence of violence. Blood. It was on the ceiling in a fine spray. It was on the floor in broad uneven pools. It was on every wall and every fixture and every item in the room without exception.

Except the mirror.

The mirror was clean. Perfectly, completely clean, as if the glass had been protected or preserved. It stood in its frame above the sink and reflected the ruined room behind Josh with absolute clarity. His own face looked back at him from the center of it, with a deadpan expression.

He looked at himself and could not look away.

The bathroom door slammed shut behind him.

The sound of it crossed the apartment, moving through the hall, and reached the front door at the same moment the front door opened.

Kate came through it like a raging storm.

She had mace in her right hand, thumb on the trigger, arm raised and ready. Her face was a specific kind of distressed, halfway between fury and fear. Her voice, when it came, was at full volume and ragged at the edges. It filled the apartment completely.

“The cops are on their way. You hear me? They are coming.” She moved into the living room, her eyes going everywhere. “You think you can call me and say those things to me? You think that’s okay? You think I’m just going to…” She stopped and reset. “You are out of your mind. You are completely out of your goddamned mind, and when I find you…”

The banging from the bathroom cut her off.

It was rhythmic. Heavy. The sound of something substantial meeting a hard surface with force, again and again, the anticipation of its intervals between each impact just long enough to make the next one worse.

Kate’s mind moved through several things quickly.

“I’m coming in there,” she called toward the hallway. Her voice had changed; the ragged anger still in it but something colder underneath now, something that had made a decision. “I’m coming in and I will mace you, Clarissa. I will absolutely mace you, so help me god…”

She crossed the living room, went to the bathroom door, put her hand on it, and opened it.

Josh was at the tub.

He was kneeling in front of it while he was bringing his head down against the porcelain edge with full and deliberate commitment. Blood was already flowing down the side of the tub in thick lines. More of it was in his hair and on the hand he had braced against the floor. His face, what Kate could see of it when the motion brought it briefly up before the next descent, was completely empty of expression. His eyes were open and unfocused and somewhere far from the bathroom.

Kate screamed his name.

She grabbed his shoulders and pulled. He did not respond to her. His body continued its motion against her grip with a horrible strength. She could not stop it, could not redirect it, and could not make him be somewhere else. She was still trying when the final impact came.

The sound of it was different from the others. Josh’s skull cracked against the ceramic with a sickening thud.

Josh went still and then went down, and the bathroom floor received him. Kate was left kneeling in the red room with her hands reaching towards a dead man.

In the mirror above the sink, Josh’s reflection stood upright.

It stood with its shoulders back and it looked at Kate with an expression that had nothing to do with the corpse on the floor. The smile came up slowly and completely, the full width of it alarming by itself. The hand came up, and it waved at her. A violent, gleeful motion.

Kate screamed. She scrambled backward out of the doorway on her hands, hitting the hall wall and getting her feet under her before pressing her back against it. The mace still in her hand. Her chest heaving. Her eyes not leaving the bathroom doorway.

The next voice came from the other direction.

“I’m so sorry, Kate.”

Clarissa’s voice. The sound of someone who has been crying for a long time. Kate turned.

Clarissa stood between her and the front door. The large kitchen knife in her hand. Her face was exactly what her voice had promised; a devastated shell of what was once Kate’s best friend. Her eyes found Kate’s and stayed there.

Kate raised the mace and charged.

The stream hit Clarissa full in the face, eyes, nose, and mouth. Kate was close enough to see it land.

Clarissa did not blink.

The room became dead silent. Kate stared at Clarissa, and Clarissa stared back. The sheer beauty of the moment overtook me, so I spoke one final thing to those damned souls.

“It is time.”

The knife plunged into Kate’s chest. Then again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

The first officers on scene secured the perimeter, called it in, and then stood in the hallway outside the open door with absolute shock on their face. The apartment was a mess.

Kate was just past the front door. The living room floor held her in a wide dark spread of blood that had moved outward and begun to dry at the edges. The room around her was otherwise undisturbed. The cookies on the counter. The mug on the table. The knitting on the bean bag chair.

Josh was in the bathroom. The officers who went in came back out quickly. Fragments of skull and brains littered the room. The mirror above the sink was unbroken and clean and showed the room with perfect fidelity.

Clarissa was in her bedroom.

She was seated on the floor in front of a large mirror propped against the closet door, the kind of full length mirror that leans rather than hangs. She was upright, or nearly, her back against the side of the bed, her legs extended in front of her. The kitchen knife was in her hand, her fingers still loosely around the handle in the configuration of someone who had held it and then simply stopped. The wound at her throat was the kind that does not leave room for a second decision. The mirror in front of her reflected her back to herself, as well as the dried trail of blood down the front of her sweatshirt.

The investigators arrived an hour and forty minutes after the first officers. Two of them. They moved through the apartment with grace. They were thorough. They were in the apartment for the better part of an hour before they ended up where investigators always end up, standing in the kitchen, speaking quietly.

The first one was older. He stood with his arms crossed and looked at the living room from the kitchen doorway while he talked.

“Nothing about this sits right,” he said. “I’ll say that first. Nothing sits right. But if you walk it forward from what’s evident…” He paused. “Josh comes in. He does what he did to his girlfriend by the door. Then he goes to the bedroom. The roommate is there, maybe she’s asleep, maybe she’s not. He does what was done to her throat and he stages it. Props the knife in her hand, positions her in front of the mirror, makes it look like she sat down and did it herself.” He stopped again. “Then he goes to the bathroom and he does what he did to himself, which is the most extreme exhibition of steroids or whatever you want to call it that I have personally encountered.”

The second detective was younger, leaning against the counter with a notepad open more out of habit than necessity. He tapped the pen against the pad slowly.

“I hear you,” he said. “And I don’t disagree that it walks like that from the outside. But something ain’t right. I mean, look at the throat on the Thompson woman.” He shook his head. “The angle. The depth. The way it went. I’ve seen what people do to themselves and I’ve seen what people do to other people and that one…” He left it there for a moment. “It seems like whoever did it wanted to decapitate her. No way she did that herself.”

The first detective made a sound of agreement that was also a sound of frustration. He moved to the kitchen table and looked at the receipt sitting next to the mug without touching it.

“Things are not what they seem,” he said.

“Things are definitely not what they seem.”

They stood with that for a moment. Outside in the hallway voices moved back and forth, the procedural noise of a crime scene being properly managed. Someone was photographing the bedroom again. Someone else was in the bathroom with an evidence kit.

“Did you get to check the security cameras?” the older detective asked. “Yeah, I did. Four individuals entered and exited this apartment over the relevant period.” He counted them off. “The boyfriend. The two residents. The mother.”

“The mother is downstairs,” the older detective said. “They’re talking to her now.”

The young detective nodded. He looked around the kitchen, at the knife block with its missing slots, at the cookies on the counter still in their wrap, at the ordinary architecture of two people’s shared life amidst the horror. He exhaled through his nose.

“If this was a killer,” he said, with his tone dripping in grim sarcasm, “you’d have to admire their sick sense of creativity.”

I cannot begin to explain how hearing his adoration for my artwork fills me with incomprehensible joy. Maybe I’ll even let him experience it firsthand.

Credit: Grant Howard

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