Mary put down the phone and began to stare at the wall in front of her. Her eyes met a long-since water-damaged, practically rotting poster reading ‘HANG IN THERE,’ and she looked at it bitterly, as if her gaze would be the last thing to take it off of the paint and onto the floor.

So Joseph was a lost cause. She would just have to proceed on her own. As always, she thought bitterly to herself.

Mary had found, at least as recently as the past few months, that the outside details of her life had grown thinner and thinner. She found it both peculiar and frustrating – she could no longer remember nice things. It was if the badness had taken over her whole life, puppeteering her from an outside world she had no privy to.

Am I late for work? she thought to herself.

What was her job, anyway?

She touched her temples. She tried to remember. But her head felt like it was stuck within a cloud, gasping, drowning.