Calliope was sure that she hadn't dreamt of anything at all. It was one of those nights where she closed your eyes and opened them again a moment ter to daylight and the sounds of birds. In that forgotten blink, the stars wheeled overhead her sleeping form and rushed to bring the morn in time, unfurling the canopy of the sky while she slumbered unaware. That stitch in time felt like witchcraft, even if it probably just meant she'd been so tired and worn that "dead to the world" was all but accurate.

  Thank you , she thought to no one in particur. She actually felt somewhat rested this time! Still, not rested enough–she rolled over to try and see if she could return to sleep as quickly as she'd left.

  The sound of distant church bells made its way into her room, ear, and brain, crossing so many membranes it was diminished and tinny by the time it reached her core. Sunday, the Lord's Day. That meant she had to go to work, in pce of worship–closing shift, no less.

  Or maybe she was te. She reached for her phone. Her heart thudded in her chest in the moments before she was able to see the time. Half past noon. Damn. Too te for her to go back to sleep after all. She had to get ready for work.

  Calliope's mind was empty of thoughts when she executed her morning routine without incident. The apartment was silent, which meant Erika had already left for work herself, so there was no one to interrupt her as she brushed her teeth and only then stumbled into the kitchen to have some excuse for a breakfast. Erika had already left the box of sugary cereal on the table for her. How nice. She poured herself some, naturally, and sat down to crunch on the stuff. It did, after all, taste pretty damn good.

  She sighed. There was nothing good on social media this morning–not that there ever really was. But she'd refreshed her news feed at least six times now only to see story after story that she'd already read. Her reading comprehension was mysteriously acute today; in the time it took to finish her cereal she'd probably consumed more than two days' worth of text.

  Come to think of it, everything looked sharper, too. The edges of things had the faintest tinge of chromatic aberration. It reminded her of the all-nighters she'd pulled freshman year, where by 6am her sleep-deprived brain would reach new levels of jittered hyper-awareness. Except rather than wanting nothing more than to melt into a mattress, she felt alert, awake, alive, and wanted that only a middling amount. The extra alertness would've been welcome, and useful even, if not for the sad reality that she had to work today, an activity that she would much rather be less lucid for. Going on autopilot made the time pass faster.

  Whatever, she'd have to manage. Calliope grabbed the cream button-up and min-green apron off the undry rack and disappeared her body underneath. One of the saving graces of her job was that the uniform hid ninety percent of her, and, if she were wearing a mask out like today, more like ninety-five. It would never be an even hundred, of course…unless she started work as some kind of corporate or collegiate mascot. Ha. She wondered if the person wearing the giant question mark costume at MISC's football games got paid, and if the pay was good–if only saries were proportionate not to hours worked but to the amount of anxiety the job caused, she'd be a billionaire many times over.

  Daydreams of wealth and success and all that came with it, paying for a body that she could stand to look at, those were the screensavers her brain repyed during her subway ride to work. The fantasy was especially vivid today. She was this close to being able to smell the salt of her imaginary isnd getaway, if not for the traincar doors opening to allow in other, less pleasant scents into her nostrils. Ah, the smell of the T, the oldest subway in America…how fucking wonderful.

  Despite the sensory overload that inevitably came with it, Calliope did enjoy the subway overall. There was just something anaesthetic about sitting there, waiting for a specific stop to come in a predefined sequence, having nothing else to do until it came. The crowds of people usually felt impersonal, too, like they were more background scenery than real human beings, although today was an exception. Her eyes fixed on the graying man across the aisle who was in the midst of eating a BLT with extra mayo that'd already dripped twice into his p; staring at him made her feel hot behind the eyes like there was a dynamo in her head. No detail could escape her at the moment.

  The detail was a bit too much. She shut her eyes tightly just as the doors opened on her stop. She kept her gaze downcast, either at her shoes or the series of dirty floors they tread upon, for the remainder of the journey.

  "Hi, welcome to Cosmic Latte. What can I get for you today?" The voice of the drive-thru operator–Stel today, ugh–wafted by as Calliope hurried to the backroom.

  " Oh! Hey, Callie!" She took her finger off the headset mic and waved. Damnit, not fast enough .

  "Hey, Stel. You're closing tonight too?" She fiddled with the tie of her apron for far longer than necessary, in the interest of postponing eye contact. Somehow she could still feel the older woman's blue gaze boring into the top of her head.

  "I am. We're going to get so much cleaning done, Callie, you're gonna love it!"

  Callie suppressed a scoff. Stel was fucking annoying with the way she treated the least remarkable job on Earth like it was absolutely essential, but it was almost funny, really. She always figured she must have literally nothing else going on if she was going above and beyond with menial bor in a service job; it wasn't like she got paid any more.

  She looked up, and did her best to fake a smile.

  "I'm sure we will!" At that moment she was saved. A car pulled up to the drive-thru, and Stel turned to greet it, leaving her free to continue to the back as originally intended.

  Calliope would have much rather remained there in the storeroom, among the unvigint rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with stocked product that'd go untouched for a few months. It was quiet there, and mostly free of people, especially once the store manager had gone home for the day. But it was not to be. Above the flimsy table where they counted and divided the day's tips was the rack of headsets she was looking for. More than once she'd thought about trying to hack them to py music over Bluetooth, or something–it would be better than listening to drive-thru orders all shift. But it was a bit beyond her capabilities, not to mention that Stel would be apoplectic if she ever did manage it. Heh. It was at least something to ponder besides coffee and pastries.

  She fell into the slow rhythm of the afternoon grind, the speed of thought slowing as if chilled by the same ice in the seemingly endless series of coffees she prepared. It was less stressful than the morning shift, fewer drinks per second to deliver, even if it meant that she always got home rather te. Technically, she was supposed to stir in whatever dairy product the customer requested using a specially-made helical spoon, but screw that. She'd long since perfected the "technique" of spinning the cup with her wrist to mix the contents–it was faster, she'd argue. Stel hated it, of course, with how much of a stickler she was for the rules, so she took care to only do it when she was otherwise occupied. It was just one way to inject a bit of whimsy into the monotony–like the time she'd created a whole rainbow of milkshakes using all the different colors of syrup throughout the store. Stuff like that made the otherwise brown and beige workflow colorful enough to bear. How could Stel deny her that?

  Before she knew it, the color of the sky outside had gone from blue to orange to bck, a night darker than the dark roast coffee grounds she tossed into the trash. Try as she might, she just couldn't seem to rex, even as Stel turned the sign on the door from "Open" to "Closed" and they began the nightly ritual necessary for cleaning. Without any customers the store was quiet and empty save for the sound of scrubbing–so why could she not scrub her brain of its jitters? She wondered if maybe all the caffeine she'd handled throughout the day had somehow seeped into her skin, into her brain, to keep her so perpetually on edge. Goosebumps rose and fell on the back of her neck in irregur migrations.

  "Callie, could you clean the bathroom, please? Thanks." A voice from the blue sent a shiver down her spine. She nearly jumped, before she remembered that it belonged to her thirty-something year old coworker and not some thing lurking in the dark. What kind of monster would hide underneath the counters in a coffee shop, anyway? She was being ridiculous.

  Cleaning the bathroom sucked, but at least it was bright in there. She wheeled the yellow mop bucket across the store and trudged into the restroom nobody had used in hours.

  Once inside she was greeted by an unwelcome sight: herself, angled a bit from above in the rge mirror behind the sink. She grimaced at it before preparing the mop, first in the bucket and then pressed against the floor. Even as she mopped, her eyes kept being drawn upwards.

  Her reflection mirrored her actions perfectly. She moved the mop right, and so did she; same for the left. All was as it should be–so why did she feel so unnerved? She'd always had a love-hate retionship with mirrors: she had to look into them to see and fix herself, but she rarely liked what she saw. Last night, though, had injected her with a shot of paranoia, turning the retionship firmly towards the "hate" end. She was struck by the insane notion that the mirror wasn't actually a mirror at all and that her reflection was just a very, very good mime, eager to get one over on her. What the hell was wrong with her, thinking that? She shook her head–and so did the mirror.

  Ugh. At that, a spike of anger; she reached her hand towards the surface and, rather than meeting the skin of her fingertips, felt only the cool gss. Like she should have expected. Time seemed to stop, and her heart beat in her ears like a timpani, and she whispered to herself words she knew were a mistake:

  "Are you…still there?" They both mouthed. She immediately felt stupid, staring at her own reflection like that like it would actually reply.

  But then a warmth grew against her fingers, and It blinked.

  Her eyes went wide, and Its did not. Calliope recoiled, and backed right up into the mop bucket that she'd forgotten was there, and promptly fell on her ass. From her new position on the floor she could no longer see anything in the mirror but the ceiling. Nothing crawled out of it; it was empty. Thank God for that.

  She ran through a checklist in her head. It couldn't be sleep deprivation, because she'd slept more generously than usual. It couldn't be a trick of the light, or she wouldn't have felt it against her fingers like that. That meant that this was not only a visual but also a tactile hallucination. Which, from the little that she'd read, seemed a worse prognosis for her sanity.

  The options weren't great. She could turn and leave, tell Stel that she wasn't feeling well or something to get out of cleaning…but could she really turn her back on the mirror? Was that safe? Or…she could stand up and face it, whatever the hell it was, and hope that didn't make the hallucination worse somehow. She dreaded the thought. Maybe…maybe she could just ignore it? Pretend It wasn't there, and continue mopping. She doubted she was strong enough for that.

  She shut her eyes and stumbled to her feet. Another skewer of fear went through her heart as she realized that the gesture was pointless: she could see the mirror, occupant and all, on the backs of her eyelids in the same space it would've been if they were lifted.

  It stared back and offered no expnation. There was that prickle again, in the outer yer of her skull, or maybe it'd been there all along; she got the sense that It had been waiting to see if she would notice.

  "Have you…have you been there all day?" She choked.

  A pause. "We could show you. You requested otherwise."

  Her voice, high and clear and colder than the space between atoms, between stars or gaxies even. Hers, and yet not hers, the way that a voice on the phone sounded different in lightwaves than airwaves.

  "I…what? No, I–please, I don't understand, sure–"

  Fsh. Her eyes opened on the morning again. She brushed her teeth and ate cereal and left the house and, and everything was there better than she could've remembered it, but for the edges of the vision which frayed off into the void. It was the burning behind her eyes, like dry ice. It was the dynamo. It had watched and heard and known her every move and thought and overtuned her mind like an antenna to do it. That was why she felt so weird.

  It faded, and she was back in the coffee shop bathroom. It left her feeling vioted.

  "We observed. We kept your silence."

  Her trembling eyes were drawn again to her reflection's own. But of course, they belonged to her no longer–they cked some essential marker of humanity that she couldn't describe, but was nevertheless clear. Too te, she realized she had looked too long: those dark irises gave way to flicts of color that she had not, should not have ever seen. Fugitive pigments that winked in and out of existence on a whim, that no earthly chemistry could have reproduced. The names of those alien hues popped into her head at first sight like they were self-evident–praseochlor and azlphlox and octarine, stygian blue and autoluminescent red, all shimmering in the depths of those starry eyes like so many nebue.

  It then impressed the truth upon her without words. Her mind buckled under the pressure, and a thousand or so neurons died–subtlety was not yet Its art. But she understood. It was not a hallucination, or any product of her imagination. It was beyond her in every sense, and It would at the least observe; she could escape It no more than the ocean could escape the moon. Her choices were to try to ignore It or to cooperate, nothing more. It showed her analogies, all very patronizing: a doctorfish preening a starfish, a Fresnel lens to magnify the sun through, a character in an RPG. She was to be the conduit through which It could finally experience the world.

  In the whirlwind of thought she felt for a moment a feeling that resembled loneliness again. It had not been lonely before her. But it was fleeting, and the rising pain in her temples drowned it out.

  She understood, even if she didn't agree and it gave her a headache worse than anything. It hurt badly enough when It only opened her mind like a book to read…when It expressed nonverbal concepts directly into her brain she felt like her head might explode. Just as she feared that something in her would break, the pressure around her skull gave way. That left only the faint cmmy sensation.

  She struggled to string words together.

  "I…I get it, but…why mirrors? Why me?"

  The image of the unreal thing behind her doppelganger flickered for a moment. She remembered the texture that the cy had had in art css in the seventh grade. They'd had to make self-portraits, and hers had come out lumpy and misshapen–how so Calliope of her. She understood then that It used her face as a convenience, a shadow between her and the great bulk she'd glimpsed and wished she hadn't. To protect her mind from shattering into a million pieces. She supposed she should be thankful. But her question persisted; this was twice now that It had appeared to her in a bathroom mirror of all things.

  It smiled–it actually fucking smiled. The effect was far from comforting, however. She feared that if those thin lips parted Its mouth would have far too many teeth, or something unimaginably worse, hidden away inside.

  Her eyes flew open without conscious order. It pced a pale hand on the rim of the mirror like it wasn't even there. Paler even than she was…Its skin was almost translucent; the way it blurred at the edges reminded her of underlight blooming through film. Then, to her horror, It started crawling forwards, hand over hand until It was fully out , dear God. It sat right on the edge of the sink, which groaned a little under the weight. That proved that It really did have mass and wasn't an illusion after all. The part of her brain still responsible for caring about her job worried that it would break and shatter into hundreds of shards of porcein–like that was her greatest fucking concern right now.

  The other Calliope Mondegrene walked past her while she, the original, stayed rooted to the spot. Its gait seemed unnatural and wrong, she could not bear to look too closely to examine it. There was nothing she could do to stop It from opening the bathroom door, the st barrier between It and the real world. It was really an obstacle in name only. She had no choice; she followed It out of the bathroom.

  It was unnerving to see her own body some feet ahead of her like that. It ran Its ghostly fingers–God she needed to get a tan–along the gss of the row of coffee carafes. That they didn't blister and burn should've been the first sign. Stel was at the far end of the room with her back turned, wiping down the counters at the drive thru. What a workaholic. Callie didn't want to know what would happen if she turned and saw two of her, one of whom was only pretending to be human. Or, wait, maybe that was her, too…

  It opened Its mouth to speak. She braced herself for some hideous utterance in an alien nguage from the depths of time. But no sound came. Stel did turn around then–maybe she'd heard something? Her eyes swept over the counter…past her double, and locked onto her. Calliope. The real one.

  "Tsk. Callie, I know there's no way you finished cleaning the bathroom already."

  The second and definitive sign: there was no expression of horror on Stel's face. Not even a hint of fear on the beginnings of her wrinkles.

  "It's rude to stare, Callie. Are you okay?"

  Huh? What? Now It was looking at her too with a mixture of confusion and interest. Callie shook her head to try and snap out of it all. Or, maybe her neck would snap instead, and she wouldn't have to deal with any of this anyway. One could hope.

  "Sorry–think I'm just tired. I'll uh, go back."

  "You should get more sleep. Please, get it right this time!" Stel chastised.

  She hesitated to turn her back on It, even knowing that It wasn't real, at least real in the way that she herself was. With great effort she forced her legs to move, left foot, right foot, until her double was no longer in her field of vision. Even then, she could still feel Its presence enveloping her skull like jelly, those bright eyes sered in on the nape of her neck. She shuddered. She continued forward. Past the row of carafes still too hot to touch, around the corner, she pushed open the door once more and–

  Of-fucking-course It was waiting for her in the bathroom mirror again. Why the hell not? That dreaded smile was no longer there at least, it'd been repced or rather removed for the creepy bnk expression she'd come to associate with It. On instinct she moved to fix her hair and found that she could not: her reflection just stood there like a lifeless mannequin. It no longer gave any attempt to mimic her.

  Confrontation hadn't worked; she'd try ignorance. Maybe if she just put it out of her mind and got back to cleaning like Stel'd asked, It'd simply go away? Engaging in the pin and ordinary could–she hoped–be a remedy for all things mad. So she plunged the mop head into the bucket and withdrew it again. Gray droplets dripped from the curled strands back into the pool–she was thankful that she couldn't see her face through the murk, even if she squinted.

  Her heart rate was quickening. Not this again . Was she destined to not have a moment's peace, now? Fshes of color made it hard to see what she was doing. She couldn't even be sure if she was still actually mopping, or only imagining things. Maybe all she had ever done was imagine things. Thoughts and feelings of unknown origin danced across her synapses: shame, embarrassment, self-punishment. Okay, those were very familiar to her. Were these her thoughts? No–

  In Its infinite wisdom It'd made an error. It had mistaken a one-way channel for duplex, and tried to send signals using a receiver. How could It have known that reality just wasn't stitched that way, that the ocean couldn't pull back on the moon, no matter how rogue the waves? All it had amounted to were spots of salt, pepper and ghosts in her visual field–It wasn't real. Calliope was a gss bottle through which It could only look outwards, like a genie…or a shipwreck. It strained against the confines of her tiny, wet, simple, pathetic, limited, simian excuse for a mind. She almost felt sorry for It.

  Something had been learned, though. Hallucination wasn't mutually exclusive with actual sight; a clean integration was possible. It had felt real right up until the instant that Stel had turned and It had faltered, unable to proceed. Surely that kind of augmented sight was more acceptable than the full-body experiences she'd had at the party?

  That st one hung in the air: in her mind's eye, the literal hook of the eroteme rested on a peg. Calliope struggled to unscramble which ideas were hers and which were not, even as she swished the mop back and forth on the same section of tile out of pure habit. Which way, left or right? Whatever the hell It was, It wasn't going either anytime soon, no matter how much she pleaded…she had to learn to coexist. She couldn't do that if her brain felt like it'd been tossed in a blender at the highest speed.

  "If you're going to put shit in my head, or whatever, can you at least make it clear that it comes from you?" Her speech was a miracle under the circumstances.

  It could–It would. Okay…that was better. Still…confounding. She wondered why It hadn't spoken to her again, in words. In response came that feeling again: humiliation, on a scale she'd never known it. But–she insisted–that was fine, she felt trapped in her own head sometimes too, what was one more? She knew the frustration It was having, on a personal level: the discord between mind and body, the sense pouring yourself out into the world and meeting resistance from within. It happened every time she tried to do something creative, the transtion from thought to pen to page was agonizingly imperfect.

  Like trying to force the ocean into a thimble.

  In spite of herself, she raised an eyebrow. It seemed to love reminding her of how small she was through metaphor–especially of the maritime variety, for some reason. Didn't she know that she was only a teeny-weeny grain of salt in a vast, endless sea? Yeah, of course. She knew. She'd read somewhere once that, supposedly, elephants thought humans were cute, the way people thought cats or dogs or isopods were cute. She sensed that It held a simir sentiment towards her, at least to the extent that it had vaguely comprehensible feelings. If nothing else, It found her interesting , deceptively so despite her miniscule nature. Though, she doubted that made her very special–if you'd never even heard of a person before, of course the first one you met would be interesting! Duh. Scientists had mapped every neural interaction of some nasty nematode, so It too had mapped the whole of her–it was her interaction with her environment that so perplexed it. That gnawing sense of confinement, of needing to grow and spread into the world beyond her eyes and ears, that was still there, of course. But it could wait. In the meantime, perhaps they had an understanding.

  Calliope took a long blink. It was quiet. The world still looked sharp, and her head was still pulsing in the background, slowly, but: her thoughts were fully her own. In a cartoon, she'd have steam pouring from her ears from the intensity of the experience. It'd probably discovered that that dialogue above her station was slowly cooking her little human brain, and so It pressed the mute key just before it scrambled her like an egg. How nice of It.

  She looked down; the mop had nearly dried out, and the small section of tile she'd been scrubbing appeared squeaky clean. Like new, even. She looked up, this time expecting some third horror in the mirror. She was not disappointed–it mirror now stood completely empty. She couldn't tell how she knew it, whether was impnted or was simply intuition, but she knew that the ck of a reflection was a signal. We're still here , It reassured her. We'll always be here .

  She both missed the sight, and welcomed the ck, of her reflection in the gss. Love/hate, maybe she'd get used to It.

  She clung to the mop handle as a lifeline to normalcy, and resumed swishing.

  gremnoire