20210826

Day 2,542

She leant against her hallway mirror and fell, passing through the glass like an open doorway, falling backwards into a near-perfect mimicry of her home. Everything looked exactly the same at first glance though the more she looked, the more differences she noticed. Namely the stained gun just beside her foot and bullet casings scattered about like confetti.

It was clear that someone was in the process of clearing up the aftermath of something she didn't want to think about. Between the stains on and beneath the gun, between the half-hearted attempts at brushing the casings into neat little piles, between her home and this was a deep, unnerving, unpleasant feeling that dripped down her spine like melting ice.

She wondered who'd been fighting in the home - she didn't want to think of it as hers, she couldn't think of it as hers in case she started accepting her current circumstance as a new reality. She wondered who'd won and where they went. Were they close by and watching her, waiting for her guard to drop so they could grab the gun and finish the job or was she the only living thing around?

Besides her own pounding heartbeat she realised she'd been hearing a moist, metallic scraping sound coming from her - the -  kitchen. Her hands grabbed the gun and loaded it before she could fully comprehend what she was doing. The cold weight of it felt comfortable and eerily familiar, like she'd always held it.

She walked into her kitchen just in time to see a scrap of flesh fall into an industrial-sized meat grinder, a scrap of flesh with a very familiar tattoo. The same one she got at the local pier when she was seventeen. Beneath the grinder was a perfectly circular hole where her crushed meat fell into, something further below was chewing contentedly.

A sudden sound behind her took her completely by surprise - she turned and shot and could only stare as she saw herself armed with a kitchen knife dripping with someone's fresh blood as she staggered back but did not die. She fired again and again and again until she saw herself fall to the ground for good, the light in her eyes fading to glassy nothingness.

That same nothingness seemed to seep into her as she dragged her corpse to the meat grinder, panting and struggling and eventually throwing herself inside. Once again she heard a sound behind her - a loud thud. She realised she left the gun in the hallway, eyes darting around the kitchen til she spotted the knife, still slick and more importantly, close by.

She grabbed it and quietly ran into the dining room, intent on sneaking behind the intruder.

Perpetuating the cycle without even realising it, without even caring about it.

Feeding the creature beneath the kitchen forever.

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