The thing to understand about Mira is that nothing happened suddenly. The light changed. The milk soured. She blinked too long.
The shifts were microscopic, molecular. A dullness at first. A refusal to laugh at the manager’s joke. A tightening around the eyes.
By the time she noticed something was wrong, it was already behind her.
She worked the checkout line at Orson’s Groceries. That was what the name tag said: Mira — 06 years of service. She was nineteen. The tag was a lie. Everything was, no? In some way.
Orson’s Groceries smelled of cold lemons and linoleum. The air was wrong, refrigerated, recirculated. No windows. Just long metal rows that hummed quietly. That was what Mira remembered most: the humming. Like something thinking. Waiting.
She clocked in at 3:58 p.m. and clocked out at 11:04. There was something honest about it, the work. Numbers matched. Plastic bags rustled the same way each shift. She knew the patterns of the regulars—who bought wine on Thursdays, who paid in change, who came through the line just to be seen.
Mira lived in a small beige apartment above a laundromat. Her windows looked out onto the alley where old men smoked and where time stalled. There were blinds she never opened. She had a bed, a kettle, two bowls. She ate dry cereal with her hands. Not out of laziness. It felt more honest that way.
She didn’t speak much. She wrote things down in a notebook—things she overheard, things she imagined.
I saw a woman cut her apple into exact sixths. I think she’s the type to fall apart one day.
There was a black dress she never wore but kept hung like a ritual. Sometimes she’d unzip the plastic, look at it, and zip it again.
No one had ever asked her what she wanted. Not seriously. Not with the intention to deliver. But if they had, Mira would have said: to be seen completely, and still chosen. That was all. That was everything.
⸻
She began waking up at 4:17 a.m., like clockwork. Not from dreams. Not from nightmares. Just awake. The street was always silent at that hour—eerily so. Sometimes she sat at the table and stared at the wall until the sun made it go pale again.
She no longer listened to music.
Instead, she listened to the washing machine downstairs. It thudded in an irregular rhythm. Like something breathing heavily behind a door.
The thoughts started to change. Not big ones. Not violent.
More like—what if she just didn’t go to work? What if she moved the items in aisle three, just to see if anyone noticed? What if she smiled when she didn’t feel like it, and stopped when she did?
People had always said she was polite. That she was so nice. Mira began to wonder what would happen if she simply wasn’t.
She began stealing small things. A chapstick. A plastic spoon. She didn’t use them. She placed them neatly on her window ledge and stared at them like trophies.
It wasn’t the items. It was the act. The soft knowledge that no one noticed.
She began standing still in public places. In the middle of sidewalks. In elevators. Just to see how long it took someone to look uncomfortable.
She began to think of herself in the third person. Mira doesn’t speak today.
Mira eats only orange-colored food.
Mira is learning how to disappear.
⸻
At work, she started slipping things into people’s bags that they hadn’t bought. A single loose olive. A spoon. A matchbook. A page torn from a children’s book.
No one ever said anything. This unsettled her.
At home, the walls started pulsing. Not literally. The silence got louder. She couldn’t tell if she was being haunted or if she was haunting herself.
She began to dream of herself standing in the cereal aisle, unmoving, even as alarms blared around her. Even as water poured in through the ceiling.
Mira started filming herself. She didn’t know why. Not to post. She’d just turn the camera on and sit. Or pace. Or do nothing. She’d play them back and study the frame like a scientist.
She noticed things. The way she blinked. The tilt of her shoulders. She tried different expressions. Smile. Confused. Sexy. Happy. None of them looked right. All of them looked real.
She watched those videos more than she watched anything else. Her online search history included:
- “How to make people remember you”
- “Sociopath test free”
- “How many people does the average person meet in their life”
- “Is there a word for when you feel outside yourself”
She no longer answered texts. There weren’t many. She deleted old photos of herself. When she saw her own name, it felt unfamiliar.
She burned her diary. Not out of drama. Just to see how long it would take for the ash to become weightless.
A man on the subway touched her wrist by accident. Mira looked at him too long. She followed him off the train. Not to do anything. Just to prove she could.
She whispered to herself, “I am the observer and the experiment.” It felt like scripture.
The world was a simulation, and she had slipped outside the code. She wasn’t paranoid. Just aware. Aware that something had tilted and no one else had felt it. That she was floating slightly above her life.
She thought of Didion’s words: “I knew what I wanted: I wanted everything.” Mira wanted everything, too. But she didn’t want to beg for it.
She became interested in mirrors. Not for vanity. For surveillance. She would stare at herself for long intervals, trying to catch her reflection doing something she hadn’t done.
She began practicing stillness. Sitting so still that her limbs would forget they were attached to her.
She stopped answering her name at work. She claimed it was a mindfulness practice.
She started leaving objects in public places. A lock of hair on a bus seat. A pair of glasses on a church pew. She liked the idea of people finding them and wondering.
They gave her a raise. No one questioned her. They called her reliable. They said she was stable. Affirmations began to appear in red ink on her mirror:
You are not a person, you are a presence.
You are a concept.
You are not real and that is your power.
At night she whispered things to no one. Not prayers. Not exactly.
Sometimes she thought about fame. Not the fame on billboards. The other kind. The kind where your name is written in small fonts in strange places. Inside a matchbook. In a bathroom stall. On the lips of someone trying to forget.
⸻
When they found her apartment, she was gone. She had left everything behind:
A stack of videos labeled only with dates.
A pile of plastic spoons.
A wall of magazine clippings arranged in a perfect grid. No explanation.
Just a note. One sentence. Written in her own messy handwriting. “This was a study of absence.”
⸻
“This was a study of absence.”
That was all. Written on cheap lined paper, torn from the back of a receipt logbook. The kind used to record inventory, restocks, returns. The ink bled slightly, like it had been written too slowly. No date. No signature. Just the sentence. A thesis, maybe. Or an ending.
They catalogued her things—half out of procedure, half out of intrigue. A drawer full of gum wrappers arranged in descending size. A jar of clipped clothing labels. Toothpicks painted red, each one labeled with a woman’s name.
There were videos. Stacks of USBs and SD cards, some labeled in Mira’s narrow print—10/04, 11/27 – crying, 12/02 – silence (real?). They were sent to a lab. But no one watched them, not really. Not start to finish. Not with care.
The detective assigned the case requested to be taken off it. He said the footage made him “feel strange.” He couldn’t explain it better than that. Just that after watching two minutes of Mira brushing her hair in silence, he could no longer fall asleep without hearing the sound of metal teeth against bone.
The story broke quietly. A brief mention on the local news. Young Woman Vanishes, Leaves Cryptic Note. The footage never aired.
And yet—people began to whisper.
At parties, a girl would say she’d once seen Mira standing motionless outside a cinema, just staring at the reflections in the glass. At cafés, waitresses described customers who left behind strange objects: a single earring. A plastic spoon. A clipping from Vogue, circled in red.
Some said she was a performance artist. Others said she’d joined a cult. One Reddit thread claimed she was part of a test—something to do with artificial consciousness. “Mira” meant “look,” they said.
A week later, someone posted a video on a dead YouTube account. It had no title. Just fifteen seconds of a grocery aisle, flickering under fluorescent light. At the end of the frame, a figure appears—just a silhouette. Still. Almost imperceptible.
No one could confirm it was her. But the comments section filled anyway.
is this real?
she’s watching us now.
i saw her last night at the 24-hour bodega. she didn’t blink. she just stared.
this is part of it. this is the second phase.
And then—nothing.
Until one morning, six weeks after she vanished, someone noticed that the mirror in the breakroom at Orson’s Groceries had changed. It was the same size, same position. But faintly etched into the surface, as if scratched with a key, were the words:
“I’m still here. I just stepped sideways.” No camera had caught anyone entering. The manager had it removed by noon.
But later that night, the security footage glitched for eleven seconds. And in that static—
She was smiling.
Oh, Mira.