Courtney left her house early on Monday morning and accidentally slammed the door on her way out. She briefly toyed with the idea of opening it back up again and closing it in a quieter manner, as the aggressive sound of the door hitting the frame felt like an irritating imperfection, a blemish on her day that would follow her around for the duration of this Monday. However, a glance at her wristwatch confirmed her suspicions that she didn’t have enough time to fiddle around with doors, and she carried on down the driveway.

Everything seemed ordinary and she made her way down the road, past the rows of Victorian houses and towards the bus stop. The sun was hanging high above her and was only partially masked by clouds, so the air felt clean and bright. A slight chill would occasionally make it’s way through her body as the wind blew from her left and spiraled around the street, but it was always gone as quickly as it had appeared, and the slight warmth of the day would be restored.

It was only once she was in the town centre, after a turbulent bus ride to say the least (who was this impostor? The absence of the usual driver made her feel a twinge of anxiety from inside the pit of her stomach) that things began to seem unusual to Courtney. At a glance, the town appeared the same as it ever was – crowds of suited adults swarmed around the streets with an urgency about them that suggested they were rushing head first into the onslaught of stress and crises that awaited behind the tall glass doors of their offices, while groups of much younger, casually dressed adolescents wandered leisurely in and out of the shops lining the high street – but there appeared to be a disconcerting atmosphere filling the space around this activity like a thick fog, hanging in every available snatch of air and confronting Courtney at every turn. 

The first thing that Courtney did every day before going to her morning classes, was slip into the bakers next door to her school and buy a tuna sandwich and a jam doughnut to eat at lunch. She had to perform this task first thing in the morning in order to be able to concentrate through her classes, for if she left it until lunchtime to go and retrieve her usual meal, she would worry and fret continuously that the bakers had disastrously run out of tuna sandwiches and jam doughnuts. She had been eating these same foods for so long that the concept of consuming anything else during her lunch break caused an overwhelming sense of impending doom to flow throughout her entire body, as though the world would end or the sun would fail to rise the following morning if she did not follow this exact routine.