It was considered a regular Tuesday.

James had a productive evening, catching a quick drink with a coworker who was stuck completing a project he had moved on from a month ago. It was still as fucked as ever, and James grinned inwardly as he got the leftover fried rice out of the fridge. Time for some Hulu.

Alex had a sinus infection, again, and was resigned to laying on the patched couch full of bleary-eyeing cold medicine. He fell asleep while flipping channels and woke with memories of a strange dream about the American Revolutionary War. No more napping to the History channel.

Marielue always felt awkward in the evening, the transition between day and night, and this particular walk home had perturbed her. A discarded brown sweatshirt in the gutter had, at a glance, appeared to be a dead dog, and after a double-take she couldn’t shake it from her mind. Everything became an abandoned animal corpse.
She saw three more “dead dogs” and one that looked like a slain kitten, but was actually a gnarled tree root poking out of a lawn.
She closed her eyes as she closed the door of her apartment, took a few deep breaths. But the rest of the night didn’t fare much better. Every bit of discarded laundry was a lifeless form; she saw a skull in a bar of soap.

Naseem was cooking up a stew for dinner, and he checked his phone for texts from his girlfriend. There was a flash of pain on his forearm; he had rested it against the stew pot on the stove. He washed it under cold tap water, but it glowed a livid red. He remembered thinking it would blister, and considered taking a picture for his girl. ‘This is what I go through for you!“’

Charles was out of the apartment, watching the basketball game on Ian’s couch and talking too loudly about a girl he’d met that weekend. He didn’t know it was too loud, though.

Amelia was plucking her eyebrows in the bathroom mirror. One, two stray hairs, grooming to the perfect shape of arched but still natural. The phone rang as she gave one last look in the mirror. Odd, that one had bled, and left a smudge of red on her dark skin. That never happens.

Caleb was doing laundry in the basement, full of coin-op machines and scuffed linoleum. He sorted the wet items into dryer-ready heaps, except one of them…
That wasn’t his. Maybe it was leftover from another tenant? A cotton pair of too-small boxer briefs, he was about to discard it before he remembered what happened last week.
Best to put them in the trash.
He bit his lip too hard as the garbage can top swung and creaked.

Jackie just woke up. Her head pounded, and she always swore Monday night drinking was the most abrasive of them all, because you’d be around people who may have no jobs or may have nothing left in life, and keeping up drink-by-drink was a hazard. She remembered some names… Michael or Mike or maybe something unusual like Makivar. One look at her phone said she was right. Skyla was asking how she felt, punctuated by emoji of which she could only see half and the rest were rectangular blocks. Then there was two missed calls from "Makkovar.”
She must have really liked him.
She wondered if he had a job.

Kevin removed his headset. The raid wasn’t going well. Wiped five times on a boss that they considered farm-status. He rubbed his eyes and didn’t notice the shadow passing by his fifth-story window.

Thomas and Stephanie lay on sweaty bedsheets, panting in the glaze of newfound love. Three times that night! It wasn’t even midnight.
“Need anything from the bathroom?” he asked.
“A towel.” Stephanie turned over and smiled into the pillow, feeling the stickiness between her thighs. But it wasn’t all just passion.
“Um, maybe I’ll… get it myself,” she called, carefully rolling on her back and edging out of the bed, trying to hide the blood on her fingers.
“Fuck,” said Thomas from the bathroom, the lights on, “Are you okay? I mean there's—”
“It’s fine, I got my period, sorry sorry.”
Stephanie hadn’t had a period in two years.

Ed was home early. It was bullshit. He pulled off his hat and cheap, dark wig, slamming himself down into his favorite lounge chair, the same chair his dad used before he died. The costume party was an annoyance at best, a disaster at worst.
“IT’S FROM TRIGUN,” he finally yelled out over the keg at a dumbstruck partygoer dressed as Finn. He didn’t mean to scream, but Ed had never been good at environments where music was blaring and everyone was drunk by the time you arrived.
He really cared about his outfit, it was good shit. A bottle of shochu washed the taste of cheap beer out of his mouth, and the remote flicked through his library to find Trigun, the episodes with Rai-Dei. He pressed 'Play.’
Ed looked awesome. Fuck anyone who didn’t get it.

Brandon took out the trash and found himself face-to-face with an oppossum.
He hadn’t recognized before how much their face looked like a skull.

Alejandro let the faucet run for a bit, waiting for hot water to make some rice. His nose was in a book, so he didn’t notice that for a moment, the water ran blood red.

Makayla wasn’t into that witchy shit, it seemed like stuff for dispossessed white girls. But on the websites, as fucking footnotes, there was a mention of Marie Laveau, and voodoo, and the things that called to her. She had more power here than she thought, without the fuckin’ salt lamps and quartz crystals that cost nine dollars each. Nah, there was good shit in here, and it called to her.
She held half a dead cigar in one hand and grabbed an oily eel filet, the best she could find at the Asian market, in the other.
It jolted through her like a seizure. Something was very wrong, and very near.
Makayla gasped and dropped her reagents. Nah, fuck this. She’ll fry that damn eel and not fuck around with this shit anymore.

John’s business worked at night. So he didn’t recognize the flickering lights in the hallways, excited squawks and yelps from other apartments doors as he passed. This was all normal.
Eyes followed him from the underside of dark doors, squinted through the keyholes of post boxes as he went to get his mail that evening. He paid no mind.
Why should he?

Renee had the worst night. Newly single, full of glass-shard memories that hurt to remember but they were everywhere…. It was easy to exist, to do normal things in a normal life because there was a repetition that was comforting. Coming home was the awful part. Moments to rest were the awful part. She felt unloved. Worse, she knew she wasn’t loved anymore. Things had ended that badly.
An hour passed sitting on her bed, thinking about a bottle of wine. Any bottle. It didn’t matter right now.
Then it was an hour and a half.
Mentally taking note of all the things in her space which SHE had touched, the candles they had lit on romantic evenings, the way the pillow still smelled like her, the dress and leggings still piled into a corner from the last time they…
It was three days ago. That they touched, that they felt each other’s heat and Renee felt the heartbeat of her as she lay her head on that chest, that perfect chest that held the most golden heart, the person she loved. It all seemed to be going so well…. Or well enough. Good enough. Enough to go on, to continue, to keep being in love as they were, as they had been for over a year now.
Maybe Renee hadn’t seen the signs. She must not have, because it all felt so sudden. Two days ago. Three days ago they had been twisting limbs in a galaxy of jersey bedsheets, and one day afterward, nothing.
She wanted to wash the sheets. But she didn’t dare.
There was no wine, so that… couldn’t have been the problem. Renee didn’t take any pills, she had always been a rather healthy person but admittedly she hadn’t eaten much that day and didn’t plan on putting together a dinner. Her friends didn’t know yet, so they couldn’t provide survival comforts. It was just her, on a bed, in a tiny apartment, alone.
So it wasn’t wine or pills or attributed to anything particularly chemical, but it just so happens that on that night, Renee got a nosebleed.
In the midst of her tears, a dark stain spread on her palms and she realized she was bleeding. It felt so dramatic, she walked to the bathroom pinching her nose and looked for the nearest towel to wipe on her face. As she removed the washcloth, a threadbare thing she would probably throw away after this incident of staining, she realized it had changed color.
It was a yellow handcloth, she had wiped her hands on it for years, probably too long without replacement, but it was yellow. It was a bit blanched with wear and wash. But it was yellow.
Not now.
The cloth in her hands was a deep red.
Renee’s eyes snapped to the mirror, inspecting her face and nose—maybe she had bled a lot more than she thought— but her face was clean. The cloth stayed red.
A single tear snuck from the corner of her eye… she followed its path in the bathroom reflection… and it was dark, moody, red. Like wine.
She felt wet, like having walked out of a steamy shower, the air was warm and full of vapor and she could barely breathe. A drop of blood splattered the hexagonal tiled floor, but her nose felt dry. Dropping the towel, Renee watched as her fingernails pooled with thick burgundy liquid and spilled to the ground.
This time the mirror showed her looking clean, and pale, and scared.
The floor was splattered art, white tile and grey grout, artful splashes of deep red.
Her sandals stood in pools of crimson, a steady flow easing out of the peep-toe opening.
This wasn’t just grief, it was worse than that.
Renee knew she wasn’t losing her mind. The world, like many other things, was here to blindside her, and she had no control over it.

Maybe the other tenants could have seen the sloshing red liquid in the other washing machine.
The mysterious stains on the stairs.
The pupils of their eyes that looked red and luminous in the mirror’s reflection.
The metallic tang from a bitten lip.

But it was a regular Tuesday night.
Easy enough to forget, anyway.