You wake up.

Your parents and partner tell you they love you as you leave for work.

You haven’t been back to work for a week. The new landlord spent that time inspecting the cleaning job you completed over the past six months. You started in January. It is now July.

“How long has the electricity not been working?” The new landlord asks once they’ve sat you down in the grand dining room of their new mansion.

You knew that question was coming.

You try to answer in a way that doesn’t throw the previous landlord under the bus. For all that they were too busy to respond to your pleas to fix the electricity while you cleaned, they were kind to you when you did have their attention.

“Since February.” You answer simply.

“So you worked in the dark?”

“The previous landlord thought I could do my job just fine without driving up the electricity bills.” You say, half-jokingly. “And they were very busy.”

The new landlord stares at you for a few seconds, tapping their pen to the table. The room is lit with portable lamps, courtesy of the new landlord for this meeting. A small hole forms in a spot of dust you missed where they are tapping their pen.

“Hm. It shows.” The landlord says eventually.

“Yes.” You agree. You wonder if this is the time and place to defend yourself, to say that you think you were pretty ingenious in setting up alternative ways of lighting the rooms when cleaning them. You put so much effort into it.

But what is the point in arguing if the end product doesn’t reflect that?

“The job has not been completed.” The new landlord says. “I have made a list of things you need to work on. And I will fix the electricity before you start working again. Is there anything else you need?”

You smile and thank the new landlord graciously. You were expecting more work – but didn’t know to expect the help.

On your way back home, you breathe in the ash that dances thickly between you and the sun. It hurts a little less today.

You realise you forgot to take your vitamin D pill that morning.

You wake up.

They’ve come up with a new cure for the ash poisoning.

The nurse, who will cure you, opens up a plastic pack with a red thread and needle as you sit next to them.

“What word do you want?” they ask kindly.

You request the word ‘grandma’, to honour yours.

You watch as the nurse threads the needle and moves it towards the skin of your upper arm. The needle enters your skin shallowly, and it hurts. It hurts even more when the needle digs perpendicular to your skin, and then exits, dragging the slightly knobbly thread behind it. The nurse embroiders your chosen word into your skin.

 You wake up.

Your parents and partner tell you they love you as you leave for work.

As the new landlord had promised, the lights flick on as you step into the mansion. 

You know the building intimately. Of course you would – you had to navigate it blind for months.

But now you see the truth behind the new landlord’s observations. You hadn’t even thought to clean the filthy hallway skirting boards before, when you were reserving your precious limited lighting for the rooms alone.

So you start on that.

You count the hallways, and estimate this task will take you about two whole days. You check you have all the cleaning supplies you need – but – oh. No sponges.

It’s not worth going into the ash just for some sponges, you decide. You’ll pick them up on your way into work tomorrow.

You decide, then, that today will be dedicated to planning instead. You draw up a timeline for progress and you make a shopping list for all the supplies necessary. You’re generous with it, trying to account for any unforeseen circumstances.

You see it is time to go home.

You haven’t cleaned a single thing.

You wake up.

There is someone standing in your bedroom doorway. You can only see them by their silhouette.

You can’t move.

You try not to panic. This has happened before. 

The figure steps into the room and leaves your line of sight. You feel phantom goosebumps forming as you sense them moving closer to you. Their hand rests on the back of your knee.

You wake up.

Your parents and partner tell you they love you as you leave for work.

It has been a month since you went shopping for new cleaning supplies. Cleaning the skirting boards took a week, and other small jobs the remaining time. You try not to feel the failure of not meeting your expected timeline, but you know you could have worked harder and took fewer breaks to finish things on time.

A part of you wonders if you erred in a pathetic attempt to put off your next task.

You’d spent so long in the first six months of the year hoovering the three giant entertainment rooms, laden with multiple tables and chairs and embellishments fit for a range of celebrations.

And now you look around one of them in full lighting – the floor for the most part is clean, but copious layers of dust still gather where you had opted not to clear the floor or furniture before hoovering.

You admit to yourself you had initially cut corners and done a lazy job. You should have done it properly the first time.

You cannot cut corners this time.

So, you lift a chair – the first of hundreds – and carry it to a designated corner.

It takes you the full day to move 60% of the furniture in that room. There are holes in the layers of dust where the table legs once were. You leave the rest for tomorrow, and tell yourself you could finish the hoovering tomorrow as well if you work hard.

You wake up.

You wake up because someone has tuned on the light in your room.

You can’t breathe, but that’s because of the ash. Your chest hurts.

“You left your windows open!” you hear someone call from the door. “You let the ash in! It’s all over the house!”

Your mind drifts to your father, who is in poor health.

Your father is now breathing in the ash.

Your father is now breathing in the ash.

Your father -

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You wake up.

Your parents and partner tell you they love you as you leave for work.

You get to work and immediately start lifting more chairs towards the corner of the room, but then something in your back rips.

Your mind conjures an image of meat tissue tearing apart as you drop the chair and bend over, gasping.

It’s bad.

After a few seconds, it’s not that bad, you swear, but your knees still hit the floor.

It’s not an emergency. It’s not. Nothing’s broken, you know that much. You squint at the furniture you have yet to carry and move in the room. Your training kicks in and you try to breathe slowly.

You stop panicking.

You consider your options.

Should you move onto a different task that won’t hurt your back further? Or should you rest and hope you will recover faster that way?

As the next few hours pass, the pain recedes further.

You gingerly test picking up a chair, and find that if you bend only in a certain way, and focus the weight on the side that doesn’t hurt, the job is still doable.

You find that pushing rather than pulling the grand piano doesn’t exacerbate the pain much. You also opt to only push it a little to the side, rather than towards the designated furniture corner. You can clean around it. You know that might mean you miss a spot of dust, but.

But.

It hurts.

And it’s time to go home.

You wake up.

You’re an automated security system in a hotel.

Sectors 5 and 6 are continuously lighting up. The lights are painful to look at. You’re trying to ignore those sectors because the security system is broken. Or it’s not, and it’s something else’s job to keep track of those sectors. Or the people infiltrating the hotel have hacked you into not raising the alarm as they ransack sectors 5 and 6. The reasoning is hazy.

There are plenty other sectors in the hotel – sector 2, for example, where an emergency is happening. Someone is drowning in the hotel pool. You report that one. A job well done.

Another emergency in sector 12 comes to your attention and you successfully ignore everything happening in sector 5 and 6.

Every time your eyes drift towards the painful flashing lights of sector 5 and 6, something in your wiring tears. It almost wakes you up several times.

You wake up.

Your parents and partner tell you they love you as you leave for work.

You stare at the entertainment room. You stretch your back using exercises the internet recommended. You lie down on the floor and blow away some of the dust next to your head.

Two hours later, you’re planning other future tasks. It’s the only productive thing you can bear to do that day.

You wake up.

You get lost on public transport on your way to meet with friends.

You finally figure out what bus you need to take, and it isn’t a frequent one. Your bus flies past you as you’re walking towards the bus stop. You have to run for it, but it’s not guaranteed you’ll make it. There are people filling up the footpath, ambling along slowly like they don’t have a care in the world. It would be rude to push past them.

But you try.

You have to try

As you run, the air turns into syrup. It is painful both to move against and to breathe.

The bus is waiting for an abnormally long time at the bus stop. You are now about 30 metres away. So you keep trying to run.

The air crystallises.

You breathe it in, and your chest hurts.

You wake up.

Your parents and partner tell you they love you as you leave for work.

Your back started feeling a little better a few weeks ago, and you’d eventually finished cleaning all the entertainment rooms. You even went back to move the pianos properly to clean all the remaining patches of dust. No cutting corners, even if it puts you behind schedule again.

You go into a room full of tiny ornaments that the old landlord left and the new landlord evidently opted to keep. You now see that the layers of dust were not removed with your initial few swipes with a feather duster.

You consider the new landlord a saint for not calling you out on your prior laziness.

It’s mindless work, taking each small ornament and using a rag to remove the dust from all the nooks and crannies. Nevertheless, you complete it in one day, to schedule.

You’re proud of yourself.

But then you look at the first ornament compared to the last ornament and you know you were rushing the last few cleanings so you could go home faster.

It looks so much better than before, but it’s not perfect. If you wanted perfect, you’d spend another day polishing every single ornament. Would the new landlord notice either way when they came to inspect it?

You go to the window and watch the ash swirling outside.

You decide to go home.

You wake up.

You’re at a family gathering at your late grandmother’s house. It’s sad but you’re always happier at family gatherings.

You sit on the couch alone for a bit of a breather from socialising.

Your grandmother’s pet rabbit, who has outlived her despite its own obvious deterioration in old age, shuffles up by your feet. You love this rabbit and its soft ears. It is beloved by the entire family.

It wants to get on your lap, where it is warm, and its arthritis doesn’t hurt.

You lift it up, but you can see it needs more support, you’re not holding it correctly, and you can feel the fragility of its bones under your fingertips. You hastily put it back down. It makes a pained noise and insists even more that it wants to get up.

You try again, and somehow lose your handling. It drops and lands audibly. Its noises rise in pitch. You’re so scared you broke something. You’re shaking. It still wants to get up.

You try picking it up again, faster this time, just to make the noises stop and to comfort its distress.

You’re careless in your approach and you press too hard.

You feel its brittle spine snap in half.

Its body deflates.

You try to connect the two halves of the spine together in desperation to keep it from folding in on itself.

The rabbit is quiet.

You wake up.

You feel a visceral sickness in your stomach from breaking the rabbit’s spine. You remember the sensation of the action vividly. Your grandmother never had a rabbit, so you attribute this dream to lingering depression over her recent death.

Dreams are not a valid excuse to pull a sickie.

Your parents and partner tell you they love you as you leave for work.

You spend the day cleaning the stupid ornaments properly.

You wake up.

You’re with a childhood friend. You spent your whole childhood suffering a cycle of friendship and resentment with her. She’s not been a friend for a while, but she’s your friend here.

It’s not a good thing.

You hang out, and the details are fuzzy. You feel bad about yourself. You end up walking away. You are allowed to walk away without the air turning into syrup.

The trains aren’t running but the air is refreshingly cool on your face as you sit on a train station bench. You start worrying about how you’re going to get home.

You wake up.

Your parents and partner tell you they love you as you leave for work.

It is October, over nine months since you set foot into this mansion, and you’re nearly done with your job.

One of the final tasks is cleaning the stained carpet in the basement. You ignored the stains before, out of laziness. The new landlord didn’t specify that you had to clean all the junk off the floor as well as clean the stains, so you wonder if it would be lazy now to ignore that problem, too.

You put the thought to the back of your mind. Armed with carpet cleaner and slightly better lighting, you get to work.

You’d put this task off (along with a few others) due to back pain, which even now, months after the initial injury, becomes more and more of an issue as you kneel down to scrub. Which means that the faster you finish, the less damage that is done.

In your haste, you kneel with your full weight next to where a toolbox was overturned in someone else’s haste.

You feel the long nail push through your skin and impale the tissues inside your left knee.

And then, seconds later, you feel the pain.

You roll onto your side.

You see the nail is fully embedded. Blood gathers around the head and drips onto the carpet. Oddly, you don’t make a sound.

After a few minutes of deep breathing, alone, you experimentally straighten your left leg. You feel the nail move inside as something tears, but it works. You stand up. You can stand up. This can’t be good for your knee. You find that if you walk with a limp, you only feel the nail dragging intimately against something, perhaps bone or a tendon, but without the sensation of ripping internal tissue. Any movement causes a vibration throughout your leg. It’s bearable.

The bleeding eventually stops.

You cover the blood stain on the carpet with the overturned toolbox and limp home.

You wake up.

Branches grow from your legs as you lie in bed. Something is wrong with one of the branches. It is sickly and the leaves are wilting. The air smells of rot.

Little spirits approach you and you welcome them. You wonder why you have never chosen to welcome them before, in your other times of need.

They land on your rotting leaves and begin cleansing them.

It helps. Your pain recedes.

You are so grateful.

You wake up.

Your parents and partner tell you they love you as you leave for work.

It is November. The new landlord is angry that you claimed to have finished the job, when you evidently didn’t. They tell you to check the list of things to clean again and to not waste their time. They leave.

You want to yell at them to look at their spotless entertainment rooms and ornaments instead of the bathroom tile grout that you couldn’t bear to kneel over and clean.

But you don’t. The new landlord has every right to get angry. You agreed to finish this job, and you didn’t. You know you have to finish it without any more excuses. It is your responsibility.

That same day, you find a pole and attach the correct tool to it using duct tape. Using this, you won’t have to kneel to reach the bathroom floor.

This kind of creative work-around is how you dealt with adversity last time, when you were working in almost complete darkness. You still have a head on your shoulders. There will always be a solution if you give yourself time to think.

But, as you work, you start to notice that the pole feels fragile under your fingertips.

You stop working.

You take a break.

You try to breathe.

In the end, you carefully put the pole to the side.

The head of the nail in your knee clicks against the bathroom times as you kneel down. You ignore the familiar internal vibrations of metal scraping against bone. You angle your back in the least painful position.  

You clean the grout.

You wonder if you can get away with leaving your blood stain under the tool box in the basement.

You haven’t been paid since May.

You wake up.

You’re at home.

You’re alone and you hear someone breaking into your house.

You move furniture in front of your bedroom door so they can’t get to you.

You wake up.

You’re at home.

You’re hearing the same noises as before, except now you’re actually awake.

You go to lock your door, but the lock isn’t working.

Their aggressive footsteps start climbing the stairs.

You wake up.

You’re at home.

You’re hearing the same noises as before, except now you’re actually awake.

Your heart is beating so fast and moving hurts.

You jump out of bed as fast as you can, so fast the world blurs.

You wake up.