Part 1

I see it in the morning, I see it in the evening, it haunts me at night.  Day is spent feigning life, seeing if I can pretend that all is well and I am not dead.  I am the ghost and the ghost is me.  No one else sees it, no one else knows, but the mirror shows what I have become.

It was a strange thing to find tucked away under a loose board, folded so many times the paper was like a checkerboard.  But that’s where it was and that’s where she found it, so she sat cross-legged on the dusty wood floor, puzzling over the distracted words.  The handwriting was faded and hadn’t been very good to begin with, so at first it was hard to make out.  But she had good eyes and enough boredom and curiosity to spend deciphering it.  Someone, she decided, had ripped out a page of their journal and wedged it between the floorboards out of embarrassment.

Muse was new to the room and new to the house.  It was much older than she was, so she supposed there had been lots of opportunities for someone to stick the note where they had.  There was no date on it.  She briefly considered giving it to her landlady, but decided against it.  She also decided not to notify Mrs. Garner of the loose floorboard, because it was actually very handy for hiding things, come to think of it.  Not that Muse intended to be a bad sort of tenant, one who hid things she wasn’t supposed to have.  Not at all.

She folded the page back up, the lines matching back up as if relieved to be put back as they’d been for, quite possibly, years.  It went in a pocket and stayed there for the remainder of the day, which was spent moving furniture and unpacking boxes.

Her new home was a single room on the second floor of a rambling old house out in the country.  The boonies, really.  It was exactly the sort of place that was so chock full of historical ambience you could forget you were miles away from everything and nothing worked quite right.  That is, if you were exactly the right sort of person for a place like that.  Muse felt she was, or would at least have to be.  The price was right, anyway.

The room was bare when she walked in and was barely less so when she went to sleep for the night.  She was, in a word, broke.  What little furniture she’d brought was secondhand and some of it wasn’t even technically furniture.  Her kitchen table was, in fact, a card table, and her chair was a camping stool.  Her shelves, which were to hold everything from books to clothes to toiletries and anything in between, were cardboard boxes turned on their sides and stacked together.  These were the same boxes her things had been transported in.  She’d cut off the flaps and reinforced the weaker ones with duct tape.

It looked pretty horrible.

She went to sleep on the floor, on an inflatable air mattress she knew would be flat by morning.  But she didn’t mind, because she would soon be dreaming, and when she dreamed, she was a queen.