Nine o'clock in the morning was an unusually late time for Janice Fitzpatrick to wake up, even on a Sunday. She prided herself as a practiced early riser, her body so accustomed to the jolt the alarm clock gave her every morning that it often no longer needed the shrill sound in order to work: she would automatically snap awake after being asleep for the right amount of time, ready to pull herself out of bed and get her day started. Every day since her mind held the concepts of routine and scheduling, the first hours of the day were always the same sequence of actions.

It was typical, normal stuff, familiar to many and a source or pride to her parents when she kept on with it without them having to ask. Climb out of bed. Pull up sheets and smooth them out into something presentable. Pick out clothes, take a shower, get dressed, clean teeth. Today was no different, even if it was starting a few hours later than normal. Janice gave a disdainful look at her alarm clock, as if trying to make time itself feel guilty for it already being 9AM.

There was a small, smartly-bound book on her bedside table she lifted up and started leafing through it to an empty page -- it was one of Janice's better-kept secrets that she had a diary, which she maintained meticulously. Only the mundane ever graced its pages, though, no stories of the Negaverse were allowed to be written in there, she enjoyed the mechanical process of writing her daily experiences but wasn't stupid about it. It wasn't exactly an interesting read, anyway. Janice's writing tended more towards densely-packed facts than her feelings and opinions on them. It was an autobiographical textbook, crammed with unevocative sentences and paragraphs about her classes and her collections and board games and band performances.

She had let Franz read it a few times. He'd lit up like a Christmas tree when she first brought it out and explained what it was, held it open gingerly like it was a museum piece and spent an epoch of silence sidled up next to her as he devoured the words with his eyes. As if it were some new installment of a novel series he'd been devotedly waiting for years to be released and had finally gotten a copy.

Even though it was just a schoolgirl's journal.

It was standard practice for her to wait until the end of the day to scribble into its pages, not the beginning. However, lately there had been some happenings during the night that prompted her to squeeze short writing sessions into the mornings. She hadn't been sleeping well: normally sleep was mostly dreamless and dreams mundane when the surfaced, but over the past week or two her dreams had gone from rare to common and from boring and forgettable to vivid and impossible to push her mind away from. Janice couldn't resist the desire to write down what she remembered of them and read them over and over, analyze them, try to figure out what they meant. They couldn't be pointless, they had to mean something. Otherwise she wouldn't be having them at all.

So she wrote her latest one down in her usual style, an emotionless laundry list of events as she remembered them happening, before returning the little book to its place in the bedside table drawer. Then in her usual fashion, she smoothed out the bedsheets, got her things together and made her way downstairs for a shower.

Janice was always in and out in 15 minutes, never patient enough to be relaxed or soothed by it as others might. It was just a chore, one more point on the daily bulleted list to get through. However, once in a while, as the steam in the room was clearing up and she paced about trying to tame the slick locks of her murky, longish hair, she was held up for a few minutes by the water-frosted pane of glass over the sink.

She'd always known she wasn't exactly pretty, had long since given up on trying to be and had pretty much gotten to the point that she no longer cared. But still, on some lethargic, slow-paced mornings like this one, Janice found herself trailing over to the bathroom mirror, staring at herself and contemplating. She didn't care -- and yet there were times where she would regard her reflection for a long moment and, in spite of herself, pass out a short sigh.

Her hand drifted up to free a bit of hair clinging to her cheek, and -- she sighed. And leaned forward with her arms crossed against the sink, and stared.

Sometimes she hated her reflection. She wondered if the person she was looking at was even supposed to be familiar (she wasn't), couldn't stand the moody disapproving gaze tracing over her form and back to her eyes. Hated how her her hair spilled over around her face like an unflattering set of curtains that didn't match up with everything else in the room. She hated it.

Hated it.

The bathroom smelled of fading steam and her shampoo. It was warm, muggy, but not unpleasantly so, and Janice stood there leaning over the sink, and stared and stared and stared. Her jaw worked moodily, she let out another irritable puff of air that made a small cloud of mist cling to the mirror for a couple of seconds.

Finally, she'd had enough of looking at herself and doing nothing else, and she lifted her hand again to brush her bangs away from her forehead as if that would help her look any better. It didn't. So she gave herself a small frown, her hand still lingering against her hairline -- and then she pushed her fingernails cleanly into her skin, pushed until she felt them scraping against the bone of her skull, and slowly started to work the rest of her fingers in. Out of the corner of her eye, in the mirror, she could see the shape of their tips bulging out against the flesh. It felt warm and smooth and slick on the inside, it would come off so easy, she thought. So easy. She should have done this sooner. She'd been so stupid, not thinking of this before.

There was dark, inky sludge leaking out from the break in her skin, forming little rivulets down her fingers and her arm. It was forming a tiny puddle on the tile with a soft pattering noise; it rose in intensity to a splattering noise and then a steady, thick stream as she started to pull, peeling a large strip of flesh off her face that tapered off at the top of her throat. The stuff was running all down her face and dripping all over the sink. She would get it cleaned up when she was done.

In her reflection Janice could see something right-feeling and stained with tar. Better, but not there yet. It was all going to have to come off. She drew up her hand again and slowly tore off another section of her face, the granite top of the sink was a mess, it was really no different from peeling a banana. Easy. She was feeling better already. She was standing in a puddle of her own muck. This was looking much better.

The sink was filling up with long, messy strips of her own skin, chunks of hair still connected to the scalp. Eyelids. One ear, then the next. There wasn't enough room in the sink for all of it, soon it was overflowing, a strip of torso hung over the edge like some sort of malformed dead fish. It was very satisfying to see this -- the old her she didn't like reduced to unrecognizable shreds. If she hadn't gotten rid of her lips she would have smiled.

So simple. So much better.

Janice looked at herself one last time, at the torn chunks of muscle and ligament left holding her frame together, at the smears of sludge swathed here and there over it all, and gave herself an approving tilt of the head. Then she reached up to pluck out her eyes, one after the other.

Much better.