You wake up, open one eye, and discover that your brain has already begun broadcasting.

Not a song you love. Not even a song you would voluntarily finish in a grocery store.

It is the chorus from something you heard once near a pharmacy in 2007, now playing inside your skull with the confidence of a sold-out stadium tour.

People call this an earworm. Convenient.

Your brain has a strange customer-service policy.

It will not remind you to buy toothpaste while you are standing beside the toothpaste. That would be too convenient. Instead, it waits until you are in the shower, covered in shampoo, with no pen, no phone, and no reasonable route to aisle seven.

Then it leans over the mental partition and whispers: You also need batteries.

This is not forgetfulness. This is theatre.

You are halfway down the street when the thought arrives.

Did I lock the door?

You did. Probably. You remember touching the handle, but that memory has the visual quality of security-camera footage recovered from a damp submarine.

Then the committee convenes.

Your phone did not buzz.

You know this because you checked it. Then checked it again, in case the first check was somehow conducted by an unreliable subcontractor.

Nothing.

And yet your pocket definitely performed the tiny electric tap of modern importance. For half a second, you were wanted. Summoned. Possibly invited to a yacht.

Instead, your nervous system had simply sent itself a push notification.

You packed the bag yourself.

You watched the keys go into the front pocket. You placed the wallet beside them. You added the charger, the notebook, and the emergency granola bar that has survived three governments.

Then you zipped the bag.

And immediately wondered whether any of those things were actually inside.

There is a face in your kitchen.

Not a human face. That would be alarming and would require paperwork.

This one belongs to the toaster.

Two little slots for eyes. A lever for an ear. A crumb tray forming the tight, judgmental mouth of someone who has watched you press “a little longer” three times and no longer believes you understand toast.

You opened the fridge.

There was half a lemon, a jar of mustard, and one container whose contents have entered the witness protection program.

You closed the door.

Then, twelve seconds later, you opened it again.

This is not hunger. Hunger has a plan.

You opened the supermarket freezer for peas.

That was the entire assignment.

Then the cold fog rolled over your shoes, the fluorescent light flickered, and something behind the frozen lasagna made a noise normally associated with old basements and unfinished family business.

Obviously, the freezer is haunted.

You went to get your shoes.

That was the mission. A simple two-shoe operation requiring no committee, no clipboard, and very little courage.

Then you noticed one book leaning sideways.

Three minutes later, the shelf was empty, your shoes remained missing, and you were holding a 2014 takeout menu as if it contained instructions from headquarters.