Morgan Mackenzie was having a very bad day. By the end of her waitressing shift, her relief had yet to show up. None of the other waitresses had been willing to answer their phones, so Morgan was stuck picking up a double shift. As nice as it was collecting tips on a Friday night, she had already had plans, which she had had to cancel.

As if they don’t do this shit on purpose every week, she thought to herself with a bitter smile as she closed out her register and turned it in, collecting her tips before she headed out the door. It was the third week in a row she had been forced to cancel her own plans, and it was the same waitresses who didn’t show up as it had been both times before. I think I’m beginning to see a pattern here, was her next sarcastic thought. Already in a sour mood, she fumbled her keys twice before managing to unlock the driver’s side door to her car. Once she got the seat belt buckled, she just lay her forehead on the steering wheel, sitting and stewing in her own cynical misery. Her phone buzzed in her purse, heralding what she was certain were angry messages from her on-again off-again sometimes-boyfriend, angry at taking second place to her job.

"Them’s the breaks, buddy; you don’t pay my rent," she muttered to herself as she cranked the engine and pulled into the late night traffic to head home. It’s not like we’ve ever been any more serious than a few drinks here or a wild night or two every other weekend, she mused silently to herself. She just wanted to get home. Her feet hurt, her back hurt, and she was extremely eager for a long bath and a comfy bed. The drive home passed in the forgettable blur experienced by anyone familiar with a routine commute to and from work.

She belatedly trudged her way from the parking lot up two flights of stairs to the door of her small studio apartment. Kicking the door shut, she stepped around her couch to the unofficial bedroom side of the single room dwelling and flopped down on the unmade bed. With a sigh she finally rolled over to retrieve her incessantly buzzing phone from her purse. Instead of angry messages from her boyfriend, it was a message from her best friend Michelle, with a picture attached.

>hey isn’t this your boyfriend Dylan?

The picture showed what was certainly a block party or back room of some club somewhere, with her so-called boyfriend sitting with a grinning blonde in his lap. Even with the other woman’s top pushed down to her waist, Morgan had no trouble recognizing Sara, the waitress who had not bothered showing up and stuck her with a double shift. For a few moments, Morgan just stared at the image, not quite able to process it. She found herself equal parts angry and apathetic. On the one hand, things had not exactly been stellar between her and Dylan in the first place. On the other hand, she had been sleeping with him on a near regular basis for nearly the past year. Territorial instincts warred with her natural tendency to just not care.

It’s not like we did all that much other than fuck, she thought. Dylan was always the extroverted socialite, always doing something, always the people person. Morgan was a working college student, and preferred staying in on the nights she had free. I should have expected this sooner, if I’m completely honest with myself, she told herself. Her emotions flickered back and forth between feeling used, and feeling like she deserved it for not being willing to indulge his plans more often than she had been. But the longer she looked at that picture, the more she felt the balance begin to tip. Not only had the other woman poached Morgan’s man from her, she had foisted off her shifts at work onto Morgan in order to do so. As she stared at the other woman’s happy smile and generous bosom, anger began to beat back her apathy and self-loathing. And then anger won out, and her phone hit the far wall hard enough to shatter the screen and break something important inside it, turning the screen black forevermore.

Peeling off her work uniform, Morgan gazed at herself in the mirror, and soon felt the anger burning out, leaving apathy behind. With an expression like she’d just bitten into an unripe lime, she tossed her bra aside and slipped out of her panties. The woman staring back at her in the mirror wasn’t ugly by any means, but Morgan had always been quietly envious of her more curvy and well-endowed peers. With her hands on her hips, she arched her back and puffed out her chest...then released her posture again with a sigh. At five feet and four inches tall, with ghostly pale skin and her hip bones and the outline of her ribs just barely noticeable, she was just a little too slender to be called curvy and a little too tall to consider herself petite.

“Not even B cups. I’ll never compete with that!” she snarled in the direction of her broken phone. Stalking back and forth in front of the mirror, she tugged her hair tie loose and let her raven-black locks free with a shake of her head. “What I need,” she declared as she ran her fingers through her waist-length hair, “is a rebound. A one night stand to get over this shit. I deserve to get slutty every once in a while!”

Turning her back on the mirror she began to hum to herself as she dug through her closet. Not this. Or this. Or that, she thought to herself. Finally finding what she was looking for, she removed a sheer black dress with tiny string-like straps from her closet and draped it lovingly across her bed. Simple and perfect. “Let’s see here. Just the dress, the heels, and my ID for the booze,” she giggled at herself, amused by her own sudden boldness. Then her hand trailed over her thigh, and the prickliness of her body hair caught her attention. "But first, a bath," she declared to the empty apartment.

Deciding not to waste time, as much in a hurry to get out the door before the local bars closed as she was to get going before she could talk herself out of it, Morgan quickly ran a bath and took care of her grooming as the tub filled up. Dunking herself to wet her hair, she lathered her mane vigorously with shampoo. It was right as she was working some moisturizer into a froth in her poofy loofah ball that the lights went out in her apartment.

“An outage!? NOW!?” she raged at the total darkness. “FUCK! I can’t see shit… How can this day get ANY FUCKING WORSE?”

And then the bathtub fell through the floor, and Morgan had just enough time to look up and see two moons wreathed in a few wispy clouds before she was falling.

And, of course, screaming.