Susan finished scrubbing her scalp clean and then leaned back under the water and ran her hands through her hair. When she sat up the bathwater was blanketed with peppermint soapsuds. Susan lathered up her legs with more Bronner’s, shaved them without cutting herself once, and then leaned her head on the back of the tub and closed her eyes. Her stomach growled. It was the peppermint. It made her hungry. Susan inspected her hands. They were pale and pruned. She stood up, grabbed a towel, and stepped out of the tub.

She stood on the bath mat as she dried off and the tub drained noisily behind her. The bathroom floor was fir, and a hundred years of water stains had left the area around the tub so blackened with water damage that Susan was sure that one day the floor was going to give way and that heavy claw-foot tub was going to end up in the kitchen. She just hoped she wasn’t in it when it happened.

Once Susan had slipped the kimono back on and combed out her wet hair, she wiped up some water on the floor with the towel. Then she walked the length of the tub, humming a Jefferson Starship song, and blew out each candle. The candles were still emitting thin snakes of smoke as she headed across the hall back to her bedroom, starving, and already thinking about the caramel apples downstairs. She flipped on her bedroom light, went to her dresser, and dug a pair of red wool socks out of the sock drawer, and then sat down on the bed to pull them on. As she did, she noticed that something was strange about her computer.

The screen was still lit up. She could see the blue glow emanating from it.

It should have been asleep. She had it set so that if she went four minutes without typing, the screen would go dark.

Susan sighed. Great. It must be frozen. A computer glitch—that was just what she needed. Naturally she hadn’t backed anything up in ages.

She reached for the computer and turned it to face her, and groaned as she saw the screen.

Shit. The document she’d been working on had been deleted.

The file that she had left open had been filled with writing. The page that was up now was just a single sentence. Her computer had eaten everything else. Her entire account of the evening before had vanished. The fact that it hadn’t been for a story, that there was no editor waiting for it, that Susan had written it all down just for the sake of it—that somehow made it worse. She wanted to pick the laptop up and hurl it across the room. What had happened? She tapped a key on the keyboard. The cursor blinked obediently. There was no frozen rainbow ball. The computer appeared to be working just fine. What the…?