𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖆𝖎𝖑𝖑𝖊𝖘 𝖒𝖔𝖘𝖙𝖆𝖋𝖆𝖍

I'm at home in one of Cher's old T-shirts when a letter arrives that does not find me well.

My hand juts out to grab my kitchen counter to stop myself from physically hunching over at what I've just read. I run my eyes over the last sentence over and over again with the taste of bile filling my mouth as I realise it reads exactly what I think it does and I in fact, did not suddenly have trouble understanding English.

'Your sudden enthusiasm to showcase your theories at our Annual Science Exposition excites us, but we believe a thesis of your magnitude deserves a larger platform, so we've decided to give you the main presentation for the night. Good luck Miss Mostafah, we can't wait to see you there!'

My head fell into my sink and the mango I had this morning was quick to shoot out of my mouth. Main presentation? But that only happened on stage at the end of the night when everyone was forced to gather in one place to watch and I only applied for a small booth in the furthest corner of the presenting hall, the closest one to the bathroom.

They wanted me to make a fool of myself.

I felt the paper crunch in my fist as I realised this was just a way to humiliate me and diminish me as a scientist. A way to prove I wasn't one. In a month, from now they were all hoping to arrive in their best clothes- dressed to the nines- and watch me get onto the stage and spew absolute bullshit in front of the greatest minds on the planet.

My hands softened at the feeling of cold fingertips gliding over them and slowly unravelling my fingers, the brown hand pulled the paper away from me and smoothed it out on my counter before folding it nicely and taking it away.

The back of my head was supported by a small palm as my braids were gathered into a low ponytail so that they could be out of my face. I stood up from my crouched position over the kitchen sink and allowed the figure behind me to step in front of me and turn on the tap as they began to start cleaning my mess. Another person walked past from the corner of my eye, picked up the discarded envelope that I'd torn the letter out of, and threw it in the bin for me.

My entire apartment was bustling with the movement of people who shared my face. There was one making my bed, another sending an appointment to my dentist on my computer, two hanging up my new curtains and my favourite one taking my coffee pot out of its machine.

I'd spent the past few weeks getting a hang of being in multiple places at once, quickly after I realized I was in control of everything, I found out that merely giving orders was not enough. I had to be there, so they could be done right. I found myself sitting quietly on the couch for hours, concentrating on dividing my mind into multiple bodies.

I broke plates, ripped curtains, set my kitchen on fire, and washed my bed sheets in milk before I even got close to getting the hang of it—and most days, I don't think I did.

It was like tearing a limb from your body and asking it to walk. My mind became louder, and although I was still in one body, it felt like I was torn. I would conjure up one to do something for me, and I would have to blink multiple times to stop seeing the world from their viewpoint. 

It became easier when I almost took off my own thumb cutting an onion.

That day was one of my hardest, I was tired from my mind being awake when I was trying to sleep and forgetting to feed myself because I couldn't feel that I was hungry over controlling multiple bodies at once. I was going to make myself dinner, preferably something simple, but getting myself back into the kitchen reminded me of how much I loved to cook and so I found myself blending basil and rushing to the corner store to buy curly pasta.

When I came back, I got way more into it than I probably should have. I put on one of my father's jazz vinyls and lit a couple of candles that I got at the furniture shop that Lily forced me to get when we were shopping for some cushions for my, and I quote, 'sad ass couch'. 

I sent off part of me to go get my laptop from my bed and when they were returning, there was a coldness that struck up my spine as I felt the illusion step on an exposed nail in my floorboards and suddenly my laptop fell from its hands, its keyboard pieces still being discovered till this day

That was the day I found out that I could make them interact with the world, but if the world interacted with them in any physical way, they would go poof.

The visit to the emergency room where I had to get twelve stitches in my hand was embarrassing to explain, only to be followed by an even more humiliating visit to the computer store with my thumb wrapped up like it was a cocoon.

Recently, I'd discovered that my 'magic' did not just create illusions with my face on them and actually fed off of whatever my mind wanted it to. I would never try to 'count sheep' on a sleep-deprived mind again and I'm sure my now collapsed bed frame thanks me very much.

This morning, before I was rudely interrupted by the consequences of my actions, I'd been working more on pulling things out of books. I'd never been that much of a reader, so larger scaled fantasy stories were out of the question, which is how I found myself hunched over a pop-up insy winsy spider story that had textured pictures and less than ten pages.

I'm sure I looked crazy, staring at the little artificial spider crawl up my window frame with an animated-like walk. A small giggle escaped my lips as it got to the top and began to spin a web down just as if it were raining, my palm reached out to catch the little thing frowning when it disappeared from my eyes as soon as it touched my hand.

I was making progress, and maybe one day, I would make miracles.

I picked up the children's book and threw it onto the long stack of stories I'd bought online, which my apartment security guard snickered at when I came to collect them. The idea of pulling out characters from books had my mind running wild with ideas, I wanted to create things the world had never seen.

My feet carried me to the chest of drawers that held up my TV and I slid one of them open to pull out a newspaper. I stopped myself from flinching at the picture of me on it's front page, young and barely five but they didn't know that then. They didn't know anything about me, except that my parents were criminals.

And for most of the world, that was enough.

I'd coloured out most of the story in permanent marker to stop myself from reading it over and over like I had when the ink was still fresh. It was old, not surprising considering it was printed more than a decade ago and I'd been preserving it in my high school suitcase for most of my life. My fingers hesitated to flip to the next page, but I did, and there it was.

Their mugshots.

In black and white, but that did nothing to hide the smug look on their faces and their bruised skin from a severe case of resisting arrest. My fingertips hovered over the picture of my mom, her arm bandaged up to her shoulder with a fresh wound, but you wouldn't know it from the spark in her eyes that was devoid of pain.

Just as if she knew they were going to get out, one way or the other.

The only thing not blacked out on the page was the lists of what they were being held for, they were long. My mother's longer. In the list it'd described the people she'd killed, the ancient artefacts she'd stolen, the laws she'd broken and the hundreds of countries she was being banned from. It was almost sad to me that I knew more about my mother through this paper than from anything she'd ever told me.

They wrote about how dangerous she was, how many people she'd killed on sight, how high on the 'Most Wanted People Alive' ranking she'd gotten and how many martial arts she was skilled in. I wondered if this would be enough to bring her back, it was kinda like a book just as many I'd touched and conjured from before which means it should work. I just had to try.

I felt my mind blending with a mix of all I knew about her, the pictures I'd seen and the very few memories I had of her before I last saw her, and slowly a semblance of a person began to bloom in my mind. For a second afterwards, I thought it hadn't worked, and I wasn't too surprised, just slightly disappointed.

Until I heard it. Humming. Soft and melodic humming from a voice I'd always worried I would forget. I put the newspaper down and slowly found myself walking to the kitchen, where I heard someone opening the fridge. The song was one I'd heard on a vinyl that was the most worn out on their shelf, it brought me comfort on some days and was almost thrown out on others.

But at this moment, it sounded like everything I'd ever wanted to hear.

I stood at the entrance of the kitchen for a few minutes, staring at the feet of the person whose body was shielded away by the open fridge door, but that didn't matter to me. I recognized the outfit. When the fridge closed, a choked breath left my lips at the face, young and a complete match to my memory, as soon as I let out the sound she twisted her head to look at me.

"Mom?"

A dark look washed over her face as her lips curled into a snarl and her hand jutted out to grab my kitchen knife from its rack. I realised what was happening almost too late as the weapon came flying towards my face, but I ducked away from it just in time with it slicing open the tip of my ear before glancing back to see if she'd really just thrown a knife at me.

My hair was grabbed in a punishing grip as my head was turned, I had barely blinked before my face was being slammed into the wall beside me with a sickening crunch. My hand shot out to push her away, but she was quick to twist it and use the opening to slam her fist against my cheek.

I was thrown through the doorway I'd just walked through and began crawling back, my nose trickling with blood as pain bloomed in my face. The woman I'd thought to be my mother stared at me with a dark look as she moved to grab the knife, but I was quick to get off the floor and try to dart for it first.

She grabbed my outstretched hand and before I could react, her foot was in the centre of my chest. I was kicked harshly away before stumbling on my own feet and crashing straight through my favourite glass coffee table, landing in the centre of it at an awkward angle that made my back arch off the floor in pain.

I had to roll away from her to stop her from jumping on top of me, but she again filled her hand with a fist full of my braids to yank me back towards her. She grabbed a large shard from my broken table and tried to stab me in the face with it, but I turned my head and she missed, making the glass cut straight through my cheekbone instead.

She straddled me to keep me still and tried to bring the sharp weapon to my neck this time, but I used one hand to stop her, only making her use the other hand to try to overpower me. My hand bled around the glass, its sharp corners cutting through my flesh as it was forcefully pushed closer towards me.

Through the struggle to resist death, I turned my eyes back to her face, a face that had haunted my dreams for longer than the Gods had.

It disturbed me that she looked exactly as the day I'd lost her, beautiful and angry, just as she'd always been. The shard of glass was now being pushed dangerously closer to my throat, nipping the skin of it ever so slightly, but enough to cause me to bleed. I was not in control of her, and that scared me.

But I was in control of this.

I made her appear, that was true, but that didn't mean I wanted to let her go. Not again. I brought my other hand up to her face instead of using it to fend for myself. My hand looked large against her face, too large considering how it was when I'd last touched her, and I drank in the feeling for as long as I could before finally closing my eyes and letting her go.