Marcus had no reason to believe it was anything other than Tuesday until he checked the time. Exiting the bathroom to continue his morning routine, he idly glanced at the black digital Casio watch to see how long it took him. Only twelve minutes, not bad- wait, it was Thursday?!

His first reaction was to squint at the watch hard, as if by doing so he could change the little 'TH' in the corner of the display to 'TU'. But the watch would not listen. He checked his phone. Thursday.

He recalled the dream. How long had he been asleep? He glanced around the room, but other than the general mess that was to be expected when two brothers shared such a small space, there was nothing to indicate some two day long bout of sickness on his part. What sickness could cause amnesia like this? Yes, his mom was not well and he wasn't feeling particularly peachy himself, but he didn't think common cold could cause this.

Finding no answer, he decided to continue getting ready for work. He was kneeling in the hallway, tying the laces of his boots when he heard a noise. A strange little noise that sounded very much like someone gently trying the doorknob.

Marcus whipped his head around at it. If there was someone on the other side of the door, there was no chance they'd be getting in unless they had a key or knew how to pick the lock. If they tried to kick the door in they'd only end up hurting themselves.

But of course, his brief analysis of how safe he was in this situation ran on the assumption that the hypothetical person on the other side was trying to get in. What if they were just letting him know they were there?

He felt a little colder at the thought, no matter that the day was already promising to be a hot one even at 5am. If someone was there, and it wasn't just in his head, then they probably knew by now that he knew. He listened intently for the creaking of the floorboards, ignoring the constant wooshing sound from outside whenever a car passed by.

Nothing.

Should he take out his knife, just in case? No, that was a bit much for him. He may have been anti-social by his own diagnosis, he may have been obsessing over a fictional serial killer for several years now, but he would never actually kill someone, right?

Right?

Thankfully he remembered the multifunctional pen in his pocket. He had first bought one for his dad's birthday and the guy loved it. His own pen was of lower quality, for example the tip of the glassbreaker that could presumably be used for self defense was hollow. The hell was he to do with a hollow tip?

Clutching the pen in his right hand, he opened the door with his left.

No one. No one in the hallway. If there had been someone he would've heard the floorboards creak with every movement. Someone tangible, his paranoia added from the side. This building they lived in was once a restaurant. It was old, and all kinds of people had come and gone through it, from all corners of the world. So many people in one place, so many emotions, incredible energy, positive and negative... it leaves traces. Traces that cannot be perceived, not physically. Maybe the place was built on top of an ancient burial site, maybe somebody got killed here once. Hell, his brother had spoken once or twice about how some shadow dog thing was attacking him as they were both going to bed. Marcus had absolutely no memory of this, but it was one of the reasons why he had superglued a magical sigil near the entrance to the building. When he got outside he looked back and nope, no one had taken it down. Yet. The sigil he had originally wanted to glue there was made to repel bad influences and bad people in general; their neighbor was a criminal, always in and out of jail, abusive towards his wife and possibly children, a whole pack of them running rampant up and down the stairs every day. No discipline, no peace. So unlike him. His own mom could rein him in, and she always did. With words and with hands when words were not enough. It was like being the son of a drill instructor.

Hush now. Focus on your work. So he would tell himself. But this day had one more strange incident in store for him.

Last year, one of his uncles (also named Marcus) told him that he had reached farther than anyone in their family. Of course, being so high up only meant that if he fell, he would fall harder than anyone else. And what a glorious fall that would be! From the privileged position... of being the guy who made boxes. Yes, that was primarily what he did in Hugo Boss – make boxes. People would bring pallets of cardboard and he would fold their bottoms and staple them together with a big staple gun. It was simple, it took no skill, meaning that he could be replaced at any moment. But he liked it. No one bossed him around and he bossed nobody around, he would just turn up his music and work, and all the while in his mind the monologue was allowed to run free, he was fantasizing, righting wrongs, thwarting his enemies, ultimately dying in peace, his funeral attended by a multitude who would remember him not by the wrongs he had committed, but by the good he had brought into the world.

But more often than not, he was just fantasizing about getting back at people for some perceived slight from eight or more years ago. At the moment he was remembering this dwarf guy who had mocked him for stumbling slightly. This was back in 2016, maybe 2017. Drunkard, they called him. And they could tell they were getting on his nerves. Not that he would ever do anything. Fucking pussy. They would sit right behind him in the bus, kicking his seat and he would tell himself the next time he does it, the next time he does it I'll do something, I'll retaliate, I'll...

I'll get sent to a youth detention center for defending myself, and the bullies will get away with it.

And so he did nothing. Ever. Aside from finding the dwarf ringleader of that gang of bullies on Facebook and antagonizing him there. Waste of time. The guy was a fucking neanderthal. Marcus knew it was pointless now, after eight years, but there was some impulse in him that drove the fantasy on. It just went on, whether or not he wanted it to. Like now the impulse was telling him he should go back to his homeland and track down the dwarf, wear the coveralls and the mask, take him into an alleyway when he's drunk and no one is looking, drive glass shards into his eyes, tear out his teeth with pliers-

„Marcus, you got a moment?"

To say that Marcus only ever made boxes was a bit of an exaggeration. Sure, it was what he did primarily, but really he did a lot of things. Making the boxes, stacking the boxes, scanning the goods and throwing them in boxes and preparing the boxes for transport and loading them into trucks... But he was always slightly annoyed whenever he suddenly had to abandon whatever he was doing to help someone else. This time it was a colleague named Wolf, with the same job as him. He was a short, stocky guy, already a grandfather, nearly bald with a friendly bespectacled face and a snow white beard. He would've made an excellent Santa Claus. In his hands he held a part of his own, disassembled staple gun. The staples they got were slightly larger than the ones they needed for these guns, so every once in a while a staple would get lodged in the mechanism, as had just happened to Wolf. So Marcus helped him out no questions asked. It took him a while to tear the stuck staple out. He tried pliers at first and the staple broke, a tiny piece that was causing the issue still left inside. So he kept nudging it this way and that, first with a knife and then with a screwdriver until finally the twisted little bit of metal was finally dislodged. „Maybe I should quit this job and apply for a dentist," Marcus had jested as he returned to his work.

And then it hit him. A moment ago he was tearing someone's teeth out in a daydream. The next moment, he was tearing a staple out of a machine as if it were a tooth. Things like these were nothing new to him. Synchronicities, Carl Jung called them. He called them magic. Like thinking of some movie you haven't seen in a while and then coming home to find that exact movie on the television. It was nothing less than the twisting of reality, but Marcus had never experienced it like this. The response time was nearly instantaneous.

I don't know what's happening to me, and I don't know what I'm going to do.

He had written those words into one of his many journals, not too long ago, at the peak of anguish when he was released from the hospital with his constant pain unsolved. Reflecting on those words again, he realized he nearly never knew what was happening, or what he was going to do, for that matter. He was a thing of pure impulse, a roller coaster addict, throwing himself into everything with no patience, no finesse. Shadowy figures, loss of time, his mind playing tricks on him, synchronicities... he did not know how all those connected to each other, but he felt that they had something to do with his declaration which, to him, felt like it was only two days ago. He had decided on Sunday that he would not slide back into nothingness with scarcely a cry. He had decided to leave a mark on the world, and in that decision alone he felt like he had taken some control of his destiny, because now he was seeing his older self in his dreams and receiving arcane wisdom and randomly entering trance states while working... what was it all leading towards? Marcus had no idea, but he had no intention of breaking the oath he had taken.