(INSPIRED BY THE PROMPT: “You don’t remember what you do for a living. You black out for 8 hours 5 days a week and a paycheck appears once a month..”)

Sometimes you’re not sure if it’s worth the paycheck. When you come back to yourself on Saturday mornings more often than not you’re covered in splatters of blood and covered head to toe in glitter. And after all the years of doing whatever it is you’re doing, you’ve never gotten a straight answer from the agency about what it is you’re doing. While you’ve gotten particularly good at getting out the bloodstains, it’s nigh impossible to get glitter out of your clothes. It’s gotten to the point that you feel like you’ve become best friends with the plumber you have on call to help you unclog your drains of glitter every two months like clockwork. She never mentions anything about the blood, but maybe she is too polite to ask.

You spend your paychecks on carefully chosen random things and dive into the world of competitive couponing to cover up the suspicious amount of bleach and glitter that makes its way into your Amazon cart every Monday. This weekend you choose to order an incense fountain, bid on some abstract art on eBay, and purchase more construction paper and glue.

Whatever you end up spending is always added on to the total of your paycheck. When you first signed on to this job, you quickly became worried you were somehow a hired assassin due to all the blood, but there were never any suspicious deaths in the news and you rationalized you were too clumsy in your every day life to really qualify as “stealthy.”

Calling in for your weekly check-in with the agency from the payphone down the street, your supervisor asks you how you’re feeling and surprises you by saying, “Since you’re almost done with your contract, do you want to extend?”