Mia Ballard

Me? I exist in grayscale. I am thirty, alone, and unraveling quietly enough that no one’s noticed. Yet.

Afterward, a shower. The water is nearly scalding. My skin blooms pink under the spray, and for a moment, I feel real. It reddens my skin, burns the surface, makes me feel tangible in a way I need. The soap I use smells of lavender, but it’s the heat that matters, the way it makes the world shrink to just this—just skin, water, and the steam that curls like a second body around me. The towel is folded when I finish, its edges even as I drape it back over the rack. Lavender lingers faintly in the air.

But the job was a mask, not a cure. It hid the cracks but didn’t fix them. I’ve been depressed far longer than I’ve been unemployed.

"I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity."
— Sylvia Plath

Warning

Despite its deceptively cute cover, this book is not a lighthearted romp. Beneath the cover lies a story drenched in disturbing content, including explicit depictions of gore, psychological manipulation, kidnapping, and body horror. If you picked this up thinking it’s a quirky, feel-good horror read, consider this your warning: it’s not. This book dives deep into the visceral, the raw, and the unsettling, and while it might keep you turning the pages, it will also leave you squirming in your seat. Proceed with caution.

To the girls who bite back

A birthday. Mine. Time here doesn’t have edges; it drips and folds, days bleeding into years, into nothing at all. Birthdays doesn’t make sense to me anymore. But the cake is real, and it’s in front of me

But his touch binds more than it soothes. His voice dips, soft but sharp, a knife wrapped in velvet. “Happy birthday,” he says

Desperation doesn’t crash down all at once; it seeps in, quiet and steady, until you’re choking on it, gulping for air. It tastes like shame. It tastes like I’m letting down not just myself but everyone who came before me, all those ancestors who clawed through history just to get me here, just to watch me drown in a mess of my own making.

But it didn’t start with money. The cracks in my life began long before that, a slow fracture widening over time

I was good at math—better than good. I built my life on it, a fortress made of equations, algorithms, sharp corners and clean lines. It was a promise: if I could just be precise enough, exact enough, maybe I could keep the chaos at bay.