Beth twitched her neck slightly to the left. It was a quick, involuntary movement that made her look like a startled pigeon. Her mouth was slightly open, with her lower jaw held a tad bit to the left, resembling a jewelry box that couldn’t be shut properly due to loose hinges. She stood in front of the mirror; her jet black hair undone, eyes red, naked. The steam from the hot shower kept fogging up the mirror slowly. Each time it completely obstructed her from seeing herself, she spat water on it to get a clear view. “ Susan is such a bitch!”, she kept murmuring under her breath, “ A wise-ass, know-it-all. She can fool everyone with her schoolgirl behaviour, but she ain’t fooling me! She is such a bitch!”
This was her daily ritual now.

“ She might be the star to those fools at the Office, but I’m done watching her from my seat while she gets showered with praises she didn’t earn. She is a BITCH!”. The third time Beth said the word bitch, she spat hard at the mirror.

Beth was an alcoholic who lived alone in a tiny apartment. The job she had at the Office kept her ends met and even let her indulge a little. She was an introvert, if the word could even begin describing how uneasy in existing in public she was. She had always found love hard to come by. It was something that she had to work really hard for, and venture far beyond her zones of comfort to receive. Her existence was mostly inside a shell, shielded away from the rest of the world by some invisible barrier that she tried hard to break out of, with little success. She had always wanted to scream to the world that she existed, and that she deserved at least the acknowledgement it, if not love itself. Her tiny apartment was the only place where she felt free and untrapped. It was ironically the only place she could spread her wings out, when the rest of the wide world felt like a cage. She commuted silently to work daily, rarely making eye contact with another human being on the way. In the Office, she worked at her desk, toiling away, overburdened even with the tasks assigned to others. She often watched Susan from her seat, having conversations with her colleagues, always smiling, always happy, and felt robbed of the good time she herself could be having with them instead. Beth believed that she had enough reason to hate Susan as much as she did. It was a kind of involuntary hatred that made her stiff whenever she saw Susan do anything, even something as simple as sit in her chair. She avoided Susan like the plague, tearing away from her whenever she noticed her presence. At times, she even found herself wondering how different her life would have been if Susan hadn’t existed.

Susan was everything that Beth was not. She was one of those people with whom one couldn’t find a fault with even if one were hell bent on it. She entered the workplace with the aura of one of those catholic housewives that could you see in an 80’s Hollywood movie based out of Texas, wearing skirts that reached below her knee and stockings that reached above, tops with puffs at the shoulder. Sometimes she would wear a knitted sweater or an overall in an unappealing colour, on which rested her neatly plaited hair on either side. She was selfless to a fault, and was ever the first one to quietly offer money to a colleague in need, offer advise when someone’s teenage son was acting up, or shed an involuntary tear or two when someone shared the news of their dog’s passing away. She would cover her mouth in modesty while she laughed with her colleagues who always seemed to surround her table, and would blush and walk away at the odd occasion when someone cracked an indecent joke. She was the perfect employee too, moving around the office like a busy bee, assisting everyone even while she completed her own assignments on time. She was the first person that everyone turned to for help, and she always delivered.

Susan only had a single flaw, a small black dot on her otherwise perfectly white sheet of character which she tried hard to hide with the only fake smiles and words she had ever smiled or spoken in her otherwise rigorously religious life.
She hated Beth!
She thought that Beth was shabby, which was true.
She believed that Beth was an alcoholic, which she was! Very often, she would catch a slight whiff of stale rum from Beth’s breath, which she would immediately repel using her small bottle of pocket perfume that smelled like jasmine.
According to her, Beth was unsocial and emanated a dark energy.
However, she cared not to express her perfectly reasonable hatred for the silent girl at the Office. As far as she was concerned, Beth was a nobody, and it was better to ignore her conveniently than to speak about her and give her the attention that she did not deserve.

The mutual hatred was however hidden perfectly in plain sight from anyone who ever mingled with either of the two women. Sometimes, Beth would try to mingle with the group by trying to meekly recite a joke or an anecdote that she had researched and repeated for the very same purpose the night before, and Susan would cut her off with her own, even before she could complete two words; almost as if she instinctively understood that Beth was about to speak. As far as Susan was concerned, she was saving her weird colleague from being embarrassed in the group, as she was sure that whatever Beth had to say was not worth saying at all. To Beth, Susan was like a huge tower that stood before her, forever shadowing her from any recognition or acknowledgement of her existence. She believed that Susan basked in all the love and kindness that should have rightfully been hers.

It was this same theft of any measure of warmth coming her way that made Beth ultimately decide to kill Susan. The fear of getting caught was severe. But it gradually wore down as she started researching methods to kill someone easily. The interest with which she studied her options excited Beth so much so that she had forgotten how she had made a copy of the key to Susan’s apartment, by the time she did it. On a cold winter night, Beth suddenly found herself hiding under Susan’s bed, holding the scalpel that she had procured from a shady chemist down her alley. She had ensured that the scalpel was sharp enough by making a cut on her left arm. As blood trickled down her arm onto the floor under Susan’s bed, Beth felt butterflies in her stomach for the first time in her life. The feeling was strangely new to her. As Susan entered her apartment and walked to her shower after the tiring day, Beth rose with her butterflies and followed her cautiously. She found it intriguing that Susan hadn’t noticed her even though she was practically walking alongside her. With a gleeful smile on her face, she joked to herself that being invisible had finally paid off. As the scalpel began drawing a red line along Susan’s neck, the mirror began turning violently red. Beth thought for a second that this was not at all how she imagined it to be. The path of the scalpel was so smooth, with a small ‘pop’ sound as she cut through the wind pipe.

The newspapers reported the death a day later. The reports read that a woman named Susan Bethany Meyers was found dead in her apartment the day before with scalpel wounds on her left arm and neck. It was believed to be a suicide and details were still awaited. Most of the people at the office kept asking each other why the lovely Susan had killed herself. Some of them kept frantically trying to make sense of the situation. Very few understood what was being said when the Company brought in a psychiatrist a month later, who explained to them about multiple personalities and the people who live with them. No one had heard of a woman called Beth.