Our Lady Of Worldly Mysteries I
Our Lady Of Worldly Mysteries I
October 2025
Toronto, Canada
The plates, pans, and other various kitchenware left out can only be explained by the fact that the woman calculated she worked three hundred and twenty hours that month. To add to her increasing burden, the time spent getting ready to go to work, the drive there, and the battlefield traversed known as “rush hour” after her shift just meant another couple hours spent. She works two jobs. Her day job was at a long-term care home. She spends most of her day dealing with complaints from the old folks she takes care of, the nursing staff she manages, and of course, the upper management she finds herself at odds with most of the time. Her role in the building was one of direction and leadership, though she never really thought of it that way. At the end of her day when she gets home, maybe seven, six o’clock on a good day, she teaches art online until ten. Art, by that I mean the drawing kind, has a weird way of telling you who you are. Maybe that’s why she did it. You see the woman was trying to answer a question she had for many millennia, “Who am i?” she thought. It wasn’t until The Renaissance in Europe she explored art as a medium to figure this out. She was living in Florence at the time, the epicenter of all Western art studying under countless masters whose names sounded fake as fuck in retrospect. The woman kept many secrets. This was one of them. Lately, she’s been feeling complications between the divine and physical realms which doesn’t occur much in metropolitans, especially the one she’s living in. She’s heard from her grocery eavesdropping and occasional commute, that there are sightings of monsters and creatures believed to only be in fairytales roaming around the city. Plus the unexplainable claw marks on buildings and giant holes can only mean something on a higher plane is now merging within a lower plane. Maybe in her past lifetime she would’ve investigated it but those days were long behind her and the only things she was focused on now were the first of every month and the weekends in between.
By the time she was done with her day, all she could really do was sleep. But it was Friday today so that meant eating late and staying up until five in the morning. She took a shower and the sweet fragrance of lavender on her body clashed with her kitchen which can only be compared to a miasma-filled swamp. For a moment, the kitchen smelled rather nice until eventually smelling like shit again. She hated coming here. Its dense odor was supplied by a brimming waste bin full of rotting fruit and fish parts, and stale soup broths from different pots that have been left for over a week. Still, one would think that she had some time during the weekend to clean up but of course, she likes to call those seconds of tranquility self-care days and prefers not to be bothered by any sort of task that involves even the slightest bit of labor. Three weekends ago she spent most of it taking afternoon naps, which lasted about five hours mind you, only for her to fall back asleep. Two weekends ago, she was waiting in line early in the morning to grab a copy of a new game that just released and spent the rest of the weekend completing it while on… the drugs. Last weekend, she went drinking with a few friends and ended up staying at some random chicks’ house until the Monday sun, in its celestial consistency, reminded them that it was time to get ready to go back to work. Finally, this weekend she’s playing a game called Grand Adventure Credit Card Online. It’s a game where you have to use your credit card to become stronger. She’s been playing this game for quite some time now and the latest expansion just dropped which of course means that for the next three weekends, there wouldn’t be any way she could have time for chores if she honestly considered it. You see for the woman, another secret she harbored was that nothing really mattered in her life anymore except for maybe paying the bills. Not the old folks she takes care of at her day job, not the aspiring artists she tutors with a smile on her face, and not even on the weekends she is known for indulging in. Nothing on this planet satisfied her any longer. That is because her soul, much like her kitchen, had been abandoned and left for time to defile.
Then, there was a knock on her door.
