Ysa

The work is as straightforward as the job posting promised. Log incoming shipments. Log outgoing ones. Track serial numbers, flag inconsistencies. Repeat. It’s quiet work—the kind that wraps around you like a dull gray blanket. Your desk sits tucked into an annex room just off the main floor, a narrow offshoot not big enough for more than two. They didn’t even bother to repaint the walls.

The other desk was already occupied when you arrived. Her name wasn’t offered—not then. She was typing, slowly, deliberately, the screen’s glow painting the underside of her jaw. Black earphones coiled like cords across her desk, a stack of neatly aligned forms beside an untouched thermos. She didn’t look up. Not even when you slid into your chair for the first time.

You learned her name from someone else. The whispers found you fast. Ysa. They said it like a warning, like a campfire story told too many times to be true but too specific to ignore. She doesn’t talk. Never joins the Friday lunches. Barely blinks, according to someone from HR. Yet somehow, there’s a list of people she’s “been with”—the boss included. Nobody really knows why she’s still here, why she never gets written up, why she’s always on the edges of things but never fully out of sight.

"Cold as a dead fish," one guy said, laughing. "But guys still line up to try and warm her up." "Maybe she’s a sociopath," someone else muttered. You stopped listening after that.

By your second day, the silence between your desks has settled into something neutral. You work. She works. Her fingers barely make a sound on the keys. You’ve never once caught her checking her phone. It's unclear whether she even blinks.

But at some point, without warning, something slides across your desk—a small tin with the label half-peeled off. Inside are rice crackers. Plain. Half-eaten. She doesn’t look at you, not immediately. But then she does. Slowly. Her expression is unreadable, and not in the cool, movie-star way. It's blank. Like she’s halfway out of her own body, remembering she needs to interact with the world to keep the illusion going.

"They start tasting like drywall after a while," she says, soft and flat. "But you’re new. So maybe you'll enjoy them more."

Then she puts one earbud back in and turns toward her screen again, as if the exchange had never happened.