Edith had first noticed it six weeks ago.

After she had prepared dinner, nibbled away while offering an empathetic ear to her husband, cleared the table, and pulled on her favorite pink leopard-print cleaning gloves – a present for her 31^st birthday last year – she glimpsed something unusual through the dishwater.

Just a small spot on a square white dinner plate at first – a rust stain, she’d supposed, from a combination of cheap plates and old cookie sheets left too long in the aging dishwasher, which could never quite manage to dry the dishes despite its patented Heated Drying feature.

She’d tried everything – re-washing with detergents, coarse sponges, scouring pads saturated with Soft Scrub – but each time she made progress, the mark was back, stronger, the following day.

“Honey?” she called over after supper one night. “Do you know if anything happened to this plate? I can’t get this stain out.”

“Nope,” came her husband’s flat reply from the next room.

“Hm. Okay. Never mind, I’ll see what I can do.”

She listened for a response, but none came. “I’ll be in in a sec, K?”

“Mm.”

She sighed and returned to her work, but no solution presented itself that night.

After weeks of mulling this over, examining the affected area, and soaking the plate in bleach, a funny idea popped into her head: the stain must be doing this on purpose. Half a second later, Edith was laughing out loud in the empty kitchen. Sure, the stain was trying to frustrate her.

Ridiculous.

“Well, Stain, one of us is going to have to go,” she arched a defiant eyebrow. “And I was here first.”

In the days that followed, it became a sort of game: she would jabber away at the orange-tinted spot, informing it of the stain-removing qualities of each new cleanser; exclaiming at its resilience; sighing dramatically as the stain consistently reemerged, unaffected, day after day. It was nearly as talkative as her husband, and somewhat less condescending.

But still, as amusing as the personification was, Edith grew frustrated with her attempt to discern the origin of the smudge. Rust, minerals in the water, an imperfection in the glaze, something in the all-natural lavender detergent, something in the air, a grudge against cleanliness. But how was it infiltrating her kitchen nightly, undetected? She couldn’t sleep for wondering, attempting to pinpoint the exact moment at which the orange shadow initiated its nightly resurgence.

In an effort to combat the nocturnal infestation, she took to sneaking into the kitchen at odd hours, tip-toeing across cracked linoleum and throwing open the cabinets as if she expected to catch it in the act. After a few weeks of this, Edith’s sleep schedule was far too disrupted for rest during the night, and she simply lay awake in bed, eyes closed, listening for – what? The squeak of a cabinet, the clatter of dishes; any clue as to how that spot was finding its way back onto her plate.

That’s when she first heard them.

Whispers, that’s all they were. A sibilant S held out slightly too long to be unintentional. A gasp; a sigh.

A breath.

Coming from the kitchen (yet somehow directly next to her ear) — pleading, mocking, teasing, tormenting. She slammed shut her eyes and stuffed fingers into her ears until morning came and her husband began to stir. Only then did it make sense:

A nightmare.

That’s all it was, of course. A nightmare brought on by the weeks of insomnia, compounded by Edith’s own natural anxiety and a baseless suspicion of a rust stain.

Insane.

She resolved to put such ridiculous obsessions behind her, and silently congratulated herself for never bringing it up to anyone else (particularly her husband). So silly. She laughed easily at herself and resolved to buy new plates that very day.

In the store, she chose the second-most expensive set of dishes they carried: Fine bone china with fluted edges and a delicate blue flower pattern decorating each pristine face.

Hand wash only.

She went out to dinner that evening (it was far too late to cook anyway), and when she got home later that night, slept soundly for the last time.

These plates deserved a gourmet meal, as she served up her husband’s favorite creamy curry over steamed quinoa with tender roasted carrots and baby Dutch potatoes the following evening, she couldn’t help feeling a twinge of pride. For the food; for the plating; for being a good wife; for recognizing that stains weren’t capable of being malicious. She grinned at her husband over the final cold dregs of their after-dinner coffee.

“I’m going to take care of the dishes, and then I’ll be in.”

Lavender-scented soap, water just shy of scalding, a fresh sponge, pink leopard-print rubber gloves.

Plates.

She was so engrossed in her work that she didn’t even notice the stains begin to bloom.

They came on tentatively at first – smudges lurking behind mashed rutabaga, belching out bubbles with mute mouths. Then more boldly, snaking their way up her forearms, pouring out of the leopard spots of her gloves as maggots from rotting lesions; boring into lotion-soft skin; binding limbs as she struggled to keep control.

Edith stood paralyzed, mouth stuck open in an “O” as it tried to form a scream but found itself unable to push air past her vocal chords. Only her eyes flitted back and forth, wide with panic and trying to take in the scene. There they were, the stuff of nightmares: masses of Stains; a colony of putrid orange nothingness swarming out of the dishes and into her pores, filling up her eyes and ears and lungs and – her eyes somehow managed to open slightly wider – tightening her grip on the delicate china.

It wasn’t just terror, but acid that washed through her hijacked body. She watched the Stains break the plate in her hands without hearing it shatter; saw one hand deftly pierce the other, and found it odd that blood pools so gracefully when skin is punctured underwater.

Later on, it would be noted that Edith’s hands still gripped the shards of china, even in death, and how uncommon it is for an entry wound from that specific angle to so precisely sever both the radial and ulnar arteries of the hand.

Also noted would be Edith’s last words, whispered in delirium to her frantic husband as he applied pressure to the already hopeless wounds:

“I think they’re gone.”