The thing about hyperthymesia is there is no such thing as now.

March 16 2026. The alert hits my phone. UGWC has announced the card for Ignition. Hot and fresh out the kitchen. My eyes scurry to the page, searching for my name. I find it… and who do I see attached to my dance card? Why it’s my good friend, Betsy—

—Granger. March 9. She finds me backstage at an XWF show with a proposition. A team-up. Girls Against the World. Not the kind of mash-up I’d like to have but… I can work with it. She makes her sales pitch. I listen, or try to. My attention drifts from her eyes to that naked ring finger. No sign of commitment from SEB. Not even a simple gold—

—Medals clang into my breastbone. August 19 2016. Two sweaty-slick bodies grinding in an Olympic Village dorm room. Simone Manuel and I are doing the horizontal mambo to celebrate her achievements. Hubba hubba. I go home empty handed due to illness. This is my consolation prize. BANG-BANG-BANG. A fist beating on the hollow door. A woman screams in Portuguese. “Don’t stop,” Simone says. I don’t. Neither does the fist on the door. BANG. BANG—

—BANG. February 7 2025. Gunfire. Bullet enters the assassin’s chest, punching a quarter-sized hole through the rose pinned to his breast. He posed as a hotel waiter to gain access to my suite, sent to kill me by a man named—

—Fukuyama. December 18 2025. The Golden King set a trap like a James Bond villain in the lava chute beneath the building. Exploding pine-tar. Enraged pit vipers. Now he’s the one roasting in the inferno. I’m wrist-deep in my tactical bag next to the disemboweled corpse of his guard, fishing out a small leather-bound journal to scratch his name off the List. But the inscription on the first page stops me. To my daughter, Yelena. The one choice I would never unmake. Love,——Dad… is dead. October 28 2020. He’s fucking dead. RIP Spiral. Once a terror of the ring and cage, now a shriveled, waxy-skinned husk on a medical bed. Cue the waterworks. Snot-dripping cries. Chest-heaving wails. FUCKIN’ PATHETIC.WEAK, STUPID GIRL. His death was expected for weeks so why am I sitting here breaking down like a bitch? In my hands is the journal he gave me. I flip through, desperate for a distraction from his peeled eyes and mouth fixed in a silent, static howl. The last page folds open to reveal his List of Names. Tears dot the paper as my finger traces the scribbled lines of red ink.

1. The Big Bad Wolf
2. The Pied Piper
3. Gretel
4. Rumpelstiltskin
5. The Sandman
6. The Juniper Tree
7. The Stepmother
8. The Golden King
9. Iron John
10. Bluebeard

The identities are coded as Grimm’s Fairytale characters. He didn’t write down the key. The targets were whispered between ragged breaths in the silver light of the moon filtered through the curtains late last night. All marked for death except one. Bluebeard. Real name: Brad Jackson. The only entry whose sentence is life. My father loved and hated the man. His love wanted Jackson to find peace in life before his own time comes. His hate agreed, preferring a long life over death, but only because it knew Jackson is a miserable bastard. He’ll fuck up his own existence and doesn’t deserve a merciful end.

The identities are coded as Grimm’s Fairytale characters. He didn’t write down the key. The targets were whispered between ragged breaths in the silver light of the moon filtered through the curtains late last night. All marked for death except one. Bluebeard. Real name: Brad Jackson. The only entry whose sentence is life. My father loved and hated the man. His love wanted Jackson to find peace in life before his own time comes. His hate agreed, preferring a long life over death, but only because it knew Jackson is a miserable bastard. He’ll fuck up his own existence and doesn’t deserve a merciful end.

But the rest?

On the chopping block.

Patient Yelena. Meticulous Yelena. Listening, watching and waiting. Never rushing. First I kill The Big Bad Wolf. Cut his throat in his hotel room with a straight razor. Months later, I lure Rumpelstiltskin into a room, bludgeon her, and leave her to die behind a sealed door. A year later, I strap the Sandman to a table. Dose him with LSD and strap paddles to his temples like he did Dad. Leave him babbling nonsense at an ER. Dies from a stroke.

The Stepmother is next. At her FUCK COVID Halloween bash, I slip a cigarette spiked with palytoxin into her case. She passes away three days later on a ventilator. Just another statistic.

As for the Golden King, he dies to fang or fire. Take your pick.

You ask why.

Why did they have to die?

I could tell you his reasons for putting them on the list but the why doesn’t matter. For me, they didn’t die for the wrongs that landed them in the journal.

They died because they were on His List.

The thing about hyperthymesia is there is no such thing as now.

The phone vibrates on the desk like a shot in the dark, breaking the solitude of the quiet house. Lira’s been asleep an hour after running me ragged all day. Nine months old of disgustingly cute joy. I never wanted children. I had a hysterectomy at seventeen. Adenomyosis ruined my performance at the 2016 games. Uterus sank me to fourth place. I had it cut out and incinerated. Explaining the chain of events leading to my motherhood would be like summarizing Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto in a YouTube short.

It wasn’t voluntary… but I’m trying.

I should sleep but rest eludes me. My mind is too busy, too focused on what to do about Betsy Granger, so I go to my darkened office and sit down behind the desk. His desk. My father’s. I had it moved from New Orleans when I purchased the Hillsborough mansion. It’s a work of art, hand-carved from rosewood timber harvested from the grounds of the family’s Danish estate. The front depicts Nidhogg flying over an ancient battlefield, its wings lined with the corpses of fallen norsemen cursed to never reach Valhalla.

I take a drink of coffee and switch on the desklamp. Amber light bleeds across the small number of permanent residents. A fountain pen on a stand. A remote to control the shades. Near the base, a ceramic coaster stares up gleefully with a yellow smiley face, flaunting indifference to a world going to shit. It disappears beneath my mug and I pry open my MacBook. The display lights up, casting a blue hue to compete with the warm heat of the desklamp’s bulb.

An alert flashes across a banner. New Email. I click on it, summoning the inbox to scale across the screen. ‘Welcome to UGWC, Yelena!’ is stamped on the subject line next to the sender’s address: sawyer.c@UGWC.com.

“Ain’t that a coincidence,” I hear over my shoulder. My Darkself has seeped from the shadow to lean over the crook of my neck. She looks like me because she is me. Or at least, part of me. The part I have to keep hidden. My Hunger.

She’s wearing a plum-colored kimono decorated with the same white blossoms screened across the glossy silk—same as mine, only hers is stained with blood, muck and worse. Her entire appearance screams dead body found in a river, including the bits of twig and plant matter in her blonde hair.

“What’cha think?” she asks, as if her thoughts and my thoughts aren’t ripples in the same disturbed pond.

When you talk to yourself, it’s called introspection. When I do it, it’s called insanity and why? Because it’s in 3D?

“Like Jaws,” she mutters, then clicks on the touchpad for me.

Most of my life is spent like this, a woman of two faces. The Yelena suit, perfectly constructed to conceal the real me, designed to bypass your internal smoke alarm, the one always armed, ready to scream fire at the first sign of danger.

Then there is the monster underneath, the one always keen to tear through the couture stitching and feast on witnesses who won’t be around long enough to tell the tale—or opponents in the ring, where my predatory compulsion can be passed off as good marketing.

Even alone I restrain myself. Once I give in, there is no self control. And with nothing to feed my raw need, there is no telling what I’ll do. I might burn the house down out of sheer boredom.

My attention returns to the screen. The email is from Clyde Sawyer. The retired wrestler is now a middleman at UGWC, working backstage as a Site Coordinator. When it’s your time to head to the ring, he’s the one who tells you.

The message begins with standard boilerplate ‘this is what to expect’ on match night. What time to get there, where to pick up your badge—all the boring shit going on behind the scenes that no one cares about. Then towards the end, he wrote, “Also, I know it’s been a few years, but I want to extend my condolences about your father. He was—”

I slam the lid shut.

Clyde Sawyer once cut a man’s throat in a pit fight to win a meaningless belt. Now he’s writing emails with emojis and telling me how it made him so sad when Daddy-S kicked the bucket. But now he gets the fucking ‘privilege’ of shepherding my career in UGWC.

Condolences.

I’ll show him fucking condolences.

Clyde Sawyer. Number nine on the list. Iron John.

The wild man. The personification of raw masculinity. In the story, the king saw how dangerous Iron John was and locked him in a cage in the courtyard. But the prince was a naive, soft-hearted fool. Fell for John’s sweet-talkin’ ways and released him into the wilderness, just like every company that has ever signed him to a contract and let him loose on their locker rooms.

The man whose throat he cut? My father. In Belfast. Sixteen and a half years ago they were working for Russian mobsters in an underground fighting ring called The Circuit. Boxed in by car hoods and oligarchs clutching fistfuls of money, the two men fought for the Middleweight Championship. When Clyde couldn’t get the job done, he broke a mirror and used a shard to carve out a victory.

The Other Me is across the desk, legs kicked up in an armchair. Her arms unfold with a casual nonchalance and she says, “And Daddy took that personally.”

For a year I’ve been considering an offer from UGWC. I’m typically a one-or-two company woman but then I saw Sawyer creaming all over his LinkedIn last month about this new opportunity he was given. Another company—another stupid fucking prince letting him out of his cage. And this time, he brings coffee.

Number nine has been bumped to the top of the queue.

He was the reason, but not the only reason.

I entered this sport in 2022 with no mention of who my father was. Just a judoka with some medals looking to make a splash in a new sport. The world didn’t know who I was, who I really was until much later, when I was ready for them to know the truth.

From birth I was molded to continue the legacy of Spiral. Punching brick walls at eight years old to stiffen my fists into hammers. Taught to keep everyone, even my siblings, at arms length. He brutally directed me to become a monster in his image because he saw the same appetite in me that had driven him his entire life.

My brother and sister had a father who lived, laughed, and loved.

I had a father who lied, laughed, and loathed.

Ding.

Another notification.

I pry open the laptop again, half disappointed the screen isn’t shattered. Another email pops up, this one a Reddit alert. Safari launches, directed to r/RainbowPill, a subreddit dedicated to all things Yelena Gorgo. Though posts often devolve into nihilistic rants about consumerism and conspiracy theories claiming Facebook and X have conspired to suppress my popularity on social media.

A new video is up. I read the title to the empty room.

“Eat the Pill. Ride the Rainbow.”

I turn to my Shadow. She’s over my shoulder again, grinning and nodding like a demented bobblehead. “Oh,” she says in a broken rasp. “I wanna see! I wanna see!”

I click play.

The video maximizes to a heavy, red theatrical curtain. Music cracks from the thin speakers, guitar strings plucked up a crisp, Spanish-style arpeggio before settling on a diminished chord.

I know the song before it begins. What I don’t expect is a 2D Monty Python-style cutout of Yelena Gorgo to rise from the bottom edge of the screen. My photographic head is split apart across a crudely hinged jaw that bobs up and down like a ventriloquist dummy.

“Some… things in life are bad…”

The Other Me cackles, “This is already fucking great.”

“They can really make you mad… Other things just make you swear and curse.”

She dances side-to-side, head flopping around in perfect time with the melody. Her mouth opens a black expanse as Eric Idle’s voice climbs to the drawn out transition.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand…!”

The curtain rapidly rises just as the full instrumentation of the song kicks in. The camera pushes hard into the background, and the cutout of Yelena drops completely out of frame. What follows is the fever dream of a deeply disturbed individual with too much time on their hands.

And I love it.

UGWC’s best are spoofed in crude, animated parodies to the repeating chorus.

Larry Tacts flaps his cardboard jaw beneath a massive TACT FACTS banner. Zoom above, in the rafters, 2D Yelena twists a wrench. The stage light plummets. Larry’s head bursts like a tomato, splattering red across the frame as he crumples into an accordion.

The scene slides to a God Save the Queen punk portrait of Sebastian Everett-Bryce in a dress and sparkling tiara. His 2D paper arm stiffly raises a porcelain teacup to his lips. Yelena’s cutout hand enters with a giant match between her fingers. Cardboard flames rush over the canvas, reducing SEB to a cinder silhouette.

Flash to Enigma standing back to seesawing red clouds. Most of his face is concealed behind cartoonishly large blackout sunglasses. In one hand, a white cane ticks back and forth. In the other, a large poster attached to a 2×4 reads DO YOU SEE?! Next to him is Yelena brightly thrusting her own sign: I ZEE NO-ZING!

The rest come rapid fire.

Kilroy and his Kult are run over by Yelena in a semi-truck. Blood splatters across a GORGO EXPRESS logo on the cab door.

Claude de Rhombus clutches his timekeeper bell. Yelena steals the hammer and bashes him over the head.

More top stars. More catastrophe.

Then the chaos melts away into a serene, watercolor field of oversized daisies. A cutout of Betsy Granger slides in from the left. Yelena glides in from the right. They meet in the center of the frame and lean in for a jerky, two-frame kiss.

As their paper lips touch, every single daisy in the field detonates into miniature, vibrant orange mushroom clouds. The two cutouts link arms and happily tap-dance off the screen into the atomic sunset as the curtains rapidly tumble over the frame.

La Fin.

The video was posted twenty minutes ago.

It already has 940 upvotes.

I reach over the desk and lower the lid, pushing gently downward until the LCD screen blinks off and the aluminum case seals. My eyes adjust to the sudden collapse in brightness. Murky shapes form in the dark room beyond the desk, but nothing centers my focus. I’m staring at nothing, mind completely lost in what I have witnessed.

“That was…”

The words cut off, razored into thin, unrecognizable breaths by a throat turned to gritty sandpaper. I swallow nothing. The saliva factories have dried up, leaving my mouth an arid basin of salt and papillae cracked like a jigsaw puzzle.

I hand off the baton.

My Darkself takes it.

“…It was fucking awesome.”

I rotate the chair on the swivel. It creaks softly on the joint and the leather groans when my shoulder presses into it. I stare at the Other Me and she stares back.

I say, “This isn’t going to make sense to anyone but me.”

She nods and replies, “Accurate.”