You suspect you're being stalked from a distance, and you arrive home to a little surprise.

For the rest of your journey, you find yourself replaying the events of the evening over, and over again in your mind. Your legs escort you along your usual route by reflex and muscle memory alone, and you hardly pay any notice to the all so familiar buildings and sights that you pass by.

On occasion, you’re suddenly roused from your reverie when you catch the faintest glint of a pair of small, glowing white orbs, or of an inexplicable black shape, flitting in the corner of your eye for just a brief second – an unexpected cameo in the reflected tableau of a store front window, or a lurking presence in the shadows a good ways down an adjacent street.

You pause momentarily at each of these sightings, but every time you turn to look, you find nothing. All is normal. Any other day, it’s the sort of thing you’d just chalk up to working too late, with too little sleep. But on this day, you know better. You’re hardly concerned, of course – and after the third or fourth time, you find a slight smiling crossing your face on each of these occasions.

Everyone’s familiar with the sense of unease and dread that’s part and parcel of walking deserted streets alone at night… But tonight, you feel serene, and you feel safe. You’re not really alone. You may never- you’re beginning to realise- be truly alone again.

When you cross the threshold into your humble (and admittedly untidy) studio home, your pocket hums. You take out your phone, to find MalO’s sent another photograph. Your brown furrows just a little, as you try to make out what it means – MalO himself is not in sight, and nor are any of his parts, regrettably – it looks to be just be a shady alleyway, between two buildings. There’s a dumpster against one wall, some boxes, and…

Suddenly, it all clicks, in one flash of revelation. With your thumb and forefinger, you widen the image, zooming in closer on the stack of boxes. Sure enough, although it’s difficult to make out, there’s a mobile phone propped up on there – the same one you’re holding in your hand this very moment.

You can’t help but laugh at yourself. You’ve had plenty of time already to calm your nerves after that encounter, but you do still feel some sort of relief. Relief, and maybe a little… Well, of course it’s not like you would ever have done anything other than hide in those circumstances. Even if you had stood up, and looked, you know you would have been greeted only by an empty street. Dead silence.

You undress yourself down to your underwear, and flop into bed, on top of your covers. You flip back and forth between your photo and MalO’s – two opposing perspectives on the same scene, revealing quite different contents. Despite how little MalO is actually able to articulate, you really think he seems to have no trouble finding the best ways to tease you.