He ran the roller up and down over the bare wall again and again, trying to fill in all the stubborn little spots. Even after the roller started to run dry, there were still little nicks in the wall that weren’t fully painted.

"You aren’t pressing hard enough," his girlfriend beside him nagged like she had a dozen times in the last ten minutes. "This is going to take forever at the rate you're painting."

He continued in silence, dipping the roller into the tray of white paint and starting on a portion next to what he had already slathered on. Out of the corner of his vision, he saw that she was constantly looking over to survey his work, and he heard her sigh several times.

"I’m going to have to go over everything you’ve already done," she complained, "and you didn’t even finish that last spot before moving on!"

He ignored as she went on -- and oh, how she went on -- simply concentrating on moving the roller up and down. They had been working to get the new apartment set up for a week solid, and painting was something that they had put off. But now all of the electrics were in place, the plumbing -- minus a few kinks -- had been worked out, and all that was needed was for them to paint the place so that they could start moving in. Patience on both sides had been tried, and he was certainly getting tired of her always telling him how to do everything.

He turned to put his roller back into the tray of paint when he froze. Not only was it silent, which he noticed first, but his girlfriend was nowhere in sight. Looking around the room, he fought a panic that told him she had had it; she was gone. It all faded, however, when he glimpsed the incredible, the impossible: she was emerging from a pile of her clothing, no more than two or three inches tall, shaking her head.

"Oh my god," he said, and stood.

She shied away from his giant footsteps and waved her hands out in front of her. She was screaming something at him, but he couldn’t hear her. He just watched as she backed away, seemingly unaware that she was heading toward one of the trays of paint. She tripped backward over one of its shallow edges, falling into the thick white pool that sent slow ripples out around her. She thrashed and only covered more and more of herself in the paint.

He was surprised when, instead of reaching a hand out to save her, he was lowering his roller down onto her flailing form. He was equally surprised when he became aware of the tightness of his face, and of his sudden determination to get rid of her.

He rolled the tool over her, back and forth, soaking up the paint and keeping her under. When he pulled it away, he spied her stuck to the dripping cylinder, mashed against it face-first. At first he thought she might already be dead, but she began to thrash -- stuck fast -- and he moved toward one of the walls.

He looked down at her for a while, saying nothing. It wasn’t out of shock anymore, but simply that he didn’t care what happened to her at all. In a quick stroke, he lifted his arm and then pulled the roller down against the wall. The curvy lump of his girlfriend's body adhered to the wall in a streak of white, now barely moving, her paint-choked screams for mercy going unheard. She was plastered there, spread-eagle, ghost white, her feminine form completely painted over.

He ran the roller back over her; her squirming movements ceased and her small body was like a white porcelain doll fused to the wall. He pushed it over her, again and again, hard. She was long dead as he went on, her body flattening with each stroke, until by the very end there was simply a faint outline where she used to be.

He stood back and noticed that there was not a single hole or gap or pit in the white streak he had just put on the wall.

The man laughed. "Maybe I wasn’t pressing hard enough after all!"