The extra button appeared on Toma’s shirt on a Monday so ordinary it was making his teeth hurt. A small plastic disc, the button was identical to all the others in everything except for one thing: it had no corresponding buttonhole. This fact bothered Toma the most.

His thoughts kept circling back to the odd button throughout the day. In the annual meeting with his team lead, on a Zoom call, and in the stuffy boardroom, under the drone of monotonous presentations about supplies, expenses, and customer service, his fingers would now and again slide towards the irregular button and run over its smooth surface. It was an anomaly, a persistent irritation, and it grated on his nerves.

Around the second coffee break, Toma snapped. He raced past the common room where his colleagues were converging on the overworked coffee machine, circling like hungry sharks, and ducked into the narrow, polypropylene-lined box of his office. With the door firmly shut behind him, Toma grabbed a pair of scissors from the table. He stood in front of the frameless mirror glued to the wall, pulled at the front of his shirt, and aimed to pinch a small opening in the placket to make up for the missing buttonhole.

Scissor blades snipped, and the shirt’s fabric parted, but instead of the errant button filling the opening, Toma caught a glimpse of bright, blue sky. He squinted to get a better look, leaning into the smooth expanse of the mirror glass. In the small slash cut into the linen of the shirt, under the banner of cloudless azure, shivering grass stretched all the way to the horizon. Toma pulled at the edges of the rip, making it bigger and bigger until the world in the mirror in front of him was nothing but green and blue. The shirt crumpled to the floor, abandoned. Toma stepped forward. Took a deep breath. The air smelled young.