THE MOODY MAVEN INVESTIGATES

Who the Heck is Stefanie K?

Mandela people are here and then just not

Come on, girl, show yourself! Who are you? Or…WHAT are you? Photo by Sherise Van Dyk on Unsplash

I noticed a person who was all over my stories lately. Her name is Stefanie K. She came on like a hurricane, reading and clapping, leaving comments and highlighting her favorite passages.

Naturally, I looked at her work, too. I read her stories and liked them. I made sure she knew that by leaving my own claps and comments for her.

Then something very strange happened.

She poofed.

Just gone. Evaporated. Deliquesced away until she was indistinguishable from the general background noise. As I said — just poofed. Her highlights, comments, and claps, any and all trace of her ever having visited my pages is gone.

Being intrigued, I eagle-eyed, scoured, Sherlock Holmed, and fine toothed my way through pages and pages of stories and comment sections. Searching for her name rewarded me with a big fat goose egg. No page. No profile. No nothin’. Not the tiniest trace.

I started thinking about the Mandela Effect. That’s right — I considered that I had been spirited off to a parallel reality.

Okay, not really. But what else could explain a woman’s presence all over the place one day, and crickets the next?

I know Stephanie K is real. Because I heard from her. She heard from me. And in this funhouse we all play in, that’s all we have to go on.

Since a better explanation would be a hiccup in the algorithm, something flagging her and wiping our collective history, I actually did feel paranoid that if that happened to me I would lose my stories.

I’m sure you can imagine how horrible that would be!

And then something happened again. Someone named Stefaniek popped into my world.

Stefaniek started reading and commenting on my stuff.

Naturally I assumed that Stefaniek and Stefanie K were the same person in all ways but for the missing K-space. And being a curious kitty, I fully intended to ask her about said K-space.

And then…Stefaniek, too, was gone. Poofed. Fizzled. Ghosted again. Yes, Stefaniek had left the building.

Once more, I am not sure what’s going on here. One thing I know, I am not crazy. Maybe it’s as simple as someone saying her name three times in the mirror and off she goes.

That’s as good an explanation as any, I would guess. So here’s the deal, I won’t repeat your name more than twice and you do the same for me.

In the meantime, I intend to keep my eyes open for Stephanie K, with a ph and a K-space. Seems the next logical step to me!

So if you see this Stefanie K, or Stefaniek, or even the future Stepahnie K, do say hello. Let me know you are okay and not a figment of my imagination.

Because if you aren’t real, I would be forced to wonder about myself. And if your poofing made me poof, who knows how far that Mandela poof would carry?

Click [MuddyUm humoristas](https://muddyum.net/amy-sea-to-toni-crowe-clickable-access-to-feature-pages-3088106c0c45) to find hidden feature pages.

🖱️ Click here to subscribe to Muddyum’s newsletter, “The Real Dirt.”

✔️ Check out our links.

🚢 The publishing mother ship.

🫶🏼 Support writers. All our non-profit’s offerings here.

Brand art by David Todd McCarty