“What’s the worst that could happen?” Ivan muttered to himself as he stared at the bathroom scale, its digital display flickering ominously in the dim light. Just an ordinary scale, he told himself, though the voice in his head carried an undertone of hysteria.

For three weeks now, the numbers had made no sense. Not in any usual way - gaining or losing a few pounds was normal. No, these numbers seemed to measure something else entirely.

“You’re being paranoid again,” his therapist had said yesterday, adjusting her wire-rimmed glasses. “A scale is just a scale.”

But was it? The day his mother died, it displayed “0.0” no matter how many times he stepped on it. The morning his colleague betrayed him at work: “666.6”. And today…today it showed something truly terrifying: “∞”.

“Perhaps,” Ivan whispered, running his trembling fingers through his unkempt hair, “perhaps the scale measures the weight of one’s soul?”

He laughed then, a sharp bark that echoed off the bathroom tiles. The absurdity of it all! Here he was, a 43-year-old accountant, believing his bathroom scale had become some sort of metaphysical measuring device.

“Having an existential crisis over bathroom equipment?” His neighbor Boris’s voice drifted through the thin walls. “I can hear you talking to yourself again.”

“Mind your own business, Boris!” Ivan shouted back, but there was no real anger in his voice. Boris had become something of an unwitting confidant through these walls.

“Come over for coffee,” Boris called. “My scale shows normal numbers, I promise!”

Ivan found himself chuckling despite the gnawing dread in his stomach. He grabbed his robe and shuffled next door, where Boris was already pouring two cups of strong black coffee.

“So,” Boris began, his round face creasing with genuine concern, “tell me about this demonic scale of yours.”

Over the next hour, Ivan poured out his fears, his theories, his mounting terror at what these numbers might mean. Boris listened intently, occasionally nodding, sometimes raising an eyebrow.

“You know what I think?” Boris finally said, refilling their cups. “I think you’ve created the world’s first existential bathroom scale. Congratulations!”

“This isn’t funny, Boris!”

“Oh, but it is! Think about it - you’ve managed to turn the most mundane object into a cosmic horror. That’s actually quite impressive.”

Ivan opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. When put that way…

“Tell you what,” Boris continued, “let’s go buy you a new scale. A nice, boring, ordinary one that only measures kilograms like it’s supposed to.”

Later that evening, Ivan stood before his new scale. Plain. Digital. Utterly ordinary. He stepped on it carefully.

“75.5 kg”

He burst into laughter - real, genuine laughter that shook his whole body. The kind of laughter that cleanses the soul, if souls could indeed be weighed.

The old scale now sat in Boris’s apartment, serving as an ironic coffee table centerpiece. Sometimes, when Ivan visited, he’d catch it displaying random numbers, but now they just seemed funny rather than frightening.

“You see,” Boris would say, patting the scale affectionately, “sometimes the greatest horrors are the ones we create in our own minds. And sometimes, the best way to defeat them is to simply laugh at them.”

Ivan couldn’t argue with that logic. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?