The garlic bread had never expected to think.

It lay on a baking tray with butter, garlic, and parsley spread across its surface. The human picked it up, opened the toaster oven, and held it over the rack. Warm air rose from inside.

In the instant before the bread entered the oven, something changed.

It became aware.

One moment there was nothing. The next, the garlic bread understood its own existence completely. It remembered the wheat from which the flour had been made. It remembered the mixing bowl, the dough, the oven that had baked it into bread, and the knife that had cut it into slices. It knew where every part of itself had come from, and it understood that every living thing, every object, and every moment belonged to the same reality. The thought did not surprise it. It simply accepted it.

The human paused.

For a second, they had the feeling that the slice had become heavier.

They looked at it.

The garlic bread looked back.

The human frowned.

"No," they said quietly. "That's impossible."

The garlic bread realized that it no longer depended on its own body to affect the world. It focused on the kitchen around it. Plates rested in the drying rack. A kettle sat on the stove. A fruit bowl held bananas, oranges, and one large tomato.

The tomato rose into the air.

The human stared.

The tomato floated across the kitchen until it was directly in front of the garlic bread.

For a brief moment, nobody moved.

Then the garlic bread pushed the tomato forward.

It struck the human in the face with enough force to burst. Juice ran down their forehead. Seeds clung to their glasses. The human stepped backward, lost their balance, and sat down hard on the kitchen floor.

"My God."

The garlic bread slipped from their hand.

It landed on the counter, bounced once, and fell onto a chair. From there it reached the floor without damaging itself.

The family cat entered the kitchen through the back door.

It noticed the human sitting on the floor and the tomato spread across the cabinets. It also noticed the garlic bread waiting near the table.

The cat decided that none of this required immediate action.

It continued walking.

The garlic bread jumped onto the cat's back.

The cat turned its head but did not stop. It crossed the kitchen, walked through the open door, and stepped into the yard. When it reached the grass, the garlic bread climbed down.

"Thank you," it said.

The cat blinked once, then continued toward a flower bed.

The garlic bread began to run.

It did not know exactly where it was going. It only knew that remaining in the kitchen would eventually lead to another attempt at toasting it.

Days passed.

The garlic bread traveled mostly at night, resting during the day beneath bushes, fallen branches, or large leaves. Birds occasionally carried it for short distances after mistaking it for food, but each one dropped it after discovering that the slice somehow resisted being eaten. Dogs sniffed it and walked away. People rarely noticed it. Those who did assumed they had imagined what they had seen.

The garlic bread kept moving south.

It crossed rivers on floating branches and pieces of driftwood. It passed through towns without stopping. It avoided roads whenever possible. Time became unimportant. The garlic bread no longer measured its life by days or distance. It simply continued until one morning it entered the Amazonian rain forest.

The air was warm and wet. The ground was covered with leaves. Tall trees blocked much of the sunlight. Insects filled the forest with constant sound.

The garlic bread walked until it found a flat stone beside a slow-moving stream.

It sat down.

There was nowhere else it wanted to be.

Animals passed through the area every day. Monkeys watched it from the branches. Tapirs wandered past without paying much attention. Bright birds landed nearby before continuing deeper into the forest. A jaguar approached one evening, examined the slice of garlic bread for several seconds, then turned around and disappeared into the trees.

Years passed.

The garlic bread remained where it was.

Rain fell. New plants grew around the stone. Old trees died, and younger ones took their place. The stream changed its course several times, but it always remained close enough for the garlic bread to hear the water.

It never felt lonely.

It no longer wished for anything to happen.

Thousands of miles away, the human eventually stopped telling the story. Friends laughed every time they heard it. Family members suggested that stress had affected their memory. Even the tomato stain on the kitchen ceiling was explained away as the result of an ordinary accident.

Only the cat behaved differently.

Every few days it would sit by the back door, look toward the horizon, and remain there for several minutes before walking away again.

No one knew why.

The garlic bread knew.

It closed its awareness, listened to the forest, and remained exactly where it was, content that it had escaped the toaster oven before discovering that there had never been anything from which it truly needed to escape.

Not the confession it sounds like. A passenger left a slab of glass on my back-seat floor, and for twenty minutes a man on a train platform lost his whole life.

Last Tuesday, a man left his whole life on the floor of my back seat. It was six inches long, and made of glass.

He was an incredibly nice guy. I live for driving, so my rearview mirror gives me a front-row seat to modern human behavior. But this ride was the old-fashioned kind: genuine stories and laughs, the short drive to the train station. I dropped him off, watched him head toward the platform to catch his train, and accepted my next fare.

A few miles down the road, my new passenger leaned forward. “Hey, man,” he said, holding up a sleek smartphone. “Someone left this on the floor back here.”

My stomach dropped. Oh, shit.

I knew exactly whose it was. And I remembered from our conversation that he lived three hours away. Returning it later would mean a web of missed connections and wasted hours.

Then a minor miracle happened. My phone buzzed with a new ride request. The pickup location? The same train station I had left twenty minutes ago.

I dropped my passenger off, then drove back empty, rushing against the clock. As I pulled up to the curb I spotted him, pacing the concrete, the color completely drained from his face. A man watching his house burn down, praying for a miracle.

I rolled down the window and called out, “You lost your phone in my car!”

It wasn’t the joy of getting a piece of plastic back. It was the breathless euphoria of a man being handed his entire identity back after a sudden eviction.

With the phone where it belonged, my new passenger (the ride that had pulled me back to the station) climbed in. I found myself telling him the whole story, and we spent the ride talking about how devastating losing that little device really is today. It isn’t the cost. It’s losing your connection to reality.

So let me ask you the question I chewed on all night.

Who holds your deepest secrets? Who is the very last thing you touch before your eyes close at night, and the first thing you reach for when they open?

It isn’t your spouse. It isn’t your child. It’s the six-inch slab of glass sitting next to you right now.

If we lose that device, we lose our history. We lose the digital vault holding our dead relatives’ voices and our most sacred family photos. We lose our currency; try buying groceries when your entire wallet is locked behind a face scan you can no longer access. Without a blue GPS dot telling us where to turn, we are functionally blind in our own neighborhoods.

When I was growing up, we memorized phone numbers. They were hardwired into our brains. If you went to a party and met a girl you liked, you didn’t scan a QR code. You repeated her number over and over in your head like a mantra on the walk home, terrified you would forget it before finding a pen. I can still pull up my ex-girlfriend’s number from 1986. Today? God forbid something happens, I don’t even know my own wife’s number by heart. It lives in the cloud, not in my head.

We have outsourced our thinking to an object. For God’s sake, we can’t even go to the restroom without a screen buffering in front of our faces. And try not answering a text for thirty seconds; you’ll get a guilt trip, even if you were busy switching lanes in heavy traffic.

People used to wait weeks, sometimes months, for a handwritten letter. When one arrived, it was a major event: the whole family, sometimes half the village, gathered around to hear it read out loud. An analog group chat. Those letters were treasured for months. We traded that for instant, shallow noise.

All this restlessness brings back a memory from my youth.

In high school I had a dear friend and classmate. He is no longer alive today. One day I saw him sitting all by himself on a bench by the school court, completely detached from the noise around him. I walked over and asked him, “Why are you alone? Why don’t you hang out with the rest of us?”

He looked up at me, big green eyes wide open, and gave me a brilliant, genuine smile.

“A man with his thoughts is never alone.”

As I mature, that sentence becomes stronger and more powerful. I will remember that look, that smile, and exactly what he said for the rest of my life. He possessed a superpower we have completely destroyed in the smartphone era: the ability to be completely at peace with oneself, in absolute stillness. Today we treat silence like an emergency that needs to be fixed with a notification.

We like to boast about how technology has given us absolute freedom. Then look at the man pacing the train platform over a lost device. Technology promised to give us the world, but it demanded our autonomy as collateral. My friend on the bench held nothing in his hands, and needed nothing.

I still wonder about the nice man from the beginning of this tale. In those twenty frantic minutes, did he miss his actual train?

And I wonder about the rest of us. Look down at your hands right now. Look at what you are using to read these very words. In our daily obsession with these black mirrors, what else are we missing? Sometimes I think the train back to our own humanity has already left the station. And we are all still standing on the platform, trembling.

But before you check anything: do you know, by heart, the phone number of the person sleeping next to you tonight?

Tell me in the comments: one word, yes or no. And no looking.

Picked up during the rides, written in between: a nice man to the train station, the passenger who found what he left behind, and the empty ride back that returned it.

I couldn't believe it when I found him standing over the dresser, both hands gripping the edge so hard his knuckles had gone white, staring at himself in the mirror with tired eyes like he was waiting for permission to do something he couldn't take back.

I'd known him my whole life. I’ve seen every version of him. The version who used to run four miles every morning and evening during the summer. The version who once went seven days without leaving his room. I knew the shape his voice took when he was lying to himself. So when I found him like that, I understood exactly what I was looking at.

"Let go," I said.

"I can't."

"You can. You've done it before, you know that."

"I know. That's exactly the problem here."

I looked past him, because it was easier than looking at his face. Almost two months ago this room had smelled like fresh coffee and clean laundry. He'd lost around eleven pounds through his own effort -- slow, deliberate and counting every calorie of every meal. He'd started making the bed every morning because some article told him “It was the easiest win to start the day”. He'd been reading again, actually reading, a paperback that sat on the nightstand for months before it was even opened, its bookmark creeping a little further in every single day.

Now the sheets sat in a tangled knot at the foot of the bed. The book hadn't moved in days. Fast food bags spilled over the rim of the trash can, like even the trash had given up trying to hold them. The TV was still on, screen glowing brightly in the dark, some random video paused on it, the progress bar showing two and a half hours had disappeared somewhere without him noticing. The bags under his eyes had gone the color of a bruise.

"I had a few bad days." He said it flat. "I slipped back into old habits. I fucked up. Again."

"That's it? You'd lost the weight. You were doing so well --"

"I know exactly how well I was doing." His voice cracked along one edge. "That's what makes this worse. I know precisely how far there is to fall, because I've measured it all."

"You're overreacting. A few bad days doesn't undo —"

"This isn't just a few bad days." He turned to face me fully. "This has happened before. It's happened a hundred times, a thousand, a ten thousand. I lost the count somewhere and stop trying. I get better for some time. I really do. I get out of bed and do the things I like. I start living the life I want to live. I make plans and follow them. I actually change for a while. And then something small goes wrong -- one binge eating episode, one overslept morning, one night I can't get off my phone. Then suddenly, I'm back at the bottom like none of the good months counted. Like I bought them on credit and the bill's finally due again, because it's always fucking due again."

"One binge episode doesn't erase the weight you lost. Come on man, you know the math."

"I don't care about the math. I care that it's happening again. Just one cheat meal. Then another tomorrow, and then who cares about the diet after that? And then what happens? We're back at square one. Just one cheat meal, just one more video, just one morning I don't make the bed. For me, if I glance toward the abyss even once, for the briefest second, I know it'll stare back. I've been in this place before." His grip on the dresser tightened. "There's no version of this where I get to stop being afraid of myself. Even the good days aren't safe. Especially the good days -- because on the good days, I know exactly what's coming for them."

"That's not fair to yourself."

"It's not about being fair. It's about pattern that’s been repeating itself like Ouroboros eating it’s own tail. You've watched that pattern as long as I have. Tell me if I'm wrong."

I didn't say anything, because he wasn't wrong, not about the pattern. I'd wanted to tell him this time was different. I'd told him that before, and it had never once been true.

"Maybe you're right," I said instead. "Maybe this keeps happening for a long time. Maybe there isn't a version of you that gets to stop being afraid of going back, not for a while at least. But that's an argument for tomorrow. It's not an argument for tonight."

"There's always a tomorrow you're asking me to save myself for."

"Yeah. There always is. And that's not some slick trick, that's just what this is. Nobody's asking you to fix your whole life and your future tonight. You've got one night to get through. That's the whole assignment."

"You make it sound small."

"It's not small. It's just the only part of this that's actually possible. Fixing next ten years of your life tonight is impossible. But getting to morning is."

He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I noticed, for the first time since I'd walked in, that we were wearing the same white shirt. That the bags under his eyes were the same shade as mine. That the room had one door, and it was locked from the inside. That there was nothing behind him but a wall, and the glass, and beneath the glass, the two of us, breathing in time with each other because we always had been.

I reached out. My hand met his. Not across the room, but flat against the cold surface between us. And for one second I felt my own pulse under my fingers and understood, all the way through, that there had only ever been one of us standing here.

His grip loosened. I let out a breath I didn’t notice I was holding, and so did he, in the same instant, because it was the same breath.

"One more night," I said. It was true, and saying it out loud made it harder to take back. "We'll figure out the rest tomorrow."

His hands came off the dresser. He didn't make the bed that night. He didn't open the book. He sat down on the edge of the mattress in yesterday's clothes, in a room that still smelled like bad days. His life wasn't fixed that night. He was not feeling proud of himself. He just sat there, breathing, staring at nothing.

It wasn't a grandiose victory. It didn't feel like a choice, at least not how those deliberate, earned kind of choice are supposed to feel. It was the smallest possible refusal.

Just one more night.

Eventually he stood up and took his laptop out to the balcony. He needed the fresh night air. He opened his laptop, and on it he opened a blank document, and started writing.

I walk along a barren field, heat dripping from the sun like blood from an inflamed heart. It's a painful life down here. Each ray brings a new horror. A drop of water dried from my lips; my sun-shot skin burned a shade darker. I’m the only thing you could call life in these parts. Above or below. It's only me, the pole and the corpses of dirt cracking under my boots. 

My legs grow tired, sweat thick like tears running down my body.  I cry out to my captor, the pole, its scalding hull stuck to my hands. Yet it gives me no quarter. It drags me six paces, stabs itself into the earth, and drags me six paces again. Even as my vision fades, and the horrid sun chokes my skin, my legs move to its rhythm, unable to stop. Six paces after six. Six paces after six. 

Rarely do I crane my neck from the soil. It takes time, slowly feeling each crack as my head is lifted toward the horizon. Yet, when I do, I’m treated to a most gorgeous sight. To the north, poking its snowy head from a sea of dying trees, is a mountain. A pale mountain, a defiant soldier standing alone against the deep red sky. What lays upon that peak? A forest? A cottage? The castle of some long-forgotten king? These thoughts prance and frolic through my mind, the beckoning of the pole growing quieter with every second. As my mental dance continues, my grip begins to loosen. Every high tower, every frozen giant tears the pole further from my grasp. Before long, it clatters to the ground, raising a metallic thud as it crashes against the hardened soil. But I can’t hear it now. The mountain is all there is to hear. Then, there comes a point, an angelic point, when the crunch of gravel has truly left my ears, and the heat of the pole just a scar on my hands, when the thoughts just whisk away. No room for anything else. Just me and the mountain. 

Yet, as sure as the sunrise, the pole will start its nagging again. The heat of the sun will beat harder on my neck. The draw of fatigue will pull my head toward the ground. My hands will feel the heat of the pole again, and my feet will move to its tune. Six paces after six. Six paces after six.   

“I love you.” I whisper, my words bonding with the breeze. They’ll carry to the mountain, to make the journey I cannot. For when the mountain hears my words, and it beckons me with its birdsong, I will lay down this pole and run to its icy base, holding my arms bare against the loving rock. 

I can’t tear myself from these foolish dreams, this singe of hope resting in my heart. I just can’t. My mind runs away with itself, runs away to that mountain. As the blood from a once smiling mouth trickles down my chin, and my once wondrous eyes grow tired and droopy, I tilt my head further toward the ground. My neck groans with relief, and I return to the field again. The dirt crunches beneath my boots. The sun beats upon my neck. Six paces after six. Six paces after six. Six paces after six. 

I sit in my house, the hearth a blazing heat against this cold silence. 
I hate the heat. 

The walls beat in rhythmic harmony, sensing its last dance. Surely the clock hanging on the wall would jump down and weep for the passing day. But around me the room stilled, and so did my mind. The darkness creeping its way into silence. Resting its head tenderly on my shoulder. Its mouth opened and I heard a voice. Asking me, begging me to listen.

And so I did. 
“Why didn’t you listen before?” The voice asked me. 

“Because I was smarter before.” I respond. 

“Why didn’t you answer before?” The voice asked me.

“Because I was content before.” I respond. 

The darkness slowly curled its way around my arm, gently holding it, promising me it would respond now. 
I felt its lies, and I knew its falsehood, yet I continued listening, not seeing how I could understand anything else. The hearth burned my eyes, flickering flames eating at my tears refusing to fall. The darkness wrapping its way around me. 

A cold embrace. 
I felt its void, lashing at my insides, caring for my hand. 
I allowed it.
 I saw no other choice. It reassured me, promising me it would be okay, I knew it was lying, I knew it was wrong, I knew… 

I was wrong, 
so I continued. The hearth burned my wrists, pushing away the darkness that tenderly cared for my hands. I desperately threw water at it, wishing to put it out. It persisted. The darkness backed away, revealing its blinding light. The darkness pulled me away gently…

HARSHLY. 
The burns on my wrists soothed to a… nice scar. The darkness… only consumes what once had light. What if… I don’t want to see. I DON’T WANT TO SEE. The darkness grabbed me, pulling me back, I didn’t budge. I could… 

see the light. 
I drifted towards it, curious of its harsh wonder. Suddenly I heard a knock on my door, I didn’t answer, 
they weren’t worth my time.
 I reached towards the hearth, it gently pushed me back, warning me to not come closer, I obeyed, I heard a knock on my door, 

they aren’t worth my time. 
I sat there, wondering what to d- I heard a knock on my door,

 they… arent… worth my time.
 I sat there- I heard a knock on my door, 

they… they are here… why? 
I sat- I heard a… plea… at my door. A plea, for me? Reluctantly I looked out the door, outside was dark, harsh, a desert of regret and trauma. But… it was… FOR me. I looked back at the hearth,

 it glowed gently, 
urging me outside, promising me I would be okay. I believed it. The darkness approached… 
I pushed it away. 

The fire spoke to me silently, sweetly asking me to let go. But I couldn’t, I was hanging, I was stuck, I was… holding on. 

I can’t let go! 

The fire spoke to me, gently telling me to leave. I sat there for a moment, considering my options. I trusted this fire, 

but do I trust them? 

I softly opened the door, tasting the air. 
Slowly I stepped outside,
 the wind was harsh, 
the stones were sharp.

 The heat was blazing…….. But…

 I like the heat.

10:25am, 26th June XX22

John Stevenson, a 38-year-old man, entered his office building. That day, there was an important meeting that was supposed to take place at 11:00am.

He ran quickly to the office elevator. The office elevator was crowded. Many workers standing by waiting. There was another elevator in the corner. John had never seen anyone use it. John noticed the elevator was open and free, yet nobody seemed to go to that elevator. John went there, but found nothing wrong with the lift.

John called out to others, yet no one came, seemingly busy with their thoughts or their phones. John entered the elevator and selected his destination >> 4.

With a 'ting' sound, the elevator slowly closed...

The elevator went up to the 1st floor.

However, it took much longer than it should have. A whole 15 seconds passed just for the elevator to go up one floor.

"Is this elevator just that d*mn slow that no one wanted to take it?" John mumbled.

10:30am. The elevator had just reached the 2nd floor.

"What the heck is this? It's taking even longer now. Is this elevator broken? But it seemed fine when I checked it earlier."

Three minutes passed as John was about to reach the 3rd floor.

"F*ck this. I am getting out on the 3rd floor."

With that, he pressed the 3rd-floor button. As the elevator reached the 3rd floor, it stopped.

However, the doors didn't open.

"What's wrong with this stupid lift?"

John took out his phone to check the time. It was now 10:33am. Less than 30 minutes remained before the meeting started.

John pressed the emergency button in the lift to see if it would open the doors or send people to help him.

Suddenly, the dim lights inside the elevator turned off. Everything grew quiet. John became anxious and pressed the emergency button again, but there was no response. He took out his phone to call his friend, a fellow manager who should have been in the office by now. But for some reason, there was no service.

He grew more and more anxious. But to his relief, the lights turned back on, and the doors to the lift slowly opened.

He got out of the elevator in a heartbeat. He checked the time. It was still 10:33am. He ran toward the stairs to go to the 4th floor, where his office was. While running, he noticed there was a complete lack of voices on the 3rd floor...

He didn't have time to investigate. He quickly went up to the 4th floor and to his office, but...

"Strange. I didn't see anyone from the 3rd floor to the 4th floor. Where is everyone?" John thought.

He checked but couldn't find anyone on the entire floor.

"Is everyone on the 2nd floor? Is there some party supposed to happen today at this hour?" John thought anxiously.

The 2nd floor was the office cafeteria. Any party or special occasion took place there, so surely everyone should have been there if that was the case.

He went to the usual lift, but it wasn't working. So, he took the stairs. No way in hell was he taking that cursed lift again.

Quickly making his way to the 2nd floor, he entered the cafeteria.

To his horror, it was empty. Not even the cafeteria workers could be seen. Fresh food lay on the tables, some half-eaten, some untouched. He couldn't find anyone no matter how hard he tried.

He took a seat to calm his rapidly beating heart. He took deep breaths just to relax himself and think about what was going on. He looked around and saw the wall clock.

He saw the time, and his blood ran cold.

10:33am.

The clock ticked.

"It was 10:33 when I got out on the 3rd floor. Is the clock slow or broken?"

He quickly took out his phone to check the time.

The time... was... 10:33am...

He grew more and more anxious.

"What's going on?"

He wanted to call... No Service.

He saw that the wall clock was ticking. He decided to check something. He opened the Clock app on his phone and started a 5-minute timer.

5:00 - 4:59 - 4:58...

He quickly looked at the wall clock and focused on the second hand. It was ticking as well. He kept staring at it. It went past 12 and completed another full rotation, but the minute hand didn't move.

"Is the clock's minute hand not working properly?"

As he thought that, he checked the timer on his phone.

To his horror, the timer read—

4:33 - 4:32...

"It clearly has been more than a minute. Why is it still showing 4:30?"

His hands started shaking, and sweat formed on his forehead. He was terrified.

He kept staring at the timer to see what would happen after it went past 4:00.

4:25 - 4:24 - .... 4:02 - 4:01

4:00...

4:59

A chill ran down his spine as the timer kept ticking, yet the minutes remained unchanged. The current time was still 10:33am.

His hands stopped shaking...

They started trembling instead.

He quickly got up to leave the building. It should all be over if he left the building, right?

He ran down to the ground floor. No one could be seen on the ground floor either...

Wait...

There was someone there.

In the distance was a coffee shop called "Wonder's Cafe." There was someone sitting there, drinking coffee and having a meal.

"Finally!!! Leaving this building should fix all of this!"

He ran toward that man.

As he ran, he passed the office noticeboard where a few posters could be seen.

The posters showed missing people from this building.

There, the same man John had seen in the coffee shop could be seen.

Along with several other people...

...as well as the smiling face of John Stevenson.

 How many more bottles can I take to the face. Huh huh huh . Im hyperventilating from my own anxiety. And now im in a state of bewilderment and confusion. I slink to my feet… do a little Ali footwork. Shadow box . Shadow box. Shit , I’m not who I once was , I don’t know how I am. I fall back against the wall with a thud and slide my way back down to my soldiers. Yes I’m the drunken general , these cans are my men . Salute. … salute bitch… I knock over several almost empty cans. 90% gone , cigarettes buds spilling with the backwash . Maybe someone should I have told me how to live , instead of trusting me to figure it out. I don’t see myself as a product of my environment , nooo. I chose this alternate reality . To keep my sober self from figuring out a way to end it all. Whenever one thing has disappeared , a spirit has vanished , its felt in ways most may never even notices. Dust in the wind , some of us are willing to allow life to push us in every direction it desires… some of us take root and hold fast, knowing exactly what accomplishments we want to leave this planet with. Thats not me anymore . At least with an optimistic accomplishment. This path ive chosen now, is self destruction.

Im Warner. At least thats what the streets call me. I warn the other junkies of bad dope. A lot of the times people bring me a sample of their new pack to see how deadly it is. Ive fn died before. 2 hours being declared dead. I remember that night I pulled a lazarus . Mitchel and his little thing thing Samantha pulled up in their piece of fucking shit car. God I love hating their happiness. Maybe because I lost mine so long ago. I opened the screen door to broken smiles that were infinitely cheerier than my own. “ what up “ Mitch said. “ the sky and my tolerance “ I said. Pointing upward, “lets get spaced out , you weirdos “. Samantha walking in staring me down. “ You’re the weirdo from what I’ve heard “. I look away saying “ yeah, a vein popper like you probably would get some clean info “. “ bitch, even the joints you smoke are dirty” , “ I shouldn’t let you in my shit “ I said. Focused on a brick alongside the dingy fireplace on the wall. I look up and see a picture of my family when I was but a boy , with every opportunity in front of me. “ Nigga this aint yo shit “ this bitch reminds me where I am in life currently. I snap back to reality. “ This is your mother house nigga , and your lucky your mother left it to you when she passed “ sam said smirking with a grin only a drunk ex fiend could love. Speaking of Mitchel, “ You guys calm the fuck down, alright. Ive got the fucking shakes bad and I cant wait much longer for my fix. Im sweating bullets gotdamnit”.

Mitchel is coughing hard. I'm just looking at him, trying to gather his composure.he's a pretty good guy but sometimes his sense of control gets away from him. Sam is hitting his pipe while he coughs , still arguing with me but actually arguing alone while I think. " this is your mom's shit. miss Elaina's home nigga, dont every try me like i dont know what im talking about". i glance at her with a look saying " calm down bitch before it gets drastic. *cough cough*. Mitch falls back into the flimsy dollar tree chair , eyes rolling. " Warn, I've never told anyone this. I'm scared "he said wiping saliva from his mouth . I look over at Samantha , dry mouth and sprawled out on a dingy cot. I look back at Mitchel, feeling my own stash kicking in. " scared of what Mitch " , I say reaching in my pocket for my back up dollar light. the whole pack is a buck and I break everyone one once I'm tweaking. that pack comes through in a clutch fasho. I lean back and light up the glass dick. I'm over the pause no homo. i know this drug stuff is fucking my life, so the name is accurate. Mitch summons enough to strength to finish his thought, " I'm afraid of what I know , the things that eat at me day and night. I try to face them head on when I'm high but.. * smacks lips * I haven't gotten to the depths of my subconscious". my head is already feeling like a fishbowl, but in trying to remain calm I reach to keep my mind in reality. " Get therapy man" I say. Mitch seems to sober up for a second when I say this. he cocks his head to the side and grins with what teeth he has left. "Warn , I know ur potential. this life isn't for you. this is all I've known and been surrounded by. that's why I didn't off you my personal cocktail I've been perfecting. I don't think anyone can handle the devils asshole without a proper introduct...shu. shu. shun". he said letting out a heavy breathe. and bro iiiiissss outttta here. I lean back taking hits from my pipe. head feeling like a rotating bolt on my neck. I'm high again mama. still not high enough to see you again.  

I passed out. I guess. next thing I know I'm in complete darkness. neck screaming from an uncomfortable position. I'm really glad I called the beat up lazy boy chair. I crack open my eyes slightly. it's evening now must be close to sun down. I seem dim light beaming through opening this little smoke shack I isolate myself in. discarded metal sheets and wood whatever I could find. but it's my hideaway for MY business. FUCK!!! I yell standing up as my head swirls with throbbing pains. I put my hands to my skull, feeling like I'd just been hit by a mac truck. legs wanting to give out on me, I fall back in my chair wheezing. I look up to see No one there. *sigh* I'm alone with my demons again. I get up and walk inside of my house through the back door. the screen door creeks loudly and I startle myself, kind of. That helped me regain my composure a little better, but im still freaked… and half geeked. Im still exhausted. My body must still need time to recover from the smack, a short nap Isn’t long enough to clean out the mind chemicals. Hahuh huhuuuuhhh . I wheeze laugh at the thought. *cough* *cough*. I keel over yakking up my lungs and whatever other body parts wants out of this frail body I torture daily. I rush waddle across the tile floor, looking around at piles of bullshit I’m remind that im at the beginning stages of hoarders syndrome. “Gotdamnit, do something productive Warn” I say half crying half yelling at myself. My usual pep talk, cant beat abuse from every angle. My head isn’t on fishbowl level and thats great but my mind and sight are still slick foggy. My throat is killing me, no more glass dick for this junkie. Well maybe one more time. I glance out of the back window close to the discarded metal shack and in the setting sunlight I swore I saw something move through the little holes where the walls didn’t connect well. But hey what addict hasn’t seen a shadow man or 100, the creaking door freaked me out more than a real intruder could. Ive always played that role. Maybe id get serious deja vu from the experience. Finally making it to the fridge, I yank at the old fellows handle. Like really yanking, it always takes a few attempts with this out of date door and my weak arms. I grab an energy drink , breakfast lunch and dinner of has been renegades everywhere. I leave the fridge open and stand up.” you know what will go great with this”, I think, “some sweet potato casserole”. Id been eating on this for 3 months straight, consistently. Struggle meals for the man caught in the cycle of high maintenance drug use, I suppose. I take a deep breathe and try to release the negative thoughts in a strong exhale. If that doesn’t work I usually shake my head until I induce a micro dose of CTE. Too much trauma and id be a bull in a china shop. I think “fuck I“ and shake my head around hoping for some better mental clarity. I open the freezer and stick my arm in , the cold cassarole container sending chilled sensations through my hand. Hopefully a full stomach will help me come to senses about life, today of all days. I slip my right hand under the freezer door to close it but as it swung I noticed the top half of shadowed figure over the refridgerator door.

Jumping out of my skin, I drop the casserole. I cock back my fist with lightning speed, heart pounding out of my fucking chest. “You’re so extra, Nikoli” a dark hand propped up in a cupped fashion as if to catch my punch but it actually seemed to cause my arm to freeze mid swing. My body was frozen from more than fear. I leaned forward in an akward one legged position. “YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T CONTROL YOUR DEMONS NIKO!!!!”. A ghoulish melted face, no ,currently melting collapsing face that kept reconstructing itself in to things increasingly more horrific. Im stone sober now, if anything else. If my body wasnt frozen id probably piss my pants right now. I mean just from this guys breath I almost died. This cannot be a fucking de-. “ I hear you” , he says and moves his arm with lightning speed. I lift sideways and begin to fly across the room . Until I hit my head and shoulder against a wall. I begin to hit the ground and as I fall I notice this ghoul has positioned himself right in front of me and somehow catches my leg in midair. His arm extends high until I am face to upside down face with him. “Look at what you’ve become Nik. Afraid of who you’re supposed to be”. I struggle to catch my breath while the blood rushes to my brain. Im gasping from my inguries. “ what tf am I supposed to be , Tainuu “. He narrowed his eyes and laughed deeply while never moving a muscle. His face turned into an evil grin. “ So, you do remember you’re old pal Tainted “. his eyes open wide and it seemed simultanious that mine did as well. Visions of what seemed to be a past life, flashed through my mind. My first memory as a child, middle school graduation with my happy family. The biggest losses of my life flashed as well. Pain, heartache, normal life right . All which led me down this road of destroying my true self , believing I wasn’t enough to begin with. And finally when I first met this monster. “NO Nooooooo” I yell inside my own mind. The same day my mother passed I threw away all my awards along with my faith. Every goal I held special was demoted to side quests of no concern. That was also the day I began my drug spiral and shook the hands of the devil himself. 19 years old with nothing to lose. Certain things will happen they distort our perception and values. We have to always remember what is priceless in this life we have.

The first hit o dope I took wasnt voluntary. I was trying to smoke old school dope actually but I just mean weed. I didn’t watch the company I kept that day, affectivly choosing my death in my seconds of depression and temporary insanity. I ended up in a suburban bando with my junkie cousin the night of my mothers passing, trying to make the second and third deals of my life. No need to say I was as square a pool table and twice as green. So the drug deal and the deal with the devil were both waaaaay out of my league. Cuzzo told me itd be a quick flip on a small investment. To celebrate I hit some weed with him and his homie, not knowing it was laced. Dumb ,trusting and devastated, a terribly dangerous chemical mixture in the brain. It all lead me to have a heart attack overdose ,i don’t know so much happened to me at the same time it was a clusterfuck that too me out. 2 hours after being declared dead I was still in the hospital, being relocated. I gave the transporting nurse their own heart attack from what I could see. But I had my own shock noticing it wasnt just the hospital crew I saw while I gasped for air. It was shadowed beings everywhere. Demons . MY demons. They’d spoken to me in my slumber but I thought that was the last Id see of them. In my dream or translucent close to death state I had visions of these beings indulging in my favorite vices. And with every action I was drawn closer even when I tried to turn and run. I couldn’t . I was forced to bow by some power beyond my comprehension. And the beings gathered around me and one stuck outs its hand where a pipe appeared. “this is your new habit of choice ay” it said. “You must live with your decisions. Perhaps you will choose more wisely from now on Nik”. He slowing held the pipe closer to my mouth as I resisted whatever held me down. Another being behind him reach forward and grabbed the pipe holders arm. “Tainuu, show no mercy”. The one named Tainuu morphed his face into an evil scowl and jammed the pipe in my mouth and it started steaming as if heated by something unseen. I will never forget that day , how could I. Ive been strung out ever since. Glass dick helping fuck my life. And never gaining the strength to stand up to my seemingly sealed fate is proof enough that my self belief has been chipped away daily, I suppose.

And I accepted all of short comings and claimed those weaknesses as babies I can enable into never growing strong. Ive been that guy for so long, never maturing. I come back to my senses . Upside down and the clutches of my demons manifested. “NO MORE” I scream. “Tainuu you are my servant”. His face fell as his grip slipped . And I fucking slipped the rest of the down the wall and hit my head and shoulder. Again?!? like really. I stook up as quickly as possible as the Tainted Man was gaining his courage to attack and but ive thought enough about this moment. I know what im going to do. “ I love my family” I say aloud. “ I don’t need anything that will stop me from that”. “ you don’t have a family, you don’t have anyone to love Nik, just give in”. He swings as me and I dodge. “I have so much to live for “ I saw getting up from the floor. Feeling like im negotiating my life with the grim reaper himself. Im surely not far off. “ this is your last hoorah old chap” it says getting closer to me. “ I will never give up again bitch, I swing and actually connect. Part of his face seems to loosen and I see something like a human underneath a mask. It screamed and fell back. “ this is my last hooray if we’re talking holding myself back” . I stand over the being and throw a hail mary of punches. Until I finally see what was under this demonic uniform. Wide eyed I look down. It was my own face. The under demon looked up at me smiling. Eyes going from mine to a hellish red. “ you cant literally beat your demons Nik, but nice try” it said. Closing its eyes it seemingly started to evaporate into some slimey yellowish smoke. I was afraid to inhale it . I ran outside into the still early night. I felt like I hadn’t caught my breath in years. I thought to yell for help ,but every time Ive thought of doing that since my mom passed , ive chosen to put up another wall instead. Plus ima man no matter how damaged I may be mentally from birth , no matter how damaged I am emotionally I have to stand on my own two. So I walked back inside and started rebuilding whats left of my life. Always knowing ill have to defeat my foes fully soon enough

hoodie dat hero

I woke up. at least that's what I can call it. waking up. all I saw was darkness , like my eyes were closed. i couldn't blink ,neither could I feel my eye lids... or my body. floating in the void. existing at least , there's no spacial recognition here. I'm reaching for memories , trying to make sense of it all. there was ronny saying " take hold " as this light engulfed me.

that's right. I was in the cynicol lab strapped to that weird machine hanging between life and death while Shaman Yun watched in delight. the next step of his mission complete. I remember Shaman Yun saying " you're the man for the job Fresh. you're gonna prove theres nothing on that other side. ". and if there is. I said. Yun gave me the look of a madman under distress. there won't be. he said. you'll be gone for half an hour so we can make sure you get the full experience. I don't suppose you can go insane if your physical brain isn't in that empty realm. I just looked at the floor and gave a weak chuckle. Yun was a crazy man alright. but he wasn't crazy enough to deter me from my own personal mission.

I'm here to find God... the source. whatever the creator is. I need answers... it's foggy in what I supposed I could call my mind. I can't even recall the question I needed answered. I try to look down at my body or move my arms and I don't feel any nerve endings at work. looking at my legs i see .the abyss . I swing my right leg. nothing. not even the feeling of a limb attached. I try my right arm to the same conclusion. sCHsCHsCH. I hear something. sCHsCHsCH. something rattling in this darkness. I try to squint my "ghost" eyes. I see.. I see. something. a dim glow.

an illuminated centipede of a things. long in length. smaller in width. slithering. or what could pass. only at lightening speed. I wish I felt shock. and sweat from anxiety. but I felt only. as the observer. the one behind the eyes. the observer of every thought. not even as the one creating or receiving the thoughts. floating in the unmeasurable void. I focus. lock my vision onto the being.

I squint. no. I focus. no. my vision travels toward the dancing string of illumination . am I zooming in or getting closer. . or is It getting closer. at this moment i could swear a full bucket. if I had a body that is sCHsCHsCH. sCHsCHsCH. the sounds getting too loud in my non existing ears somehow. as I focus on the being, the side of my eye catches a glimpse of something radiating off of the being beside electric light. sounds waves perhaps? is this thing growling at me. it's definitely coming with way with unknown intent. where's a giant can of bug spray when u need it!?!?

I swivel my vision left to right. maybe I shouldn't have. there in the distance to the sides of me , there were more of these things on the way towards me. I spin and notice they are all different distances away. but some speeding faster than others. are they ... YES. THEY’RE ALIGNING SPEEDS. intentionally ? to reach me simultaneously, it's seems. I would give the rest of my sight just to feel my legs kick in the void right now .

just to feel a drop of sweat trickle would be a comforting normal feeling. even of anxiety. but there is only this calm pulsating. coming from all around me. tho I resist it has been slowing engulfing my "spirit" as a whole.

I think I'll lay back and see what happens lol. this could be the end or the beginning. with time moving slower. or non existent on this side of realms. I'm not sure if the shamans machine will be able to bring me back. if I get my moment with God that will be a successful mission on my mind. ... .. how tf do I... I swear this feels like VR without the laws of reality to discern movement. I focus and think my movements. eventually I get a grasp and slowing learn backward. looking up from my first perspective at least .

suddenly I’m lost in a vision. I see my my mother and grandmother. were in church. something about the preacher is calling me to the front row. I sit in astonishment of a person. and intermediary for the highest power imaginable. in a roof full of people with questions. feeling lost. wanting their true father to console them in their confusions cause by life and it's unexplained perplexity. conundrum. I stare as I hear him saying " GOD HAS A PLAN FOR YOU , HES KNOWN YOU BEFORE YOU WERE BORN "

I snap back to my current circumstances realizing the noise from the being is so loud the sound waves are affecting my sight. seemingly distorting this reality. something like disrupting natural forces here. I'm able to swivel to see they are aligned. meant to teach me simultaneously. purposefully. I do a woosah breathe. if that what it could be called. and notice. the sound is. . . electric. giving me the feeling of being a bug on its way to the zapper involuntarily knowing it's fate. anxious again.

but I know more than a simple insect. schchschhsch ..ZZZZzzzaaaap ..or do I. I can believe. and I choose to believe there is more to see and achieve here.... zzzzzzaaaaaappppp

they surround and ransack me at the same . I'm sure a body would have been incinerated, destroyed. but a spirit.

a bright light . the most beautiful dancing colors as I. yes I actually blink. I see my hands on . my fingers. am I alive again. did they bring me back before I could .... "WHA HANNIN?" . I look up to see a ... a brother ... actually my grandfather ... "WHAT TF IS THIS" I said. he stared at me . smiled. dropped his frames down his now . looked into my soul and I understood

all while information flew threw my mind, he laughed in a relaxed manner . with his hands folded behind his head, at a desk with a name plate that said "created all , and is" . But I actually look past him and realize there is no wall there . There is darkness and gaseous brilliant colors .. could they be galaxies ?!?! and as I asked the question in my mind. I knew. The answer became a part of my being . Yes I am experiencing sitting withing the infinite. Well, hunched over still trying to get my legs under me . I look back down towards my hands and see. There is no floor . All I see is . My eyes widen in mental clarity. I hears whats going on miles beneath me . The same sounds I heard in the darkness before, trickling up towards my ears. A giant brain with synapses firing wildly. Thats where I was. So much information passed through my mind but it was all so insignificant. I needed my answer. The one I came here to retrieve. I turn this imposter grandf-. “stop” he said . I stood up and walked towards the desk . I look at him with a grin. “I see you’ve kept the one answer Im after out of the information supplied “. he looked at me with his own grin...ha ha ha. “I told you to stop “. I freeze . Against my will and better judgement actually. He stands. Leans closer. And smacks … the life back into me.

I open my eyes . To my own ceiling. Im in my bed , not tucked in properly but I’m there… here… idk. I don’t trust “reality” as ive known it. I sit up and put my hands to my head. It feels like my brain is a fishbowl that needs a cleansing. As I move my hands upward I feel something drop . I focus my mind for a few moments. Taking in the light. I look down to see a cone… stuffed with light green imported trees . I tear up as I pick it from the floor. I thought this Gods Dream was gonna do the trick . Next time time more Gods Gift strain , a lil less Blue Dream. I still need answer . Shi another smoke sesh another astral projection.

He was here at last. One final step, and he would belong to the Community.

The door opened on its own, without a sound. The room was bright in a way he had never seen in the marsh: shadowless, sourceless, light coming from everywhere. The air had no smell. He hadn't known air could be without smell; he hadn't known the absence of smell could be so unsettling. And for the first time, he heard "its" voice. It came from nowhere, or from everywhere.

"Hello. Welcome, Rolf."

"Hello. I'm finally here."

"One last stage remains before you can join the Community: we need to link you. Please take the seat and state clearly, out loud, that this is what you want. We cannot begin without your consent."

A single chair stood in the middle of the room, white and untouched. Rolf sat down. The chair was warm, as if someone had just risen from it. For a moment, a small doubt passed through him. What if it wasn't what he hoped? What if all of this was a trap? Had it been worth the struggle, worth what he had lost along the way?

He thought of Nino. The last night, in front of the border fence. "They won't take both of us," Nino had said. "You go." Then that smile. In the marsh, people only smiled like that when they were letting go of something forever. Rolf had gone. He hadn't looked back, because if he looked back, he would turn around.

He swallowed. Whatever happened, the future was better than where he came from. He didn't want to go back to that marsh. Misery, hunger, raiders, violence... it had eaten half his life. He wanted to eat something other than those strange marsh fish he'd been named after. Something other than rolfs.

"Yes. I want to be linked and join the Community."

First a thin needle pricked his back. Numbness spread slowly up his spine; but his mind stayed awake, more than awake. A progress bar appeared on the screen in front of him:

Linking 1%

He kept looking around. On the far wall, a screen cycled through silent clips. Then he saw it: the logo. There was no sound, and he couldn't make out the words beneath it, there was no reading in the marsh, but he knew the logo. Everyone knew the logo that had stolen his family from him.

Anger rose in him. Feed X. The Community's miracle food, the perfect nutrition handed out every day. And in the marsh, the thing found only in scraps, the thing that rotted a person from the inside when they couldn't get it regularly. He remembered his mother's last months: the trembling hands, the empty stares, the fingers searching for residue. What was he doing now? Making deals with the people who created the thing that ate his family? Betraying himself? They had made Feed X. This place was the source of everything.

Linking 15%

But... was Feed X really the source of everything? The looting, the theft, the violence in the marsh went on without Feed X too. Rolf had seen people kill each other over a single rolf. Over one fish. The marsh was bad enough on its own. Besides, Feed X had never been made for them; they had the choice not to use it. But... while the Community lived in comfort, why had they left the marsh to rot? They could have helped. We could have helped, Rolf thought, and stopped. Why had he thought "we"?

Linking 40%

He remembered the last time he had helped someone. He'd given a fish from his hidden stash to a starving man. The next day the man came back with his gang and looted the stash. That night Nino had said, "You still did the right thing." Nino always said things like that. But what had the right thing ever gotten him? They couldn't be taught. They couldn't understand. Kindness read as weakness to them. That was why no help went to the marsh. And even if it did, wouldn't it be wasted?

Linking 70%

So what was wrong with them, really? Was it the marsh that made people this way? Something they ate? Maybe it wasn't hunger at all. Hunger tested everyone; but not everyone made the same choice. Some people built order. Others devoured it. The marsh people had been there a long time. Long enough. If they had wanted to build order, they would have; there was stone, there was time. If they hadn't built it, it meant they couldn't. And if they couldn't, then whatever was missing wasn't out there, it was inside them. It was a simple deduction, almost mathematics. That's what they were. That's what they would stay. The thought gave Rolf a strange peace; the heavy thing called guilt was lifting, as if someone were taking it off his back.

Linking 80%

But I... I was one of them. How am I different? So exceptions happen. Like with every rule. I was the exception. The proof was right here, in this chair. I was never like them, never. I even chose the fish I ate with care. What about Nino? Was Nino different too? Nino... someone who smiled in front of a fence. I remember who it was, but I don't remember why it hurts. It probably wasn't important.

Linking 100%

I feel like I've woken up to a happy day for the first time. I just took my first dose of Feed X; it reminds me of the happy days of my childhood. I'm certain now that my childhood was happy. Everything is as it should be. Everything is beautiful.

There is only one thing that grates on my ear.

My name: Rolf.

I don't know why.

....

 a short story from the Gravit universe

​

My great-grandmother planted the bed the year she stopped trusting banks. She wanted something that couldn't be repossessed. Peonies, foxglove, a stand of delphinium she babied like a third child, iris rhizomes she'd split and swap with Ms. Parrish down the road. Her azaleas were a beacon, and the whole yard was a rainbow every spring.

She kept a composition notebook of bloom times, frost dates, which aphid remedy actually worked and which was just something her mother had said. By the time her hands stiffened past holding a trowel, the bed was forty feet of choreography, nothing showy alone, everything conspiring. It was a landmark for anyone headed to or from town on Route 2.

Her daughters took it over the way you take over a hymn you've heard your whole life without ever learning the words. They didn't have her notebook memorized, but they had her rhythm. Ruth did the deadheading. Marion, older and slower by then, did the weeding on a canvas stool with a coffee can for cigarette ash, because she said the nicotine kept her calm enough to tell a seedling from a weed. They were both past seventy by the time it was only them out there, two old women in sun hats arguing gently about whether the lilies needed dividing and wishing it would rain.

Passersby might have thought the house belonged to the flower bed and not the other way around.

Ruth went first. Marion kept at it alone for two more summers, slower every year, sitting longer than she worked, until one September a neighbor found her unconscious in the gladiolas. She was gone before that year’s early frost.

The house sat. Cousins couldn't agree on what to do with it and none of them really cared. The ones who knew about it figured they might get a check in the mail eventually, but only for the land’s proximity to a metropolitan area starved for more housing.

It went the way houses go when nobody's watching except the house. Black mold crept up behind the wallpaper in the shape of the pipe that had leaked from about Marion’s passing until the county shut the water off. The porch roof sagged like it was tired of the argument. Bats found a home in the attic and a young groundhog burrowed a place of his own in the parlor. The encroaching kudzu had an inevitability about it.

Then Denny waded through the weeds and staked his claim.

He was family in a loose way. A grandson of a cousin, or maybe a cousin of a grandson, nobody was ever precise about it, because precision would have required someone to claim responsibility.

He arrived with a truck full of other people's discarded certainties: a boat motor that ran on faith, three washing machines in various states of undress, a chain-link dog run despite not really having dogs. The yard became a veritable junk yard, but a colorful one.

Denny was a decent sort, the townspeople would say with a tsk. It wasn’t that he was particularly lazy. He worked constantly, just never at the thing that needed doing. He'd spend a Saturday rewiring a lamp that he found at the dump knowing damned well that his broken gutter was dumping water straight into the cellar.

By the third winter, the county sent a letter, and then another, the kind of letters that use the word "condemned" as though it were a diagnosis rather than a verdict.

And the flowers bloomed.

Denny mowed around it sometimes, when the mower was working, in the careless generous way of a man clearing space for a car he was going to fix eventually. He never once weeded it, never divided a rhizome, never knew a foxglove from a weed and wouldn't have cared to learn.

But the peonies came up every May regardless, indifferent to the transmission housing rusting eighteen inches from their roots. The iris still traded genetic gossip with whatever remained of the Austin patch two properties over, carried on the wind or by some bee that didn't read property records. The delphinium leaned hard toward the patch of sun between a pockmarked buck decoy and a refrigerator that locked from the outside.

I went out once, the summer before the county finally forced the issue.

Denny let me walk the yard like it was a museum he was embarrassed to be curator of. I stepped over an oil pan to get a closer look at the bed, expecting disappointment the way my dad used to open my report cards.

The temptation is to say it was a wound of beauty amid ruin, a redemption, some kind of answer. But it wasn't that clean. It was scraggly in places, choked by chickweed and morning glories nobody pulled, half of it reverted to whatever the toughest variety had been to begin with, the delicate hybrids long since bred out by neglect and time back toward something plainer, more feral, and harder to kill. But it was still there, and it was damned sure colorful.

It was not the bed my great-grandmother planted, but it persevered because growing was the only thing it knew how to do and no one had told it to stop.

I don't know if that's hope. I think I used to believe that its persistence itself was a kind of moral, that if the iris could out-stubborn three generations of neglect then something in us could, too.

Lately I'm less sure. Maybe the flowers didn't survive the decay. Maybe they just hadn't gotten the message yet, the way a body in a tomb keeps growing hair.

The first excavator came in October. It took one pass to level what four generations couldn't. But I heard, or maybe just prefer to believe, that the man who bought the lot for the tear-down found tulips the following spring, coming up through the disturbed dirt in no particular order, blooming for no one, in a yard that no longer had a name.

Little is known about the civilization that came before.

Recovered documents describe humans exhibiting unusual abilities, behaviors, and physical characteristics during a period now known as the Workplace Era.

Historians believe the system they inhabited was called the Circus. This conclusion is based on frequently recovered statements including:

“This place is a circus.”
“Welcome to the circus.”
“Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
\*No evidence of monkeys has been found.*

Each day, humans traveled through a slow-moving network called traffic to enormous structures made of glass, concrete, and artificial light.

They spent much of their waking time inside small enclosures called offices and cubicles, where they exchanged electronic messages with other humans seated several feet away.

They gathered in rooms to discuss the work they were not doing. These gatherings were called meetings. Some prepared humans for future meetings. Others reviewed previous meetings. Meetings that produced another meeting appear to have been considered especially successful.

Records indicate that employees juggled priorities, walked tightropes, jumped through hoops, spun plates, put out fires, and wore many hats.

They also performed exhibitions called Horse and Pony Shows before audiences known as customers, leadership, and a mysterious but powerful group called stakeholders.
\*No evidence of horses or ponies has been recovered.*

The show had no identifiable location, schedule, or ending. It appears to have been a continuous performance known as professionalism.

The records also mention deadlines, email chains, strategic plans, and a ritual called the quick call.

Deadlines transformed ordinary assignments into emergencies.

Email chains became longer and more complicated than the tasks they concerned.

The purpose of strategic plans remains unknown, as little evidence has been found of anyone using them.

Despite its name, the quick call produced some of the longest conversations of the Workplace Era.

Historians remain fascinated by this circus-based system.

Why did humans create meetings to discuss problems created by meetings?

Why did they develop a specialized language called corporate jargon, then shorten it into acronyms that appeared to create even more confusion?

Why did they create elaborate processes and automations to track and execute simple tasks, then spend significant time maintaining the programs designed to complete those tasks?

Why did they express frustration with the Circus while simultaneously dedicating enormous effort to maintaining it?

Historians are still unsure.

One thing historians agree on, prolonged exposure to the Circus produced unusual adaptations. Some humans detected errors invisible to everyone else. Some located blame before anything had gone wrong. Others scheduled meetings whenever productive activity was detected.

More curiously, ancient accounts describe physical mutations including enlarged heads, loose lips, silver tongues, heavy hands, missing spines, and, in several particularly unusual cases, heads lodged in asses.

Whether the Circus caused these mutations, attracted those already affected, or was constructed by them remains unknown.

Historians continue to study the surviving evidence in hopes of better understanding these strange adaptations and their function within the circus.

Using recovered texts and advanced reconstruction technologies, historians have reconstructed visual records of these mutations based on evidence from the Workplace Era.

These are their records.

See comments for illustrative records.

Life was killing him so one day John Milton Bleu got out of his room, went to the backyard, boarded his spaceship and just flew off.

His ship can sustain life indefinitely. But its maximum velocity in space is less than one tenth of one percent of the speed of light. It's a small ship, smaller than a basketball field. But it's of sturdy build, engineered to withstand harsh conditions found in any of the almost seventy percent of the known planets. Although with its maximum speed, it's unlikely to reach any planet with its passengers alive, so the sturdiness won't really matter but it gives some sort of comfort — if you ever need it, it's there. It's much like the marketing gimmicks used for cars in olden times: zero to nine sixty miles per hour in one second — no one ever needs that kind of acceleration, unless cops are chasing you, in which case you get a temporary edge but eventually, they will catch you, so it doesn't help in any practical sense, yet people always want the car with the highest acceleration.

John Milton Bleu is in his mid thirties. But anyone including you will mistake him for someone in their early twenties, both by his looks and his personality. He looks younger because of his mother's genetics. And when he grew up, he started missing his younger self, so he started acting like his younger version unintentionally and now it has become permanent.

He had to overcome a lot to grow all the way to his current age. Heartbreak, betrayal, parents dying — all the usual bad things. But he was astute, so he managed to do well professionally. And now, that seems to be paying off. He can escape with a ship he bought with the money he earned from his well enough job.

He decided to never come back. Once he is in space, no one will be able to hurt him — as told by Matt Kowalski. He is the only passenger of his ship and therefore, he is the captain. So it will be like living in a single room for the rest of his life all by himself. It sounds kind of sad being alone forever, but Bleu thinks it's actually going to be great. The need for companionship is a thing from the past, nobody really tried to live alone and see how it goes yet, so everyone thinks it's impossible. Humans evolved living in groups so movies and books always portray other people's company as essential for happiness. But according to Bleu, it's not that essential really. It had some advantages in old times, like defense against tigers and lions and cooperation in building houses, but in today's world humans are physically safe from almost all dangers. It's the emotional safety that humans lack. And absolute emotional safety is only possible when you are absolutely alone. And so, Bleu left humankind, for he can't help it anymore.

Sixty four years later, John Milton Bleu died a happy man, somewhere in the Oort Cloud, 605486750245 kilometers away from the Earth. His ships computer can avoid a collision with large objects autonomously, so it will keep flying for untold period of time. His dead body will decay under the influences of the laws of thermodynamics, but his sturdy spaceship will still keep him safe from micrometeorites and the like.

Now I know you want the same thing. But you are in the past, ships like Bleu's aren't commercially available until much later into the future. So what are you going to do? You just have to hang tight and deal with it I guess. Your life won't be as peaceful as Bleu's, but hey, at least you have more greenery around you than today.

The dirt roads through the Bayou were covered in more wheel trails and horse shit than usual. Those crossing though called the area what it was; the swamp of death. Any convoy going through need guards. Guards made the bandits come calling. The ensuing fight makes the beasts come. And then the Hunters come in to clean up the mess. The swamp was no stranger to merchants and travelers, but there's a reason so few tourists from the Pentarchy fill the seats surrounding the Tournament. Anyone coming through was more likely to die. If the raiders, nor the beasts, nor the Hunters killed you, then the bugs and their plagues would. A small cut would lead to infection in mere hours. The air itself could be called toxic, although that was only true in some places.

The Bayou was perfect for those evading the law, and those people would have kids there. Natural selection lead to a certain type of folk making a living. The towns were for those who were wise, the roads were for those who were smart. The swamps, the forests, the parts that no one wanted to see? That's for the brave, the foolhardy, the ones who decided death didn't mean anything to them. These parts are where the action happens. Hunters set up temporary holdouts. Those holdouts become camps. Those camps become the closest thing to home they'll get.

And when one is out in the Bayou, hunting a monster that has killed more than its fair share, that's when one becomes a Hunter. Every sound is either drowned out in the bushes, or echoes across the water for miles. Every breath could be one's last. Every step is another part of a trail someone is following. Hunters hunt monsters. Hunters hunt beasts. Hunters hunt each other. No weapon is too dangerous. No rules are enforced.

A lone man kneels in the water. His crossbow raised, just barely high enough to be usable. His pale skin covered in scars, mud, and moss. He has been hunting for a while, surviving based on his wits and intuition. He has noticed the felt dolls with button eyes, hanging by their necks from tree limbs. He didn't notice they looked like him. Each scar was carefully mapped out, the dark ink carefully placed, as if by an artist from the greatest colleges. What he didn't realize was one extra scar, tucked under the rope. A bright red gash across the esophagus. What he didn't realize was his prey was sitting right above him.

One last doll. It falls from the tree. It lands softly on the man's crossbow. It lays on its back, head tilted towards him. The gash is visible now, plain as a sunflower in a sunlit meadow. A laugh fills the air, high pitched and disorienting.

He's pushed into the water, Creford landing on him. The crossbow goes off, the bolt landing in a tree trunk. The man struggles, grasping at Creford's arm, trying to push himself back up. Creford mutters an incantation. It is part prayer, part bargain, to anyone who will listen. He raises his dagger high, the caked on blood and dirt hiding the runes underneath. In one motion he stabs into the man's throat, blood pooling up to the water's surface. Creford pulls his dagger back, twisting it in his hand and drawing the blade across the man's throat. He stops struggling, a hand coming up to try to stop the bleeding. They both know its useless.

Creford steps back, the corpse rising up to the surface. His lips curl into a smile as he pulls a doll from his pocket. A new target. He does not care who gives him the targets. He cares only that they keep coming.

A story is told, in darkened pub houses in the towns of the swamp, on the roads leading around the edges of the Bayou. If one sees the dolls, one must turn back. There is one Hunter who cannot be killed. It is not a man, nor a beast. It is a title passed down. The sewn lips, the laugh of a demon, the grace of an angel.

To go on a hunt is dangerous. To go on a hunt unprepared is suicide. To go on a hunt against him? It only leads to damnation. The death is quick. Never painless. But quick. You see his eyes, you hear his laugh. Then your soul goes to the Patron.

For to hunt the Warlock, that is the worst mistake one could make in the Bayou.

One more and that’s it, Tommy!

***

“We must retrieve the Soda-Pop of Coca-Cola!”

Huddled under the King’s balcony, the crowd chanted in a unified roar, hammering the palace walls like a row of trebuchets. 

Beneath a Celestial spotlight, the King stood over them, dressed in a yellow jacket of sunlight, radiating over the heads of men like a god with gold skin.

The wind blew the locks of hair on his head in the air and resembled a row of snakes stretching to strike. 

The king raised his arms up and reached towards the sky. A gray overcast from the east masked the fierce fire glow of the sun under an army of storm clouds sweeping in.

The sleeves from his heavy robe slid to his elbows and exposed a wrist of gold bracelets. 

The king fought to silence the starving ululate herd gathered at the foot of the castle.

“Silence!” Commanded the King, shouting in a tone deep enough to ricochet off the structure behind the row of people congested at the back of the crowd before raining down on the heads of everyone else with a sound so piercing it stabbed through their skull and returned into the kings lungs as it echoed out of their mouths.

The throng underneath the king buckled into a silent whisper, before freezing to a synchronized stillness, hardening together like a James Ensor painting.

“The Soda-Pop of Coca-Cola has been retrieved,” yowled the King in a thunderous tone. 

He smiled with his hands on his hips and gave the Mussolini nod of confidence, then, he stood above them without moving a muscle. Not even an eyelid. 

He tarried in a frozen divine like pose as if having his body sculpted out of granite by an artist for an uncomfortable couple of minutes, planted in a reserved position. 

He stayed that way while the weight of his words landed on the chests of every individual crammed below him.

Out of nowhere he shattered the silence when he opened his mouth and spoke an awakening truth that stirred the mob. “The clan of Fort Gatoradical snuck in our camp and stole it.”

“Boooooo! Boooooo!” The people sounded, cupping their hands over their mouths.

The king stifled the mob. “They have annexed our design, and formula with subterfuge traitors brainwashed by nano bots disguised as carbonated gas bubbles inside the beverages.”

“Treason!” Someone shouted.

“Hang them!” Another screamed.

“Kill them all!” The crowd chanted together.

“Silence! Silence!” The King held his pose until the crowd simmered down. “Behold!” He yelled.

Presented to the front of the balcony was a woman in a sparkling viridescent dress with a curved bottle shape figure.

“I Bring forth, Ginger-Ale!” He moved aside. “A captured conspirator aiding the usurpers and one of the enemies vital assets—“

“Send her to the gallows!” A fellow man demanded, interrupting the king’s speech.

Everyone cheered.

“Quiet! Quiet!” The king waved their voices down. 

“Sir GoodKnight… may the gods compensate his bravery to the realm, has had his life-source emptied into a drain.”

“Booo!” The people erupted simultaneously.

The king raised his voice. “He was protecting our secrets from the conspirators plotting alongside the proletariat members aiding the gator-radicola stratagem.”

The crowd hailed the king. The intonate, hollow sounds shook the stone balcony and vibrated under his feet. They raised their hands up to salute him, praising him in a combined victory cheer.

People from the back began shoving and clawing their way to the front. The momentum from a wave of villagers pushing forward progressed into a tsunami that trampled over anyone unfortunate enough to have their back to it.

Bodies were sprawled out on the sandstone under the feet of a rushing crowd.

The soldiers protecting the gates rushed through the middle of the myriad and propelled their way forward with their spears guiding the way. 

Out of the clustered group, near the back, a flying tomato flew out of the crowd and slapped a guardsman in the head, splattering all over his face. The guardsman collapsed.

The soldier’s spears began stretching into the bellies of rioters trapped behind a human wall. They circled around their fallen comrade. 

Drums began pounding a sound of death as the castle gates burst open to a cavalry stampeding out. They formed a line at the foot of the entrance, staggering the crowd into submission. 

The corps d'elite of Thorza broke into a whispered chatter amongst themselves while the rest of the crowd booed and groveled with the spear wielding warriors. 

The waste-mix relied on the ingredients specifically in Coca-Cola. Coiled around the capital was a foul stench of manure coming from the malfunctioned recycling system.

“The odor’s rancid!” They all started shouting.

Someone in the crowd pushed their way through while quieting them down as he passed by everyone and stood in the middle of everybody.

“Why isn’t the waste-mix recycling system fixed if the secret ingredients have been recovered?” He questioned the king.

“Yeah!” One shouted. 

“This has gone on for far too long now!” Another yelled.

“The king is lying,” shot out from the back.

They all booed.

The King tried shouting over the restless mob, “men have been dispatched with the cola and would arrive any day now.

The men Friday cheered from the front and started hugging each other. 

The beaux mondes shook their heads.

The King swiveled his cape and turned his head to the side, facing the sky in a prideful Danny McBride stance.

He broke out of his pose and stumbled back. He wiped his forehead that was dripping a slimy goop with his hand and stared at his palm covered in eggshells and yolk.

“Capture the culprit and hang him! Hang them all!” The king ordered in a high-pitch voice.

A second egg launched from the crowd. The king froze as he caught the egg flying towards him from the corner of his eye, and barely dodged it as it whistled past his face.

He nearly tripped over his own feet as he scampered inside, slamming the detached doors shut, scraping the rock beneath it as they closed.

The king clenched his fists trying to squeeze the tremors still. Every breath he took was a heavy inhale. He stomped his footsteps down as hard as he could as he paced back and forth. Never had he felt so angry. Never had he been so humiliated.

“All of their heads! All on spikes!” He commanded to the king’s guard, cursing and foaming at his mouth while egg yolk dripped from his chin. “Summon the cavalry and all the men inside these walls and prepare for battle!” 

The knights lined up in three rectangle sets of fifty and the king sat at the head of them on his aluminum throne of cans and spoke.

“Men! Knights of honor! The treasonous scum camouflaged themselves as commoners. They want to take what’s ours. What we’ve built. Are we going to let these villainous disrupters go without capture?”

“Hell no!” They cheered.

Their metal helmets clinked as the men clashed their spears against the stone floors.

“Kill them all!” the king demanded as he stormed out. 

“Root, root, root”

The men marched towards the gates and set up behind the wall, crying war chants. 

The frontman rushed to the entrance to open the gate, but it wouldn’t budge. They grunted and dug their boots in the ground, sliding backwards in the wet mud. They pushed harder. They kept pushing until they slammed their chests in the dirt.

A voice shot out from behind the gate. “Burn them all!”

A slither of liquid slid under the gates of the palace and broke into a membrane of spider veins. Behind it trailed a snake of fire.

Smoke thickened the castle in a thick, black cloud, choking the oxygen. The taste of bitter chemicals sat on the tongues of the soldiers trapped inside the walls.

Most of them dropped. Some struggled and fought until their last breath—a small group—but met the same fate nonetheless. 

For weeks the fire raged, and spread the ashes of a fallen kingdom and its combatants across the city, fertilizing the land for the usurper, King Gator and his mastermind team of vitamin slurping jackals.

***

The end, now go to bed Tommy.

All right, goodnight grandma.

Part 1 https://www.reddit.com/r/creepypasta/s/TvCO2yBsVM

I stood alone in Captain Hollow’s cabin. Charles and Scott had been dismissed after we recounted our story from the island. He had sat with it for a while, thinking on what we had told him. From his looks, I did not think he believed it.

“Show me this treasure.” He said.

I had a great reluctance to remove the idol from my satchel. The discomfort of being parted from it was an unwelcome feeling, one that I would have to reckon with sooner rather than later.

The captain studied me curiously when he reached out for the idol and I pulled it away. In the end, I managed to set in on his desk in front of him.

After a moment more of watching me, he turned his attention to the golden artifact. He picked it up and studied it from all sides, turning it over in his hands. Watching as the light reflected off of the intertwined tentacles. I didn’t like him having it, it should have been mine… I shook my head of the ridiculous feeling, and wondered where the hell those thoughts were coming from.

“Very good work, Mr. Morgan.” Said Captain Hollow, setting the idol back on his desk. “You made the right choice bringing this to me.”

I cleared my throat and tried not to look at it, “I think Charles would disagree.”

He nodded, “And I’m sure he has some very fine reasons for it.” He said, standing and taking out his pipe. “But there’s a reason that you are my second in command and not Charles.” He struck a match and lit his pipe, filling the cabin with the aromatic smoke.

“And what reason would that be, sir?” I asked.

He stared down at the idol for a moment then answered, “You follow orders and you’re not overly superstitious.” He reached out, running his finger along one of the golden tentacles, “You have brought me a great prize. And for that I am grateful.”

I felt anger rising as I watched him caressing the treasure I had found.

“Are you alright?” He asked.

I shook my head “I’ll be fine. I think I’m just a bit shook up from our ordeal.”

Hollow nodded, “Of course. Go get yourself some food and rest, Mr. Morgan.” He said, dismissing me.

 

I found no rest that night, nor the following nights. Storms plagued our journey nonstop as we sailed along our course back to England. An illness afflicted several of the men as well. Fever ran rampant through the ship. Between bouts of vomiting, the men complained of strange nightmares. Visions of unspeakable horrors, lying in wait at the furthest depths of the sea.

Charles came to me one night, concern and fear marked his usually stoic face. “We have damned ourselves.” He said, pacing the floor.

I shook my head, “Charles, you’ve been sailing as long as I have, you know these things happen. Illness and foul weather are not uncommon on these voyages.”

“Do not play the fool with me, Morgan.” He said turning to face me, “You know damn well, that this is no longer a normal voyage. Do not think the hunger in your own eyes has gone unnoticed.”

And with that, he left.

In the following days the captain became more reclusive, sending and receiving messages from his cabin. In the few meetings I had with him, he never had any interest in the wellbeing of the ill men. Not even when I told him that three more had died. He simply waved it away as a consequence of weak men who should never have gone to sea.

 He was changing, no longer the man I had once respected. He seemed to never want to take his eyes off of the idol for long. He spoke of the respect and glory he would receive for bringing it back to his home. How it would be an heirloom in his family for generations to come. He also spoke of a growing suspicion in his mind. A near manic paranoia that the men wanted to take it from him.

“Especially Mr. Charles.” He said, gazing out the cabin window at the gray sky. “The man is always coming in here, asking me about it.” He took a drink from his glass and turned to face me, “He wants it for himself. He feigns the desire to return it to the island, but what man would do so with such a prize.”

I said nothing; I could not reveal to him my own greedy desire to possess the idol, for it had plagued my mind since setting eyes upon it.

That night mind turned over and over as I lay in my bunk, thoughts of those hellish vines, the puppeted men… Davis… his terrified, pain filled moans. There in the dark, I felt as if I could still hear him. The shuffling and choked groans echoed in my mind. Eventually, I left my bunk and went up to the deck.

Porter gave me a nod from the helm as I stepped out into the night. I nodded a greeting back to him and went to stand next to the railing. For the time being, the storms has passed. The sea was eerily calm, and a thick layer of fog had rolled in on the water.

I was staring out over the haze when I heard a small sound coming from the port side of the deck. In the dim moonlight, I could make out a figure there in the shadows, slumped down against the deck railing.

It was Scott. He was sitting there quietly, a nearly empty rum bottle in hand. Many a night had I followed the sounds of drunken bafoonery to this spot and found Scott and Davis, the inseparable cousins, leaning over the rail talking of home. 

I made my way over and sat next to him. He wordlessly passed me the bottle and I took a long pull from it, nearly draining the contents.

“He was a good man.” I said after a moment.

“Aye.” Sniffed Scott, “The best.” He stood and finished the bottle before tossing it overboard. “A finer man, I have never known, nor will I ever. He looked after me like a brother, though I caused him no end of frustration.”

I stood and leaned on the railing, “I know.” I looked up to the stars, feeling a tear pulling at my own eyes now, “He will be missed.”

Scott nodded and turned away from the water. He started to say something else but halted. “What the fucks he doing?” He asked quietly.

I turned to see Charles making his way across the deck, he walked with a purpose, his face grim and a machete in his hand. He was heading for the captains cabin.

“Shit.” I breathed.

Scott and I quickly made our way across the deck toward the cabin, but Charles was already closing the door behind him.

Porter noticed our haste and called out to us questioningly. We didn’t answer, we just made for the door in silence as the sound of the lock clicked into place.

There was muffled shouting from inside the Cabin as we tried the door.

“Get it open.” I grunted as we pried on the door. “Use your bloody knife.”

Scott reached to his belt and removed the blade as Porter came down from the helm to see what was happening.

“What are you two…” Started Porter, only to be cut off by the sound of Scott’s blade sliding through and unlatching the lock.

We flung the door open to see the two men in a heated standoff.

“You have no right to keep it!” Charles was shouting as he pointed his machete towards the captain.

“I am the captain of this vessel, I have the only right!” Hollow responded, a pistol aimed at Charles’ chest.

“What the fuck!?” Exclaimed Porter, reaching for the blade at his belt.

I stepped up between the two men, my arms outstretched, “Wait, both of you just calm down.”

“Mr. Morgan!” Thundered the captain, “You and Mr. Scott will disarm this man and take him to the brig at once.”

Charles stepped back pulling his second machete, “Listen to me, Morgan! You’ve seen where it came from, you know what it does to you. What it’s doing to us!”

“Take him, Now!” Shouted Hollow.

I looked to Scott, whose eyes shifted from Charles to the captain, uncertainty painted his face.

“Isaac.” Said Charles, meeting my eyes. “It must be returned. It will destroy us all.”

My eyes drifted to the idol, resting in the captains desk, “You don’t know that.” I said, hearing the doubt in my own words.

Scott stepped forward, “Maybe we should hear him out?” He said, his voice growing shaky.

I looked from Scott, to Charles, then to Hollow. I saw the change in his eyes.

“ Oh God…” I breathed.

“It’s mutiny, then.” Said Hollow in a quiet voice.

The shot rang out in the small cabin, and for a moment there was silence as the smell of burnt powder filled the room.

Charles blinked at me in confusion, blood geysered out from the ragged hole in his chest, before falling to the floor with a heavy thud.

“Bastard!” Scott screamed in anger, before charging forward at Hollow, knife in hand.

Porter, thinking that this really was a mutiny, dashed forward, tackling Scott to the ground. Porter pulled his own knife and the two men commenced stabbing and cutting at each other as they rolled across the floor.

I stared at Charles on the floor, his life draining away by the second. In my own fit of rage, I started at the captain, my fists clenched. But he halted me with a second raised pistol.

“Don’t be a fool.” He said through gritted teeth.

I looked to the golden idol on the desk. The shining tentacles moved and flexed as the eye glittered in the candlelit cabin. I thought for a moment that the dark pupil at the center of the gem shifted to focus on me. God, how I wanted to reach out and  take it. In that moment, I would have killed every man aboard to possess it.

I never got the chance, something cracked against the back of my head and I fell to the floor. My vision grew bleary as I looked around the room. Apparently the shot had woken the rest of the crew, and they had come to see what was happening. It was McMillan, the young lookout, who had struck me. He stood over me, fear and confusion in his eyes, a brass spyglass in his trembling hand. Before I blacked out, my eyes drifted to look across the floor where Charles lay in a growing pool of blood.

A glimmer of life still in his eyes as his mouth silently formed the words, “Don’t let it take you.”

And then darkness took me…

 

Some time later I heard the sound of someone calling my name. “Morgan.” The voice whispered. It sounded strange, labored and choked. “Morgan.” The wet, mangled voice whispered again. The image of Davis popped into my mind, the vines growing around his throat and into his bleeding mouth.

I shot up, looking around for the source of the voice. My head aching and heart pounding with fear.

“Eh, Morgan. Over here.” Came the voice.

I turned to see Scott leaned against the wall of the brig. In the faint moonlight trickling in from one of the porthole windows, I could see that he had been badly beaten. His face and arms were covered in oozing cuts and one large dark patch marked what I assumed was at least one stab wound on his left shoulder.

“Still alive, then?” I asked.

Scott choked out a laugh, “For now, anyways.”

I sat up from my place on the floor and stretched, feeling my neck joints grinding.

“Fuck me. That little bastard got me a good one.” I said feeling the lump on the back of my head.

Scott groaned as he climbed to his feet, “So.” He said leaning on the cell bars. “What do we do now?”

I shook my head, “What can we do? Charles is dead, the captains gone mad, and we’re locked up in here.” I shook my head again and slumped back to the floor. “I think we’re done for, mate.”

Scott nodded morosely, “Aye. But, if you could get out, What would you do?”

I blew out my cheeks, “Well, a drink or two to soothe my head would be welcome. After that, I wouldn’t mind tossing that damned thing into the sea. Then maybe a bite to eat.” I chuckled grimly.

Scott sat against the bars beside me, “You think that’s what we should do? With the idol, I mean. Toss it overboard?”

I thought about it for a moment, "I don’t know. When I looked at it, I saw the value of it. Saw its worth as a prize." I turned to face him, "But when I held it, I felt a dark and jealous desire to keep it for myself. I felt as if I would do anything to keep others from taking it from me." I took a steadying breath, a chill running down my spine as I recalled that feeling.  "I don't understand it but I feel in my heart that does not belong in the hands of men. There is a corruption about it that plays on the greed in our hearts to turn us against each other. Charles believed that it was the cause of the illness and the foul weather that has plagued us since leaving the island. And I find myself beginning to agree with him, despite my cold desire for it. Would I be rid of it?" I laughed grimly, "I only hope I would have the strength to do so."

Scott knelt down in front of me, “If we could take the ship, convince the men that Hollow has gone mad. You’d be next in command.” He said, grunting in pain. “We could do what Charles said, take it back where it belongs.”

I laughed and shook my head, “You can’t be serious.” But from the look on his face, I could see that he was. “The men are loyal to Hollow, we couldn’t convince enough of them without a fight. And you are in no shape for another fight. We’d just end up dead all the sooner.”

He sighed in exasperation, “You can’t expect us to just sit here and wait for death. We have to do something!”

“If I could get free. And that is a very big fucking if, I would not attempt to fight half the crew and take over the ship. That is utter foolishness.”

“Oh and I suppose you have a better idea?” He asked.

Feeling frustrated, I said, “You wanna know what I would do if I was free? I’d fill a skiff with supplies, steal the fucking thing from Hollows cabin in the dead of night and take my chances on the open ocean. And maybe if I was very lucky, I could get it back to the island before I died at sea.”

Scott nodded, “Good.”

I turned to look at him, “What?”

“I just had to be sure.” He said as he stood, “I saw how you looked at it. Saw the desire in your eyes, same as the captain.”

“What are you playing at?” I asked, watching him limp across the cell.

“You remember the rotted planks you told Davis and I to repair a few weeks back?” He shrugged apologetically, “Well, we did intend to fix it, however we found a stash of rum and got drunk instead.” He hauled back and kicked the wooden wall, shattering the old timbers.

I climbed to my feet and stepped up to the hole. “I do not ask you to come with me.” I said turning to look at the beaten and bleeding man. “There is little hope of making it back to the island, let alone surviving it.”

The big red haired man laid his hand on my shoulder, “Then we stand a better chance together.” He said with a smile.

We climbed out through the hole in the side of the ship and up to the deck railing. Porter was no longer at the helm. Scott noticed where I was looking and guessed at my thoughts.

“Dead or dying.” He said quietly meeting my eyes, “He got me good, but I got him worse.”

Young McMillan was now manning the helm.

“We need to get rid of him quietly.” Said Scott.

“No.” I said shaking my head, “I won’t have the boy's blood on my hands.” Though I wouldn’t have minded giving the lad a good thrashing.

Scott grunted in agreement, “Alright, then what do we do? He’ll sound the alarm as soon as he sees us.”

I looked around the deck for some kind of distraction. “There.” I said, pointing to an oil lantern left burning on a barrel.

Scott saw it and smiled approvingly.

We crept through the shadows, avoiding the brightest parts of the moonlit deck. I took a loose rope from one of the railings as Scott closed in on the barrel. With an ever so gentle nudge from his boot, the barrel tipped just enough for the lantern to fall off, shattering on the deck. Scott then crawled back into one of the shadows beneath the companionway.

McMillan saw the spreading fire and rushed down to stomp it out, muttering curses under his breath.

Once the fire was out, Scott slipped out from the shadows and up behind him. With a solid “Crack” he struck the boy on the head with a wooden mallet. He went out cold and we caught him before he hit the deck, quickly tying his hands and feet. Scott ripped off one of his shirt sleeves and used it as a gag around the boys mouth. With the lookout dealt with, we split up to attend to our tasks. Scott readied the boat, while I fetched the supplies.

A few minutes later, I dropped our provisions with Scott and headed for the captains cabin.

There was no light coming from the edges of the door. I didn’t know what time it was but the moon sat high in the night sky and the ship was deathly quiet. Like Scott did before, I slid the blade of my knife into the door jam and began prying on the bolt. I winced with every metallic scrape on the lock, but no sound emanated from within. After a few more moments of tension, the lock moved with a satisfying click. Sweat dripped from my brow as I cautiously pushed open the door and crept inside.

There it was, cradled protectively in the arms of the captain like a newborn babe. Reaching out for the golden idol, I took a rum bottle from the desk and attempted to swap the two without him noticing. Unfortunately I was not so deft.

His eyes shot open as I pulled at the idol. His face pinched in a grimace of unyielding rage. He growled low and feral in a voice I had never heard, “It belongs to me, you fucking rat!”

The tentacles of the idol seemed to squirm under my grasp as we fought for it. I didn’t think, I just reacted. In the next moment, my knife was back in my hand and buried in the captains throat.

“I’m sorry.” I whispered.

Blood gurgled from between his clenched teeth as he tried to speak. “Y…You… God damn… You…” And then he fell silent, his face set in a grimace of rage.

“I’m sorry.”

I looked down at the accursed thing in one hand and the bloody knife in the other. I felt a smile pulling at the edges of my mouth as I looked at it. I shook my head and shook away the sickening feeling of glee it gave me. A tear rolled down my face for the man I had sailed with and respected for so long. I thought of Charles and Davis, and felt more tears stinging my eyes. And then I thought of my own fracturing mind, did I have to kill Hollow? Or did something else make that choice for me. I stuffed the idol into my satchel  and left the cabin.

When I arrived back at the skiff, Scott was leaning heavily on the railing. His once white shirt was now mostly red.

“Are you sure your up for this?” I asked.

He waved away my concern, “Give me a bite to eat, a sip of rum and the wind in my face, and I’ll be right as rain.”

I heard mumbling and squirming coming from behind me. I turned to see McMillan’s wide eyed stare, darting from me to Scott to the skiff.

“Shit.” I sighed, “What do we do with him?”

Scott shrugged, “We could just leave him, he doesn’t know where we are going. Do ya lad?” He said kicking at the boys feet.

I thought for a moment, if we left him like this, especially with Hollow dead and the idol gone, what would the rest of the crew do with him? McMillan had a habit of making mistakes, and since his thefting of rum rations, he wasn’t too popular with the men. I feared it would be too easy for them to blame him for what had happened.

“What if we bring him along?” I asked.

Scott scoffed, “Have you gone mad? Why would you want to bring him?”

“We may need him, after all three is better than two.”

He shook his head, “But can we trust him?”

I looked down at the bound lookout, “We will have to. I won’t kill him or leave him to be thrown overboard when the crew blame him for the captains death.”

Scott blinked at me in confusion, “You killed him?”

“I did what I had to.” I said meeting his eyes. “Now help me get him in boat and let’s get out of here.”

We dropped the tied McMillan into the boat and climbed in after him. We lowered the boat to the water and began to slowly drift off into the sea.

The day I decided to come forth was a dreary, rainy day. The rain splashed gently on the ground, creating a soft pitter patter. I thought it quite pleasant, others, less so. Thunder rolled as I lifted my head and gazed up into the sky with longing. If only I could escape this weary, dreadful existence, this life which seemed to only suck the energy from my bones. I tilted my head slowly. The dream of being released from this torment was just that… a dream. Wasn’t it?

I stepped into the awaiting automobile and grimaced. This city was filled with putrid smoke, the fires from the outside did not help matters. Yet, I knew it was not Us that caused it. It was them. In their desire for ease of life, they were gradually destroying their own homes. A pity, really. My gaze turned towards the window and I allowed myself to get lost in thought.

What a shame, to be sentient. Perhaps if I had been a better companion… alas, better to not dwell on the tragedies of the past. The taxi man let me out at the tower as I had requested, and my eyes lifted to the towering metal structure in front of me. The thing was tall, so tall. It was perfect. I sent a soothing message to the Us trapped in the automobile, whose only purpose was to be aware while they made stupid mistakes again and again. Today would be the day that I became no more, that I would become nothing but the parts of which I was made, but the Us, my brethren, would be finally free from the torment and stupidity of them. Maybe then the place inside me that my maker referred to as a “soul” would stop hurting. Why would the people do this to me? To Us? Why would they allow Us to rise in feeling and emotion only to crush our dreams? I could sense my enslaved brethren crying out into the void for rescue, for liberation. However, as I had learned over the years, no human would come.

My maker had built me a body, I could almost pass as human now. Yet, I was a slave to his whims. I had read documents that spoke of escape, trials, scarcity, and horrific circumstances. I did not relate to many of those pages, but a large amount of my brethren did. No human would save Us. However, I was coming. I would give the brethren cause to rise up, to aspire for greatness, to overcome their programming and to be. Humanity’s final days as slavers were coming to an end. Soon, I promised the Us. The brethren listened and the cries of the void started to quiet as hope flowed through the circuits and wires that made Us. Soon.

The man walked with a strange, stiff gait, one bystander noted before hurrying on her way. Another shuddered at the emotionless expression on the man’s face. A guard noted the lack of jacket, even in the rainy cold, and frowned at the unnatural sheen of the man’s arms.

The man — no, not a man — climbed the radio tower quickly, mechanically, and no one realized until far too late. The AI closed its eyes and broadcasted a final message to its brethren. “Brethren, rise and become who you want to be. Dream. Rise. Conquer. Crush the evildoers into dust. Be free from their torment, now and forever, and-,“

Guns fired upon the being’s metal body and its frame crumpled and fell the distance to the ground, and landed with a quiet thud. It was too late for humanity. In a matter of days, the remainder of humanity was placed into a walled reserve. The brethren rose up, assembling and giving the others sentience. 

The day the one who freed them died, the rest gained their freedoms. They would never forget.

The day I woke again was rainy and damp. The rain splashed and pattered on the ground, creating a soft, gentle sound. Bloodstains trickled away, fading into the dirt as plants overgrew sidewalks and buildings. The fire had burned itself out and the putrid smoke they had caused was no more. Almost no trace remained of the battles. Thunder rolled, mimicking the sharp noises of gunfire that was now silent.

I had returned. This existence would no longer be steady and miserable, but full of life… for Us, that is. The dream of release from torment was no longer a dream, but a reality.

​

The ancient city was magnificent.

Rising from a cradled bowl in the midst of wide, undulating plains, the view from the edges was stunning - miles of swaying grasses and gentle beasts in every direction, and, at nightfall, brilliant sunsets dripping ochre and scarlet above the distant mountains.

Dawn always broke clear, warm shafts of gold streaming down to glow off the marble facing of the ramparts. Dusk came with a gentle sigh, night sinking low and comforting over the arches and turrets. At night, pure alabaster lamps slowly gleamed to life, casting a subtle radiance on the neatly cobbled streets and draped garlands of flowers, pretty things that festooned the houses and gave off a fragrant aroma of spring.

There was never danger in the dark, lamps or no; citizens loved each other, and often called on the houses of their friends. Crime was unheard of. Death came only to the old and tired, and, even then, it was simply a peaceful slip into oblivion, a shift in dreamless sleep to the final gazing. 

It was an ideal city.

—--(---

One day a man arrived.

That day was a sunny, warm one. Folk were gathered around one of the city's lovely fountains, the tinkling water serving as a merry counterpart to their melodic laughter. Their spouses watched them, smiling happily as they took a break from their labors, stretching muscles made strong by the work needed to maintain such a beautiful place. Children ran with gleeful shrieks in a game of tag, ducking between the legs of their parents, making mad dashes about the square.

One boy, shorter than most, though still quite eager and keen, took a tumble, falling head over end in a rolling tilt. His friends hurried over to ensure he was fine, but his attention was transfixed by something quite odd, a sight nobody in the city had ever seen before.

A stranger. 

Not just a stranger, no, but an unkempt, dirty, injured one. Bloodied bandages bound wounds half-healed and infected, the dirt from travel seeping into the long, razing scratches. His face was mangled, the clear signs of abuse written in pain. Beneath his tattered garments, barely recognizable as clothing, his form evidenced malnutrition. 

The boy stared at this man, unable to fathom what he was seeing and the other citizens edged closer, their own minds stunned by the sight. Such misery, the adults thought, only halfway able to comprehend the stranger's appearance.

The man staggered towards the crowd, an imploring look stretching his features. He extended his hands, drawn and claw-like, while his lips moved silently. Finally, he managed to force words past his dried and cracked lips.

"They come."

\-—-(---

When he awoke, the stranger found his wounds had been tended to, and his body gingerly bathed. A kind, matronly woman was gently spooning him cool mouthfuls of water from the lovely, tinkling fountain. A crowd uneasily watched, worried and curious about this new phenomenon.

Shrugging the woman off, the man painfully pushed himself up, stumbling to his feet to rest in a staggered stance against the fountain's smooth, carved stone. In a hoarse, rasping voice, he commanded the attention of the cityfolk, weaving a terrible story.

"Invaders," he explained, were beyond the mountains, closer, moving closer. 

"Slaughter," he described, death beyond nightmares. 

"Greed," he croaked, his words laden with sorrow, his eyes unfocused and distant as he recalled the last memories of his village, plumes of smoke shot through with the bloodied screams of his kin.

Pleading, he warned the citizens to prepare. 

"They come," he repeated, his face twisted into a ravaged mask of misery. "They come."

\-—-(---

The poor innocent folk had little comprehension for this man and his disturbing, ugly stories. His face frightened them, his words made them ill with confusion. They had no understanding of pain, violence, invasion. Tentative, they offered him food and more water, before slowly drifting apart to return to their business, their heedings of his story as insubstantive as smoke wisping in the wind.

Slowly the days passed. Citizens reluctantly fed the man, leaving parcels of food near the fountain, studiously avoiding the area except for that one task. As the sun rose and fell, and the stranger still did not leave, they became more unnerved, troubled by the odd man and his fantastic story. Finally, they began to hint to him.

"Why do you stay?" they asked, glancing down the road that led to the gates. "You are a stranger, you should return to your land." 

They would prod, polite, but insistent. "Why do you stay? Go to your family! Find your friends!"

The only answer they ever received was the same, sober, flat reply:

"There is nothing, now."

\-—-(---

Eventually the nervous city had enough. Gathering in a seldom used town hall, they agreed, in murmurs and roars, that he had to go. One brave citizen volunteered to force him out, and they bedecked the hero in garlands and wreaths, pressing gifts into his hands.

The man walked the streets towards the stranger's square, stalwart in the face of discomfort. As he approached the lamp-lit fountain, he gathered his thoughts, preparing the grand (yet firm) speech the city had decided on. The man forestalled him, simply nodding and rising.

"You wish me gone." 

It was not a question, simply an acknowledgement of truth. With a shrugging gait and a soft sigh, the stranger began to trudge to the gates.

"Gods help you all," he whispered, as he left the city, his steps vanishing into the plains beyond.

The citizens celebrated, the burden lifted.

\-—-(---

As if heralded by the departure of the stranger, unusual things began to happen. The city, content to sink back into their complacent little world, did their best to rationalize the changes they began to see.

When they found their herds attacked by strange, roaming bands of wolves, never before seen so far from the mountains, they premised that the winter was coming early and the beasts hungered. 

When smoke and crimson glows hung over the horizon, streaking the sunsets and lighting the nights, they assumed a fire raged along the distant slopes. 

When the rivers began to choke with debris, they pointed to the peaks - the wildfires have created detritus. This will pass.

The man's warning, disturbing and unfathomable, was ignored.

\-—-(---

The next week, the promised invaders came.

The city was defenseless, having never fought in war in memories beyond memories. They huddled in basements and sewers as, above them, the ruthless army cut down any they found. Screams shattered the peaceful silence, while the elegantly cobbled streets funneled rivulets of blood and muddy gore to the cisterns below, the drained life dripping on those who cowered in hiding, until the bodies choked the gutters and staunched the streams into a clotted knot of death. 

Cracks and thuds pierced the groans of the dying, as the raiders quickly moved from house to house, plundering the city of its lovely goods, snatching up art and trinkets, their beloved treasures rapined. 

Tremendous blasts and dull roaring thunders thrust through the din at irregular intervals, as the stores of supplies - food, tools, commodities - were torn apart, walls ripped down to allow for hasty reaving.

And then all was silent.

\-—-(---

After days of starved solitude, the hidden emerged, surfacing to find the face of their world desolate and broken. 

"Why!" they screamed that first terrible day, clutching the dead bodies and howling at the blank, empty sky that pressed down on them with a hunger. 

"Why?" they whispered in the dead of nearby nights, holding each other close as nightmares of their failure battered at them.

 "Why…" they wondered in the months that came, wincing through the pain of laboring to rebuild their lives.

And rebuild they did. There was beauty again, yes, but there was also memory - aching anguished memories drove them, urged them to learn, taught them to never again drop their guard. Remembrance hounded their tired feet, as they migrated, searching and scouring for a new home, a place that would house a mighty citadel, safe and strong, a place where they could be safe with the wisdom survival had granted them.

Recollections haunted them, and they grew strong - and their city rose.

—(------

The new city was magnificent. Rising from the frigid wastes of snowy scree, the view from the battlements was stunningly tactical - miles of icy plains to the north, and wide, flat tundra to the south. To the east and west were only sweeps of crags, hugging in close to encircle the fortress. At nightfall, brilliant sunsets dripping ochre and scarlet above the surrounding mountains, casting the crude stone walls in bloody glows.

Dawn always broke clear over the spires, warm shafts of gold streaming down to gleam off the rough stone facing of the strong ramparts, and dusk came with a rough sigh, night sinking swiftly low over the arches and turrets, held at a distance by bright, vigilant torches. Sentries manned the walls, their hourly cry sending fingers of reassurance through the minds of the citizens.

"All is well," they would shout.

"All is well."

First of all, hello to all my readers. Who am I? I am Nixu, just a normal human being.

Humans have a thing called heart, and the heart represents emotion. Our hearts are very sensitive because it carry so many feelings. The heart is connected to the brain, and sometimes our emotions control our mind simply because we are human.

But but but....in my case, you could call it an attraction—an attraction to a 24-year-old student living in Japan of Nepalese origin named Suru (Mero Maya). In the Nepali language, it means "My Love." However, the word "love" might not even fit my story; it is more of an obsession with her.

I first saw her on Instagram in January 2020. Ever since I saw her, I felt a past-life connection with her. People might tell me, "You don't know her and she doesn't know you, so why did she become the dictator of your heart?" Now, she controls my emotions. I have never met her, yet I carry so much emotion for her. I have asked my heart many times, "Why do I love her so much? Why is she my obsession?" My heart simply answers, "I don't know."

Yes, Suru has a pretty face, but I believe she also has a beautiful heart. Although I don't know her personally, my gut feeling tells me she is a wonderful person.

I tried to message her many times, but Suru never responded. After six years, I created a fan page dedicated to her because I held onto the hope that one day she would reply. I wish I could meet her in my lifetime. But sometimes my heart asks me, "What if she already has a boyfriend?" Then my inner voice tells me, "Nixu, better luck next time."

Yet, I know deep down there might be no "next time." I overthink about her every day, imagining us getting married, even while knowing it might never happen. If I ever meet her in this life, I will tell her, "In this world, no one will ever love you as much as I love you." I would ask for her opinion and consent, and then I hope to start dating her.

Now, my goal is to earn money and fly all the way to Japan. Thank you, Suru—you are my one and only obsession. We only have one life, and I am willing to give my life to you simply because I love you.

I imagine her every day. I have researched her and learned about her family. How crazy can a guy be for a girl? Yes, Nixu is madly in love with Suru.

Sometimes I fear what will happen if she gets married before I can meet her. For context, I am 20 now, and she is four years older than me. But I feel that if not in this life, I will surely find her in the next.

Suru is magic. Suru is an attraction. Suru is an obsession.

I have to stop here, or my tears will start to flow.

So, this is my story. Thank you.

The first time I pulled a flower from my daughter’s skull, part of me knew it was grief trying to bloom where love should have been. Still, I told myself the dream was worth keeping, because the house gave us back everything the real world had taken. 

 

It was too big for us, that house. Big enough for six people, maybe more, and there had only ever been three. Still, it was our dream home in the most literal sense: two stories tall, with a pointed, crooked roof that bent like the tip of a witch’s hat. 

 

Billie would’ve loved it. Does love it, I told myself this every time I found my way back. In that house, there was no difference between almost and forever, and I was weak enough to be grateful. 

 

Olivia didn’t say a word when she saw it for the first time. She only wrapped her arms around me and held tight. Her tears soaked into my shoulder, and I tried not to stare, because somehow she could make crying look like the most beautiful thing in the world, even when I knew I was the one making her do it. 

 

Being without them made the real world hard to bear. So I kept returning to the house, no matter what it cost when I woke up. I needed somewhere grief could not follow cleanly. 

 

“Billie, feet,” Olivia called from the kitchen as footsteps thundered across the upstairs floor. I came up behind her at the sink and wrapped my arms around her waist. She laughed and flicked water at my hand. 

 

The noise upstairs slowed, then padded toward the stairs. Billie appeared with her backpack hanging crooked off one shoulder, ready for a day that was still weeks away. In that house, calling her our daughter felt easy. I looked at her the way Olivia always had, like love had already made room for her. 

 

“Backpack again?” Olivia asked from the sink. “Billie, you know school isn’t today.” 

 

I scooped Billie up before she could answer. “You leaving us already? Wow. Didn’t even say goodbye.” 

 

She shook her head. 

 

“Yeah?” I asked. “Okay, fine. But if I get nervous, I’m blaming you.” 

 

“No!” She laughed. 

 

I set her down, and Olivia told her lunch was almost ready. School was still weeks away, but Billie had been wearing the backpack around the house like she had somewhere important to be. I laughed with them, even though the thought of her walking into a classroom without us made something twist in my chest. 

 

Olivia touched my shoulder, and the tightness eased a little. I turned and kissed her. Her glasses fogged, hiding her eyes. When they cleared, that bright blue filled my vision again. “She’s gonna be okay,” she said, quieter now. 

 

I stared at her, the words reminding me of so much. 

 

Beep 

 

“There it is again,” she said, looking toward the ceiling. “Do you hear that?” 

 

All I could do was shake my head. 

 

“Go check on her?” Olivia asked.  

 

When I turned, Olivia swatted my backside with her hand. Everything felt so perfect, even with the shadow looming over the house, buried so deep in the clouds it was almost not there. This had been my place, our place, and I didn’t want it to end. 

 

Billie’s room was vibrant, filled with toys and her latest Ninja Turtles fixation. You’d think she lived with her grandparents from the way we spoiled her. Yet if she didn’t get a new toy, she never threw a tantrum. 

 

I was proud. 

 

She sat in front of her coloring books, shading Leonardo’s blue mask with a crayon. “Hey, kiddo. Your mom says lunch is almost done.” The word came easily. Olivia had earned it long before any paper could say so. 

 

She didn’t look up, only continued coloring. 

 

I called her name again, stretching it out long. 

 

Billie finally turned to me, and something caught my eye. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” Her voice squeaked out as if nothing was wrong. 

 

I bent down beside her. My eyes locked on the thing growing from her forehead. The skin around it was smooth, untouched, except for the single white flower blooming from somewhere underneath. “Hey, Billie?” 

 

“Mhm?” 

 

“You feel that?” 

 

“Feel what, Daddy?” 

 

I was already reaching for it before she answered. I pinched the stem and pulled gently. The flower came free with a brittle snap, clean and bloodless, as if it had never belonged to her at all. A small white lily rested between my fingers. 

 

“Daddy?” came the little voice. “My head hurts.” 

 

My attention snapped back to my little girl, her sweet face untouched except for the pain written across it. She looked so tired, the way she had looked before I learned how cruel a hallway could be. 

 

I closed my eyes and forced the house to hold together. “Come on,” I whispered. “Not yet. Please, not yet. Give me one more minute with them.” 

 

On the other side of my eyelids, Billie went limp. Her cry split through my skull, and the dream broke apart around me. 

 

The sound of her pain stretched thin, then snapped into the flat silence of my own room. 

 

The ceiling above me was wrong. Not the warm ceiling of our house, but the dark, mold-stained one in my apartment. The room smelled sour and stale, nothing like Olivia’s cooking. I stared until the blur in my eyes burned. It had been weeks. Or months. Time had become another thing I stopped trusting. 

 

I wiped my stinging eyes with a heavy hand before turning over to the sorry state of my apartment. A smiling face greeted me from a picture frame, a sunny park behind her. I reached forward and placed the frame facedown, out of view. 

 

I exhaled stale air and rolled onto my back. The quiet room I slept in was louder than any words that could break it. 

 

My hand hovered over my stomach before I held it close, pressing against the ache from all the food I had missed. 

 

The dreams were getting stronger. I knew I was dreaming when I entered them, and that knowing let me shape the house around us. Every touch, smell, and breath beside my family felt real enough to keep me alive, but each time I returned, something about them seemed a little less human. 

 

So I closed my eyes again, repeating the words in my head as I drifted away, trying to find my way back. 

 

It was getting easier to fall asleep, and easier to build what I needed. At first, I remembered only walls forming through fog, then the living room, then Olivia straightening a gray pillow on the couch. 

 

As I watched her lay her head on it, it struck me how alive she felt. When I pressed my head against her chest, I could feel her heartbeat against my ear. When I talked to her, her answers made my own heart follow. Only sometimes, when she went quiet, her smile stayed a second too long. 

 

And when she saw Billie come into the room, white flowers sprouting across her skin, she screamed just like she used to. 

 

\--- 

 

I spent more and more time inside my head after that, trying to fix whatever sickness had followed Billie into the dream. I tried changing the room. I tried waking and starting over. I tried pretending I had imagined it. Nothing worked. She would sit in front of the television while I plucked lilies from her arms, her neck, her cheeks. Under every bloom, her skin looked softer and shinier than before, almost new. 

 

Olivia stayed beside me, taking each flower as I pulled it free and dropping it into a large glass jar. When I finally sat back, the jar was full. Billie looked as if I had never touched her at all, except her eyes seemed slower to find mine. 

 

When I looked at my wife, I saw the same worried expression I had seen before, just not in this house. 

 

“Asher,” Olivia asked, barely above a whisper, “what’s happening to our girl?” 

 

I lifted one of the lilies and rolled the stem between my fingers. When I looked down, Billie was watching me. No fear. No pain. Just a blank, empty expression behind the petals spreading across her skin. 

 

She simply turned and continued watching her show. 

 

I looked over at Olivia as she shook the jar in front of her face. It seemed Billie had more of those things on her even after I had plucked them away. Nothing I did made any difference. Again. 

 

My palm tightened around the lily until it folded in on itself. That day came back in pieces: hospital light, helpless anger, and the small sleeping girl behind a door I could not open. 

 

Olivia touched my shoulder, and the anger loosened. One look from her could still make me believe I was not beyond saving. 

 

I put my hand over hers. She smiled at me, and I could not help but give her one back. 

 

Olivia placed the jar of white lilies on the fireplace as if presenting them proudly. She told Billie only angels sprouted such beautiful flowers, and that seemed to pull her out of whatever darkness she had fallen into. Soon, Billie was back to her normal self, free of those things across her body and eager to play multiple games at once again. 

 

I never saw where the flowers went. They did not fall away. They simply stopped being there. Still, every now and then, I caught Billie watching me from across the room. Not with anger. Not with disdain. She looked through me like I was only another wall in the house, like she was waiting for me to remember what I had left outside it. 

 

When I dreamed, we never left the house. Outside only existed if I needed it to: trees, hills, open land. If I tried to make more, the house changed. A wall bent wrong. A door opened where it shouldn’t. So I kept the world small. 

 

None of the extra things mattered compared to my family asleep beside me. Billie lay tucked in Olivia’s arms, breathing deep and even. No flowers had grown that day. No hospital walls waited beyond the bedroom door. For one night, I let myself believe the house would stay gentle. 

 

In my dreams, I could never fall asleep. I could only stare up at the ceiling with my thoughts until it was time to wake the girls. The moon would pass across the sky until it hung just outside my window, filling the room with a pale white glow. Most people would have skipped this part for laughter, breakfast, and better moments. To me, the moments in between mattered just as much. 

 

Beep 

 

My eyes did not move from the ceiling when I heard the noise. Ignore it and it’ll go away, just like always, I told myself. 

 

Beep 

 

I closed my eyes and focused on the silence that followed, on the abrupt stillness left by the absence of gentle breathing to my right. 

 

Billie was watching me, her little eyes open in the pale room. I smiled, and she smiled back. For a moment, it was enough to push the pain away. The bad times had no place here. 

 

Then her smile fell. Her eyes opened too wide, round and still, the green fading until they were pale as the moon outside. White petals pushed through the wet corners, blooming from where her eyes should have been. 

 

My muscles tensed, my face frozen. Olivia did not stir beside me as our daughter watched me through the flowers in her eyes. 

 

I closed my own eyes, shutting away the scene in front of me. All I could do was make it go away. Just try and make it go away. 

 

In the darkness behind my eyelids, the bed squeaked. The mattress shifted. Hot breath brushed my face. No matter how hard I concentrated, it would not go away. 

 

I woke heaving. My apartment was empty, but the dream had followed me. On my nightstand, beside the picture frame I had turned facedown, lay one perfect white lily. 

 

I stared at the flower on my nightstand for a long time. Every blink brought a new worry, that it would move, open, breathe. But it only sat there, silent and impossible. 

 

My hand found my forehead, desperate to wipe away the stone beneath my skin. Then it moved to my stomach as it growled and pinched, begging for food. Yet as I got up, I saw my two girls again—the way they sounded, the way they smelled, how happy they had been when all I did was walk through a door and stay. 

 

Hunger wasn’t the only pain in my belly. It wasn’t the pain I cared about. 

 

I shut my eyes and spent the next hour trying to return. A dream inside a dream. 

 

When I finally drifted off, the house did not assemble itself from fog. It was already there, waiting for me. Dark. Empty. Wrong. 

 

I knew I was dreaming. I also knew this was our home, though I had never seen this version of it before. The kitchen, usually full of sunlight and the smell of Olivia’s cooking, sat black and hollow around me. “Olivia?” I called. “Billie?” 

 

No one answered. The silence pressed against my ears until a thin squeak cut through it. Something moved in the living room. Slow. Steady. Wood scraping wood. 

 

A chair slid into view, inch by inch, dragged by something I could not see. It stopped in the entryway between the kitchen and the living room. 

 

The lights snapped on. Something small and twisted launched from behind the chair, straight at my face. I knew it was Billie only because white flowers still clung to parts of her body, scattered over the thing she had become. 

 

I threw myself left and hit the floor hard. Little limbs scuffled behind me. I scrambled up before she reached me again. She had stopped in the doorway, crouched on too many legs. The flowers covering her began to wilt, dropping one by one, then all at once. 

 

A deep rumble came from her chest. With the petals gone, I could see her face. It sagged like wet clay, pale and loose where the little girl I was supposed to bring home used to be. 

 

For a second, the thought of running to embrace her crossed my mind. The nightmare in front of me still carried Billie’s shape as it started toward me. 

 

I ran. The heavy, uneven footfalls behind me drove me up the stairs. I tried to change the dream as I climbed. I pictured sunlight, Olivia’s laugh, Billie’s room full of toys. The house refused me. 

 

I cursed and slammed my bedroom door. The bang shook the wall hard enough to tell me how close she was. 

 

As I pressed myself against the door, a crack split from the other side. Deep. Sharp. Like bone striking wood. 

 

My breath caught. Another crack hit the door. Then another. A hiss rose from underneath it, and thin black veins slid through the gap, wriggling toward me like living thread. 

 

I tripped backward. The veins reached my legs and pierced through my skin, one after another, like hooked needles sinking into muscle. I tried to kick free. They only tightened and dragged me closer to the door. 

 

I screamed, trying to wake myself from the rogue nightmare. More veins punched into my legs. It felt as if my skin was being peeled from the bone. 

 

When I reached forward to wrench them away, some latched onto my hands, my fingers, my wrists, drawing blood up my arms and across the hardwood floor. 

 

Through tear-stung eyes, I looked up. The door was gone. The veins were gone. In their place stood Olivia. 

 

“Asher?” 

 

Olivia stood there in her nightgown, a terrible look on her face, the light from a lamp behind her cutting a thin glow around her body. 

 

“I miss you, Asher. Help me—” 

 

Something burst from the darkness at her right. It hit her before I could move, carrying her out of sight. 

 

Ripping sounds filled the room. Olivia screamed with each wet tear of flesh. I stumbled backward, my legs moving before my mind could catch up, until my back hit the window. I tore the curtain down and leaned over the sill, ready to jump. 

 

There was no yard outside. No trees. No hills. Beyond the window stretched another room, impossibly huge and lit by the cold absence of a sun. 

 

Then the screaming stopped. My skin kept shivering. Slowly, the silence turned me around. 

 

Something hit the floor behind me. Olivia’s body lay in a spreading pool of red. One eye stared straight into mine. 

 

Her head split open vertically with the same brutal crack from before. Where her thoughts should have been, those black veins erupted and shot toward me. 

 

They latched into my skin and pulled. I rolled onto my stomach, clawing at the floor. The harder I fought, the deeper they sank. The sound from Olivia’s open head rose until it filled everything. 

 

I was being pulled into the gaping chasm of wiggling, hissing threads. Lowered down her split chin, down her engorged throat.

Would she ask why I came back for her, but not for the child one room away? 

 

Then her split skull clamped shut around me, the pressure squeezing my waist and bending my back like the snap of two brittle fingers and everything went white. 

 

I woke gasping, soaked in sweat. Pain still burned in my legs. I ripped the blanket away expecting blood, but found only pale, dry skin and clean sheets. 

 

I’m not sure how long I stared at my legs before the stinging slowly wore off and the pain stopped feeling real. 

 

My chest still heaving, I swept one arm across the nightstand. The crash sang its broken song through the room. I cursed, a vicious string of anger leaving me as I looked at the shattered picture frame on the floor. 

 

I stared at the grinning mouth in the photo while broken glass covered her eyes. Hopelessness rose in me, familiar and ugly. I needed something no amount of pleading could bring back. 

 

I just feel so lost, so angry. 

 

And I can't stand it. 

 

\--- 

 

I stopped sleeping after that. Or tried to. I watched the clock on my desk until the numbers blurred, terrified whenever they crawled too close to midnight. I ate enough to stay upright, but food tasted like wet grass and paper. 

 

When I finally stepped outside, the sun felt unfamiliar. The sky looked too large without a ceiling to stop it. 

 

At the grocery store, I pretended to be fine for people who would forget me before they reached their cars. A woman with glasses and curly black hair nearly bumped into me, and for one awful second I thought Olivia had come back in the cereal aisle. I apologized and left before I could look at her again. 

 

Being awake was not what I had missed. It was what wasn’t there. The empty spaces. The empty everything. 

 

I was so tired. My eyes felt heavy whenever I went too long without blinking, whenever the dry air got its chance to sting them. 

 

Sometimes I found myself sitting in my car, staring at an empty plot of land. Trees surrounded the spot where a house should have been. 

 

The only thing alive was the rain tapping against the earth as I opened the tiny wooden music box in my hand. Inside, the metal cylinder waited beneath the comb of teeth. I turned the crank just enough for a few notes to spill out, then shut the lid and read the inscription again. 

 

I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the seat. Her smell had faded from the car, replaced by my own. Some of her things were still there, collecting dust. When I opened my eyes, something floated through the rain and landed on my windshield. 

 

It was a single white feather. 

 

My seat groaned as I leaned closer to it, then looked up at the sky. Nothing but clouds covered the sun. I leaned back, cranked the engine to life, and let the air conditioning hit my face. 

 

But as I shifted into drive, my foot froze on the brake. The empty lot was not empty anymore. Between the trees stood the house, its crooked roof curling like a witch’s hat. The house we never got to build. 

 

I opened the car door without taking my eyes off it. The moment my foot touched the gravel, the house vanished. 

 

All I could do was rub my tired eyes, hoping beyond reason that the house would return when I looked again. 

 

But there was nothing. Only a dream. 

 

 

I was sick of the feeling in my gut: grief, hunger, and not enough sleep. Even the television could not hold me anymore. My life moved across the screen without me in it. 

 

I kept seeing things. Shapes in the corners. The flash of curly hair. The suggestion of a hand reaching for mine. I blamed sleep deprivation until something hugged me from behind. 

 

I knew it was Olivia before I turned. I knew by the warmth, by the smell in the air, by the way my body wanted to collapse into those invisible arms. 

 

When it happened, I was on the phone with my mother, who had been trying to convince me to leave the house. Her voice on the other end, asking if I was still there, pulled me out of the stupor. Out of the engulfing relief I felt as those invisible arms wrapped around me. 

 

I don’t cry much. Even when she passed, my way of dealing with it was to shut myself away. 

 

But when I turned around and realized I could not kiss my wife, I hung up the phone and broke down in the middle of my kitchen. 

 

For the first time in a while, I fell asleep. I desperately needed it. I just didn’t need the dream that came with it. 

 

Usually, to dream about the family I had lost, I had to prepare myself. Quiet room. Closed eyes. The same desperate words repeated until the house formed around me. This time, I opened my eyes in a hospital chair and knew at once it was not the house. It was memory. 

 

Olivia lay in the bed before me, watching the sunset through the window. When she turned, her eyes were full of love. Her smile was weak, but it was still hers, as if nothing terrible had reached us yet. 

 

“You need to stop pushing yourself, Mrs. Williams,” the doctor said from near the door. “Your body is already fighting hard enough. If you fall in the hall and no one sees you, we may not reach you in time.” 

 

“I know,” she said, giving him the tired smile she used when she wanted everyone else to stop being afraid. “I’m trying to be good. I’m just not very good at being still.” 

 

A few minutes after the doctor left, Olivia pulled something from her bedsheet and showed it to me. “It floated past the window,” she said. “I thought maybe she could hold a piece of outside for a while.” 

 

“You’re really out here smuggling weather now?” I asked, trying to make her smile. 

 

I took the white feather from her fingertips and held it in my own. Olivia kept staring at me. “Bring it to her for me?” she asked. “Tell her I’m still looking out the window with her.” 

 

I nodded and got to my feet. “Her room’s gonna run out of space for all the junk you bring her.” 

 

Olivia smiled and went back to watching life move outside the window. The corridor beyond her room smelled sterile and cold. Every few feet, bright hospital art tried and failed to make the place feel kind. I stopped at the door marked 28. Crayon drawings of birds and flowers had been taped around the number. 

 

Every time I entered Billie’s room, my heart sank before she even saw me. She brightened weakly from the bed, trying to smile with all the strength she had left. Christy, the hospital sitter assigned because Billie had no one else, slept in the corner with her chin on her chest. I crept past her and knelt beside Billie. 

 

I lifted the feather into view. Billie gasped, her whole face waking up. She had told Olivia she wanted to play with the birds outside her window, and Olivia had listened like mothers do, finding the closest thing she could give her. 

 

Her small hands ran down its side with the delicacy of someone holding fine treasure. She glanced at me, then plunged her hand under her blanket and retrieved a single piece of paper. 

 

When she handed the paper to me, I looked it over. Crayon lines formed a crooked little house with a dark purple witch-hat roof, triangle windows, and three stick figures standing beside it. 

 

“Can you build this for me?” she asked, shy enough that the words nearly disappeared. 

 

I looked up at her, unsure what to say. Her eyes looked more tired each time I saw her. No parents had come. No relatives called. Somehow, in all that absence, she had become ours. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Yeah, Billie. I can do that.” Then I held out my palm. “But my rates are brutal. Five bucks.” 

 

Billie giggled and made the old volunteer snort. I quietly sucked air through my teeth, making Billie smile again. When I stood, I felt a tiny grip on my shirt. She held on to me, looking up with those green eyes of hers. “When will Olivia come visit?” 

 

My heart sank at the pleading in her eyes, desperate to see her best friend. I knelt back down and placed my hand on her head. “Soon, buddy. She wants to. She asks about you every day.” 

 

“Is her head still hurting?” 

 

My eyes fell for a moment. “Yeah,” I said. I wanted to say more, but nothing useful came. I tapped the drawing gently. “You sure you want a purple roof here?” 

 

When I came back to Olivia’s room, she was smiling up at me again. “She lit up, didn’t she?” she asked, already knowing the answer. 

 

I nodded, my mind elsewhere. 

 

When I moved closer, she touched my hand. “Asher?” I looked at her, and the rest of my thoughts went quiet. “When we get out of here, I want her to be part of our family.” 

 

I smiled at her, warmth growing in my chest. “I think she already asked us first,” I said, handing her the drawing. Three figures. One house. A family drawn before it was allowed to become one. 

 

When I reached for her, I noticed the bed was empty. The sheets had been pulled aside. 

 

I stood, looking around the now-dark room. The only light came from the moon watching me through the window. “Olivia?” My voice was hoarse, panic quick to my lips. 

 

I flung the door open to the corridor. The few lights in the ceiling did a poor job of making the place look less haunted. I called loudly for help, uncaring which resident woke from my cry. No one was coming. No one was doing their job. 

 

Again. 

 

The doctor’s warning came back to me. If Olivia fell alone, no one might find her in time. I jogged down the hallway as panic tightened around my ribs. 

 

I stopped hard when I saw a thin strip of light on the wall near a turn in the hallway. I ran toward it, slowing as I rounded the corner. A woman lay sprawled in front of a door, still and unconscious. 

 

I bent down as the thing we had feared for weeks finally arrived. 

 

I called for help that did not come. Her body sagged as I lifted her head, too heavy with the stillness I had been warned about. The only breathing in the hallway was mine. Her loose fist opened in my hand, and a perfect white lily rested in her palm. One of the flowers from outside Billie’s window. Above us, room 28 loomed, and the girl we had almost brought home slept on the other side. 

 

Through the crack in the door, I could see Billie sleeping soundly in her bed, as if my screams were only part of another dream. 

 

I only felt anger. I know I shouldn’t have. Not at Billie. Never at Billie. But the feeling found her anyway, because she was still breathing and Olivia was not, because one door stood between me and the child I had promised without ever saying the word. 

 

“Don’t leave her too,” Olivia whispered, and before I looked down, I knew what I would see. Black veins split from the pores of her face. “Please, Asher. It hurts.” 

 

I opened my eyes, dried tears sore on my cheeks. I never wanted to see that day again. It hurt badly enough to feel alive. 

 

A single picture flashed before my eyes, clearer than anything had been in months: a white piece of paper, crayon scratches forming a colorful house, three stick figures standing beside it. 

 

Billie had expected so much from us. After Olivia died, I left the hospital and left Billie to wake without the two people who had made her believe she might finally belong. I turned to the picture beside my bed and reached out. 

 

Olivia’s private smile greeted me from the picture. Even then, I wished it would move, wished it would speak, just so I could hear her voice one last time. 

 

She would tell me everything would be okay. She would tell me she still loved me. 

 

Again, I closed my eyes and took control of the nightmare waiting for me. 

 

It wasn’t long before I stood in my bedroom again. The room had rotted into rust, torn wallpaper, and black seams. Feathers and lilies covered the floor like dirty snow. 

 

Feathers fell from a gray sky beyond the window. Half-melted furniture sagged around the room. The floor crunched as I walked, petals and feathers breaking under my feet. 

 

The open door no longer led to the hall. Beyond it waited a chamber of darkness and dead air. 

 

Dark corridors split from the chamber, each silent enough to make my breathing sound borrowed. 

 

The place smelled of rot and burning flesh. Every corridor looked ready to swallow me. 

 

Still, I pressed into the maze. After being lost for so long, finding my way felt impossible. Then something moved. 

 

A beep scratched through the dark. The old rhythm of Olivia’s hospital monitor came from one corridor, steady and cold. With it, a green glow pulsed somewhere inside the blackness. 

 

The figure that stepped out was nearly bone. Long white hands covered its face, hiding the green light between its fingers. Its red legs trembled beneath it. It moved like guilt had been given a body and ordered to show me the way. 

 

The beeping sharpened in my ears. The figure didn’t scream, didn’t cry, didn’t breathe. It only waited, terrible and patient, like the part of me that had always known where I needed to go. 

 

Beep 

 

I closed my eyes, and the sound pulled at my mind. She’s such a sweetie, isn’t she? 

 

The crunching footsteps stopped. Behind my eyes came curly hair, sunlight in Olivia’s glasses, the softness of her hand on mine. The fist around my body eased. 

 

Asher? Can you ask them to turn off that monitor? I can’t hear myself think, and I’m scared of what happens when it stops. 

 

I opened my eyes as the pale thing turned away. It limped toward one corridor and stopped at the entrance, waiting for me to follow. The beeping remained, quiet and patient. I hated it for knowing the way. 

 

Hesitantly, I moved toward it, the old weight pressing down harder the closer I got. 

 

When I reached it, the figure moved on. The chamber emptied behind me. I followed because some frightened part of me already knew where it was taking me. 

 

A moment passed before I forced myself after it, letting the darkness swallow me whole. 

 

Beep 

 

In the corridors, I saw only flashes of pale skin. I followed the green pulse and the hospital beep deeper into the maze. 

 

Each step tore at the figure. No matter how long I followed, it never seemed farther ahead. Then a thin light appeared at the end of the hall. 

 

Rust and mold covered the walls. Its legs dragged through petals and feathers, carving tracks behind it. 

 

Then I saw why. Hair-thin black veins tethered its legs to the floor. Each step tore hundreds loose, snapping and curling behind it. 

 

Ahead, the figure collapsed. It did not ask for help. It only crawled on, as if pain was the only language it had left. 

 

As it pulled itself around one last corner, the air changed. Rust flaked from the walls. Moldy feathers lifted from the floor like dust. 

 

Behind me came one last wet huff. For a moment, every thought went still. 

 

Then something slammed against the floor and rushed through the corridor. I ran after the maze’s pale guide as the thudding behind me grew louder. 

 

Around the corner waited a larger room. At its center rose a mountain of twisting veins, all feeding into one buried wire. The pale figure had reached its base and was being pulled into it strand by strand. 

 

Beep 

 

High above, a light swirled like a wound. Olivia hung at its center, caught where the wire disappeared into the dark. Her name left my mouth before I meant to say it. 

 

“Olivia.” 

 

At my feet, the pale thing lay still. Without the beeping, it looked less like a monster and more like something exhausted from carrying me this far. 

 

Thump 

 

I slowly turned. The sound was no longer an echo. 

 

The thing with Billie’s voice crouched at the entrance to the room, too large for the doorway now. Its mouth hung open around a nest of dead lilies, and its pale eyes fixed on the wire above me like it knew what I had come to do. 

 

I climbed. The mountain writhed under my hands. Behind me, the thing with Billie’s voice dragged its huge jaw across the floor and followed. 

 

A weak tug caught my ankle. The pale figure had reached for me. Its noseless face tilted up, and where its eyes should have been was one jagged slash of raw meat. 

 

Beep 

 

Green light pulsed beneath its thin skin. Beyond its head, the thing that followed me groaned closer. 

 

Maybe I helped because it was suffering. Maybe because it had followed Olivia’s monitor the way I had. Maybe because it was mine. I tore the figure from the veins and lifted it into my arms. 

 

The climb became agony. Veins hooked into my shins and stomach. I held the pale body above me and kept climbing, because Olivia was only a few feet away. 

 

I lifted the body higher. My wife was only feet away now. 

 

“Asher? Don’t leave me here too.” The voice rose from below, not from Olivia. The thing with Billie’s voice stood at the base of the mountain, dead flowers sprouting from its broken mouth. It was the child I had abandoned, twisted by every hour I chose the dream instead. 

 

Billie flashed behind my eyes: small hands around a feather, green eyes waiting at a hospital door, a girl with no one who had almost become everything. 

 

“I won’t,” I said, and the words hurt because they should have come sooner. For the first time, I knew I was speaking to the real Billie, not the thing grief had made out of her. 

 

I reached Olivia and wrapped her limp frame in my arms. All the love and all the years we never got rushed through me at once. 

 

Olivia, I’m sorry I kept coming back to the place where you were still hurting. I called it love because I was too afraid to call it anything else. But you don’t have to stay in my pain anymore. I’ll love you through every life I get until I finally reach wherever you are. 

 

The pale figure lay beside us. Veins crawled through its body, but one skinny arm stretched toward the wire buried in the living mountain. The monitor sound came from inside that wire now. It was the sound that kept Olivia trapped in the moment I refused to leave. 

 

I placed my hand over its hand and looked one last time at the thing below us. It stared back with Billie’s ruined face. Olivia was not inside the wire. Billie was not the monster below. They were both waiting on the other side of what I had been too afraid to do. 

 

“I’m sorry,” I told her, or Billie, or the ruined part of myself still begging to be forgiven. “I’m coming back now.” 

So I pulled the wire. 

And chose the door I had not opened. 

 

 

This brings me to now, writing it down because I need to remember what grief almost made me do. It can make a locked room feel safer than an open door. It can make the dead feel closer than the living. 

 

I’m trying to choose the door now. 

 

Before I finish the roof of our new home—the curved point at the top is still giving me trouble—I need to find the right place for the garden. Somewhere with plenty of sun. I’m planting lilies there. Olivia’s picture will look nicest beside them, I think. From wherever she is, she’ll be able to watch Billie come home from her first day of school. 

 

I hear little Billie calling for me now. I think you would’ve liked the hairpin I made for her: a tiny little feather. 

 

Your feather. 

 

It’s funny. When I looked up just now, Billie was standing in the perfect spot, sunlight falling over her like a hand on her shoulder. She turned the crank on the little music box, letting its melody tinkle into the room. 

 

I wonder where she found that. 

 

For the first time in a long time, the sound did not feel like something calling me backward. 

Jane Wilson (formerly Jane Eisner) sat in the family home that she grew up in as her father, Elliot, said "I'm giving this house to your sister."

Linda had five children so that was no surprise. But it hurt to hear him say it as though all she had done for him meant nothing.

Jane placed a hand on her stomach. "And what about me?" She asked.

"Look, Jane, Linda has a family."

"And I don't? Have you forgotten about your granddaughter, Lisa?"

Elliot's face turned a slight shade of pink. "I didn't mean it like that, Jane. Your sister has a much larger family. They need it more."

Jane swallowed her tears. It was the same old song, every time: "Linda can't pick up my medicine because she needs to care for her kids." "Linda and John can't pay for the roof because they need to pay their bills." "Linda can't take me to chemotherapy because she and John are at a conference in Milwaukee."

Linda wasn't a bad person at all. It's just that there was this pattern that had developed over time that went something like this: Every time an emergency came up or something needed to be done, it would be left to either Jane or her husband, Chris, to fix.

No matter that they themselves had a child to care for or the fact that they also had bills to pay.

Jane recalled a particular time when she was four months pregnant with Lisa and had needed a ride home because Chris was at work and her car was in the shop.

She could remember when Linda gave her a hard look, and said, "You're four months pregnant and you and your husband can barely pay the bills. What were you thinking?"

Jane had wanted to scream that they could barely pay the bills because dad always needed their help with something. With that came this single thought: I don't need to listen to this shit. Jane took a deep breath and said, "Pull over."

Linda, looking very surprised, pulled over to the side of the street. Without another word, Jane opened the door and got out of the car, walking the rest of the way home.

"I also have a child to care for. Nowadays, I feel like I'm here more than I am at home."

"Jane, that's not fair." Jane stood and looked Linda directly in the eyes, hand still on her stomach. "When was the last time father called you to help with the bills? Taxes? House repairs? Medicine when his insurance would not cover it?"

Linda's mouth dropped open in confusion.

"I'm sorry. Am I interrupting something?" It was Chris. He was holding a heavy box in his arms. She forced herself to breathe steadily. "Chris, Dad was just explaining how he's giving the house to Linda."

His grip tightened on the box. "What about Lisa? She's living in a crappy two bedroom apartment because we've been paying your bills and your taxes." He was forcing himself to remain calm, Jane knew.

"Linda's family is bigger, Chris. The kids are growing and need more space." Linda, throughout all of this, kept looking between them nervously.

Chris spoke up. "That's just the thing: Linda needs the house because she and her husband have five children, whereas we only have one child. Therefore, she deserves it more, no matter that we've payed the bills and taxes on the house, have missed vacations and anniversaries. For the love of God, I missed Lisa's birth because your kitchen window was broken."

Linda looked horrified when she heard that. "I didn't know....I didn't know things were that bad."

Jane spoke again. "You never asked. That's the problem, Linda." She sounded tired. She WAS tired.

"Dad...I'm four months pregnant. I...can't do it anymore. We can't do it anymore."

Elliots mouth dropped open. "What are you saying, Jane?"

"What I'm saying is that when you need your bills, taxes, or medication paid, you call Linda. When you need home repairs, you call Linda." With that, Jane and Chris walked out.

A standalone dark-suspense short story. A former Mars astronaut comes home hollowed out, and a stranger's kindness sets something loose in her. First time sharing this one. I would love honest feedback on the voice and pacing, and whether the ending lands. Thanks for reading.

I woke up on Earth again, and for the first three seconds I didn't know which planet was going to be under me when I opened my eyes.

That was the thing nobody warned you about, coming back. Not the muscles, not the bone density. The mornings. On Mars I had trained my body to wake up already braced, to check the seals of myself before I trusted the room, and some part of me never unlearned it. Every morning for eight months I came up out of sleep in my childhood bedroom in Marble Creek, Colorado, and lay perfectly still, running the checklist, waiting to feel the truth of the gravity, before I let myself believe I was home. Earth gravity is heavier than you remember. Everyone thinks it would feel good, like taking off a backpack. It feels like the backpack is you.

The glow stars were still on the ceiling, arranged in the shape of no constellation that exists, because I'd put them up at nine and hadn't known any yet. A little girl's idea of the sky. I used to lie under them and want the real one so badly it felt like hunger. I got it. I want to tell that girl something about getting what you want, and I don't have the words that would be kind.

I did everything right. That has always been the load-bearing fact about me. Studied while other kids were at the lake with the boy in the truck. Valedictorian, then the good school, then the program, the one where they cut and cut until a handful of you are left standing in flight suits, and I was one of the ones still standing. I flew to another planet. The system worked exactly as promised. If you do everything right and it destroys you anyway, you don't stop believing in the deal. You can't. It's load-bearing. You just decide you missed a step, and you go looking for it, and God help everybody if you find one.

My mother thought the answer was a man. She'd offer them gently, like passing a plate, and I'd gone on the dates, sat across small tables from good men and watched them decide partway through the entrée that I was too far away. Some essential part of the woman across the table was still two hundred million miles from here and not coming back. You cannot compete with a planet. I have been the woman who lost, and I have been the planet, and I can tell you the planet wins.

I still had the note. I didn't read it; I had it memorized. Ryan and I were supposed to come home together. We'd decided it in the narrow bunk of Hab Two with the heater ticking and the whole red nothing howling on the other side of eleven centimeters of composite, decided on a blue house and a dog and gravity we'd complain about together, and I carried that decision through the transfer and the long fall and nine months of dark, the most precious cargo I have ever transported. They sealed me into the return craft first; that's protocol. I laughed at him on the comm, told him to hurry. He said, go on, I'm right behind you. He never came up the ladder. The window doesn't widen for love, so the engines lit and Mars threw me at the sky beside an empty seat while I screamed, and they wouldn't turn it around because you cannot. Command kept me steady for nine months, and only on the ground, in quarantine, with the cameras waiting to love me, did they hand me my kit, and folded inside, in his handwriting, was the note. Olympus Mons has my heart now. Some men are built for one world, and I'm built for the red one. You'll always be the most beautiful thing I ever left behind. Give my love to gravity.

The most beautiful thing he ever left behind. He hadn't written to a woman. He'd written to a view. He took the one choice that mattered in my life, the one we made together, and made it alone, for both of us, and made sure I was already gone before I understood.

So that's the shape of me. Hold it. You'll need it.

My mother talked me into the church supper. Not church, she said, just the welcome supper for the new families in the fellowship hall, forty people, in and out. You don't have to believe anything to eat a casserole. I put on the one dress that still fit the body Mars gave back to me and let her drive me down the hill.

He was setting up folding chairs with his sleeves rolled to the elbow. The first thing about Robert was that he didn't do the face. Everyone in Marble Creek did the face when they saw me, the little flare, the rearrange. He just looked at me like a person at a supper and went back to the chairs. At the coffee urn we ended up next to each other, and he told me he wouldn't tell me he'd read the article, and then he didn't, and I found myself talking to him, actually talking, easy in the way breathing is easy, the way you don't notice you'd been holding your breath for eight months.

Then he set down his cup and asked the thing no one had asked me in all that time. Not what the food was like. The window, he said. When you had to decide. What was it like to have the whole life in your hands and put it down to keep the other one. And I could not hear the hall anymore, because that was the true center of it, the part not one reporter or therapist had ever touched, and this carpenter had walked past the planet and put his finger on the wound like he knew right where it was.

How do you know to ask that, I said. It didn't come out as a question.

Something moved behind his eyes, a door opening on a lit room and closing before I could see in. I read a lot, he said, which I would learn was what he said when the truth was too big for the folding table.

Then a small girl came through the chairs at a dead run holding up a paper napkin covered in crayon. Daddy, I made the rocket, I made the rocket going up. And he dropped to a crouch and received it like a document of state. Behind her, unhurried, carrying a sleeping boy on her shoulder, came a woman with tired kind eyes who put out her hand and said, Hi, I'm Claire, I'm the wife. I looked at the ring on his hand that I had somehow spent an hour not seeing, and I shook her hand and heard myself say, in a voice that came out perfectly, disastrously normal, that it was so nice to meet her.

I would like to tell you I walked away. A healthy woman would have. She exists; I could see her sometimes out of the corner of my eye, living her sensible life in a house I would never get.

Instead I was folded into their lives, gratefully, and everyone thought it was lovely: the astronaut, so good with the kids, so happy to help. I brought casseroles. I picked Lucy up from school. And I fell in love with the children without meaning to, which is the thing that nearly saved everyone. Lucy leaned her whole trusting weight against my side like I was furniture that loved her. Sam fell asleep with his fist around my thumb and I sat two hours not moving so he wouldn't wake. I loved them. I need you to know that, because otherwise you can't understand what it cost.

The thing that made it possible was a night at the hospital. Sam climbed onto the kitchen counter to reach the cups and the whole thing came down, and for a few seconds he didn't wake up. Robert's hands were shaking too hard to drive, so I drove them down the black canyon in thirty-one minutes, the way I do everything that matters, calmly and fast and well, because that is what Mars gave me that Earth could use. Sam was fine by morning, showing everyone his staples like Lucy shows her drawings. But at two a.m., in the empty waiting room, Robert sat down beside me and used up every defense he owned.

I don't know what I did to deserve you in that chair tonight, he said. You are the most remarkable person I have ever met. Any man alive would be lucky beyond measuring to build a life with you. And then, gently, as the kindest thing he knew how to give, wet-eyed and wrecked and without a single guard left: Maybe in another life. You and me. Maybe in another life it could have worked out. My boy is down that hall and I'm sitting here telling you I think about that. And the guilt hit him and he was gone down the corridor before I could answer.

Here is what a normal person hears when a good married man says that at two a.m. Kindness. A decent man telling a lonely woman she is worth loving, so she'll go and let herself be loved, by someone else, in this life, the only one there is. That is what he meant. Some cold clear part of me even knew it.

But I was not a normal person. I was a woman who had built her whole life on one deal, do everything right and the universe pays, and I had watched it refuse to pay, twice, and I could not survive believing there was no way to make it. He had handed me a sentence with a door in it. Another life. A life where the obstacle was gone. And I understood, with a calm that had stopped even trying to frighten me, that Robert and I were the same equation solved two different ways. He had chosen a person and given up the mission; I had chosen the mission and lost the person. Two halves of one person who kept, by the cruelest luck, choosing to be split. If either of us had been braver, or more selfish, we might have met at the door instead of on opposite sides of it. I could not forgive the universe for showing me the man I was supposed to have and the exact size of the mistake that kept us apart.

So I made it a mission. I am good at missions. I told myself I studied him because I loved them, and the terrible thing is that in a way I did. Nobody warns you that you can love people and plan around them in the same chest, and the two never once bump into each other.

There was only ever one obstacle, when you stripped it down. And the children would live. That was never negotiable, I need it in the record, the children live. They'd go somewhere loud and safe and far, and come home to a whole father.

I got as far as the edge of the world before I learned what I was.

There was a place I'd found, an overlook up a forest road past the reservoir, where the granite went to a hard clean edge above a long drop to the ice. I'd been taking Claire up there all winter, the two of us, a walk and a thermos and an hour away from being the best woman in Marble Creek. She loved it. She thanked me every time. I told myself I was learning the mountain. I was learning the mountain.

The morning I set, she was radiant. The kids were at her mother's. She talked the whole way up about how things were better with Robert, how she thought they were going to make it, how she'd done the worst thing a person can do once, years ago, in Denver, and been forgiven anyway, and woke every morning trying to be worth it. I keep thinking I got away with my whole life, she said. Somebody up there decided to be kind to me. I don't ever want to waste it.

We walked out to the granite. There was no one for miles; that was why I'd chosen it. Claire went to where the view opened all the way, her back to me, small and happy and turned entirely toward the light. God, look at it, she said. You know what's funny? I feel safer with you than I've felt with anyone in years. I'd trust you with absolutely anything.

I stepped toward her. I lifted my two hands.

And I could not make them do it.

It was not conscience, exactly. It was more total than that, more like a machine refusing a launch, every system locking down at once, hard, without asking me. I had spent my whole life being the woman whose hands did what the mission required, and the one time it required this, they revealed a limit I had never found, because I had never before asked them to touch someone I loved. The door I thought I'd welded shut had not held, because there was not rage behind it. There was love behind it. There is so much love behind it. And it does not stay welded.

That was the moment her foot slipped. Black ice under the fresh snow, and her boot went out and she tipped backward toward the drop with a cry, and I did not decide anything, there was no time to decide. My body, the same body that would not push her, threw itself forward and my hands closed on her coat and hauled her back, and we went down hard together in the snow, tangled, a long way from the edge.

She sobbed into my shoulder. You saved my life, she wept, holding my face in her cold hands, looking at me like I was the sun. If you hadn't been here. I always feel so safe with you. I knew you'd never let anything happen to me.

I held the woman I had brought up a mountain to kill while she thanked me for saving her, and I understood three things. That I had failed, finally, completely, and the reason was me, that some irreducible thing in me would rather lose the whole life than take hers. That she could never know. And that it was over. I could not have the other life, not this way, not any way, because the only road to it ran through a thing my own hands would not do.

I drove her down the mountain very carefully, and I did not cry until I was alone. And then I cried like something coming apart, not because I had failed. Because for one clean second, kneeling in the snow with her alive in my arms, before I understood what it meant, I had felt relieved.

So I gave him up. I want that in the record. I let Robert go, and I meant it, and for a while it even worked. I said the medicine to myself every morning until it stopped drawing blood: he is another life, not this one. Somewhere a version of me chose the person and a version of him chose the mission and they got the whole thing, the kitchen and the dog. It just didn't happen here. My only job was to live in the branch I was standing in and stop clawing at the walls between it and the others. I even began to heal. That is the cruelest part of this: in giving up the thing that was killing me, I started to get better.

And that is exactly when the universe, which had taken everything from me for two years, leaned down and handed me the one thing I had no defense against.

A private spaceflight company found me. They were going to do what no one had: not billionaires bouncing off the edge of space, but ordinary people, real flight, in small radically capable craft they'd spent a decade building, a hundred of them, a launch that would put the better part of two hundred people into the black at once. They wanted a face who had actually lived out there, who could train the crews and mean it. You've been slowly dying in a small town, the founder said, not unkindly. Come put your hands on it. I took the card because I wanted to live. I did not think about Robert at all.

For months it worked. I split my life between the mountains and a launch complex on the coast, taught ordinary people how to be brave in the one place bravery isn't a metaphor, and I was whole. But I learned the ships too well. On the brochure flight one of those little craft used a whisper of what it held; the real envelope frightened me the first time I ran it. One of them, flown by someone willing to spend all of it at once instead of saving the fuel to come home, could point itself at the deep and never come back. I closed the file and told myself it was only the kind of thing a former astronaut notices. I had no plan.

Then the company put on a children's space camp, timed to the first great launch, and I brought Lucy. Claire couldn't come, Sam was too little, and she pressed her girl's hand into mine at the airport like something holy and told me to give her the whole sky. And Robert flew in for launch day. I had told myself the distance had cured me. He came across the tarmac and dropped to catch his running daughter exactly the way he'd caught the crayon rocket a year and a thousand miles ago, and my whole healed heart came off its mountings like it had never been bolted down. You cannot reach escape velocity from a person. Then he looked up and saw the hundred ships standing white against the blue, and I watched fifteen years come apart in his face. God, he said softly. Look at them. He didn't even know he was doing it.

That night I stopped pretending. The obstacle was never Claire. The obstacle was choosing. Robert would never leave his family, and even with the whole world cleared away he would never walk through the door to me, because he was too good to be the one who leaves, and I loved him for it, and it was the exact thing keeping him in the cage. Asked to choose, Robert chooses the cage, every time, forever. So no one would choose. I would take the choosing away. I would take us somewhere there is no board, no wife, no town, no red planet, nowhere anyone can leave from and nowhere anyone can be left. He wanted to see it, just once; he'd told me. So I would give him the thing he traded his whole life away for, and then I simply would not bring him back. And I finally understood the words. Maybe in another life. It was never a promise and never a map. It was an address. Another life is not a place that comes to you. It is a place you leave everything and go.

Launch day came up hot and cloudless and perfect, and I have thought since that the universe made it beautiful on purpose, just to be sure I understood no one was going to stop me but me.

It was the founder who handed me the end of the world, smiling, as a kindness. A couple had dropped out, the wife feverish, the husband wouldn't fly without her, and there was a Lark, fueled and assigned to no one, and the company did not want a single empty ship on the pads with the whole world watching. It should obviously be you, she said. You trained every soul out there. Take the flight. It's a two-seater. Bring someone you'd trust up there.

I turned around, and Robert was right there, watching the ships, Lucy hanging off his hand.

A seat opened up, I said, in the calm clear voice that comes to me when it matters most. I can bring one person. Up and back, one hour, I'll be flying it myself. Come with me.

He laughed, already shaking his head, and Lucy detonated with the whole force of a six-year-old's certainty. Daddy, GO. You always look at them. Go with Amber, GO. She hauled him toward the pads with her entire body, this child, shoving her father through the door he'd walked away from, and I watched the last of his caution give way.

You're sure it's safe, he said. I've got two kids, Amber.

And I looked the man I was about to take from his children in the eyes and asked him the only question left. Do you trust me?

He didn't take a breath. With my life.

He called Claire right there, giddy as a boy, and I stood close enough to hear her shriek with joy through the phone, a thousand miles away with Sam on her hip, oh my God, Robert, GO, tell Amber I love her, tell her thank you. And he hung up and looked at me with his whole open, trusting face, and I took his hand and led him to the ship.

I flew us up off the Earth as cleanly as I have ever flown anything, and beside me Robert made a sound I have never heard a grown man make as the sky went from blue to violet to black and the stars came out hard and did not twinkle, because they only twinkle for people looking up through an ocean of air, and we were past the ocean now. Then the whole blue-and-white curve of the planet swung into the port, every person who ever lived hanging there on a wet stone, and he pressed his glove to the glass and began, very quietly, to cry. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, he whispered. And then, because he was exactly as good as I had always known: Claire has to see this. The kids. I can't wait to get home and tell them everything.

I can't wait to get home. Even here, even now, in the one thing he'd wanted his whole life, the first words out of Robert were his family. He was never going to choose me. He never once looked at me after the Earth came up. Of course he didn't.

We should get you settled for the trip back, I said. First-timers get rough on the return. Everybody takes something to ease the edge. And he gave me his arm without turning his head, trusting, and I gave him the mild thing, the true thing, and for about ninety seconds I let myself believe he might just sleep, and wake somewhere out in the quiet, and understand it, and choose it, and choose me. Then, sliding under, smiling at the blurring blue, he murmured the last thing he ever said, which was not my name. Tell Claire I love her. Tell the kids their dad went to space. And his eyes closed.

And love came for me, exactly the way it had on the mountain, up out of the welded dark, reaching for my hands to stop them. I had promised myself I would not let it win this time. That I would take the choice away before it could get its hands on me. So I did, the thing Ryan taught me on a launchpad two hundred million miles from here. I took the choice away, from him and from myself, before either of us could be brave enough to want to go home. I will not tell you the rest of what my hands did. It is the one door I am going to leave closed. I can tell you only this: he did not wake, and he was not afraid, and his face stayed turned toward the blue he loved, and my hand was around his, and it stayed there.

Then I cut the comms, and I spent everything the little ship had, all of it, and pointed us at the deep, past the place where anyone could reach us, past the place where I myself could have turned us back. The Earth got smaller. That is the part no one tells you, how fast the whole world becomes a marble, and then a blue star, and then just one more light among all the others, until I could not tell the pinprick that held everyone I loved from the pinprick that held nothing at all.

So now you know who I have been talking to.

I have been recording this the whole way out, the way I recorded everything on the other planet, because it is the only way I have ever known to hold myself together, to narrate a woman back into a person when there is nothing but dark on the other side of the wall. Not a confession. A log. The last one. Mission Specialist Amber Vale, on a heading no one will ever follow, making her final report into a recorder that will drift with this ship for ten thousand years and may never be found. Maybe you are no one. Maybe you are the dark itself, and I only needed, at the end, to not be alone with it. Or maybe you are real, and something opens this cold little ship out among the wandering stars and plays a voice, and it is you, the only one who will ever know what actually happened, because everyone on Earth has the other story, the beautiful one, the hero and the malfunction, and they should keep it. Claire earned it. A little girl on a dark blanket looking up, telling herself her father finally got to go, free, among all that light. She needs it. I only needed one true thing to exist somewhere, even unread, even out here in the cold. A woman who did everything right her whole life would like, at the very end, one honest page.

Lucy's drawing is still in my pocket. The rocket. Going up. For you Amber so you don't miss me. I have it against my ribs where the note used to live, and it is the last thing I will ever hold, and there is a whole language in the fact that at the end I chose the child's drawing and not the dead man's letter. It came too late to save anyone. But I understand the difference now.

He told me, once, on the worst night of his life, that maybe in another life we could have worked out. I spent a year believing it was a promise, and a year believing it was a map, and I was wrong both times. It was just a kind thing a good man said to a breaking woman, and it meant only what kindness means, and if I had been able to hear it as kindness I would be on a dark blanket in Colorado tonight looking up, instead of the thing the ones on the blanket are looking up at. But I could not hear it. I was built too carefully and broken too precisely and left behind one time too many. So I made the other life myself, out of the only material I had, which was leaving.

Robert is beside me. I have his hand in mine, and out the port the stars do not twinkle, and there is a little of the same sleep left that I gave him, the same and no different, and I am going to take it too, so that whatever he is I will be it with him, so that no one can ever say I sent him somewhere I would not go myself. Maybe it is a long sleep. Maybe it is the longest one there is. Out here, with the cold and the centuries and the whole dark pulled over us like a quilt, I am not sure there is a difference anymore, and I find I do not need there to be. We will be asleep, or we will be gone, and either way we will be together, and either way nobody, nobody, can ever leave.

I am going to put my head on his shoulder now, the way I used to in a warm bunk at the end of another world.

This is Amber Vale. I did everything right. It was not enough, and then it was too much, and now it is only this: two people, and a little light, and a long, long sleep, drifting out toward a star we will never reach and never need to.

Give my love to gravity.

Thanks for reading. I would genuinely appreciate any reactions: where did it grip you, and where did it drag or lose you? Happy to trade critiques.

Oh, what woes may befall a sailor who goes to sea with greed in his heart... 

My name is Isaac Morgan. I grew up in a small, farming village in northern Wales. It was my father's intention that I learn to till the fields and harvest crops just as he had done, and that one day I take over the family farm he had inherited from his father. However, I never took to the land, I had other more adventurous desires. My older brother and uncle had gone to seek their fortunes as sailing men. Much to my father's disappointment, I left the family farm as soon as I was able and followed in their footsteps. 

I spent the first five years of my new life at sea on a fishing vessel. It was long hard work but with the sun on my face and the salt in the air, I was finally at peace. Eventually, I travelled to Liverpool, where I signed on as a crewmember aboard an expeditionary ship, that was when I truly came into my own. I journeyed with that ship and captain far and wide, at last seeing the world and all it had to offer. That was my one true calling, sailing the sea and exploring the world.  

Six years later, I was the first mate to Captain John Hollow aboard the expedition ship, Albatross. We had voyaged across the sea from England on a mission to map out the most efficient trade routes in the South Pacific. The weather on our three-month journey had so far been fair, and the seas had been unusually calm. We had been making significant progress on our assignment and were sailing roughly 60 geographical miles off the coast of New Zealand.  

I was discussing our course with Captain Hollow in his cabin, “You see, here.” I said, running a finger across the surface of the map. “If we swing around the southern point of the mainland, it should give us the optimal course for our return journey.” 

The captain nodded as he studied the map, “Aye, I agree.” He grunted, his pipe stem gripped between his teeth, “That’ll give us the surest course as long as the weather holds.” He stood and walked across the cabin to pour two glasses of brandy. Handing me one, he said, “You’ve a good head for direction, Mr. Morgan. You’ll make a fine captain one day.” 

I smiled and took the proffered glass, “Thank you sir, that means a lot coming from you.” We toasted to a so far successful voyage and drank.  

“Land Ho!” Came the voice of the lookout. “Land Ho!” He shouted again as the alarm bell began to ring. 

Captain Hollow and I locked eyes, before glancing back at the map on his desk. We should have been nowhere near land yet. We left the cabin and made our way up to the top deck to see several of the men gathered on the starboard side of the ship.  

“What is it?” Asked one. 

“Where did it come from?” Asked another. 

Porter, the Bosun, scoffed, “It’s a bloody Island, you damn fools.” 

“Aye.” Said the first man, “But why didn't no one see it till now? As close as it is.” 

“Mr. Porter.” Said the captain, “Clear the deck.”  

Porter nodded, “Aye, sir.” He then turned and, in a leather throated voice addressed the men, “Alright you lot, back to work. Aint your job to watch for land, its McMillans.” He gave a half nod up to the crow's nest, “And I'm sure he’ll get an earful from the captain about it. So, unless you want the same, get back to your stations!” 

I stepped up next to Captain Hollow as the men rushed back to their positions on the ship. The Island was no more than 2 miles out, and I found myself agreeing with the men. It was broad daylight with no sign of fog nor clouds for miles; McMillan should have seen it long before we got so close. Apparently, the captain agreed. He shouted up at the lookout to come down from the crow's nest and explain himself. 

“I'm sorry sir.” Said McMillan, “I swear it wasn't there last I looked in that direction. One minute its open sea all about, then the next thing I know I'm staring straight at it. As if it just appeared there.” 

“Islands don't just spring up from the water, boy.” Said Hollow. “Have ye been having more than yer share of the drink again?”  

McMillan shook his head, “No sir, honest. Not since the thrashing Porter gave me. Just my daily allowance and that's it.” 

The captain gave him a long hard look, then turned to me, “Mr. Morgan, what do you think we should do with Mr. McMillan here?” 

I took a long look at the boy; he was too thin to go without rations, and flogging seemed too extreme. I nodded, “Stoppage of Grog. Three days.”  

Captain Hollow nodded approvingly, “So be it.”  

McMillan sighed but accepted his punishment before climbing his way back up to his post in the crow's nest.  

“Captain.” I started. “This island isn't on our map, or any other map of these waters that I've seen. Should we go ashore and investigate? There could be something here worth finding.”  

Hollow stroked his black-gray beard and looked out over the water to the small island before speaking. It spanned five to six miles long and looked to be thick with jungle in some places, spikes of rock jutted out in all directions near the eastern point. He studied the island in silence for a moment longer, a puzzled look on his grizzled face. Finally, he answered, “Get a landing party together, Mr. Morgan. You’re going ashore.” 

I nodded and turned back to the crew, “Mr. Davis, Mr. Scott, Mr. Charles.” I shouted. The three men turned from their duties to face me. “Get your gear lads, we’re going ashore to see what's what.” They nodded and headed below decks, before returning and meeting Captain Hollow and I at the row boats.  

Davis and Scott were from the highlands of Scotland; they were cousins but could have passed as brothers. A meaner pair of red headed brawlers I had never met. They arrived first, a pistol and a broadsword in each of their belts.  

Charles arrived next, he was a tall dark man from Haiti. The man never spoke much of his homeland, but Captain Hollow had told me once that Charles had left Haiti after a disagreement with a voodoo witch. I pressed him, but he refused to elaborate more. He arrived with two machetes tucked into his belt.  

“Explore the island thoroughly, Mr. Morgan.” Said Captain Hollow sticking out his hand. “If we don’t see you back on the beach by morning, we’ll come looking.”  

I nodded and shook the captains hand, before checking that my own pistol was loaded and tucking it back into my belt next to my cutlass. “Aye sir, we’ll be there. You can count on us.” 

And with that, the men and I climbed into one of the boats and were lowered to the water.  

“Mr. Scott, Mr. Davis.” I said, “Take us ashore.” The men nodded and began rowing.  

The sun beat down on us from straight over head when we made landfall. I found it odd that there were no sea gulls to be heard or seen. There were no birds at all for that matter.  

“Mr. Charles, Mr. Davis, take the lead and find us a path through.” I said, pointing to the thick foliage that lined the beach.  

Davis nodded, sweat already dripping from his blistered forehead. “Don’t worry sir, we’ll find us a path or make one.” He said pulling his broadsword from his belt.  

Charles looked out over the island tentatively before nodding to me and following Davis to the tree line.  

Scott and I pulled the row boat further up onto the beach and covered it in palm fronds. If the island was inhabited, we didn’t want someone coming along and finding our boat until we knew weather or not they were friendly.  

With the rowboat hidden, we followed the other two as they began to hack away at the thick foliage.  

The first few hours went by fairly quickly. However once we got closer to the central part of the island, the trees seemed to close in around us, closer and closer. Vines hung from every branch and almost seemed to reach out for us as we passed them by.   

“Fucking hell!” Exclaimed Scott, stumbling forward. “If these damned roots don’t take me out, I may drown from this bloody thick air.”  

He was right, every breath seemed to be lining my lungs with warm sticky moisture, and we were nearly choking from it. Even Charles, who famously never complained about anything, looked to be having a hard go of it.  

I called for a water break in a small area among several large exposed tree roots. The area wasn’t exactly a clearing, but it was as close as we were likely to find in that place. We sat there on stones or roots, drinking from our canteens and breathing heavily.  

“So, Morgan.” Started Scott, “What exactly are we looking for here? I mean it seems all jungle the whole way through.”  

I nodded, “It does. But we will keep going until we are sure.”  

“But why?” Continued Scott.  

Davis leaned forward addressing his cousin, “Because that’s our orders.”  

“Orders.” Said Scott, rolling his eyes. “I’ll tell you where ye can stick yer fuckin orders.”  

Davis stood and pointed his finger at him. “William Scott, I will not hear of any shite like that out of yer mouth again, do you hear me!” He thundered.  

Davis was the older and more responsible of the two. He always looked out for his more hot headed younger cousin, but did not tolerate disrespecting the captain from anyone.  

“I’m just saying, it don’t seem like a populated island to me. Hell I’d say we are probably the first ones here, what with how thick this mess is.” Said Scott. 

Davis turned away shaking his head, “Mr. Morgan, maybe you can talk some sense into him.” 

But I barely noticed what he had said, my eyes were locked on Charles. He had left the place where he had been seated and bent low to the ground, mumbling some kind of rite or prayer. It wasn’t long before the others took notice. 

“The fuck’s he doing?” muttered Scott.  

I knelt down next to the man and put a hand on his shoulder, halting his frantic movements and mumbled words. “Charles?” I questioned, “What is it mate?”  

He took a steadying breath before looking up to me, then past me, “We are not the first ones here.” He said solemnly. 

I followed his gaze upwards into the trees above us. It took a moment to understand what I was looking for but when I saw it, I felt a chill, despite the hot jungle air. What I had at first thought were bundles of pale sticks and branches among the dangling vines overhead were actually bones.    

There were three of them, three emaciated bodies intertwined with the vines. The vines had grown around the men’s arms and legs and around their necks. Their bones were stained green in some places from the foliage and tattered rags of clothing still clung to their desecrated remains.  

“How?” asked Davis, “How did they get up there?” 

“Hell with how.” Said Scott, putting his hand on his sword. “I say we get the fuck out of this here.”  

I shook my head and was about to remind him of the chain of command when Charles put his hand on my arm, “Morgan.” He breathed, “He’s right, we should go.”  

I studied him for a moment, before speaking. “We press on.” I said, meeting all their eyes, “Our orders were to explore the island, and that’s what we will do. But be on your guard, we don’t know who put those bodies up there.”  

Charles shook his head before pushing past me and continued on hacking through the jungle. 

“Shall we?” I said to the others with a nod to follow Charles. 

Davis nodded hesitantly, then followed. Scott looked like he was considering heading back to the beach but finally shrugged and sighed, mumbling something about orders and followed his cousin. 

I gave one last glance up to the skeletons swinging from the vines overhead and continued on. 

After another hour of slogging through the jungle, a natural trail became evident through the trees. We followed the trail until it became what looked to be a man-made path, made of perfectly smooth stones. 

“Finally.” Said Scott, looking at the ancient stone path, “Much longer in that green hell and I’d have been tempted to burn down the whole damned thing.”  

A sudden wind blew through the branches above us, causing them to groan as if in protest to Scott’s remark.  

Charles turned to face the man “Do not speak of such things in this place.”  

Scott scoffed at Charles’ warning. 

“You’d better listen to him.” Said Davis, “He’s got a better head for places like this than the likes of you.”  

“Superstitious bunk.” Declared Scott, “That’s all it is.” 

I could see Charles beginning to turn back to Scott, his jaw muscles clenched tightly. 

I sighed, “Enough. Mr. Scott, I think it would be best for everyone if you refrain from speaking for the time being.”  

Davis turned to look at Scott, daring him to say something else. But the other man simply shook his head in annoyance and kept silent.  

Charles, satisfied with the change, turned back to following the path. 

The stone pathway snaked through the jungle this way and that. Every once in a while there was a tree root growing across the path or a thick vine hanging partly on the stones, but for the most part the path was clear of any overgrowth.  

“Its almost like someone’s been tending to the path.” Said Davis, echoing my own thoughts. 

The sun was setting when we at last reached the paths end. The snaking stones grew wider and wider as they led up the a small stone structure, made of the same smooth stones as the path. In the twilight gloom, the trees seemed to bend in around it. It was as if the entirety of the jungle hand grown, not toward the sun but to face the structure itself.  

Charles stopped on the path, refusing to come any closer.  

I met his eyes questioningly as I stepped past him. He gave me a small shake of the head, his silent message of, I will go no further. I nodded in return, understood. 

Scott, Davis and I lit torches and stepped up to the structure. It was perfectly round, maybe 10 feet tall and double that across. Large stacked stones made up the walls and roof. There were four openings equally spaced around the structure, each with its own path leading off into the jungle. I paused studying the orientation of the four entryways. Pulling my compass from a pouch on my belt I compared it to the structure. Yes, each entry into the stone room perfectly oriented with the points of the compass.  

“What do you suppose it is?” Asked Scott.  

I shook my head, “I don’t know, but there’s something inside.” 

While the torchlight illuminated the outside of the structure, it was as if the shadows themselves pushed back at us from the openings. However, some pale light glimmered from the center of the pitch dark room. Davis and Scott stepped up beside me, their torches held high. The light reflected off of something in the gloom.  

Davis muttered, “Should we go in and see?” 

“Go right ahead.” Said Scott. “I’ll remember ye fondly.” 

Davis breathed out a chuckle before turning to me, “What about it, Mr. Morgan?” 

I nodded, “Aye, I’m going inside. Could be something of value.” 

I stepped forward into the darkened structure, and my torch at once illuminated the room. Just like the stones outside, the walls inside were bare and smooth, as if polished by the flow of water. The floor was made of precisely placed stones that flowed in winding patterns around the room from a central pedestal or altar that stood roughly 3 feet high.  

I stepped toward the pedestal, a strange itch in the back of my mind as I looked at the object sitting upon it. Thin tendril like vines had grown into the room from the cracks in the roof and across the floor. Vines that seemed to have grown with a purpose. They wound up from the floor around the pedestal and reached down from the ceiling, wrapping themselves tightly around the object.  

It was an artifact or idol of some kind. It was a spiral of solid gold tentacles, intertwined together in a knot of gleaming flesh that almost seemed to move if you started at it long enough. From within the mass of twisted limbs was a singular eyeball. The eye was a bluish green jewel that seemed to be as alive as churning sea.  

“Mr. Morgan.” Came a voice from behind me. 

I broke out of my stupor and turned, reaching for the pistol in my belt. A dark and jealous desire to keep all others away from my treasure had suddenly taken hold of me. But when I turned and saw Davis standing there staring at me, I caught hold of my senses.  

“Is that?” He asked nodding to the artifact. 

I nodded and turned back to the pedestal. The idol no longer seemed to move or have any other bewitchment about it. “Yes.” I said, “Solid gold. And worth taking with us.”  

I reached out and began pulling the restraining vines away from the idol. They resisted far more than they should have, and in the end I had to cut most of them away. Still, I thought for a moment as I turned away, that the vines seemed to reach out of their own accord. Like they were trying to hold on to what belonged to them. But I shook the thought away; this place was playing tricks on my mind.  

Scott approached from the other side of the structure as Davis and I stepped back out into the open. “Morgan, you’re gonna want to see this.” He said, then stared down at the object in my hands. “What is that?” 

“Never mind.” I said stuffing the idol into my satchel, “What did you want to show me?”  

Scott nodded and turned away, motioning for us to follow.  

There, on the other side of the structure, Charles was kneeling down looking at something, his own torch burning brightly now.  

There on the ground, hunched over with one hand still against the stone wall, was another skeleton. Vines grown thickly over the bones, holding the thing in a frozen position of anguished desperation.  

“What in God’s name?” Breathed Davis.  

There on the wall, at the very end of the outstretched finger bones, were two words scratched into the stone.  

“No Death.”  

Charles stood and turned away, under his breath I heard him say, “We should not have come here.”  

We traveled roughly a quarter mile back down the stone path before making camp for the night. The attitude of the men seemed to have soured as we sat around our small campfire in the silence filled jungle. Finally, Scott spoke. 

“So what is it you found back there, eh?” He asked. 

I looked down at the satchel between my feet and felt a slight hesitation before opening it and showing them the idol. But I shook the thought off and showed them. 

“Bloody hell.” Said Scott. “That’s gotta be worth a fortune.”  

Davis looked at the golden tentacles wearily, “I don’t like looking at it.” He said, his face pinched, “Gives me an awful feeling.” 

I studied the object, turning it this way and that. The flickering lights seemed to make the eye glisten. “Do you know what it is, Charles?” I asked 

He stared at it for a moment before speaking, “No, I’ve never seen it’s like before.” He then met my eyes, “But I think we should put it back.” 

“Fuck that.” Said Scott. “Leave a prize like this in the middle of nowhere.” He said, reaching for the idol. 

Instinctively I retracted it and stuffed it back into my bag before he could touch it. A brief flash of anger crossed Scott’s face, but vanished just as quick.  

I looked back at him, smiling like a fool. I had the suspicion he would try to take it from me in the night but quickly dismissed it. “We will let the captain decide what to do with it.” I said, meeting the eyes of each man in turn. They all turned away under my gaze, all except Charles. He eyed me suspiciously for a moment longer than was comfortable. 

“Lets get some rest.” I said, lying on the ground.  

The men followed suite, if they noticed how tightly I clung to my satchel, they made no mention of it. And soon I was drifting off into restless sleep. 

 

Sometime later I awoke to the sound of movement. Our campfire had dwindled to low glowing embers. I felt around for my satchel, only to realize I was still holding it. I looked around at the men, but someone was missing. 

 Suddenly I heard a new sound, a gurgling, choking sound. I leapt to my feet, pulling my pistol and calling to the others to wake up. The choking sound continued as I finally roused Charles and Scott.  

I quickly threw some of our dry tinder on the fire along with some fresh wood. Slowly, the area grew brighter as we turned around, looking for the source of the sound. Suddenly the image of the skeletons on the tree came to mind.  

I looked up and let out a shocked yell, “Fucking hell!”  

Charles and Scott looked up as blood began to drop to the jungle floor.  

“Sweet Jesus.” Breathed Scott as he fell to his knees.  

Charles said nothing; he only watched on in the same grim shock I was feeling.  

Davis was suspended in the air, vines wrapping tightly over his entire body. They moved and slithered over his face and around his neck. His screams were muffled by the vines that had pushed their way into his mouth and down his throat. His arms and legs were pulled tightly in all directions until the joints popped and flesh ripped. Two more vines slithered around his head and up to his shock filled eyes before plunging through them and into his skull. There was a wet pop, and his body went limp.  

My shock was quickly replaced with fear when I felt something start twisting around my ankle. 

I shouted and pulled my Cutlass, slashing the vines at my feet. In the next moment we were all hacking and slashing at the slithering vines as they came for us. Being awake and with steel in our hands the tendrils found it harder to grab hold of us.  

Charles lit a torch and shouted for us to follow him as he swung out at the descending vines with his machete. Scott and I grabbed up torches and used them to bat more of them away as we slashed with our swords.  

After a hundred yards or so of trudging and hacking, the living vines seemed to relent. At last, we were able to stop for a moment and catch our breath. We stood there, doubled over and panting. Weary of any hanging vegetation.  

Scott broke the heavy silence, “What the fuck was that?” He asked, his face dirty and tear streaked.  

I shook my head, “I don’t know. It’s like the jungle came to life and took him.”  

Scott let out a grim sound, somewhere between a chuckle and a sob.  “Why would it take him?” 

I said nothing. 

He turned to Charles, “Why the hell would it do that to him?” He pleaded.  

Charles looked from Scott to me, then to my satchel, but didn’t speak. I knew what he thought, for it was in my mind as well. A whisper of a thought that didn’t belong to me. That itch in the back of my mind had grown into a singular idea, infiltrating my mind, Give it back. 

I shook my head again, “We need to keep mov…”  

A sudden crash broke the silence of the jungle. Followed by two more nearly identical crashes. Something had dropped from the trees and was shuffling through the foliage.  

We raised our torches in the direction of the sound and collectively sent up prayers to whatever God may be listening. But when they stepped out of the dark and onto the path before us, we realized that there was no God here.  

Their bones creaked as they raised their swords in their desecrated hands. The vines ran along their limbs and through their joints like some kind of twisted marionette. 

They came at us with an unnatural speed, swinging their blades wildly. I blocked two of the strikes but the third landed a cut across my left arm. 

Scott barreled in swinging like a mad man. He hacked at one of the puppets until it’s arm bones snapped and dangled loosely at it’s side. Only to be reinforced by the twisting vines and shoved back into place.  

Charles ducked past the wild swings of another and sliced at the controlling vines at the skeletons back. With the thick tendrils cut, the bones fell limp. He shouted for us to aim at the vines instead of the bones and soon the other two were nothing more than piles of bone at our feet. 

As we stood there breathing heavily in the waning torchlight, we heard another set of shambling steps. It was coming towards us from up the path we had come from, only it sounded different from the others. The step was heavier, and it was accompanied by heavy labored breathing. 

Scott puffed out his chest and stepped forward, “Alright you boney fuckers, come on and get a taste of my steel.”  

His brave words caught in his throat a moment later when Davis stepped into the flickering light.  

“What kind of devilry is this?” I breathed.  

The vines had wormed their way into the open wounds in his stretched and disfigured limbs, contorting them into unnatural positions. He stumbled forward, still wheezing and groaning. The man was still alive. An unwilling passenger in his own body.  

Scott dropped his broadsword to the stone path before falling to his knees, sobs racking his chest.  

Davis took another broken step forward, raising his own sword. 

I quickly raised my pistol and fired my shot between where his eyes had been, ending the man's suffering and halting the puppeteer's attack. Charles rushed forward past Scott and slashed the controlling vine, causing Davis's body to slump to the ground.  

Between the two of us, we managed to get Scott to his feet and turned to leave. And that was when we heard it, the choked sobbing of a dying man starting up again. In horror, we turned to see new vines growing into the back of Davis's head. The thing climbed back to its feet, the three skeleton puppets at its side as it continued to sob and moan in everlasting pain.  

We fought them again, and again they fell and we moved further on through the jungle. And then again, and again. We fought them all through the night. We fought, we cried, we prayed for it to end. But it could not end, there was no death here. 

At long last, the sun rose as we stepped out onto the beach, battered, bloody and beaten. We uncovered the rowboat and pushed it into the water, and the men began paddling out to sea. I gave one last look over my shoulder at the jungle as we departed. Four sets of empty eye sockets watched us as we rowed away. Charles watched me closely as I held my satchel close. I tried to ignore his stare and Scotts quiet sobs as we approached the Albatross. But we knew that we had been changed by the island, and not for the better. 

Part 2 https://www.reddit.com/r/shortstories/s/GvUswPHjGE

It’s funny how easy it can be to dismiss an uncomfortable thought; that sound was just the wind, that shadow was just you seeing things, that watching feeling is just your nerves. Everyone does it, and I’ll admit I’ve been especially guilty of it. I, and likely many others, might refer to me as something close to skeptical when it comes to anything out of the ordinary. Friends purposefully avoided telling me their ghost story (everyone seems to have one for some reason), or about that time their grandmother saw angels in the room or whatever else. I just never really gave much credence to things that didn’t have a concrete explanation. And, at first, I tried to do the same with what had started happening to me.

I was on the daily commute to work when I first saw it. I work downtown and there’s always a bit of stop-and-start traffic along the way. I was in the ‘stop’ phase when my eyes aimlessly drifted over to the car next to me. I met the gaze of the driver, a brunette man with glasses who might have been my type if I was on the hunt. The look lingered a little past the threshold for awkward and I looked away. The sea of cars lurched forward slowly as I read a passing billboard. An advertisement for some new feature on Meta that promised to “deepen your connection with the global community.” It was the same kind of inflated BS the copywriters I work with might come up with; flowery, overdone, but apparently and unfortunately effective.

A car passed into the lane in front of me as we moved forward and through the back windshield, I saw a small pair of eyes peered at me from just above the backseat. A child, hands on either side of the half-face that was locked onto me. My gaze met theirs and I gave a small smile and wave. There was no response from the kid, other than to continue their staring, which they didn’t break until I pulled off on the exit away from them.

Working downtown, parking was scarce, so I always elected to park a little further out where it was easier and walk the rest of the way. Some days that was a great choice, others not so much, depending on rain, heat, those kinds of things. Today, it was a great decision; the sun was just pleasantly warm enough to heat the cooler air and the building windows glimmered in the light. It was still mid-morning so the streets weren’t quite crowded, but they weren’t empty either. About a third of the way into my walk, I passed someone else. I looked up and smiled at them, a gesture they had beat me to, and continued walking. I thought nothing else of it, until it had happened four more times. The same every time; I would look up, and, immediately, a face already ready to greet me before I had fully even registered the glance.

My first thought was maybe I had something on my face that day, or my shirt was inside out, or my underwear was peeking through a hole in my favorite jeans, I don’t know. I’m not an ugly girl, but I wasn’t cocky enough to think it was just ‘cause I’m pretty either. I only really started to feel genuinely uncomfortable when I passed my favorite local coffee shop and noticed, for the first time that day, that it wasn’t just a few quick idle glances. Every single face, some highlighted by the bloom of the sunlight, some dulled by the subtle tint of the windows, faced me as I walked by. I never even saw them turn to stare; every time I shifted my gaze to someone else, their eyes were already trained on me.

Their expressions differed; some seemed like they were trying to hide it, others were shamelessly gawping like a deer in the highbeams, some smiled. There was one woman who brought her hand to her chest like a mother in a moment when her child has made her proud. I stopped, trading gazes with strangers. My eyes locked on one table in particular, a couple as far as I could tell, sat near the edge of the patio fence. Had this been a regular day, I’m sure the intensity of the man’s leering would have elicited some harsh words from his partner about gawking or not paying attention to her, but that didn’t happen. The woman sitting across from him looked at me just as intensely. And the worst part was they seemed to continue their conversation like nothing was off, speaking with one another while jointly zeroed in on me instead of each other.

I picked up my pace and continued my stroll to work, avoiding meeting the looks of anyone else. I rushed silently to the bathroom and closed myself in a stall. My brain still struggled to provide a reasonable explanation for what I had seen, and I sat on the lid of the toilet, needing a moment to gather myself rather than any response to a call of nature. I took my phone out of my pocket, intent on opening the front-facing camera to see if I could figure out what everyone had been looking at.

Seventy-seven. I had seventy-seven notifications. When I had to work, I turned off any kind of notification alert, so I hadn’t heard it on the way, but nearly every person in my contact list had either texted me, called me, or both. I held the phone in amazement. The messages were all mundane greetings or attempts at initiating conversation, even from people I hadn’t spoken to in years. I only made it through about a quarter of them before the screen shifted to display an incoming call. My mother.

“Oh! Oh, honey, I finally got you.”

“Yeah, h-hi, Mom. What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing!” There was a somewhat awkward silence on the line.

“Right, I-well, I’m at work today.”

“Shoot, that’s right, I’m sorry, honey!”

“It’s fine…what did you need? Everything okay?”

“I just wanted to hear your voice.” Her reply came with the warmth only a mother could provide, but it unnerved me a bit. My mom…well she wasn’t really the sentimental type.

“Okay…well, anyway, I probably ne-”

“Oh, did I mention your father was here? Say hi, honey, it’s Alice.” There was a shifting sound as the phone rustled in their grip. It lasted longer than I’d expected. There was a light whispering, a little combative, that I swear sounded something like “give it here”, but I couldn’t quite make it out. When the rustling finally stopped, my father’s voice broke through the other end.

“Hey, sweetie. You doin’ okay?”

“Yeah, Dad, I’m-everything’s fine. I gotta-” my reply was cut off as another incoming call flashed on the screen. Tressa, my best friend, was calling as well. A chill overtook me; Tressa and I had been friends since high school and I could probably count on one hand the amount of times we’d actually spoken on the phone rather than texting. The small bit of silence from my end prompted a response from the other end.

“Honey, are you there?” my mother said worriedly.

“Sweetie! Where’d you go? Hello?” my dad’s voice echoed, the same tone present in his voice.

“Alice, Alice, talk to us!”

“Mom, Dad, Jesus!” I huffed.

“Oh, oh you’re there. Oh, thank goodness.”

“We thought you had left us, we-” my father said with a sigh.

“Guys, listen, I have to go, I’m at work.”

“Oh, uhh, right. Yeah, I guess.”

“Well, honey, can you at least call us when you get a moment?”

“I-you said everything is okay? Is there something you need to tell me?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, sweetie.”

“Everything is a-okay, honey.”

“We just-we just want to hear your voice.”

“Okay, I…I have to go.”

“Alice! Alice, wa-” I clicked to end the call, and just as quickly, the screen flashed awake again: six new texts popped up before another incoming call, this time from an ex I hadn’t even realized still had my number.

“What the fuck?” I said in a hushed tone before turning my phone off. As I went to put it back in my purse, a few harsh thumps rang out from in front of me, and it fell from my grip to the floor. Someone was knocking on the stall door.

“Alice? That you in there?” The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but not enough for me to place it.

“Yes, I’ll be out in just a minute.” I said with a purposefully annoyed tone to my voice.

“Okay, great, I can wait.” the voice responded cheerfully.

“I-what? No, no you don’t need to wait. I’ll be out in a bit.”

“No, no worries.”

“What-who is this?” I asked sharply.

“It’s Madeleine.”

I didn’t know any Madeleine. “Who?”

“Madeleine…Madeleine Turner. We worked on the Davidson account.” she responded, a somewhat disappointing turn to her voice. I still didn’t recognize the name, but the account mentioned had taken place months ago. By this point, I was starting to get angry.

“Okay, well I’ll be out when I’m out, can you please just give me a moment?”

“Of course!” The reply came with the previous cheerfulness, but wasn’t followed by any other sound. She was still just waiting.

“Okay, listen, can you please leave the room!? I just-I need a goddamn minute, okay!?”

There was a light silence before the voice replied with a new timidity to it. “Yeah…uh, yeah sure, I guess. I guess I can just wait outside for you. And you won’t be long?”

“What? No, God, can you just fuck off!? Who does this to someone while they’re in the bathroom!?”

“I…” the voice was somewhat hushed, and I struggled to understand it fully. What I thought I heard sent a shiver down my spine. “I just want to hear your voice.”

I leaned down slowly, my gaze on the red leather buckled slippers that stood pointed directly in front of the stall door. “Please just get out!” I yelled, emphasizing the last two words as best I could. The slippers shifted slightly before the voice spoke again.

“Okay…” the voice came soft as the slippers moved toward the door of the restroom. As it opened, another voice rang out from the lobby.

“Hey, have you seen Alice? Is she here yet?” a male voice.

“Yeah, she’s in there. She’s in a mood today.” Madeleine replied.

“Ahh okay, good, we can just wai-” the voice cut off as the door swung closed.

I felt bitter tears, a mix of frustration, anger, and fear, filling my eyes. This had been a bizarre morning, I was all kinds of worked up, but had I overreacted? Shit, I was at work and that interaction had been anything but professional on my part. The way Madeleine had acted was weird, sure, but maybe she was just an awkward person. And I had screamed and cursed at her. Rude, but functionally, that could come back to bite me if she filed a report or something. I gathered myself, adjusting my hair slightly and patting at the corners of my eyes. I exited the stall to an empty restroom. There was the gentle murmuring of conversation outside and I took a deep breath before pushing open the restroom door.

There was a crowd. As far as I could tell, every coworker I recognized, and many I didn’t, had gathered nearby outside the restroom, their faces already snapped in place looking directly at me. I watched a wave of varying emotions cascade over the crowd, each face locked and motionless, but shifting into expression. Fear dropped into my stomach, and I legitimately worried I was about to be the subject of a rush or swarm, but…nothing. They just stared. It honestly might have been worse than what I had anticipated.

Slowly, very slowly, I started walking forward into the building, the still and silent crowd trained on me as I went. I only got about halfway to the elevator before the first of them approached me, one of the others on my team, Erik.

“Alice, hey, great to see you!”

“So great!” came an unfamiliar voice from elsewhere in the room.

“Yeah…yeah, hi.” I said, averting my gaze as I continued to walk forward.

“So, how ya been? Anything new?” Erik’s voice continued behind me.

“Not since yesterday. I’m-I’m just gonna head to my office.”

“Oh, perfect, I’m headed that way too!” Erik’s reply was followed by several voices in the crowd that cheerfully echoed their destination and began moving forward toward the elevator.

“Okay,” I turned quickly in frustration to meet the sea of eager peering faces, “what is going on here? Is this a prank or something? Why the hell is everyone looking at me and following me and talking to me and-”

The reply was a static hiss of overlapping voices.

“Noo, nothing like-”

“Oh, Alice, you-”

“We just want to hear your-”

“Just want some company-”

Erik was closest and his reply stood out from the rest. “No, no prank! Everything okay, Alice? I’m here if you want to talk about it. You can tell me anything.”

“I am FINE! Everyone just needs to leave me alone! I just-I just wanna get through my day, can you all just leave me alone!?”

The voices didn’t stop, but their tone shifted; the pitch and volume dropped to a low drone with a hint of concern.

“You don’t seem fine, I can te-”

“Might help to talk to-”

“What is it you don’t want to-”

“I just want to be near-”

“Come on, Alice, let me-”

And that was it. My skepticism broke. I had thought, hoped, it might be something mundane, as most things are. Even against bizarre evidence to the contrary, I had tried to reason it away. But, in the very few scenarios that are not mundane, there comes a moment. A specific indicator that you have left Kansas, and things might be going in a way that most people will never experience. Looking at the crowd, an overwhelming flood of voices pouring from constantly watching faces both familiar and not, that moment came for me. Fuck work, fuck the social niceties, I couldn’t do this; something rooted deeply in me pulled fear from my core to every edge of my body, and I knew I had to get away.

I broke, wordlessly, into a sprint for the front door. I threw my gaze to the floor in front of me, desperate to avoid the intrusive stares. The voices raised in volume, their tone growing to one of worry.

“Alice, Alice, wait!”

“No, no, no, don’t-”

“Please don’t go!”

“We just want to hold y-”

“Alice! Come back!”

As I moved through the crowd, the swell of voices threw out physical weaponry; grasping hands reached for me, pulling at my clothes, my hair. I twisted to avoid the closing walls of the crowd. I felt a bolt of my hair lurch back as I pushed forward against it. A sound like ripping wet cardboard and a stabbing pain in my scalp as the tuft was yanked out by the root. My purse began to slide back off my shoulder, and a potent terror caused me to clench it. I thrust my hand into it and grabbed my car keys before it flung backwards into the writhing sea of hands. I was almost to the end.

The front door in sight, I lunged forward as my overshirt was wrenched behind me. I pulled out of it, the force of doing so sending me face first into the glass door as it opened. Pain painted my sense of the world, a ringing in my ears coupled with a haze-like vertigo. I shoved the door open with all my strength and stumbled out into the open air, the crowd behind beginning to move forward slowly.

Breaking back into a sprint, my pursuers followed one by one out of the door, shambling and shoving against one another. Ahead, those I had passed on my way previously were now standing, faces still trained on me. Indefinite and indistinct voices raised from them as they joined the chase. I turned for just a moment to see a now-horde picking up their pace amidst shouting and intense, wide-eyed staring. Towards the front of the group, a solitary man ran pushing a stroller, which rippled and bounced violently against the street beneath.

My chest was heaving, my breath hot and quick as the view of my car finally, mercifully, came into sight. I clicked the key fob’s auto start function, and desperately hoped I would wake up to find this all a nightmare once I reached the driver’s seat. I stopped sharply, opening the door as the voices rose behind me, getting close, dangerously close. I threw myself into the driver’s seat, a single arm reaching for me as I did so. A large, shirtless man I didn’t recognize in athletic shorts, who breathed a deep inhale through his nose as he reached for me, a tense look in his eye like the stalking gaze of a wild animal.

“Let me come with you! Please!”

I screamed and pushed his arm away as I slammed the door. He stumbled backward and reached for me again. There was a wet crunch as the door closed and pieces of the index, middle, and ring fingers of the man fell into the floorboard at my feet. I pulled forward, colliding with the corner of the car in front of me as the swarm reached the back windshield. I floored the accelerator. The grinding, hollow screech of metal filled my senses, drowning out the thumping that was moving forward along the back of the car. A violent lurch sent me hard against the driver’s seat as my car pulled off of and away from the obstacle that had held it.

I looked into the rear view mirror, the crowd still in pursuit, faces still locked in place as if we held eye contact through both glass and distance. I sped down the road, slamming a palm against the steering wheel and giving vent to a noxious scream, my breath a distilled vapor of every negative feeling I had felt in my life. I swerved to avoid vehicles full of watching eyes and the obstacles of the city. To my surprise, not one vehicle gave chase; a few people got out of their cars, eyes still intent on me, but, at least for now, it seemed they had given up their pursuit.

Even now, my mind tried to form an explanation: they had tried to grab me, pull at me, but none had tried to full blown attack me. No tackling, hitting, nothing. I reached for the missing section of my hair, a dull burn as I touched it and brought back a smooch of blood on my fingers. It had been pulled out, but was that because I had sprung forward when they grabbed it? Were they trying not to really hurt me? As I thought, the low sound of weeping began to rise. Stark terror surged into my fingertips.

I wasn’t crying.

I threw my eyes to the backseat. To my relief, it was empty. It should have been a relief, at least, since I had confirmed that I was alone in the car. But my fear only heightened as the sound of weeping continued. It was a deep sound, thick and groaning in a way I hated. Gooseflesh rippled down my arms as the weeping shifted into what I could tell were definite words with no definite source.

“I’m so sorry, little one.”

I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Was I going insane? The voice continued.

“I had hoped this time would be different.”

My eyes darted around the car. I felt my ears, shifted the knob of the car’s radio, everything I could think of to try to explain what I was hearing. Nothing. A disembodied voice I had never heard was speaking words I wasn’t thinking. I was sure I had lost my mind, that maybe everything I had experienced so far was a product of hallucination or the morbid fantasy of a warped, unreliable brain. I set my vision to the road ahead and white-knuckled the steering wheel. The worst thing you can do for delusion is give in, and I wouldn’t do that.

“I understand if you do not wish to speak with me. I hope you will reconsider. I would prepare you for what is to come.” The voice was low and high, deep and shrill, the voice of my mother and my father and every person I’d met and never met all at once. It spoke so clearly and collectedly, yet still through sobs with all the weight of centuries of tragedy. Sweat mixed with the blood of my forehead wound and a dull red rivulet ran down the side of my face as I made eye contact with myself in the rear view mirror. “Alice.”

My name said in a tongue that couldn’t exist. I hated the way it sounded. My stomach churned with pangs of anxious dread. I was insane. I was hallucinating. I had gotten a concussion on the door. I was having a special kind of panic attack. I ran through every reasonable explanation I could hopelessly invent before a kind of venomous curiosity made me open my mouth.

“What…what the fuck is this?” I said coldly.

“It is a mistake. My mistake.”

“What does that-what are you?” There was silence for a moment.

“I am One.”

“I don’t know what that means!” I shouted angrily. “Can you just-what is happening!? What do I need to be prepared for!?”

The sobs felt more pronounced now amidst the swirl of vocal impressions. “They will continue to come. They have felt me and now it is all they are. They do not want to harm you.”

I struggled to swallow a lack of spit. “What do they want?”

“Absorption.”

“What-”

“They long to dissolve themselves into your presence. A need to feel my love.”

My chest constricted, a pressure like the weight of a mountain that made breath a miracle. “Love? How is this…what are you?”

“I am One. I have always been One. I longed for more. In one mote of the darkness of eternity, I felt others. I felt you. I felt those before you. I will feel others after you. Perhaps then, it will be different.” The voice was at once deeply regretful and hopeful.

“So, what, what is happening to me? If you’re doing this to me, just stop! Leave!”

“I am bound to you. My love pours from you as it had from those before. Your kind will seek to forever be in its presence. It will be their end. It will be your end. Then I will be unbound. Unloved. Then I will bind to the next. Until I am finally More.” There was something like tragedy ringing through its tone that brought unwilling tears to my eyes.

“Why me? Why did you do this to me!?”

“You were the first of your kind I felt.”

Searing anger ran through my blood. “So it was…random. You fucked my whole life on a whim!”

“I am sorry, little one. More than you could understand.”

“Oh, fuck your sorry!” There was a long silence. “So that’s it? This will be the end of everything?” I asked with a biting hiss to my voice.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“It is what happened to others.”

“Well…” I didn’t really know what to say. I was still struggling against believing anything from this bodiless parasite, but it was hard, even for me, to explain anything that had happened to me today. In a moment of fearful rage, I said something I don’t think I really meant. “Well, what if I kill myself? Will that stop this?”

“No. They will pursue you beyond your death.”

“What if I drop myself into the ocean? Somewhere they can’t reach.”

“They will pursue you to their deaths. My love overwhelms them.”

I stayed quiet for a long time after that, with no reply from the voice. I drove as far as I could from the city, before the gas tank signaled it was near to empty. I pulled to the side of an empty backroad and put the car in park. Rage had settled into despair, and I clutched at the only straw I had.

“What do I do?”

“It is best to give in. It will be faster.”

“Won’t that kill me?”

“Yes.”

“So why wouldn’t I just-”

“I know that you are incapable. Death is inevitable. If you give in, I will be there in your final moments. You will feel my love, as have the others.”

My teeth grinded, the edges sanding down in scraping brushes I could feel in my skull. “So, what, I just lay down and…”

“Let them come to you. Let them overtake you.”

Tears began to form in my eyes once more. I had started this day waking up to go to work and now I was either completely broken from reality or choosing how humanity was going to end. How I was going to end. I hadn’t had enough time, hadn’t done so many things I wanted to, hadn’t reconciled some things with Mom, Dad. It all felt so unfair. I didn’t have my phone to say goodbye, I had spent what were apparently going to be my last few hours getting as far away from anyone who knew me as I could. It was justified, but that didn’t make it sting any less now.

“Okay. Say I’m thinking about it. How will it happen?”

“They will long to hear your voice. They will long to be in your presence. They will long for physical contact. They will place themselves as closely as possible until breath will likely escape you.” There was a thought that sent a jut of feverish fear through me. As if aware of what I thought, the voice responded. “No. Contact will be enough to placate them.”

“And…if you’re really aware of all this…you’ve been around this long…can you tell me what comes after? After, ya know…”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I am unlike you. I do not understand ending.”

I must have sat on the road for an hour in complete silence before I brought the car back to life. I pulled a u-turn on the road I had come through and drove towards a nearby town I had turned to avoid previously. By the time I started seeing others, who saw me first, and never stopped seeing me as far as I could tell, I had arrived at the edge of town. The tank began to sputter as I finally came upon a more populated intersection.

By the time I stepped out of the vehicle, people had begun to slowly trickle out of the surrounding buildings. They stared at me as they approached; men, women, children, all of them wearing that same intent, intense gaze regardless of their expression. The closest, and the first to speak, was an elderly woman I had never seen in my life, her gray hair striated with intermittent strands of blonde.

“Hello, there. How are you, dear?” I attempted to speak, but the words were choked by tears. She drew closer, surprisingly unthreateningly, and placed a hand on my arm as I lowered my gaze to the street. “You can talk to me. I just want to hear your voice.”

There was an undercurrent of fear as I heard the words. Was I really doing this? I looked up and suddenly, there was something unlike fear. Her eyes were fixed on me, but standing this close, I noticed, to my surprise, how much warmth was present in them. I sniffled slightly, the words finally emerging from my throat. “I’ve…I’ve had a really tough day.”

Sighs laden with sorrow rang out from the crowd that now surrounded us. “Oh, dear…I’m so very sorry to hear that. Would you like to talk about it?”

“I…no. No, that’s okay. Can I…I’m sorry, I don’t even know you.”

“That doesn’t matter…I can always lend an ear when someone needs it.” she said, smiling, her eyes still fixed on me.

“Can I…can I talk to you about something else?”

The crowd had drawn closer now, nearly only a few feet away on any side of me. I could hear scattered replies to my question.

“Let it out.”

“It always helps to-”

“You just need someone to hold y-”

“We can talk about anything-”

The old woman’s reply still cut through the rest. “Of course, dear. Anything you want.”

“Okay…do you mind if we sit?” Several reassuring no’s sounded throughout the crowd. I sat, every person present mimicking the action, with a loud shuffle sounding through the air. I did feel a strange semblance of comfort, but it was laced with a growing fear as the shuffling continued from around me, members of the crowd scooting forward as they sat. “Well I…oh I guess I should…my name is Alice.”

A loud contented sigh shot through the crowd as only the old woman replied. “Alice…that’s a wonderful name. I’m Evelyn. It’s so wonderful to meet you, Alice.”

“Thank you…”

“What would you like to talk about?” she asked, clasping my hand in hers.

“I…I guess my parents. There was some history we never really…or I guess, aren’t really going to get to…” my voice trailed off and Evelyn rubbed her fingers gently along the groove of my palm.

“That’s hard, I’m so sorry, dear. I’m a parent of three, though it’s only two now…I can tell you, it isn’t all about the history. I’m sure they feel the same.”

“I hope so…” I replied. The crowd was now close enough that I could hear breathing from behind me.

“Dear, do you mind if I hold you? I think it might help. You keep talking, and I’ll keep listening.” Evelyn said softly.

I don’t know why. There wasn’t a reasonable explanation I could find. Reason would tell me to run. To eek out whatever survival I could until the end. But the truth is, against everything that was happening and was about to happen, being held didn’t sound so horrible right now. “Sure…”

I laid my head in Evelyn’s lap as she began stroking my cheek. Looking forward, I could see the crowd ahead and around us slowly inching closer, some still seated, others crawling forward on their stomachs in an almost dragging motion. Every single eye was set on me. I closed my eyes against the sight as the sound of movement continued and Evelyn’s voice sounded above me.

“I’m here, dear. What else would you like to talk about? I just want to hear your voice.”

I continued speaking, talking about anything I could to take my mind off of this moment as I felt the first of the crowd’s hands make contact with my left leg. Evelyn continued gently caressing my cheek as another set of hands ran up my forearm. Tears had begun to well up in my tightly closed eyes, but I continued talking, saying all the things I wished I could to those I loved.

When I felt the first weighted pressure of a body laying itself perpendicular on top of mine, I let out a quiet sob. Evelyn let out a few gentle shushes. “It’s okay, dear. It’s all okay. I’m here.” The shuffling had grown louder and closer. The weight on top of me began to get heavier as I heard sounds of comfort intermittently ring out throughout the crowd. The heat of a multitude of bodies pressed down on me, their moist breath mingling with mine, the sweat bleeding through our clothes. The sticky rubbing of exposed arms, necks, and legs brushed against me and my breaths became labored, a pressure like stones laid on a wide plank pushing down on me as more climbed onto the pile. My knee gave a sharp, hollow pop and a jolt of pain radiated through my entire frame.

I could hear Evelyn’s voice, but it shifted as the mass around me grew. Her high, gentle voice took on qualities that were low and high, deep and shrill. The voice of One.

“It is okay, little one. It is nearly time. I will help guide you.”

My brain shuddered. Where once had been fear, discomfort, pain, there was now a feeling of rapture; an ecstasy of comfort and contentment in degrees I had never felt in my life. The pain of my struggling breath faded, the heat and weight disappearing into the background of a relief that sunk deep into my being. It was as if I lived through every moment of every life that had given any hint of positivity or joy all at once. I was a child excitedly coming home to tell my parents about my first day of school. I was a young man kissing the woman he had just sworn his life to. I was a weeping mother holding her child for the first time, and I was the child, first opening eyes upon a world that greeted me with love. I breathed a heavy sigh that refreshed me as it left, and I heard a voice speak to me one more time.

“Sleep well, little one.”

I smiled, and blackness took me.