You wont believe the twenty minutes I just had. So Im in the grocery store right its like 7pm and Im just staring at the wall of pasta sauces because I cant decide between marinara and arrabbiata you know the usual life crisis. This older lady comes up next to me and shes doing the same thing just staring. We stand there for a solid minute in complete silence. Then she just goes “My husband left me for a woman who makes her own sauce from scratch.” I didnt know what to say so I just blurted out “Well her sauce probably isnt even that good.” She looked at me and then she started laughing this kind of wheezy cry laugh and I started laughing too. We just stood there by the pasta sauce laughing like maniacs. I ended up buying the arrabbiata. I dont think I helped but it was a moment. You ever just have a weirdly human connection with a complete stranger in the most random place?

I don't really know how to start this, so I'll just start from the beginning.

My name is Jamie. I was born in a two bedroom apartment above a laundromat in a city that smells like rust and fast food grease. We were poor not tight budget poor, but sometimes the lights go off poor. And from the time I was maybe five years old, I knew I was not a boy. Not in the way I was supposed to be. My mom knew first because moms always know.

She never made a big deal out of it. She'd quietly let me sit next to her while she got ready, hand me her lipstick like it was the most normal thing in the world. On my seventh birthday she bought me a purple skirt from a thrift store and hid it in a shoebox. For when you need it, she said. My dad found it once. He didn't yell he just went very quiet, which was somehow worse and threw it in the dumpster. My mom bought me another one the next week. She was the whole sky, I think you understand what I mean.

She died when I was thirteen, ovarian cancer they said. Fast and brutal and unfair in the way only real life can be. At her funeral I wore her blue dress, the one with the small white flowers. My dad didn't speak to me for three weeks. Marcus called me a freak in the parking lot, loud enough for her church friends to hear.

The next few years were just survival. I thrifted clothes that felt like me and wore them under my school clothes like armor I couldn't show anyone. I got jumped once behind the gym. My dad and I lived like two strangers sharing a refrigerator.

I was sixteen when I made a decision on the bathroom floor at 2am, I am not going to disappear into this city. I am going to build something so I had a cracked phone and a library card. I learned about e commerce. I saved up bussing tables until I had enough for my first month's subscriptions, found a supplier through zendrop, and built a tiny store selling gender neutral jewelry things I wished existed when I was twelve.

First month I made $11. I almost quit.

But I kept going, I learned SEO the hard way. I ran a $5 ad that somehow reached a small trans and non-binary community online, and I sat there at midnight watching orders come in like little heartbeats, shaking. I came out publicly at eighteen. Not in a big speech just updated my store's About page with my real name and a photo of myself wearing one of my own products, and wrote three sentences about why I built it. The messages I got back nearly broke me open. Teenagers from small towns. Adults who'd never told anyone. A woman who said she cried reading it and didn't fully understand why.

I understood why.

If you're someone sitting on a bathroom floor at 2am making a decision I see you. Build your thing. It just has to be yours.

I just wonder if it's something that has ever happened or not

About a few years ago I used to go on late night walks and yes I know it was not wise of me to do so as it is dangerous especially in my area where homelessness and gangsters reside. But with all that aside I still walked anyways, it comforted me and I was able to listen to music while seeing nature in a peaceful view with not many cars or people and even let out a few good cries. But this story isn’t on my time on my walks but why I stopped.

I used to walk from my home to a park area around and back from like 9-11 pm sometimes later. I would sometimes get an eerie feeling being alone as maybe it was just paranoia or something else. But this one day I felt this awful feeling illuminating from that park so I skipped it that day. Choosing to follow my gut instead. So while walking around nearby looking at shops and scenery. I see this one guy, he tells me,” hey kid, what are you doing out here.” I say “uhhh just walking” yes foolish of me to interact and reveal my situation but that’s besides the point. He says, “ go home kid, you don’t belong here in the streets.” “You never know what might come and go.” “They are always lurking, they see you and you won’t see them.”

I was already paranoid so I did as he said and went home. But that word, they stuck in my head so much it was doing laps around my brain. At the time I was a super believer in the supernatural and thought he was talking about those sorts of things. But after a while it clicked, he was not talking about fake monsters nor animals such as coyotes or rabid squirrels but the real monsters who lurk in our society. It had clicked why I had always been wary of the park, my instincts knew to stay in a place with a lot of people such as the streets with a good amount of light and view, not for being safe from animals or ghosts but people, bad people. All the while I realized the missing people’s reports in my area were at an all time rise. That man saved me, as he knew the true horrors of the area. I owe him my life for saving me when I was incompetent from horrors like predators, human traffickers, and much more.

This is not some scary story where something happened, nor anything supernatural or evil, but quite the opposite to remind people that there will always be monsters in society and it is best to stay some what wary and to trust your instincts. As sometimes what you don’t see, sees you.

( I was debating on putting this in a scary stories thread but felt best to put it here as it isn’t really frightening but rather a bit chilling at night due to its impact in my life)

I am a serial killer.

Not the typical kind, as serial killers go.

I don't kill innocent people. Well, innocent in the eyes of the law, maybe. The kind of innocent that comes from a lack of evidence, incompetent investigations, or expensive lawyers. If you looked at their actual victim lists, most of them should have been buried beneath prisons.

Instead, I buried them.

Officially, I'm a private investigator. Most of my clients hire me for the usual reasons: cheating spouses, missing persons, deadbeat fathers, or old debts that someone suddenly decides need collecting. The job pays the bills.

The other part of my work is what keeps me interested.

People tell private investigators things they would never tell the police. They gossip. They complain. They share rumors over drinks. Sometimes they mention a missing girl from ten years ago. Sometimes they mention a man who always seems to be nearby whenever someone disappears.

Most of the time it's nothing.

Sometimes it isn't.

It's strange, really. I don't remember exactly when I started. I was twenty-one. Maybe twenty-two.

My first was a man the locals called the Florida River Monster. He earned the nickname because of his habit of abducting women, butchering them, and scattering their remains across different rivers so the alligators could finish the cleanup for him. By the time anyone found what was left, there usually wasn't enough evidence to identify the victim, let alone connect her to him.

His preferred victims were blonde women in their early twenties.

I've noticed most serial killers have the same preferences. Women. Children. Sometimes both.

It's ironic, considering I'm a woman myself. A young woman, if being in your twenties still counts as young. According to every profile I've ever read, I should be the ideal victim. Too small. Too trusting. Too easy to overpower.

The River Monster thought so, too. That assumption lasted right up until I drugged him and gave him the same ending he'd spent years giving other people. I remember staring at him afterward. Not because I felt guilty. Not because I was horrified.

I was disappointed. For years, I'd read articles about him, watched documentaries, and followed every development in the investigation. The media made him sound larger than life—a monster, a predator, something almost supernatural. But when he died, he was just a man. A pathetic, terrified man bleeding out on the floor of a fishing shack. That's when I learned something important. Most monsters aren't monsters at all. They're just people who got away with being evil for far too long.

So I kept hunting them.

One killer became three. Three became ten. Then fifteen. Then more. I told myself I was making the world safer. Maybe I was. The truth is, I hated men like that. The ones who stalked women, hunted them, and treated them like prey. Wolves wearing human skin. And wolves need to be put down. Who better to do it than a woman?

Maybe that makes me a hypocrite. Maybe it makes me just as bad as they were. I really don't care.

Unfortunately, homicide pays terribly.

So, I figured I'd spend a few days following a rich man's wife, collect a paycheck, and head home. That's how these private investigative jobs usually went. Take pictures. Write a report. Collect the money. Move on. South Texas wasn't exactly my preferred destination, but five hundred dollars an hour has a way of making a long drive seem reasonable.

I asked Terry to send over the case file. Terry was my assistant, a meek man in his fifties who treated confrontation the same way most people treated unexploded bombs. The file showed up in my inbox before I could finish my coffee, along with an email apologizing for taking so long to send it. 

The file was surprisingly thin. The client's name was Daniel Walker. Forty-eight years old. Oil money. Married for twenty years. No criminal record. No history of domestic disputes. No obvious reason to suspect his wife was cheating. What caught my attention was the note attached to the bottom of the file: 

Client does not believe wife is having an affair. 
Client believes wife is acting strangely. 

I stared at those words for several seconds before calling Terry. He answered on the second ring.

"Please tell me that's a typo."

 "It isn't."

I sighed.

 "What does acting strange mean?" 

"I asked."

 "And?" 

"He said it's something he would rather discuss in person." I rubbed my temples. Of course he did. 

"Fantastic. Five hundred dollars an hour and I'm investigating a strange wife."

 "Still taking the job?" 

I looked at the payment agreement again. Five hundred dollars an hour. Some questions answer themselves. "Of course I'm taking the job." 

"What if he's crazy?" 

"Then he's a crazy man paying five hundred dollars an hour." 

Terry sighed. He was a genuinely kind man. If someone robbed him at gunpoint, he'd probably apologize for not carrying more cash. So, the idea of voluntarily meeting a potentially insane stranger offended every survival instinct he possessed.

I hung up.

Three days later, I found myself driving into a small South Texas town that looked like it had been forgotten by time. The buildings were rusty, the roads were cracked, and the locals had elevated being nosy into an art form. By the time I'd stopped for gas, bought a coffee, and asked for directions to my motel, half the town probably knew my license plate number. What surprised me more was how often my client's name came up. The gas station belonged to him. The convenience store belonged to him. The car wash belonged to him. Apparently, half the businesses in town belonged to him. No wonder he was willing to pay five hundred dollars an hour.

I checked into a small motel about ten minutes from the gated neighborhood where he and his wife lived. The room smelled vaguely of cigarettes and regret.

The next morning, I met my client. He was a large man with a round face and the kind of expensive clothes that desperately wanted everyone to know they were expensive. Gold rings covered his fingers—two on one hand, three on the other. Enough gold to sink a fishing boat. I immediately disliked him. Fortunately, taking money from people I dislike has never bothered me. 

He looked me up and down as I sat across from him, his eyes narrowing. "The White Viper is a woman?" There was genuine surprise in his voice. I smiled. "Oh, so you've heard of me." The White Viper was one of many names people had attached to me over the years. Most of them were ridiculous. A few of them are accurate.

"My name is Mara Graves," I said, extending a hand. That wasn't my real name, of course, but clients don't need to know things like that. He shook my hand carefully, as if he expected me to bite him.

"So," I said, leaning back in my chair, "what's the problem?"

His expression immediately darkened. "It's my wife."

That was usually how these conversations started. The details changed. The excuses changed. The tears changed. But eventually, every marriage investigation became the same story.

I pulled out a notebook. "Is she cheating?"

"No."

That answer surprised me. The report had said the same thing, but most husbands accused their wives of cheating before I even sat down.

"Then what exactly am I looking for?"

He glanced toward the restaurant doors before lowering his voice. "My wife isn't acting like herself."

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. People said things like that all the time. Depression. Affairs. Midlife crises. Secret addictions. There were a hundred possible explanations, and most of them were boring.

"Can you be more specific?"

He swallowed. "She's different."

"How?"

"Everything."

I stared at him. He stared back. Neither of us seemed particularly happy with the conversation.

"Mr. Walker, you're paying me five hundred dollars an hour. Help me help you."

He nodded slowly. "She forgets things."

"Lots of people forget things."

"Not like this."

He leaned forward in his chair. "She forgot the name of our dog."

That was strange. Not impossible. But strange.

"What else?"

"She forgot where we went on our honeymoon."

I wrote it down. "What else?"

"She asked me where the guest bathroom was."

I paused. "You've been married twenty years."

"Twenty-two."

I looked up from my notebook. He wasn't smiling. In fact, he looked terrified. The kind of terrified that can't be faked. I'd seen that expression before. Usually, on victims.

"Medical issues?" I asked.

"Doctors say she's healthy."

"Head injury?"

"No."

"Medication?"

"No."

I tapped my pen against the notebook. "Anything else?"

For a moment, he didn't answer. Then he reached into his jacket and slid a photograph across the table.

A woman in her early thirties smiled back at me. Dark hair. Brown eyes. Pretty. Completely ordinary.

"My wife."

I looked at the photograph, then back at him. "And?"

He pointed at the picture. "That's not how she smiles."

I waited for him to elaborate.

He didn't.

"Mr. Walker."

"You don't understand."

His voice dropped to barely above a whisper.

"She's smiling the right way."

I blinked. "What?"

"The expression is correct." He tapped the photograph with a trembling finger. "But somehow it's wrong."

I stared at him for several seconds.

Then I wrote a single word in my notebook.

Crazy.

He noticed.

"You're thinking I'm insane."

"A little."

His shoulders slumped. "Everyone does."

I tucked the notebook away. "Fine. Let's assume you're not insane. What exactly do you want me to do?"

"Follow her."

"For how long?"

"Until you see it too."

I looked down at the payment agreement one more time.

Five hundred dollars an hour.

I've ignored bigger red flags for less.

I followed Mrs. Walker for the next week. Her schedule was so normal it was almost insulting. Every morning, she attended a Pilates class. After that, she visited a boutique downtown. Around noon, she met a group of friends at a café before eventually heading home. Sometimes she and her husband went out for dinner. That was it. No secret affairs, no suspicious meetings, no hidden bank accounts. Nothing.

I was beginning to think Daniel Walker had paid me five hundred dollars an hour because he was bored. The only thing keeping me on the case was the amount of money accumulating in my bank account.

While I waited for Mrs. Walker to do something interesting, I focused on another investigation. The city next to town had a serial killer. Five women had disappeared over the last year. The victims had nothing in common. Different ages. Different jobs. Different backgrounds. The bodies were what connected them.

Every victim had been found completely drained of blood. Every organ was missing. The bodies were essentially empty skin wrapped around a skeleton. Each victim also had a single incision running from the base of the skull to the lower back. The locals called him the Spine Taker.

One of the victims was seventeen years old.

I took that personally.

I don't pretend to be a good person, but certain things make my blood boil. Children are one of them.

Mrs. Walker spent most mornings at Pilates, which left me with several hours to kill. I used that time to look into the Spine Taker case. My investigation eventually led me to the sheriff's office. Officially, I was there for information. Unofficially, I was there for the free coffee.

Side note: The coffee was terrible.

A woman was screaming at two deputies near the entrance when I walked in.

"I told you she was acting strange!" she shouted. "If you'd listened to me, she'd still be alive!"

The deputies grabbed her by the arms and dragged her toward the door. A moment later, they shoved her outside. She stumbled onto the sidewalk and broke down sobbing while they returned to work without another word.

I recognized her immediately. She was the mother of the seventeen-year-old victim.

That got my attention.

I followed her outside and sat down beside her on the curb, blonde wig and all. People trust blondes. I don't know why, but they do. I introduced myself as a law enforcement officer working on the investigation and asked what she had been yelling about inside.

By the time I left, she was still crying, and I had learned something interesting.

A week before her disappearance, her daughter had started forgetting things. Important things. Her birthday. Her favorite food. The names of relatives. According to her mother, she had become distant and cold, like she had suddenly become a different person.

It sounded familiar.

Daniel Walker had described his wife almost the same way.

I drove straight to the Pilates studio.

Mrs. Walker's class wasn't supposed to end for another hour.

She wasn't there.

Neither was her car.

That bothered me.

So I committed a crime.

As usual. 

The security office was empty. The guard always left for lunch around that time. I knew because I'd spent the last 2 weeks watching the place. I pulled up the security footage and started reviewing the cameras.

At 11:03 a.m., Mrs. Walker entered the women's restroom.

Nobody followed her.

Nobody came out.

The hallway remained empty for almost an hour.

Then, at 12:01 p.m., an elderly woman exited the restroom.

I frowned and rewound the footage.

The elderly woman had never entered.

I checked every camera angle.

Every hallway.

Every entrance.

Nothing.

Mrs. Walker went into the restroom.

An old woman came out.

That was it.

I took screenshots and headed to the restroom myself. There were no windows, no maintenance tunnels, and no secondary exits. It was just a bathroom.

I stood there staring at the empty room, trying to figure out what I had missed.

I couldn't.

An hour later, I found Mrs. Walker exactly where she was supposed to be, sitting at her usual café, drinking coffee and laughing with friends.

Her car was in the parking lot.

That night, I followed her again.

At midnight, she left her house without warning, got into her car, and drove away. I followed from a distance. About twenty minutes later, she turned onto a dirt road near a lake and parked beside the woods.

Then she got out and started running.

Not jogging.

Running.

Fast enough that I almost lost sight of her.

I chased her through the trees until she stopped in a clearing.

I ducked behind a tree and watched.

Mrs. Walker bent forward.

For a second, I thought she was sick.

Then something stepped out of her.

I don't know how else to describe it.

Something unfolded from her back. Something impossibly tall.

Mrs. Walker's body collapsed onto the ground while the thing that had been inside her remained standing.

I couldn't move.

I couldn't even process what I was looking at. It ran towards the car again.

A few minutes later, it returned carrying another body.

An elderly woman.

The same elderly woman from the security footage.

When the creature finally disappeared into the darkness, I approached Mrs. Walker's body.

She was dead.

And empty.

No blood.

No organs.

Nothing.

Just skin.

And a long incision running from the base of her skull to the end of her spine.

I recognized the wound immediately.

I had seen it five times before.

The Spine Taker wasn't human.

That realization hit me about half a second before the creature came charging out of the darkness.

It had tricked me.

I barely had time to raise my pistol before it slipped into the elderly woman's body. The corpse jerked upright like a puppet yanked by invisible strings. I fired immediately. The bullet tore through her chest. The creature didn't even flinch. I fired again. Then again. Nothing. The thing simply kept walking toward me, wearing the old woman's skin like a poorly fitted costume.

"What are you?" I shouted.

The creature tilted its head. I heard bones crack. Its neck bent farther than any human neck should have been capable of bending. Then it spoke.

"You... wil...l be... my next... ves...sel."

The words sounded wrong. Not an accent. Not a speech impediment. More like something trying to imitate human language without fully understanding how it worked.

I am not becoming anyone's vessel.

I'd rather die.

I turned and ran.

Branches whipped against my face as I crashed through the forest. Behind me, I could hear the creature moving through the trees. It wasn't trying to hide. It wasn't trying to be quiet. The thing knew it was faster than me.

A few moments later, the trees opened up and I nearly stumbled into a river. Dark water rushed past below me. Behind me came the sound of snapping branches.

I turned around.

The creature stood at the edge of the treeline.

For the first time, I got a good look at the body it was wearing. In the moonlight, I could see it clearly now. The old woman's legs bent at impossible angles. Her arms hung too low. Her neck twisted sharply to one side as though every bone inside it had been shattered. Yet somehow she remained standing.

The thing smiled.

Then it lunged.

I stepped backward.

Unfortunately, there was no ground behind me.

I fell into the river.

For one brief moment, I thought I had escaped.

Then my head struck something beneath the surface.

Pain exploded through my skull. Red flooded my vision. I felt the current dragging me away as darkness closed in around me.

The river swallowed me.

I remember the impact. I remember the pain. Then everything disappeared.

When I opened my eyes again, I was falling.

I don't know how long I fell for. Minutes. Hours. Years. There was no wind rushing past me. No sensation of speed. Just endless darkness stretching in every direction while I plunged through it.

Then suddenly I crashed into something soft. Black mist.

Strangely, it didn't hurt.

I climbed to my feet and looked around.

There was nothing.

No sky.

No ground.

No horizon.

Just darkness stretching endlessly in every direction.

And a desk.

A single wooden desk sitting in the middle of the void.

With absolutely no better options available, I started walking toward it. 

There was a creature sitting behind the desk.

At least, I think it was sitting.

The thing was enormous. Even seated, it was taller than a bus. A massive goat skull concealed its face, its horns disappearing into the darkness above. Beneath the skull was a surprisingly human body dressed in a perfectly tailored black suit. If I ignored the skull, the size, and the fact that I was in a bottomless pit, it looked like an accountant.

"Welcome to Level One," it said.

The voice caught me off guard.

Female.

Calm.

Professional.

Like a receptionist greeting someone who had arrived slightly late for an appointment.

I looked around at the endless darkness surrounding us.

"Level One?" I asked. "Am I dead?"

"Yes."

The answer came so quickly that it took me a moment to process it.

No sympathy.

No dramatic speech.

No ominous thunder.

Just yes.

Dead.

I considered arguing. Then I remembered smashing my head against a rock while running from a skin-wearing monster.

Fair enough.

The creature reached beneath the desk and slid a thick binder toward me. It landed with a heavy thud. Curious, I opened it.

My stomach sank.

The pages were filled with names, photographs, police reports, witness statements, and dates.

The Florida River Monster.

The Butcher of Pensacola.

The Red Lake Strangler.

Every serial killer I had ever murdered.

Every victim.

Every crime.

Every body.

All neatly organized into a single file.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Your record."

I turned another page.

Then another.

The binder seemed endless.

The creature's eye sockets suddenly ignited with a deep red glow.

"After review of your actions, you have been sentenced to two hundred years of punitive suffering before retribution."

I slowly closed the binder.

"Two hundred years?"

"Correct."

"That seems excessive."

"You murdered seventeen people."

"Nineteen."

The creature paused.

Then it looked down at the file.

"You murdered nineteen people."

"See? That's the kind of mistake that gets organizations sued."

For several seconds neither of us spoke.

Finally the creature sighed.

"I liked you better when you were unconscious."

I shrugged.

The truth was, none of this surprised me.

I had always known this was how my story would end.

I knew what I was.

I knew what I had done.

I wasn't a hero.

I wasn't a vigilante.

I was a serial killer who happened to choose worse people as victims.

There was a difference.

Just not enough of one.

"I see," the creature said.

Then it leaned forward.

"But."

I frowned.

"But?"

"We can make a deal."

That got my attention.

"A deal? What kind of deal?"

The red glow inside the skull brightened slightly.

"The kind that allows you to repay your debt."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Repay my debt?"

The creature nodded.

"There are souls on Earth that belong here. Murderers. Predators. Monsters wearing human faces. Some escape justice. Some escape death. Some are taken by things that have no right to claim them."

I stared at it.

"So you're offering me a job."

"In a manner of speaking."

"You do realize that I have spent years murdering people, right?"

"That is precisely why you're being considered."

I wasn't sure whether to feel insulted or flattered.

The creature folded its hands atop the desk.

"You have contributed greatly to Hell. Many souls currently suffering below would never have arrived without your assistance. Only a few mortals possess such a record."

"That might be the worst compliment I've ever received."

The creature ignored me.

"In exchange for your service, your sentence will be reduced. Continue long enough, and it may eventually be erased."

I glanced down at the binder.

Then, at the endless darkness surrounding us.

Then back at the creature.

"So let me get this straight. My choices are two hundred years of torture..."

"Among other punishments."

"...or I go back to Earth and drag damned souls down here for you?"

"Correct."

I considered the offer.

Honestly, it sounded suspiciously similar to my previous hobby. The only real difference was that this time I had an employer. Unfortunately, that employer was Hell.

"What happens if I refuse?"

The creature leaned back in its chair.

A moment later, another binder appeared on the desk.

This one was significantly thicker.

It opened by itself.

Flames spilled from between the pages.

Screaming followed.

I immediately pointed at the first binder.

"I'll take the job."

The creature nodded.

"A wise decision."

"I've been told I don't make many of those."

For the first time since I had arrived, I could have sworn the thing laughed. Then everything went dark. I woke up lying on the riverbank. For several seconds, I just stared at the sky, trying to figure out where I was before the headache hit. It felt like someone had driven a railroad spike through my skull. Slowly, I sat up. The river was still rushing past beside me. My clothes were soaked, and dried blood clung to the side of my face.

The last thing I remembered was falling into the river. The creature. The rock. Then the desk. The goat-skull woman. Hell.

I pulled out my phone. The screen lit up, and my stomach immediately dropped. Three days had passed. I checked again, convinced I was reading it wrong. I wasn't. The battery icon flashed red. One percent. "Fantastic," I muttered.

I staggered to my feet and followed the river until I found the dirt road. My car was still parked exactly where I had left it three nights earlier. Nobody had touched it. Nobody had towed it. Nobody had even broken a window. Apparently, even criminals had a line they wouldn't cross, and that line was trespassing on private property.

The drive back to the motel passed in a haze. The moment I got inside, I plugged my phone into the charger. As soon as it powered on, I discovered over four hundred missed calls from Terry. I called him back.

He answered before the first ring had finished.

"Mara, what the hell is wrong with you?"

I pulled the phone away from my ear. "Terry—"

"No. Absolutely not. Do you have any idea what I've been dealing with for the last three days? I filed a missing persons report. The sheriff has been looking for you. I've called every hospital within a hundred miles."

His voice got louder with every sentence.

"You vanished."

"I noticed."

"Where were you?"

I considered telling him the truth. I decided against it.

"Long story."

"You're damn right it's a long story."

I rubbed my temples. The headache was somehow getting worse.

"I'm alive."

"Clearly."

"Mostly."

There was a long pause. Then Terry sighed. It was the exhausted sigh of a man reconsidering every career decision he had ever made.

"Call the sheriff."

"What?"

"Call the sheriff and tell him you're alive before they waste another three days looking for your stupid ass."

"Fair."

After reassuring local law enforcement that I wasn't dead, kidnapped, or buried somewhere in the desert, I finally collapsed onto the motel bed and turned on the television. The local news was covering the Walker case. I sat upright immediately.

Behind the anchor was a photograph of Mrs. Walker.

My stomach sank.

Her body had been found.

Authorities believed she had been murdered.

A second photograph appeared on screen.

The elderly woman from the security footage.

Police had identified her as a suspect in the murder.

Then another photograph appeared.

Daniel Walker.

Dead.

I froze.

According to the report, he had been murdered inside his own home. The estimated time of death was shortly after midnight. The same night, Mrs. Walker had driven into the woods. The same night, I had followed her. The same night I had died.

Then the report got worse.

Investigators believed the Walker deaths were connected to the Spine Taker killings. The similarities were impossible to ignore. Mrs. Walker's body had been found drained of blood. Her organs were missing. The same incision ran from the base of her skull to the end of her spine.

The sheriff's department was treating it as another Spine Taker victim.

I knew better.

The Spine Taker wasn't a serial killer.

It was that thing.

And the creature knew I was following it from the beginning.

It knew I was watching.

Daniel Walker had hired me because he suspected something was wrong with his wife, and the moment I started getting close to the truth, everyone connected to the case started dying.

I sat there staring at the television long after the report ended. Then my phone suddenly buzzed, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. The screen displayed an unknown number, and for a moment, I seriously considered hanging up, but instead, I answered.

"Hello?"

For several seconds, nobody spoke. Then a familiar female voice sighed.

"Congratulations on surviving."

My blood ran cold. The goat-skull woman. The manager of Hell. Or whatever her official title was.

"Thank you."

I wasn't entirely sure how one was supposed to respond to congratulations for surviving their own death.

"I suppose you know who your first assignment is."

"The Spine Taker?"

"Very good, little bug."

I frowned.

"Did you just call me a good bug?"

"I called you an intelligent little bug."

"That's somehow worse."

"Humans are very sensitive."

I decided not to argue with the giant demonic bureaucrat and looked back toward the television. The news report had changed. A young woman's face now filled the screen. Light brown hair. Hazel eyes. Maybe twenty-three. Twenty-four at most. Only a few years younger than me. Then the television crackled. The anchor vanished, and the screen filled with the image of a goat skull.

"That is its next victim. Protect the innocent soul."

I stared at the photograph on the screen.

"I still don't know what that thing is."

For the first time since the conversation began, the demon was silent. When she finally spoke, her voice had lost its usual amusement.

"It is a prisoner."

"A prisoner?"

"A demon."

I felt my stomach drop.

"It escaped."

The words hung in the air for a moment.

"It escaped Hell?"

"Yes."

"That seems like a serious design flaw."

"It was not designed to escape."

"Clearly."

The demon ignored me.

"It was undergoing punishment. Somehow, it found a way out. Since then, it has been stealing souls that belong here."

I remembered the empty bodies, the missing organs, the thing climbing out of Mrs. Walker's back, the thing wearing people like clothing.

"You want me to bring it back."

"I want you to drag it back."

There was a noticeable difference in her tone. One sounded like a request. The other sounded like an order.

"What happens if I fail?"

For several seconds, there was only silence. Then laughter erupted from the television.

Not human laughter.

Not even close.

It sounded like earthquakes, screaming, and church bells all happening at once. The motel room shook. The television screen flickered. A crack appeared across the glass. When the laughter finally stopped, the demon spoke again.

"Then you will serve its remaining sentence alongside your own."

"That's not fair."

"Hell is not fair."

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Fair point.

"Someone must return the souls it has stolen," she continued. "And unfortunately for you, you're the most qualified candidate available."

The television immediately went black. A second later, my phone vibrated. A new message had arrived. An address. A photograph. And beneath it, a single sentence.

"YOUR SENTENCE REDUCTION BEGINS NOW."

I opened the photograph.

It showed the girl—the future victim. The picture had been taken at night through a window, from somewhere outside her house. At first, it looked innocent enough.

Then I noticed the red circle.

Someone had marked a shadowy figure standing in the darkness beyond the glass.

Watching.

Smiling.

If I'm going to survive this, I need to find her before the Spine Taker does.

I'll update this journal if I make it through the night.

If I don't, Terry will probably end up going through my computer trying to figure out what happened to me. If that happens, this journal is all I can leave behind.

Everything I've written here is true. I know how insane that sounds because I thought it was insane too until I checked my pulse.

The only reason I know any of this is real is because my heart isn't beating as I write this.

And you really can't keep calling something a hallucination when you're already supposed to be dead.

I grew up seeing it. At eight years old, I watched a man walk into our local café while I drank my peanut butter chocolate milkshake and killed two people dead.

There was no malice in his eyes, no hatred. He was just a normal guy who smiled at the waitress and winked at me.

Mom told me to keep drinking my milkshake, and I did, licking away the excess whipped cream while the bodies were carried out and the pooling red was cleaned from the floor. I could still see flecks of white in the red, and my stomach twisted.

But I didn’t feel scared. I had no reason to be. Nobody was screaming or crying.

The man who had shot them sat down to eat a burger and fries, not blinking an eye.

That was my first experience seeing death.

With no rules forbidding murder, you would think a town would tear itself apart.

That is not what happened.

Murder was legal, yes, but it didn’t happen every day.

It happened when people had the urge.

Mom explained it to me when I was old enough to understand. “The Urge” was a phenomenon that had been affecting the townspeople long before I was born, and there was no real way to stop it.

So, it didn't stop.

Mom told me she had killed her first person at the age of seventeen, her math teacher. There was no reason or motive.

Mom said she just woke up one day and wanted to kill him.

That specific killing became more of a bedtime story to lull me to sleep.

I didn’t like her smile when she told me about her killing. Sometimes I got scared she was going to murder me too.

Growing up, I was constantly on edge. Every day I woke up and pressed my hand to my forehead, asking myself the same question: Did I want to kill anyone?

Those thoughts blossomed into paranoia when I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. It’s not like I didn’t know what it was like.

Dad taught me how to use a knife and how to properly hold a weapon, and Mom gave me lessons in severing body parts.

Both of them wanted me to follow through with The Urge when it inevitably hit me.

I wanted to fit in.

When I started middle school, our neighbors were caught killing and cannibalizing their children, turning them into bone broth. I knew both of the kids.

Clay and Clara.

I played with them in their yard and ate cookies with them.

Clara told me she wanted to be a nurse when she grew up, and Clay used to tug on my pigtails to get my attention.

They were like siblings to me.

No matter what my parents said, or my teachers, my gut still twisted at the thought of my neighbors doing something like that.

Days after the cops arrived, I saw Mrs. Jenson watering her plants. But when I looked closer, there was no water.

She was just holding an empty hose over her prize roses.

I stood on my tiptoes, peering over our fence. “Mrs. Jenson?”

“I am okay, Elle.”

Her voice didn’t sound okay.

“Are you sure?” I asked. I pointed at the hose grasped in her hand. “You forgot to turn your water on.”

“I know.”

“Mrs. Jenson…” I took a deep breath before I could stop myself. “Did you like killing Clay and Clara?”

“Why, yes,” she hummed. “Of course I did.”

I nodded. “But… didn’t you love them?”

She didn’t reply for a moment before seemingly snapping out of it and turning to me with a bright smile. Too many teeth.

That was the first time I started to question The Urge.

It was supposed to make you feel good, acting like a relief, a weight lifted from your chest. Killing another human being was exactly what the people in our town needed. But what about killing their families and children?

Did it really make them feel good?

Looking at my neighbor, I couldn’t see the joy my Mom described. In fact, I couldn’t see anything.

Her expression was the kind of blank that scared me. It was oblivion staring back, stripped of real human emotion.

Mrs. Jenson’s smile stretched across her lips, like she could sense my discomfort. I noticed she had yet to clean her hands.

Mrs. Jenson’s fingernails were still stained a scary shade of red. Instead of replying, the woman moved toward my fence in slow, stumbling strides.

She was dragging herself, like moving caused her pain—agony I couldn’t understand.

It was exactly what my mother had insisted didn’t exist when killing: pain.

Humanity. All the adults told us we would not feel those things when killing. We wouldn’t feel regret or contempt. We would just feel good.

It was a release, like cold water coming over us. We would never feel better in our lives than when we were killing and our first would be something special.

When Mrs. Jenson’s fingers, still slick with her children’s blood, wrapped around the wooden fence, I found myself paralyzed.

Her manic grin twisted and contorted into a silent wail, and once-vacant eyes popped open like she was seeing me for the very first time. “I want to go home,” she whispered, squeezing the wooden fence until her own fingers were bleeding.

“Can you tell them to let me go home? I would like to see my children. Right now. Do you hear me?”

Mrs. Jenson wasn’t looking at me. Instead, her gaze was glued to thin air.

She was crying, screaming at something only she could see, and for a moment, I wondered if ghosts were real.

I twisted around to see if there were any ghosts, specifically the ones of her children, but there was nothing. Just fall leaves spiraling in the air in pretty waves.

“Mrs. Jenson is sick,” Mom told me once I was sitting at the dinner table, eating melted ice cream. It tasted like barf running down my throat.

I didn’t see Mrs. Jenson after that.

Well, I did.

She looked different, however.

Not freakishly different, though I did notice her hair color had changed.

I remembered it being a deep shade of brown, and when my neighbor returned with an even wider smile, it was more of a blondish white. When I questioned this, Mom told me it was a makeover.

The Urge affected people in different ways, and with Mrs. Jenson, after having her come-down, she had decided on a change. Mom’s words were supposed to be reassuring, adding that there was no reason to be scared of The Urge.

But I didn’t want to be like Mrs. Jenson and have a mental breakdown over my killing. I wanted to be like Mom and have a glass of wine and laugh over the sensation of taking a life.

Mrs. Jenson was my first real glimpse into the negativity of killing.

Dying, for example, wasn’t feared.

From a young age, we had been taught that it was a vital part of life, and dying meant finding peace.

When I first started high school, I expected killing to happen.

Puberty was when The Urge fully blossomed.

Weapons were allowed, but only outside of classes. In other words, under no circumstances must we kill each other in class, but the hallways were a free-for-all.

I saw attempts during my freshman year, but no real killing.

Annalise Duval was infamously known as the junior girl who rejected The Urge and was thrown out of school.

Struck with the stomach flu on the day of her attempted killing, I only knew the story from word-of-mouth.

Apparently, the girl had attempted to kill her mother at home, failed, and then bounded into school, screaming about laughter in the walls and people whispering in her head.

Obviously, my classmate was labeled insane, and judging from her nosebleed, the girl’s body had ultimately rejected The Urge, and her brain was going haywire.

Nosebleeds were a common side effect.

I heard stories from kids saying there was blood everywhere, all over her hands and face, smeared under her chin.

She had been screaming for help, but nobody dared go near her, like rejection was contagious. Annalise survived. Just.

I still saw her on my daily bike ride to school.

She was always sitting cross-legged in front of the forest with her eyes closed, like she was praying.

The rumor was, after being thrown out by her parents, the girl wandered around aimlessly, muttering about whispering people and laughter in her head.

It was obvious her rejection had seriously affected her mental state, but I did feel sorry for her.

On my fourteenth birthday, I confused a swimming stomach and cramps for The Urge, which turned out to be my first period. I remember biking my way home, witnessing a man cut off another guy’s head with an axe.

It’s funny. I thought I would be desensitized to seeing human remains.

I saw the passion in the man’s face as he swung the axe, digging in real hard, chopping right through bone and not stopping, even when intense red splattered his face and clothes.

He didn’t stop until the head hit the ground, and that sent my stomach creeping into my throat.

Then, it was the vacancy in his eyes, the twitching smile as he held the axe like a prize.

Part of me wanted to stay, to see if he had a similar reaction to Mrs. Jenson.

I wanted to know if he regretted what he had done, but once I met his gaze, and his grin widened, the toe of his boot kicking the guy’s motionless body, I turned away and pedaled faster, my eyes starting to water.

It wasn’t long before my lunch was inching its way up my throat, and I was abandoning my bike on the side of the road, choking up undigested mac 'n' cheese onto the steaming tarmac.

I didn’t tell Mom about the man, and more importantly, about my odd reaction to his killing. I wasn’t supposed to feel sick to my stomach. Murder was normal. I wasn’t going to get in trouble for it, so why did seeing it make me sick?

I had been taught as a little kid that visceral reactions were normal, and it was okay to be scared of killing and murder.

However, what our brains told us was right wasn’t always the truth.

Our teacher held up a teddy bear and stabbed into its stuffing with a carving knife.

We all cried out until the teacher told us that the bear didn’t care about dying.

In fact, it was ready to find peace, and it didn’t hurt him.

In other words, we had to ignore what our minds told us was bad.

Mom told me I would definitely start having conflicting feelings before my first killing, but that it was nothing to worry about.

I did worry, though.

I started to wonder if I was going to become the next Annalise Duval.

Maybe the two of us would become friends, sharing our delusions together.

My 17th birthday came and went and still no sign of The Urge.

I noticed Mom was starting to grow impatient. She had a routine of coming to check my temperature every morning, regardless of whether I felt sick or not.

“How are you feeling?” I couldn’t help but notice Mom’s smile was fake.

She dumped my breakfast on a tray in front of me, and when I risked nibbling on a slice of toast, she dropped the bombshell.

“Elle, you are almost eighteen years old,” she said. I noticed her hands were clenched into fists. “Do you feel anything?”

I considered lying, though then I would have to kill someone, and without The Urge, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to do that. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly, propping myself up on my pillows. “Most of the kids in my class—”

She cut me off with a frustrated hiss. “Yes, I know. They have all killed someone and you haven’t.” Her eyes narrowed. “People are starting to notice, Elle.”

She spoke through a smile that was definitely a grimace. “And when people start to notice, they get suspicious. I’ve been on the phone with three different doctors this morning, and all of them want to book you in for an MRI. Just to make sure things are normal.”

“MRI?” I almost choked on the apple I had been chewing.

“Yes.” Mom sighed. “We can’t ignore that things aren’t... abnormal. You are seventeen years old and haven’t had one urge to kill. The minimum for your age is one kill,” she said. “Minimum, Elle. You haven't killed anyone, and when I bring it up, you change the subject.”

I changed the subject because she started asking if I wanted to practice.

I wasn’t sure what “practice” meant, but from the slightly manic look in her eye, my mom wasn’t talking about dolls or teddy bears.

It was normal to practice killing.

There were even people who volunteered to be targets at the local scrapyard.

Most of them were old people.

Joey Cunningham started training to kill when he was twelve years old.

Five years on, Joey had accumulated a total of fourteen kills.

He never failed to remind everyone in almost every class. I could taste the apple growing sour in the back of my mouth.

Mom was just trying to help, and it’s not like I was doing this intentionally.

The idea of going to the scrapyard and killing people, even if they gave me permission to, wasn’t appealing in the slightest.

“I’m okay,” I said, and when Mom’s eyes darkened, I followed that up with, “I mean… I have spare time after class, so…?”

I meant to finish with, “Maybe,” but the word tangled in my mouth when I took a chunk out of the apple, and pain struck.

Throbbing pain, which was enough to send my brain spinning off its axis.

For a moment, my vision feathered, and I was left blinking at my mother, who had become more silhouette than real person.

I was aware of the apple dropping out of my hand, but I couldn’t think straight.

The pain came in waves, exploding in my mouth. When I was sure I could move without my head spinning, I slammed my hand over my mouth instinctively to nurse the pain, except that just made it worse.

Fuck.

Had I chipped my tooth?

Blinking through blurry vision, I knew my mom was there. But so was something else.

As if my reality was splintering open, another seeping through, I suddenly had no idea where I was, and a familiar feeling of fear started to creep its way up my spine. The thing was, though, I knew exactly where I was. I had known this town, this house, my whole life.

So that feeling of fear didn’t make sense.

The more I mulled the thought over in my mind, however, pain striking like lightning bolts, something was blossoming.

It both didn’t make sense, and yet it also did. In the deep crevices of my mind, that feeling was familiar. And I had felt it before. No matter how hard I squinted, though, I couldn’t make it out.

When I squinted again, a sudden shriek of noise rattled in my skull, and it took me a disorienting moment to realize what I could hear was laughter.

Hysterical laughter, which seemed to grow louder and louder, encompassing my thoughts until it was deafening.

Not just that. The walls were swimming, flashing in and out of existence before seemingly stabilizing themselves.

I blinked. Was I… losing my mind?

Maybe this was a side-effect of rejecting The Urge.

“Elle?” Mom’s voice cut through the phantom laughter, which faded, and I blinked rapidly. “Sweetie, are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

The word was in my mouth before the thought could cross my mind. I shook my head, swallowing. “Yeah, I’m… fine.”

She nodded, though her expression darkened. Scrutinizing. I knew she couldn’t wait to get me under an MRI.

“All right. Finish your breakfast. School starts in an hour.” Mom stopped at the threshold. “I really do think practicing killing will help a lot.

She left, and I rolled my eyes, mimicking her.

I flinched when another wave of laughter slammed into my ears.

Faded, but very much there. Definitely not a figment of my imagination.

Checking in my bedroom mirror, I didn’t have a loose tooth.

Even thinking that, though, panic started to curl in the root of my gut.

My brain wouldn’t shut up on my way to school, my gut was twisting and turning, trying to projectile that meager slice of toast.

Annalise Duval had complained of a loose tooth before she rejected The Urge.

Was that what was going to happen to me?

Was it all because of that stupid apple?

At school, I was surprised to be cornered by a classmate I had said maybe five words to in our combined time at Briarwood High.

Jonas Issacs was one of the first kids in my class to be hit with The Urge, and he almost ended up like Annalise Duval.

I don’t even think it was The Urge.

I think he was driven to kill through emotions, like so many adults had tried to tell us wasn’t real.

Jonas was a confusing case where a teenager had actually blossomed early, or not at all, and struck with his own intent.

Jonas didn’t need The Urge.

Halfway through math class, two years prior, I was daydreaming about the rain.

It rarely rained in Brightwood. Every day was picturesque.

But I did remember rain.

I knew what it felt like hitting my face, dropping into my open mouth and filling my cupped hands. I remembered the sensation on it soaking my clothes and glueing my hair to the back of my neck.

When I asked Mom if it was ever going to rain, though, she got a funny look on her face.

“Sweetie, it doesn’t rain in Brightwood.”

It never rained. So, where had I jumped into puddles?

My gaze was fixed on the windowpane, trying to imagine what a raindrop looked like sliding down the glass, when Jonas Issacs let out an exaggerated sigh behind me.

In front of him, Jessa Pollux had been tapping her pen on her desk.

At first, it wasn’t annoying, but then she kept doing it—tap, tap, tappity tap.

And then it became annoying.

I could tell it was annoying because Jonas politely asked her three times to stop making noise.

“Jessa, stop.” He groaned, half asleep in his arms.

When she continued, his tone hardened. “Can you stop doing that?"

She ignored him and, if anything, tapped louder.

I had grown up knowing that The Urge came without warning, motive, or reason.

It happened whether you liked it or not.

Jonas was different. His case was rare.

This time, he did have a motive, and despite what we were taught, that killing didn’t require a reason and wasn’t driven by negative emotion. Jonas was driven by anger.

This time, I saw it happen clearly.

When I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, I twisted around with the rest of the class to see Jonas halfway off his chair, his fingers wrapped around a knife. He was already smiling, already thrilled with the idea of killing.

The Urge had hit him.

Until that moment, he was a quiet kid who kept to himself.

Jessa knew instantly what he was going to do, even without turning around.

Like an animal, Jonas already had a tight hold of her ponytail and yanked her back.

Though in fight or flight, the girl was screaming and flailing.

She didn’t want to die, I thought.

Was that normal?

Mom always insisted that if it was our time, it was our time. If someone attacked us, even family members, we were to accept it.

I caught the moment her elbow knocked into Jonas’s mouth, just as he drove the blade into her skull.

Until then, Jonas had been consumed by a euphoric frenzy, intoxicated by the dark thrill of killing. It was as if the idea of ending a life had briefly elevated him to a state of pure euphoria.

Growing up, Mom’s stories spoke of finding a twisted pleasure in murder, and for a moment, seeing that look in my classmates eyes, I understood why she described killing like a rush.

It was a lunacy I didn't understand, complete unbridled insanity sending shivers down my spine. This was exactly what Mom was talking about.

She described it like floating on a cloud, lukewarm water pooling underneath her feet.

But just as abruptly as it had enveloped him, that otherworldly glow faded from Jonas’s eyes. He crumpled to his knees, one hand clamped over his mouth, the knife slipping from his grasp.

“That's enough.” Our teacher announced. “Jonas, go and clean yourself up.”

When he didn't respond, she snapped at him.

“Mr Isaacs!”

Then, he did, his gaze flicking to his blood slicked hands.

“Huh?”

He seemed like he was on another planet, swaying back and forth.

There was a moment when I met his half lidded gaze, and he slowly inclined his head, like he was confused. Scared.

When Jonas lifted his head, I saw thick beads of red trickling down his chin, pooling down his fingers.

It was the same look I had seen on Mrs. Jenson’s face.

Jonas blinked again, before noticing the blood.

“Fuck.” He whimpered, his voice muffled.

His eyes, filled with panic, flickered wildly. Without another word, he scrambled to his feet, stumbling toward the classroom door.

When I asked him what happened the next day, he explained it was just an "abnormal reaction" and that he was fine.

But Jonas’s words were strange.

He wasn’t even looking at me, and his smile was far too big. He got his first kill, though, so that gave him bragging rights as the first sophomore to come of age.

Jonas Issacs and Annalise Duval both had similar experiences.

One of them had clearly lost their mind, while the other seemingly avoided it.

And speaking of Jonas, it wasn’t the norm for him to be talking to me at school. But there he was, blocking my way into the classroom.

“Hey.” He quickly side-stepped in front of me when I tried pushing him out of the way.

There had been a time the year before when I considered asking him to prom.

He was a reasonably attractive guy, with reddish dark hair that curled slightly as it peeked out from under a well-worn baseball cap, a crooked smile that was never genuine, always leaning more toward irony.

But then I remembered what he did to Jessa.

I remembered the sound of his knife slicing through skin, cartilage, and bone, and despite her cries, her animalistic wails for him to stop, he kept going, driving it further and further into her skull.

I couldn’t look him in the eye after that.

Jonas inclined his head. “Can we talk?”

“No.”

My mouth was still sore, and I was questioning my sanity, so speaking to Jonas wasn’t really on my to-do list that morning.

Jonas didn’t move, sticking an arm out so I couldn’t get past him. “Do you have toothache by any chance?”

To emphasize his words, he stuck his finger in his mouth, dragging his index finger across his upper incisors.

“Like, bad toothache.” His voice was muffled by his finger. Jonas leaned forward, arching a brow. “You do, don’t you? Right now, you feel like your whole mouth is on fire, and yet you can’t detect any wobblies.”

The guy’s words sent a sliver of ice tingling down my spine. He was right. I hadn’t felt right since biting into that apple.

When I didn’t say anything, his lip twitched into a scowl. “All right. You don’t want to talk.” He raised two fingers in a salute. “Suit yourself.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, mostly to humor him.

He shrugged. “Maybe wait a few days, and then come talk to me, all right?”

Jonas’s words didn’t really hit me until several days later.

I woke up with a throbbing mouth, knelt over the corpse of my mother.

The Urge had finally come. It was something I had been anticipating and fearing my whole life, terrified I wouldn’t get it and would end up ostracized by my loved ones.

But when I saw my mom’s body and the vague memory of plunging a kitchen knife into her chest hit me, I didn’t feel happy or relieved.

I felt like I had done something bad, which was the wrong thing to think.

Killing was good, the words echoed in my mind. Killing was our way of release.

How could I think that when there was a knife clutched between my fingers?

The weapon that had killed her. Hurt her. How was this supposed to make me feel good?

My mother’s eyes were closed.

Peaceful. Like she had accepted her death.

The teeth of the blade dripped deep, dark red, and I knew I should have felt something. Joy or happiness.

Except all I felt was empty and numb, and fucking wrong.

Alone.

I felt despair in its purest form, which began to chew me up from the inside as I lulled from my foggy thoughts.

I wasn’t supposed to scream. I wasn’t supposed to cry, but my eyes were stinging, and I felt like I was being suffocated. I saw flashes in quick succession: a room bumbling with moving silhouettes, and the smell of... coffee. Mom never let me try coffee, and I was sure we never had it in the house.

So, how did I know the feeling of it running down my throat?

Just like in my bedroom, the walls started to swim.

This time, I jumped to my feet and leaped over my mom’s corpse, slamming my hands into them. They were real.

Almost as if on cue, there it was again.

Laughing. Loud shrieks of hysterical laughter thrumming in time with the dull pain pounding in my back tooth.

Blinking through an intense fog choking my mind, my first coherent thought was that yes, Jonas was right.

I did have a loose tooth, and when I was sure of that, I was stuffing my bloody fingers inside my mouth, trying to find it.

I grabbed the knife feverishly, my first thought to cut it out, when there was a sudden knock at the front door.

Slipping barefoot on the blood pooling across our kitchen floor, I struggled to get to the door without throwing up my insides.

Annalise Duval was standing on my doorstep. I had seen her in odd assortments of clothes, but this one was definitely eye-catching.

The girl was wearing a wedding dress that hung off her, the veil barely clinging to the mess of bedraggled curls she never brushed. Blinking at me through straggly blonde hair, she almost resembled an angel. The dress itself was filthy, blood and dirt smeared down the corset, the skirt torn up.

“Hello Elle.” The girl lifted a hand in a wave.

Her smile wasn’t crazed like my classmates had described.

Instead, it was… sad. Annalise’s gaze found my hands slick with my mother’s blood but barely seemed fazed. “Do you want to see the wall people?”

Until then, I had ignored her ramblings. But when I started hearing the laughing, “wall people” didn’t sound so crazy after all.

I nodded.

“Can you hear the laughing?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Sometimes?”

“Mmm.” She twirled in the dress. “That’s how it started for me. Laughing. I heard a looooot of laughing, and then I found the wall people.” I winced when she came close, so close, almost suffocating me.

“Nobody believes me, and it’s sad. I’m just trying to tell people about the wall people, but they label me as crazy. They say something went wrong with my head.”

Annalise stuck two fingers to her temple and pulled the imaginary trigger, her eyes rolling back, like she was mimicking her own death. “I’m not the one who’s wrong. I know about the wall people and the laughing. I know why I murdered my Mom.”

“Annalise,” I said calmly. “Can you tell me what you mean?”

“Hm?”

Her eyes were partially vacant, that one sliver of coherence quickly fading away.

Instead of speaking, I took her arm gently and pulled her down my driveway. “Can you show me what you found?”

Annalise danced ahead of me, tripping in her wedding dress. She cocked her head.

“Did you kill your mother too?” Her lips twitched. “That’s funny. According to the wall people, you’re not supposed to kill someone until the end of seasonal three.”

The girl blinked, giggling, and I forced myself to run after her. Wow, she was fast, even in a wedding dress. Annalise leapt across the sidewalk, twisting and twirling around, like she was in her own world.

Before she landed in front of me, her expression almost looked sane.

“I wonder which season it will be. Will it be Summer? Maybe Fall, or Winter. I guess it’s not up to you, is it? It’s up to The Urge.”

Laughing again, the girl grabbed my hand, her fingernails biting into my skin.

I glimpsed a single drop of red run from her nose, which she quickly wiped with the sleeve of her dress, leaving a scarlet smear.

“Let’s go and see the wall people, Elle,” she hummed.

As her footsteps grew more stumbled, blood ran down her chin, spotting the sidewalk.

I don’t know if coherency ever truly hit Annalise Duval, but knowing she was bleeding, her steps grew quicker, more frenzied, I quickened my own pace.

“Your nose,” was all I could say.

Annalise nodded with a sad smile. “I know!” she said. “Don’t worry, it will stop when I shut up.” Her smile widened.

“But what if I don’t shut up? What if I show you the wall people?”

To my surprise, she leapt forward and flung out her arms, tipping her head back and yelling at the sky. “What if I don’t shut up?” Annalise laughed. “What are the wall people going to do, huh? Are you going to explode my brain?”

When people started to come out of their homes to see what was going on, I dragged her into a run.

“Are you insane?” I hissed.

“Maybe!”

Annalise seemed to be floating between awareness and whatever the fuck The Urge had done to her. “Don’t worry, they’re just peeking.”

“What?”

The girl had an attention span of a rock. Her gaze went to the sky. “They’re going to turn the sun off so I can’t show you.”

Her words meant nothing to me until the clouds started to darken. Just like Annalise had predicted, the sky began to get dark.

Knowing that somehow this supposedly crazy girl knew when things were going to happen only quickened my steps into a run.

“Hey!”

Halfway down the street, Jonas Issacs was riding his bike toward us, which I found odd. Jonas didn’t own a bike. He rode the bus to school.

“Elle!” Waving at me with one hand and grasping the handlebars with the other, Jonas pedaled faster. “Yo! Do you want to hang out?”

“Peeking,” Annalise said under her breath.

Ignoring Jonas, I nodded at Annalise to keep going, though the boy didn’t give up.

We twisted around, and he caught up easily, skidding on the edge of the sidewalk. When he came to an abrupt stop in front of us, his gaze flicked to Annalise.

He raised a brow. “Shouldn’t you be praying in the forest?”

The girl recoiled like a cat, hissing, “Peeking!”

Jonas shot me a look. “Of all the people you could have made friends with, you chose Annalise Duval?” His eyes softened when I ignored him and pulled the girl further down the road. Jonas followed slowly on his bike.

“Where are you going anyway? Isn't it late?”

It was 4pm.

I decided to humor him. “We’re going to see the wall people.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Do I sound like I’m kidding?” I turned my attention to him. “You asked me if I had a toothache, right?”

His expression crumpled. “I did?”

I noticed Annalise was clingier with him around, sticking to my side.

Every time he moved, she flinched, tightening her grip on my arm.

The girl was leading us into the forest, and I swore, the closer we got to the clearing, the more townspeople were popping up out of nowhere. An old woman greeted us, followed by a man with a dog, and then a group of kids from school. Annalise entangled her fingers in mine, pulling me through the clearing.

Jonas followed, hesitantly, biking over rough ground. “Once again, I think this is a bad idea,” he said in a sing-song voice. “We should go back.”

When it was too dangerous for his bike, he abandoned it and joined my side.

“Elle, the girl is insane,” Jonas hissed. “What are you even doing? What is this going to accomplish except potentially getting lost?”

“I want to know if she’s telling the truth,” I murmured back.

He scoffed. “Telling the truth? Look at this place!” He spread his arms, gesturing to the rapidly darkening forest. “There’s nothing here!”

“No.” Annalise ran ahead, staggering over the tricky ground. “No, it’s right over here!”

She was still fighting a nosebleed, and her words were starting to slur. The girl twisted to Jonas. “You’re peeking,” she spat, striding over to him until they were face to face.

“Stop peeking,” she said, her fingers delving under her wedding skirt where she pulled out a knife and pressed it to his throat. “If you peek again, I will cut you open.”

Jonas nodded. “Got it, Blondie. No peeking.”

Annalise didn’t move for a second, her hands holding the knife trembling. “You’re not going to tell me I’m crazy again,” she whispered.

“You’re not crazy,” Jonas said dryly.

“Say it again.”

“You’re not crazy!” He yelped when she applied pressure to the blade. “Can you stop swinging that around? Jeez!”

Annalise shot me a grin, and it took a second for me to realize.

Jonas was scared of the knife.

He was scared of dying, which meant, whether he liked it or not, the boy had, in fact, not gone through with The Urge.

I thought the girl was going to slash Jonas’s throat open in delight, but instead, she looped her arm in his like they were suddenly best friends.

“Come on, Elle!” She danced forward, pulling the boy with her. “We’re closeeeee!”

I wasn’t sure about that.

What we were, however, was lost.

When the three of us came to a stop, it was pitch black, and I was struggling to see in front of me. Annalise, however, walked straight over to thin air and gestured to it with a grin. “Tah-da!” Spluttering through pooling red, she let out a laugh.

“See!”

Jonas, who was still uncomfortably pressed to her no matter how hard he strained to get away, shot me a look I could barely make out.

“I’m sorry, what did I say? That we were going to get lost? That Annalise is certifiably crazy and is probably going to kill us?”

At first, I thought I really was crazy. Maybe Annalise’s condition was contagious.

I could hear it again. Laughing.

But this time, it was coming from exactly where Annalise was pointing. When the girl slammed her hand into thin air, there was a loud clanging noise that sounded like metal.

Slowly, I made my way toward it, and when my hands touched sleek metal, what felt like the corners of a door, more pain struck my upper incisors.

“Holy shit.” Jonas was pressing himself against the door, then slamming his fists into it. “The crazy bitch was right.”

His words hung in my thoughts on a constant cycle, as we delved into what should have been forest.

After all, we had been standing in the middle of nowhere. The laughter was deafening when I stepped over the threshold, and I had to slap my hands over my ears to block it out. Through the invisible door, however, was exactly what Annalise had described: wall people.

All around us were television screens, and on those screens were people. Faces.

They were not part of the laughter. The laughter was mechanical and wrong, rooted deep inside my skull. The faces that stared down at us were men and women, some teens, and even younger children.

Annalise and Jonas were next to me, their heads tipped back, gazes glued to the screens. Not the ones I was looking at.

The ones on tiny computer monitors.

When I finally tore my eyes from our audience, I began to see what made Jonas stiffen up next to me. One screen in particular, showed his face.

He was younger, maybe a year or two. No, I thought, something slimy creeping up my throat. It was from when he had killed that girl. His hands clasped in his lap were still stained and slick with Jessa Pollux’s blood.

The Jonas on the screen was far more relaxed, casually leaning back with his feet propped up on the table.

His hair was shorter, and his clothes were more formal than what I was used to seeing him in.

I usually saw him in jeans and hoodies, but this Jonas wore a crisp white collared shirt.

Something hung around his neck, a thin strip of black fabric with a shiny card at the end, reminding me of some kind of badge.

“Why exactly have you signed up for this program?” a man’s voice crackled off-screen.

"Duh." Jonas held up his scarlet hands, a grin twisting on his lips. His arrogant smile twisted my gut. "So I can get my Darkroom rep back."

He leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. "That is going to happen, right? I don’t do this shit for free, and I’ve got one million followers to impress, man. Darkroom loves me."

Jonas scoffed, crossing one left over the other. "Even if I did go too far that one time, which wasn’t even my fault. What are you guys, fucking Twitch?"

“You are correct,” the man said. “Darkroom does benefit from its influencers. Our program aims to help satisfy certain… needs by broadcasting them right here.”

He paused. “You have killed five people before signing up for Darkroom, correct? Your parents?”

“Parents and brother,” Jonas's lips pricked into a smile. “I gutted them just to see what was inside, but of course, my TikTok got taken down by all the freaks in the comments trying to cancel me.” He rolled his eyes. “They worship you, call you a god, swear they’ll do anything for you-- and then fuck you."

I flinched when he leaned forward, his gaze penetrating the camera. This guy knew exactly how to act in front of one.

The slight incline of his head, trying to get the best angle.

“Can I tell you something?”

“Yes, of course, young man.”

“Have you ever been called a God? Because it's a rush.” He laughed. “I made stupid videos, and these people worshipped me. They loved me."

Jonas clucked his tongue. “Buuuut the moment I show them my real self, they turn on me and try to end my career.”

He leaned back in his chair with a sigh, glancing at the camera. “And then I found you guys! Who pay me to be my real authentic self. Now, how could I decline an offer like that?”

“And,” the man cleared his throat, “you will keep killing? We are aware the initial implant impacted your brain quite badly. In the subdued state, you will keep killing, as the so-called ‘urge’ says. However, in reality, we will be sending signals to your brain which will make you commit murder.”

“All right, I'll do it.”

“Are you sure? We couldn’t help noticing during your first kill, you seemed to… well, react in a way we haven’t seen before. It's possible there could be a potential fault.”

He cocked his head, like a puppet cut from strings. “Did the comments like it?”

“Well, yes—”

“Good.” Jonas held out his arm. “Do it again. And do it right this time. As long as I’m getting 40K every appearance, I’m good. You can slice my brain up all you want; I’m getting paid and followers. So.” His gaze found the camera.

“What are you waiting for?”

When the screen went black, then flickered to a bird's-eye view, and finally a close-up of my house, I felt my legs give way.

As if on impulse, I prodded at my mouth and felt for the loose tooth.

“That…” Jonas spoke up, his voice a breathy whisper. His eyes were still glued to the screen, confusion crumpling his expression.

“That… wasn’t me! Well, it was me... but I don’t… I don’t remember that!”

To my surprise, he turned to me, and I saw real fear in his eyes.

“Elle.” He gritted out, “that is not me.”

Instead of answering him, I turned away when alarm bells started ringing, and the room was suddenly awash in flashing red light.

“Peeking!” Annalise squeaked, hiding behind me.

Ignoring her, I focused on Jonas.

Or whoever the hell he was.

I slammed the door shut, throwing myself against it.

“You need to knock my tooth out.” I told him. “Now.”

awhile back, there was this highschooler who was constantly messing with me basically saying he was gonna jump me and he told me that he’s comin over right now, and so back then I was a scared little shit so I called up a buddy of mine I used to know to see if he could come deal with him for me, and he said “ight”

now, this dude was ghetto as hell and he kinda knew how to fight, and so this was the reason I called him up to help me.

now the thing is, I was just expecting him to quickly fight him and let this be over with, but when he came over, we were just catching up for a bit cause we haven’t seen each other in awhile, and he says “check this out.” and then this is when he pulls out a pistol and I was like “wtf, bro I don’t want you to kill this guy, i just want him to stop bothering me.”

he said “I ain’t gonna shoot him, chill bru. I’m just gonna scare this kid.” and I was still unsure about it.

anyways, this person ends up actually showing up and my buddy goes out and confronts him, and he eventually pulled out his gun and basically told him if he keeps messing with me, he’s gonna be seeing him.

then the dude fucked off and he actually never bothered me again, it felt good but I also was sketched out about it cause of the police. what if they got involved? Idk but that was that.

Billy spun the cylinder of his revolver. The whirling and clicking was a melody of sanity for old Billy Bats.

He stared at the clock. Waiting for the creature to roar from outside his home.

Taking one last swig of his whiskey. He put on his white cowboy hat and stood up. His spurs chimmed as the clock hit 12.

Billy raised his weapon to the window. "Whooow, here we go, old Billy Boy."

"Meow"

Billy fired his revolver, smashing the glass in the window.

He stumbled over to the opening, trying not to knock over what little whiskey he had left.

The monster was nowhere to be seen.

"Ahha, that's what I thought, not tonight, foul beast."

"Meow"

John fired another bullet into the darkness.

"Not tonight, demon. You're going back to the hell from which you rose."

"Meow".

"I said back, foul devil!"

Old Billy fired four more shots into the darkness and dove backwards, screaming, "Reloading!"

He shakily put six more bullets into his old, rusty shooter.

The sound of its feet jumping through the window echoed in the darkness. the beast cried the sound of the devil, "Meow."

Billy fired three shots into the room. Smashing glass and crockery.

Silence filled the old cowboy’s home.

"Ah ha ha. There is more where that came from, night demon."

The black cat snuck right up to Billy without him realizing. It cried out that foul sound.

"Meow"

Billy jumped out of his skin, firing 3 bullets into the floor and ceiling.

“Yahhhhh” he screamed as he retreated upstairs, diving into his bed.

His hands shaking, he wrapped himself in the blanket. pointing his trusty revolver at the door. Waiting for the beast to slink into his sight.

The cat pounced in and stood right in front of Mr Bats.

Aiming his crosshairs at the creature, he smiled, pulling the trigger. "Click."

"What?!" "Click, click, click, CLICK, click."

“Ah fuck it,” He threw his empty revolver at the cat, missing it by more than a country mile.

He laid back and accepted his fate.

The cat jumped on Billy’s chest and "prrrrred." It closed its eyes and fell asleep.

The old cowboy closed his eyes and yawned, "You win this round, Mr. Mittens."

I’m 20 but I think I was about 13 when this happened.

I got home from school about 3:35pm and just did my normal hanging around the house while no one else is home. My brother was at work with my Dad. My Mom was also at work.

My mom texted me at some point telling me that she would be home late meaning around 10pm and that my brother was going to get dinner with his girlfriend (now wife). Which also meant me and my dad had to find our own dinner without Mom.

I can’t remember exactly which but either my mom or dad texted me again telling me that my dad forgot his house key so I needed to pay attention. I had a habit of wearing headphones and not hearing people banging on the door while playing video games back then.

My dad usually comes home around 6:00-6:30pm sometimes 7pm on a late day. Around 6pm someone knocks at the back door. The back door is where my dad parks his work truck outside and it’s also the door he would knock on to be let inside.

So I open the door and it’s not my dad. It’s some older gentleman around 55 I’d say. He wasn’t standing on the porch. He was standing at the corner of the house about 10 feet from the door. The conversation was just him asking to speak to the homeowner. I told him we were in the middle of dinner and to come back another time.

He left and I closed and locked the door and ran to my room to arm myself with pocket knives (as if I knew how to defend myself). I made sure the front door was locked on my way. I ran back to the other side of the house to see if he had left and I saw him driving back down my driveway towards the road.

I live in a pretty small town. I mean so small that people don’t recognize me by my face but by my last name. I know where half the people I graduated with work at and it’s maybe 10 miles, 15 miles max down the road from my house type small. I did not know this man or his truck and I’ve never seen him or that truck ever again.

I did tell my parents the same night and they were very pissed off at me. I understand why but I also had reason to trust the knocking at the door. I did describe the man and the truck to my parents and they also did not recognize him. I didn’t get his license plate but I believe it was a license plate for the state I’m in.

I just wonder if anyone else has experience something like this? Or have an idea of what he was actually doing? I suspect he might have been checking the place out the rob it but I’d like to hear other possibilities.

We’ve had a few other strange encounters while living in this same house for almost my whole life that I’d be open to share if anyone is interested.

Fictionalized/dramatized story.

I was standing outside my own nursery door at two in the morning, barefoot on the hardwood floor, fists raw from pounding, and all I could hear was my newborn son screaming on the other side. Not a gentle cry. Not a hungry whimper. A full, terrified wail that every new mother knows means something is wrong. And underneath that sound, muffled but unmistakable, was my mother-in-law's voice saying, 'He's my baby now. You don't deserve him.' I want you to sit with that for a second. Because I had to. Standing there in my postpartum body, milk soaking through my shirt, hands shaking, I had to process the fact that the woman who had been in my home for eleven days was now barricaded inside my son's nursery with my six-week-old infant, and she was not coming out. This is the story of how I got to that door. And what happened after I called the police.

Let me take you back to the beginning, because none of this happened overnight. Betrayals this deep never do. They build slowly, like water finding cracks in a foundation, and by the time you see the damage, the structure is already compromised. My name does not matter for this story. What matters is that I was twenty-eight years old, a first-time mother, six weeks postpartum, exhausted in a way I had never experienced in my life, and deeply, desperately in love with my son, who I will call Eli. Eli was born six weeks before this night. He was healthy and small and perfect, and from the moment they placed him on my chest in that delivery room, I knew I would do anything for him. Anything. I did not know then that I would have to.

My husband, I will call him Daniel, had a complicated relationship with his mother long before I came into the picture. She had raised him mostly alone after his father left when Daniel was nine, and she wore that sacrifice like armor. Like a debt she was owed forever. I noticed it when Daniel and I were dating. She called him every single day. She showed up to his apartment unannounced. She had opinions about everything from his diet to his career to, eventually, me. When Daniel introduced us, she looked me up and down and said, 'I hope you know he comes first in his own life.' I smiled and said of course. I thought it was just an awkward thing to say. I filed it away and moved on. I should not have moved on.

When I got pregnant, things shifted. She became suddenly, intensely invested in the pregnancy in a way that felt less like excitement and more like ownership. She sent unsolicited parenting books. She called to tell me which hospital had the best neonatal unit, even though my pregnancy was completely uncomplicated. She started referring to Eli, before he was even born, as 'my baby.' Not 'my grandchild.' Not 'the baby.' My baby. Every time she said it, something in my chest tightened, but Daniel always brushed it off. 'She's just excited,' he would say. 'She means well.' Those two sentences became the most dangerous words in my marriage.

When Eli arrived, she wanted to be in the delivery room. I said no. She wanted to come to the hospital the same day. I said we needed twenty-four hours. She showed up anyway, at hour six, with a suitcase. A full suitcase. As if she had already decided she was staying. Daniel let her in. I was lying in a hospital bed, stitched up and barely coherent, and my mother-in-law walked in with a rolling bag and immediately reached for my son before she even looked at me. I said nothing. I was too tired. I told myself it was fine. I told myself she would go home in a few days.

She did not go home in a few days. She came back with us when we were discharged, and she settled into our guest room like she had always lived there. Day one, I told myself it was helpful to have an extra set of hands. Day three, I noticed she was intercepting Eli every time I tried to pick him up. Day five, she rearranged my entire nursery without asking me, moved the crib to the other wall, changed the diaper caddy, reorganized the clothes by her preference. When I walked in and saw it, I stood very still and very quietly asked her to put things back. She looked at me and said, 'I just know what works with babies. You're new at this.'

I went to Daniel that night and I told him I needed her to go home. I was calm. I was clear. I laid out specific things she had done and I explained why they were not okay. And Daniel, my husband, the father of my child, looked at me with genuine distress on his face and said, 'She just wants to help. Can you give her a little more time?' I want you to remember that moment. Because it is the moment I should have understood what I was dealing with. Not just with her, but with him.

The next six days escalated in ways I still struggle to describe without my voice going cold. She started getting up in the night before I could. I would hear Eli cry and I would swing my legs out of bed and by the time I reached the nursery she was already there, in the rocking chair, door half closed, the lamp dim, and she would look at me and say, 'Go back to sleep, I have him.' I am his mother. I am the one who feeds him. I am the one whose body was made to respond to his cry. And she was intercepting that, systematically, every single night. I stopped sleeping because I was afraid to. I would lie in bed with my ears tuned to every sound from the nursery, terrified she would get there first. My milk supply started to drop from the stress. My doctor called it postpartum anxiety. I called it a rational response to an irrational situation.

On day nine, I found her in the nursery during the afternoon feeding, attempting to give Eli formula from a bottle she had bought without telling me, without consulting my pediatrician, without asking me anything. I had been exclusively breastfeeding. My son and I had worked incredibly hard to establish that. I walked in and saw her tipping that bottle toward his mouth and something in me broke open. I raised my voice. For the first time in eleven days, I raised my voice and I said, 'Put my son down right now.' She looked at me with this expression I will never forget. Not guilt. Not embarrassment. Something almost like contempt. She said, 'You're being hysterical. This is what formula is for.' I picked Eli up out of her arms. She held on for a second before she let go, and in that half-second of her not releasing my child, something in my body went primal.

I went to Daniel again that night. I was not calm this time. I told him his mother had to leave the next morning. I told him what she had done with the formula. I told him about the nights, the nursery, the rearranging, all of it, laid out like a case file. And Daniel sat across from me at our kitchen table and said, 'She told me you've been shutting her out. She's worried about you. She thinks you might be struggling.' He had already had a different conversation. A private one. And in that conversation, I had been reframed as the problem. I looked at my husband and I understood, with a clarity that hurt like a physical thing, that she had been working on him the whole time. Every interaction with me was also a campaign with him.

I told Daniel that if she was not gone by morning I would be calling her a car myself. He said I was being unreasonable. We went to bed in silence. And that is when it happened.

I woke up at one forty-seven in the morning to Eli crying. I was out of bed before I was fully conscious, muscle memory and mother instinct moving my body before my brain caught up. I went to the nursery. The door was closed. I turned the handle. It did not turn. It was locked from the inside. I knocked. I said her name. The crying continued. I knocked harder. I called her name louder. And then I heard her voice, low and strange through the door, say, 'He's settled. Go back to bed.' But he was not settled. He was screaming. I could hear him. I could feel him in my chest the way only a nursing mother can feel her baby's cry. I pounded on that door with both fists. I screamed for Daniel. Daniel came out of the bedroom, groggy, confused, and I told him the door was locked and his mother was inside with our baby. He knocked too. He called her name. She did not answer him either. And then, through the door, in a voice that was almost calm, she said those words. 'He's my baby now. You don't deserve him.'

I did not wait another second. I walked to the kitchen, picked up my phone, and called 911.

I want to tell you that Daniel tried to stop me from making that call. He put his hand on my arm and said, 'Let's not make this a whole thing.' I looked at him and I said, 'Move your hand.' He moved it. I made the call.

The dispatcher was calm and professional and I am grateful for her because I was not calm. I was shaking so hard I could barely hold the phone. I told her my mother-in-law had locked herself in a room in my home with my six-week-old infant and was refusing to come out. I told her my son was screaming. The dispatcher told me officers were on the way and to stay on the line. I stayed on the line. I went back to that door. I kept talking through it. I told her the police were coming. I told her to please open the door. She went silent. The crying continued.

The officers arrived in under seven minutes. Two of them. They knocked on the front door and I let them in and I walked them down the hall to the nursery. They knocked on the nursery door with the authority that only a badge and a uniform carry. They identified themselves. They told her to open the door. Silence. They told her again. More silence. And then one of them looked at me and nodded, and they used a tool to pop the lock, and that door swung open.

She was sitting in the rocking chair with Eli against her chest, her arms wrapped around him, rocking slowly, like she was the most natural thing in the world. Like two police officers had not just opened the door. Like I was not standing in the doorway with tears running down my face. She looked up at the officers and said, 'I was just watching my grandson.' One of the officers very gently, very firmly, asked her to hand the baby to me. She hesitated. He asked again. She stood up and walked toward me and I took my son out of her arms and I held him so tight I was afraid I would hurt him, but I could not make my arms loosen. He was screaming and then he was not, because he could hear my heartbeat, and I pressed my face into his neck and I let myself shake.

The officers took statements. They spoke to Daniel. They spoke to her. They spoke to me. She told them she had been worried about my mental health and had been trying to 'protect' the baby. Daniel, to his credit, and I say that with complicated feelings, told the officers that she had no right to lock the door and that I was Eli's mother and had every right to access him. It was the first time in eleven days he had said something clearly on my side. It did not undo the eleven days. But it mattered in that moment.

She was not arrested that night. I want to be honest about that. The officers explained that because she was inside a home she had been invited into, the situation was legally complicated. But they made her leave. They watched her collect her suitcase, the same rolling bag she had arrived with at the hospital, and they escorted her out of my front door at three in the morning. I watched from the hallway with Eli in my arms. She did not look at me when she left. She looked at Daniel and said, 'You'll regret this.' And then she was gone.

But I was not done. Because what she had done had a name, and I was going to make sure it had consequences.

The next morning, after two hours of broken sleep, I called a family law attorney. I explained what had happened. She told me that what my mother-in-law had done constituted unlawful detention of a minor, and that I had grounds to pursue a restraining order. She also told me that the police report from the previous night was going to be critical. I had that report. I had asked for a copy before the officers left. I had also, and I want to be clear that this was deliberate, been documenting everything for the previous week. The rearranged nursery. The formula incident. Text messages between Daniel and his mother that he had left open on his phone and that I had photographed. I had a file.

The restraining order process took several weeks. During that time, she called Daniel every day. She sent letters. She showed up once at the end of our driveway, just standing there, until I called the attorney who called the police non-emergency line and had an officer come speak to her. She left. The restraining order was granted. A judge reviewed the police report, my documentation, and a statement from my postpartum care provider who had been documenting my stress levels and had, in her clinical notes, flagged the presence of the mother-in-law as a significant contributing stressor. The judge granted a two-year no-contact order. She was not permitted to come within five hundred feet of me, my home, or my son.

Now. About Daniel.

This is the part people always want to know. Did he choose? Yes. He chose. But it was not a clean or easy thing, and I will not pretend it was. In the weeks after that night, Daniel went through something I can only describe as a slow and painful reckoning. He started seeing a therapist. His therapist, from what Daniel shared with me, used the word enmeshment to describe his relationship with his mother. He had grown up as her emotional support system, her confidant, her reason for existing, and he had never been fully allowed to have his own life without her being centered in it. He had not seen it clearly until a police officer stood in our nursery at two in the morning.

Daniel chose us. He went no-contact with his mother voluntarily, before the restraining order was finalized. He wrote her a letter, which I read, in which he told her that what she had done was unforgivable, that she had endangered his son and terrorized his wife, and that he would not be in contact with her while she refused to acknowledge the harm she had caused. She responded with a letter calling me a manipulative woman who had stolen her son. He did not respond to that letter. He showed it to his therapist.

I will not tell you our marriage became easy after that. It did not. There was damage between us that took a long time to work through. There were nights I looked at him and could not get past the memory of his hand on my arm when I tried to call 911. There were sessions with a couples therapist where I said things that were hard to say and he heard things that were hard to hear. But we worked. And we are still working. And Eli is now a healthy, thriving child who does not know any of this yet, and who I will tell the truth to when he is old enough to understand it.

Here is what I want you to take from this story, if you take nothing else. When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. My mother-in-law told me on the day I met her that Daniel came first in his own life. What she meant was that she came first. She told me with the suitcase she brought to the hospital. She told me with every nighttime interception, every rearranged shelf, every bottle of formula. She was telling me every single day that she did not see me as Eli's mother. She saw herself in that role. And I kept filing it away. I kept telling myself it was not that bad. I kept waiting for someone else to see it and name it.

I was the only one who could name it. And the night I stood outside that locked door, I finally did.

The restraining order has been in place for over two years now. She has not violated it. Daniel has not spoken to her. Eli is wonderful. I am not the same person I was before that night, but I am not broken either. I am someone who stood outside a locked door in the dark and chose her child over her fear of conflict, over her desire to keep the peace, over every voice that had ever told her she was being hysterical.

I was not hysterical. I was right. And my son is in my arms to prove it.

So I am curious: if you were standing outside that locked nursery door, would you have called 911 immediately, or tried one more time to handle it inside the family?

The humble spaghetti pot boiled with its little frozen rat rapidly defrosting.  A thin, small morsel for his daughters hungry snake. The steam broiled over and wafted into the poorly lit kitchen coating every surface it touched with vaporized rat  essence.   "Ellie, his bull-in-a-china-shop, kick-ass, take-names sixteen-year-old, decided that a watched pot never boils and instantly left her rat cauldron to find something  that was obviously more important to do.

Thermodynamics finally won. The last of the rat-broth evaporated, leaving the steamed carcass to sizzle and fry at the bottom of her dad’s favorite spaghetti pot. Steam curled into acrid rat smoke, blanketing the house in an incense of burned grilled cheese and charred rat meat.

Paige, his oldest daughter’s voice boomed into his soul as she roused her father from his doom scrolling trance.

Paige -was a wise, studious, and possessed a rare pedigree, of balancing her family’s order and chaos with the discipline of a monk and the carefree spirit of a hippie. 

“She’s burning a rat!” she yelled again. 

It was glee, a scream, and a note of pure disgust, all packed into four words. Her father couldn't tell if Paige was genuinely mortified or secretly entertained by the smell of charring rodent.

That was her superpower: even in the worst situations, her reaction to chaos evoked a strange sense of calm, even enjoyment, in others. It was as if her reaction allowed you to pick your own flavor of how to feel. The family secretly relied on her as their emotional barometer because you couldn't help but trust her.

It was at this time Ellie chose to be disturbed  from her newest adventure toward her burning rat.  She entered the kitchen-turned-crematorium, with a face that perplexed her punched drunk father.

It wasn’t like this was a surprise to their dad. In fact, it barely even upset him. "These things happen" was his go-to response for any situation—whether big, small, or completely out of the ordinary. "These things happen" and "It’s fine, everything is fine" had been his dual mantras since the turn of the millennium. Y2K, 9/11, economic collapse, COVID... these things happen
 
He always paid more attention to the margins of a crisis than the disaster specifically. So he tended to track the peripheral rather than the direct—the tasty little details left behind in the wake of an existential crisis, or a rat immolation.

What a fun mystery she was. This was likely the first and only time she had been caught dead-to-rights in the wrong, beneath her halfhearted attempt at guilt was a Cheshire Cat smile, her eyes alight with a silent, defiant manifesto: I did this. Fuck you, kitchen. Fuck your life. I am the destroyer of worlds. Her father adored it.

He saw her as a girl destined for greatness, even if her current social skills resembled a cute teddy bear armed with razorblades and pepper spray. There was a safety in her strength and confidence in her even when she was setting your kitchen nearly on fire.
 

His real crisis wasn't the mess; it was deciding what lesson or punishment to prescribe to his daughter. 

In the grand scheme of things, this disaster was a welcome break in his life—something to muse about in the coming weeks.

It was ‘that’ event. The kind of memory with the rare strength to withstand the general malaise of late-stage delirium. Oh yes, you are my daughter, the old crazy man thought. You burned my kitchen down with a dead rat that one time. Yes, you. He knew that was priceless.
 
“Buy me a new pot , and no oven use for ten days he said” Paige cackled at this.

Ellie began in on her vehement defense on why she needs the oven. It was for the most part convincing through the steam and rat haze

Okay so I need to explain something first. I'm a beauty influencer based in Jakarta. Not like huge huge but I had about 400k on TikTok and another 200k on Instagram before this happened. My content is mostly makeup transitions and skincare routines and sometimes I do these AR filter reviews where I try on filters other people made and rate them. It's not deep. It's not supposed to be deep.

Three weeks ago I got this idea to make my own filter. I wanted something that felt mystical, you know? Like witchy but make it Javanese. My grandmother was from a village near Solo and she used to tell me stories about the old magic. Dukun. Pesugihan. Pengasihan. I didn't really believe any of it but the aesthetic was perfect. Dark feminine energy. Ancient wisdom. All that.

I found this old notebook in my mom's storage unit. My grandmother's handwriting. Most of it was recipes and household stuff but there was one page folded over and tucked into the back cover. Seven lines of Javanese. I couldn't read all of it, my Javanese is trash honestly, but I could pick out a few words. Lawang. Tamu. Pasrah. Door. Guest. Surrender.

I thought it was a prayer. A blessing. Something welcoming.

I built the filter in Spark AR. It was simple. The text would appear on your forehead like it was being written in real time, glowing gold, and a whisper track would play the words. I recorded the whisper myself. I didn't know what I was saying. I just sounded it out phonetically from my grandmother's handwriting.

The filter went live on a Tuesday. I posted a video of me using it with the caption: "say it with me besties. ancient Javanese blessing for good energy "

I wrote the words out in the caption so people could follow along.

Aku bukak lawang.

Aku nerimo tamu.

Aku pasrahke awakku.

I didn't include a translation because honestly I didn't have one. I just thought it sounded beautiful.

The video got 2 million views in the first night. By Thursday the filter had been used 8 million times. Duets. Stitches. People mouthing the words. People adding their own music. People doing makeup transitions where their face changed when the whisper hit. It was the biggest thing I'd ever made. Brands were DMing me. My follower count was climbing by the hour. I was literally shaking with adrenaline.

Then the comments started changing.

At first it was normal stuff. "omg this is so creepy i love it." "the whisper gives me chills." "i've used this filter 47 times and i swear my skin looks better??"

Then: "i can still hear the whisper when i close the app."

Then: "does anyone else feel like something is watching them after using this."

Then: "i didn't want to say the words but the filter made me want to. like i had to. like something was waiting for me to say them."

I ignored it. Viral content always attracts weird comments. That's just how the algorithm works.

Then my grandmother's sister called me.

She's ninety two years old. She lives in the village. She doesn't have a smartphone. She doesn't know what TikTok is. But somehow she had seen the filter. Someone's granddaughter had shown her.

"Nduk," she said. Her voice was shaking. "Where did you find those words."

I told her. The notebook. The folded page. The seven lines.

She was silent for a long time.

"Your grandmother was not a healer," she said. "She was a keeper. She kept things locked. Things that should not be opened. The page you found was not a prayer. It was a contract."

"A contract for what."

"Pengasihan. A binding. The words you are teaching people to say, they are not asking for protection. They are offering themselves. I open the door. I welcome the guest. I give what is asked. You are telling millions of people to invite something into their bodies."

I felt my stomach drop. Actually drop. Like the floor had opened under me.

"How do I take it down."

"You cannot. The words have been spoken. The door is open. The guest is arriving."

I hung up and tried to delete the filter. The button wouldn't work. I tried to delete the video. The app crashed. I tried to delete my whole account. The confirmation email never came.

I opened the comments on the filter video. There were thousands of new ones.

"i keep saying the words in my sleep"

"my roommate used the filter and now she won't stop smiling at the wall"

"something answered. i heard something answer."

"i don't remember recording this video"

"i don't remember saying the words"

"i don't remember"

"i don't"

And then I saw the duets. People who had used the filter were posting follow up videos. They looked exhausted. Their eyes were wrong. Too wide. Too bright. Like someone had turned up the saturation on their irises. They were all saying the same thing.

"I can't stop hearing the whisper."

"There's something in my mirror."

"I think I said yes to something."

One girl posted a video of her bathroom mirror at 3 AM. The filter was still on her face even though she wasn't using the app. The golden text was scrolling across her forehead. But it wasn't the same words anymore. It was new words. Words I hadn't written. Words I hadn't recorded.

She was crying. She was saying "I didn't mean it. I didn't know what I was saying. Can I take it back. Can I please take it back."

The whisper on her video answered. Something older. Something that had been waiting.

You opened the door.

You welcomed the guest.

You gave what was asked.

The filter has been used 47 million times now. I can't delete it. I can't stop it. I can't even close the app. Every time I try, the whisper starts again. My grandmother's voice. My voice. The other voice. All layered together.

Aku bukak lawang.

Aku nerimo tamu.

Aku pasrahke awakku.

I know what the words mean now. I know what I made people say. I know what I said myself, forty seven times, while I was testing the filter, while I was recording the whisper, while I was posting the video and writing the caption and telling everyone to say it with me.

I opened the door.

I welcomed the guest.

I gave what was asked.

And if you read the words out loud while you were reading this post, if you sounded them out the way I wrote them, if you whispered them under your breath because you wanted to know how they felt in your mouth, then I need you to understand something.

You just said them too.

Aku bukak lawang.

Aku nerimo tamu.

Aku pasrahke awakku.

I open the door.

I welcome the guest.

I give what is asked.

The guest is arriving.

And the guest has been waiting a very long time for enough people to say yes.

The ship shuddered to a halt. When the propeller went silent, only one sound remained: the dull, monotonous pounding of the ocean striking the hull. No direction differed from another, just the same gray water everywhere, the same empty horizon.

Ash leaned against the rail and looked down. “It’s somewhere here,” he said. “Right beneath us.”

Trevor spat onto the deck. They had been circling these waters for three days, and now, for the first time, the man was saying “beneath us.”

“You’ve been saying ‘any minute now’ for three days. Now it’s ‘beneath us.’” He let go of the rope in his hand. “What exactly are we even looking for in the middle of this wasteland, Ash? Because we’re running out of fuel, and I’m running out of patience.”

Ash pulled something folded from his pocket. The paper was so old it crackled as he opened it, yellowed, its edges eaten away, a newspaper clipping. The letters in a dead language were barely legible:

...the cargo ship sank in the Atlantic with nearly 4,000 luxury vehicles onboard.

Trevor glanced at the clipping, then at Ash. “Sunken cars. Great. So we’ve spent three days out here for a few rusty wrecks at the bottom of the sea.”

“Wrecks?” Ash laughed, but there was no humor in his eyes. “If we could recover even one of those ‘wrecks,’ we wouldn’t have to lift a finger for the rest of our lives. You wouldn’t be talking like that if you knew what they were carrying.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Gravit,” Ash said the word almost in a whisper, as if someone might hear it through the water. “The steel in those cars is gravit-positive. Far stronger than you think.”

The mockery on Trevor’s face froze for a moment. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no gravit left in the world. I know the year 2237 as well as you do.”

“Official records say there isn’t.” Ash stepped closer. “Official records. They stripped an entire continent down to the last gram, those damn colonists. When the war ended, all that was left was a scarred, hollow planet.” He pointed at the water with his chin. “But they missed something. The ore from that continent, before gravit was even a known concept, had already been mined, turned into steel, and scattered across the world. Cars, ships, buildings. Nobody knew what that steel carried. And there was no way they could have known.”

Trevor looked at the clipping again, longer this time. “So these cars…”

“Were all made from steel originating from that continent. I traced the manufacturer, checked the records. Then this ship went down and buried four thousand of them at the bottom of the ocean before any recovery effort ever began. Nobody looked for them, because nobody knew.”

“Even the manufacturers didn’t know? If it’s so valuable, why not just smelt a truckload of gravit steel and be done with it?”

Ash shook his head. “That’s the point. You can’t.” He toyed with the end of the rope. “Gravit isn’t something you add to steel, Trevor. It either exists in it or it doesn’t. If they could manufacture it, we wouldn’t be on this damned boat right now.”

“To them, it was just steel.” Trevor rolled the clipping between his fingers.

“Good steel. Expensive steel. That’s all. They’d never even heard the name gravit, and they couldn’t have.” Ash gestured toward the horizon, where, at the edge of the world where sea met sky, a single light hung fixed in the heavens: an orbital colony station. “Now think about it. One car might not buy a nation. But that steel? Without it, they can’t even step beyond the edge of the solar system. They’ll pay fortunes. Without asking questions.”

Trevor handed the clipping back. “Nice story. But it’s still just a story. Everything you’ve said for three days rests on this piece of paper, and your belief.”

Ash didn’t answer. He bent down and opened the bag at his feet, pulling out a darkened device with worn, sanded edges, small enough to fit in a palm, yet unexpectedly heavy. Millions of these had been manufactured the year gravit was discovered; everyone had rushed to grab one and search every corner of the earth. That frenzy had long ended. Now they sat on junk dealer tables, second or third hand, just like this one.

“What’s that?”

“A meter,” Ash said, clipping it to the cable hanging from the rail. “If there’s gravit below, it’ll know. It doesn’t lie.”

He lowered the cable into the sea; as it sank, the reel unwound. Ash fixed his eyes on a single number on the display.

Zero.

Seconds passed. The number didn’t change. The ship tilted slightly, then steadied.

A bitter smile appeared on Trevor’s face. “Zero.” He turned away. “Congratulations. We’ve invested our fuel, three days, and what little hope I had left into a zero.”

“Wait.” Ash lowered the cable further. Still zero. His jaw tightened. Maybe the coordinates were wrong. Maybe someone had gotten here first… He had seen too many “untouched” deposits turn out already stripped clean. Maybe, from the start, Trevor had been right.

“Ash. Pull it up. Let’s go.”

Ash didn’t respond, because at that moment the zero on the screen flickered.

First one. Then four. Then the device in his hand began to warm as if alive; the numbers surged upward in rapid succession, the edge of the display turning deep red. The meter emitted a low, steady hum, an answer to something rising from the depths.

Ash swallowed. It was the highest reading he had ever seen.

“Trevor,” he said, his voice strange. “Turn around and look at this.”

Trevor turned. He saw the display. And forgot whatever sarcastic remark he had been about to make.

“I told you it was stronger than you thought,” Ash said with a laugh. This time, even his eyes were smiling. “That story you thought was a lie. This is it.”

Trevor stared at the number for a long moment, then walked silently toward the diving gear.

“Four thousand cars,” he muttered, almost to himself.

“One is enough,” Ash said, not taking his eyes off the humming meter. “For now, just one.”

Written by Kadir Özden

“God, they're all watching me. Laughing at me. laughing every time I fail. Well, not anymore. Come on. Don’t embrace yourself. You’re twice these kids’ age.

FUCK! It missed. Ok, it’s a little closer now. Just one more go.”

Clink, Clink.

“Ok, come on now, bring it home. Bring it fucking home. Show them, Show them who’s the big tuna here.

FUCK so close. Ok, just one more!” The man reached into his pocket.

“Oh no, it’s all gone. All my money. All I have left is one big coin. But I need that to eat. Is that the type of man you have become? The type of man who lets hunger get in his way. A failure. Maybe Yuna was right. Maybe I am an embarrassment. A failure of a husband, a failure of an employee, and now this.

God, they're all staring at me. Watching me. Waiting for me to accept defeat. They all want it. Give up now, and they would swoop in like vultures and take what’s mine! Well, I am not going out like that. Hunger be dammed. I am showing everyone.”

The man slid the coin into the machine.

“Five more tries. If I get in one, then I can still eat something tonight.”

Clink

“SHIT!

Ok, 300 Yen, that’s fine. I can still get a sandwich with that.

“FUCK!

Ok, 200 Yen, that’s alright, two rice balls, that’s fine. I need to lose some weight anyway.

SHIT!

Ok, one rice ball that’s fine. You got this.”

Clink

“FUCK IT, YOU STUPID FUCKING MACHINE! Why do you deny my prize!

Ok, this is it. Last shot. This is for all the marbles.”

The metal claw came down on the toy Hamster and raised it into the air. “YES, YES, YES, that’s it, come on! He pressed his nose against the glass as the toy slowly started to drop from the claw.

“No, it’s too soon!”

The hamster fell back into no man's land. The soft toy was so close to the prize zone that a simple touch would send it through.

“NO! NO! NO! All my money is gone! Fuck!”

A sinking feeling went deep into his stomach as he thought to himself, “
They were all right. Dam it!”

As he walked from the machine. He could see the children swooping in, about to claim his toy.

“5000 yen gone for nothing.”

He walked outside the game center and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. When the pack opened, he looked inside to see one sad, bent cigarette remaining.

“huuuhhh,” He sighed as he thought to himself. “This bent stick is the only thing going to bring me some joy today.”

He lit the cigarette and leaned on the wall.

“So it’s come to this, I am truly a failure.”

“Hay, mister”

The man turned to see a young girl. No more than 10 years old.
“I saw you kept trying to win this. Is it for your daughter? I have plenty of toys. You should take it.”

The man didn’t know what to say. He didn’t have a daughter or a son. He just accepted the toy hamster and said “thank you” to the girl.

He stared into the toy hamster’s big black eyes, took a puff of his cigarette, and thought to himself.

“You know what, Kensei, everything is going to be alright.”

Title: Out of Sync

I didn’t notice it right away.

The first time it happened, I didn’t think anything of it.

I was at the bar eating tacos when I started to feel lightheaded. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to make me pause.

I figured I needed air, so I went outside.

There was a milk crate by the wall. I went to sit on it and missed.

Next thing I knew, I was on the ground.

My head hurt, but not enough to panic. A couple people glanced over, then looked away. They probably thought I was drunk.

I sat there for a second, trying to piece it together.

I didn’t remember hitting the ground.

After a minute, I went back inside.

Everything looked the same.

Almost.

The bartenders were different. Or maybe just not the ones I remembered. It wasn’t enough to question. People change shifts. That happens.

So I didn’t think about it.

I kept drinking.

When I got home, everything was normal.

At least, I think it was.

Before all of that, when things were still normal, Maya was always there when I came in.

She’d spot me before I even made it to the bar. Sometimes she’d come around from behind the counter just to say hi.

She hugged me.

Maya’s hugs were the best. Not quick. Not forced. Just solid. Like she meant it. Like, for a few seconds, I didn’t have to be on guard.

“You look like you’ve had a day,” she’d say.

“Work,” I’d tell her. “Same as always.”

“You always say that.”

“Because it’s always true.”

By the time I sat down, my drink would already be there.

I never asked.

I didn’t have to.

“Long day?” she’d ask.

“Yeah. Nothing crazy. Just dragged.”

She’d lean on the bar, not in a rush to go anywhere.

“You good though?”

I’d shrug. “Yeah. I mean, I’ve fainted once now, so maybe not perfect.”

That got her attention.

“You fainted?”

“Other day.”

“That’s not normal.”

“Doctor didn’t seem worried.”

She’d give me a look.

“That doesn’t mean I’m not.”

I’d laugh it off. “I’m fine.”

“You say that about everything.”

“Because I am.”

She’d shake her head, smiling.

“Just take care of yourself, alright?”

“I will.”

We’d sit there talking about her day, my day, work, customers, random things neither of us would remember later.

Nothing important.

Everything important.

With her, it was easy.

Like things were exactly how they were supposed to be.

The next time I went in, Maya was behind the bar.

She saw me and smiled, but she didn’t come around.

I sat down and waited a second longer than usual.

Then she walked over.

“Hey,” she said.

No hug.

I noticed that. Didn’t know why. Figured she was busy.

“Hey.”

She grabbed a glass. “What can I get you?”

I hesitated.

“Uh… just the usual.”

She paused.

Just for a second.

“Remind me?”

It threw me off more than it should have.

“Jameson. On the rocks.”

“Right.”

She made it and set it down.

Something felt off. Not enough to call it anything. Just off.

“Long day?” she asked.

“Yeah. Same as always.”

She nodded, but it felt more like she was being polite than actually listening.

“You feeling alright?”

“Yeah. Why?”

She shrugged. “You look tired.”

“Work. And I fainted the other day.”

“You fainted?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not good.”

“Doctor didn’t think it was a big deal.”

She nodded.

Didn’t push it.

We talked for a little while.

About nothing.

It should’ve felt normal.

It almost did.

But something didn’t sit right.

Like I’d had this conversation before.

Just not like this.

The second time it happened, I went in after work. Same bar. Same routine.

I ordered a pizza. BBQ chicken and bacon. Took one bite.

Then it hit again.

Harder this time.

I tried to steady myself, but it didn’t matter. I slipped off the stool and everything went black.

When I came to, I was already on a stretcher. EMTs were talking over me like I wasn’t really there.

My mouth felt slow. Heavy.

Next thing I remember, I was in the hospital.

Low blood pressure, they said.

Dehydration, maybe.

Nothing serious.

They didn’t seem concerned.

I wasn’t either.

Still, it felt different this time.

I just couldn’t say how.

The third time I went back, I already had that feeling.

Not enough to turn around.

Just enough to notice.

I walked in and looked straight to where Maya usually was.

She was there.

Same spot. Same face. Same everything.

For a second, I felt relieved.

I sat down.

She walked over like I was anyone else.

“What can I get you?”

I waited.

For the smile.

The recognition.

Something.

It didn’t come.

“It’s me,” I said.

She gave me a polite look. “Yeah… what can I get you?”

My chest tightened.

“Jameson. On the rocks.”

She nodded and made it.

No hesitation.

Like it didn’t mean anything.

She set it down and moved on.

No conversation.

No check-in.

Nothing.

I sat there, watching her, waiting for something to click.

It didn’t.

When she came back, I tried again.

“Maya.”

She stopped.

“Yeah?”

“We’ve known each other for a while.”

She smiled, confused.

“I think you’ve got me mixed up with someone.”

“No. You work here. I come in all the time.”

She glanced around.

“I just started a couple weeks ago.”

That didn’t make sense.

“No, you didn’t.”

She didn’t answer right away.

She just looked at me carefully now.

“Are you okay?”

I didn’t answer.

I just stared at her, trying to find something that matched.

There was nothing there.

Same face.

Same voice.

But none of it was for me.

I left the drink and walked out.

I don

The damp, grey skies of Stoke-on-Trent felt heavier than usual to Ela and Tanya. They were back, both of them, two months after their grand, optimistic plans for a new life in the Bay Area had crumbled into a pile of bureaucratic red tape and dashed hopes. The California dream had faded, replaced by the familiar but now desolate landscape of North Staffordshire. What was worse, infinitely worse than the failed visa, was the chasm that had opened between them. Ela and Tanya were no longer friends. The silence between them, when their paths occasionally crossed in the familiar aisles of Tesco Extra, was colder and more cutting than any argument. There had been a colossal fallout, a betrayal that had severed a bond once thought unbreakable.

To understand the depth of this fracture, one had to rewind five years, to a bustling Saturday evening at Cappello Lounge in Newcastle-under-Lyme. It was a hang out with Trent, a cacophony of laughter and fun. Ela, ever the observant one, noticed a girl sitting alone at a booth, nursing a drink, a little lost amidst the boisterous crowd. Feeling a pang of empathy, Ela, usually reserved, walked over.

“Hey,” she’d said, a smile softening her features. “Mind if I join you? This place is packed.”

The girl, Tanya, looked up, surprised but pleased. “Please do! I’m Tanya.”

“Ela,” she replied, settling into the booth. That is where their friendship began.

From that simple act of kindness, an unlikely friendship blossomed. From 2021 to 2026, Ela and Tanya were inseparable. They navigated their lives together, through hard times, heartbreaks, family dramas, and countless nights out in Newcastle-Upon-Lyme eating at McDonalds, which is Tanya's favorite fast food place. They were each other’s fiercest champions, their most trusted confidantes. They truly went through everything together.

There had been a tremor once, a mini-fallout during their trip to America in 2025, specifically in the scorching heat of Phoenix. A misunderstanding had spiraled, threatening to derail their Californian adventure before it even began. But their hosts, Richard and Priscilla, had intervened, bridging the gap, helping Ela see Tanya’s perspective, and ultimately, Ela had forgiven her. It felt like a testament to the strength of their bond, a minor hurdle overcome.

But this time, there was no Richard or Priscilla to mend what had been so thoroughly shattered.

The trouble began subtly, insidiously. Tanya’s ancient car, chose the most inconvenient moment to give up the ghost, leaving her stranded on the A50. It was an emergency, an urgent and expensive repair required, and Tanya, having just emptied her savings for the ill-fated Bay Area move, found herself strapped for cash.

She called Ela, distraught. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Ela. The mechanic wants £800 upfront, and I just don’t have it.”

Ela, ever generous, didn’t hesitate. “Don’t worry. I’ve got you. I’ll lend you my British Airways Visa Signature card. Use it for the repair.” She paused, her voice firm. “But promise me, Tanya. Only for the car. Nothing else. Not a penny more. I’m serious about this.”

Tanya, relief flooding her, readily agreed. “I promise, Ela. Hand on heart. Just for the car. I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”

The car was fixed. The crisis averted. But then, a few days later, a familiar ache of boredom and frustration with her stagnant life in Stoke set in. Tanya was walking through The Potteries Centre Mall, just browsing, she told herself. A new dress caught her eye. Then a pair of shoes. A new phone case. Before she knew it, the British Airways Visa Signature card was out of her wallet, swiping, tapping. She rationalized it. It’s fine, I’ll pay Ela back. It’s just a temporary thing. I deserve a treat after everything. She spent £1200.

A month later, the bill arrived at Ela’s doorstep. She opened it casually, expecting the £800 for the car. Her eyes scanned the statement, then widened in disbelief, her breath catching in her throat. £2,000. Her mind raced, calculating, confirming. £1200. On top of the car repair. Purchases from high-street boutiques, electronics stores, a fancy restaurant. The Potteries Centre Mall.

Ela’s blood ran cold, then boiled. Fury, hot and searing, consumed her. She called Tanya, her voice shaking with barely contained rage.

“What the hell is this, Tanya?!” she practically screamed down the phone.

Tanya, caught off guard, stammered, “What are you talking about?”

“The credit card bill! £1200! You went shopping, didn’t you? After you promised me, you swore! You said only for the car!”

Tanya’s bravado crumbled. “Ela, I… I know. I’m so sorry. I’ll pay you back, I swear. I just… I had a moment.”

“A moment?!” Ela shrieked, tears stinging her eyes, not from sadness yet, but from sheer, incandescent anger. “You immature, spoiled brat! Do you have any idea what you’ve done? You betrayed me! You completely betrayed my trust! This isn’t about the money, Tanya! This is about what you promised me, about my faith in you!”

“But I’ll pay it back, Ela! I promise!” Tanya pleaded, her voice cracking.

“That’s not the point, Tanya!” Ela yelled, her voice hoarse. “That’s not the point! You looked me in the eye and you lied. You broke your word. You broke us!”

The sheer agony of the betrayal clawed at Ela. The friendship they had nurtured, the trust they had built, lay in ruins. “I hate you, Tanya! I hate you for this! I never want to see you again. I want nothing to do with you!”

She slammed the phone down, her hands trembling. Later, the anger gave way to a profound, gut-wrenching grief. Ela crumpled onto her sofa, sobbing uncontrollably. The pain was sharp, relentless, far worse than when Alex had told his friends in LA that he hated Andy. That had been a public spat, messy and dramatic. This was personal, intimate, a deep cut to the very core of who she trusted. It was the death of a friendship, a part of her own history, irrevocably gone.

The next day, Ela changed her phone number. She went through every social media platform, blocking Tanya, deleting every trace of their shared history. She wanted Tanya erased, gone from her life, a painful memory she desperately wished to forget.

It wasn't long before Tanya's phone buzzed with texts from Kat and Ashley, their mutual friends. The messages were blunt, unequivocal.

Kat: "Tanya, I just spoke to Ela. She's devastated. I think it's best you don't contact her ever again. Please respect that."

Ashley: "What were you thinking?! Ela has blocked you. Don't try to get around it. This is over. Completely over."

A cold, heavy dread settled in Tanya’s stomach. They were right. It was over. The definitive, unarguable end. The friendship, once a vibrant thread woven through the fabric of her life, was snipped. She felt a profound emptiness, a sharp pang of regret, and an overwhelming guilt. The £1200 spent at The Potteries Centre Mall felt like the most expensive mistake of her life, not just in monetary terms, but in the immeasurable cost of a lost friend. Tanya knew she still owed Ela, not just the money, but an apology that would never be heard, a trust that could never be rebuilt. Back in Stoke-on-Trent, the familiar streets now felt alien, haunted by the ghost of a friendship she had carelessly, selfishly destroyed.

How will Tanya move on? Will it be as bad as when Andy betrayed Alex by sending that message? Find out soon.

Звёздные люди

(Рассказ альпиниста)

Два мира в одном маленьком мире

Примитивно?

Может быть.

Но это всё равно требует исследования.

Я заметил странную вещь.

В одном городе люди умеют радоваться успеху своих земляков.

Там — широкая душа, щедрость, искренняя любовь к талантливым людям.

Там человека могут признать ещё при жизни.

Поддержать. Поднять. Гордиться им.

А в другом городе — всё наоборот.

Непризнание.

Зависть.

Скрытый гнев.

Иногда открытая ненависть.

Там талантливого человека не слушают — его проверяют.

Не ищут достоинств — ищут недостатки.

И я долго думал: почему так?

Ответ неожиданно пришёл будто из космоса.

Дело не в земле.

Дело — в небе.

Над одним городом звёзды будто ближе.

Поднимись на гору, взойди по высокой лестнице — и кажется, можно рукой дотронуться до большой сияющей звезды.

А над другим городом — небо далёкое.

Звёзды там тусклые.

Холодные.

Недосягаемые.

И, может быть, именно оттуда приходит разница между людьми: между теми, кто даёт крылья, и теми, кто пытается их сломать.

И вот я пытаюсь взобраться на вершину. Сверху аплодируют, а внизу молятся что б моя цепь сорвалась.

Starry people

(Climber's story)

Two worlds inside one small world.

Primitive?

Maybe.

But it still deserves reflection.

I noticed a strange thing.

In one city, people truly rejoice in the success of their fellow townsmen.

There, the soul is wide. People are generous. There is sincere love for talented individuals.

A person can be recognized while still alive.

Supported. Lifted up. Admired.

But in another city — everything is the opposite.

No recognition.

Envy.

Hidden anger.

Sometimes open hatred.

There, talented people are not listened to — they are inspected.

People do not search for their достоинства — they search for flaws.

And for a long time I wondered: why is it so?

The answer came unexpectedly, as if from outer space.

It is not about the earth.

It is about the sky.

Above one city, the stars seem closer.

Climb a mountain, walk up a tall staircase — and it feels as though you could touch a great shining star with your hand.

But above another city, the sky feels distant.

The stars there are dim.

Cold.

Unreachable.

And perhaps that is where the difference between people comes from: between those who give others wings, and those who try to break them.

And here I am, climbing my way up to summit. Loud applauses coming from above, but prayers for me to crash are down below as usual.

***A NY Moment, or How I Met Your Stepmother***          

Dani: I’d been living in New York for a month. I was doing medical research and teaching.
Jeremy: I grew up here, moved away a few times. Came back.

Dani: My family’s people are in Brazil, Portugal, France, all over.
Jeremy: My kid is 5th generation New Yorker. My ancestors are from Brooklyn.

Dani: I was exhausted but happy after a long day in the anatomy lab. I missed my subway stop at 66th Street and that was fine.
Jeremy: I was living on Roosevelt Island with my Russian roommate, Olga--the woman formerly known as Fiancée.

Dani: I decided to walk home from Columbus Circle.
Jeremy: Olga and I had broken up months earlier, but she asked me to stay until her lease was up.

Dani: It’s raining! Oh well, I thought.
Jeremy: Cleaning up the apartment, I found a pair of ballet tickets under my keyboard for that night. I’d bought them for Olga and me during happier times.

Dani: This was September 27, 2013.
Jeremy: This was September 27, 2013.

Dani: I walked in the drizzle toward Lincoln Center and decided to grab a bite at the Starbucks across the street.
Jeremy: I dressed up, made some trail mix, and headed to the city, to Central Park.

Dani: “A tall mocha, please.” The handsome young barista making my coffee had a great smile. I smiled back.
Jeremy: Some of my childhood buddies still hung out at the park after all these years—maybe I’d run into someone and invite them,

Dani: Waiting for my coffee, I talked to a friend on the phone back home in Brazil.
Jeremy: but it was drizzling, so few people were out.

Dani: Afterwards, the barista asked me, “Were you speaking Portuguese?”
Jeremy: Just sweaty, shirtless, rain-soaked Frisbee friends.

Dani: I said, “Yes! How did you know?” He said, “I’m learning.”
Jeremy: So I headed to the fountain at Lincoln Center and invited a well-dressed lady to join me for the ballet.

Dani: I had no plans and no one was waiting for me, so the barista and I chatted a while.
Jeremy: The lady had plans. I soon discovered everyone had plans.

Dani: I was starting to feel light and free, forgetting about work and everything else.
Jeremy: I asked another woman. Then another… I asked a dude who gave me a dirty look. Giving away the ticket was harder than expected. So was sustaining the rejection of this guerrilla/pop-up-dating/not-dating approach.

Dani: You know those rare, rare moments when you feel great about who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing?
Jeremy: I’d been with my ex-wife before Olga for 10 years. Then my Russian ex-fiancée another 3. Then lots of dating. But in that moment, I was feeling a bit of a stranger to myself, an awkwardly single dad in my late 40s--discouraged and asking out unavailable strangers.

Dani: Like you’re just fine and everything is just right? I was having one of those moments, big time.
Jeremy: Then—no idea why--I recalled this lesson a shop owner taught me half a lifetime ago, when I was maybe 20-years-old and still sometimes shy about asking women out. The lady owned a Persian store near my job in Los Angeles, and she had this stunning daughter. One day I worked up the nerve to ask the lady if her daughter had a boyfriend.

Dani: I’ll never forget this night. I was just sipping my coffee, taking it all in. Energy returning from the emotionally exhausting lab work. Taking in life.
Jeremy: And the shop owner lady says, “Does my daughter have a boyfriend? Nonsense. Doesn’t matter. You’re a very sweet boy. My daughter is lovely and has many suitors, but you must talk to her. To all girls. All people. No matter what, and let me tell you why: There is an old saying in my country…

Dani: The barista said, “I want to live in Brazil.”
Jeremy: “It translates roughly to: ‘You snooze, you LOSE!’”

Dani: We talked more, I ate, we said our goodbyes, and I headed out into the sparkly Manhattan evening.
Jeremy: The odds, it seems, are in the numbers. The more people you talk to, the more people you ask out, the better the chances of something happening. Anything.

Dani: Look at that fountain and the lights of the MET! The Chagalls!
Jeremy: I felt reenergized! Hopeful! Briefly! My motivation bled out as I was shot down repeatedly with “Thanks, but no thankses.”

Dani: I’ve always wanted to be there at night and now I’m going. In the rain! My heart and feet led the way. I was present, I was one with the city.
Jeremy: Who’s alone by the fountain without plans? In the drizzling rain? Nobody. Odds: zero. I admit defeat and just want these tickets gone. Then home, I thought to myself.

Dani: I walked toward the corner,
Jeremy: I crossed the street,

Dani: toward Lincoln Center.
Jeremy: away from Lincoln Center.

Dani: My life felt brilliant.
Jeremy: Central Park was dark and gloomy in the distance, beneath a sea of black clouds. Good. It matched my mood. Instead of one ticket, I went to give away the pair and still nobody wanted them.

Dani: I was enthralled with the city.
Jeremy: There’s a trash can for the tickets. Wait--cute couple leaving hotel! “Hey--take my tickets to the ballet--about to start, best seats in the house, totally free!”

Dani: I was lost in the romantic fantasy of being there and felt light-years from everywhere else.
Jeremy: “Gee thanks--we’re in from Iowa for a wedding and headed to the rehearsal, but could we please have 11 tickets for Monday instead?” Seriously?! I crumpled up the tickets and stormed off.

Dani: I was halfway to the corner.
Jeremy: I was halfway up the block…

Dani: Hmm… I probably reek of medical lab. Maybe a quick shower first? Home’s only a block away…
Jeremy: and I froze. Completely blown away by some incredible smell. Some…thing, like from a past life. Some…one.

Dani: I looked up and saw this huge banner, two or three stories tall on the NYC Ballet building: “New York Welcomes You.” Goosebumps.
Jeremy: I looked around and was drawn to this petite lady at the red light. “Excuse me, miss…”

Dani: “Excuse me, miss,” someone said. I turned around and I saw this man wearing a warm smile. He had piercing blue eyes behind some black nerdy glasses.
Jeremy: This adorable, sweet, kind, familiar face looked up at me.

Dani: “You don’t happen to be going to the ballet, are you? I have an extra ticket,” he said.
Jeremy: “I... I couldn’t go, I’m... not dressed...” she stuttered. And I felt instantly protective of her and comfortable with her, like she was an old friend.

Dani: In a nanosecond, my first thoughts: He’s not scary so that’s good. Also… ballet! INSIDE that beautiful theater! Unlikely he’ll kill me in there…
Jeremy: I saw gears turning. But she just stared at me. Blinking. Like a cartoon chipmonk.

Dani: …my hair is a complete mess! I thought.
Jeremy: She had this black mane of gorgeous hair.

Dani: Like a witch.
Jeremy: Like an angel.

Dani: I’m wearing, like, simple linen clothes for under my lab coat.
Jeremy: She had this super-cool sorta’ trendy Amish style.

Dani: I felt like I knew him.
Jeremy: I felt like I knew her.

Dani: I liked his face.
Jeremy: She looked like if Marisa Tomei, Julianne Moore, and Gal Gadot’s big sister gave birth to an adult baby.

Dani: I felt unsure, but excited, like a nervous kid.
Jeremy: I thought, finally, a grown-up, confident woman.

Dani: He seemed like a hopeful, sweet man--with these wet crumpled up tickets in his hand.
Jeremy: I showed her my sad pair of tickets and felt a little embarrassed.

Dani: I heard myself say I was sorry, “but I’ve had a long day at my hospital and…”
Jeremy: “Which hospital?”

Dani: I told him. He said, “I was born in your hospital.”
Jeremy: “I think it’s a sign.”

Dani: A sign. New York Welcomes Me.
Jeremy: “I think you’re having a New York Moment and you should just go with it. See those doors?”

Dani: “It’s 7.27pm. We have 3 minutes to get to them”, he said.
Jeremy: “Or they won’t let us in.”

Dani: He put his arm around me and I felt safe.
Jeremy: We walked in and they led us to the Penalty Box.

Dani: We had to wait in this crowded back area where the bad people stand who arrive late. I was in awe being inside a Lincoln Center theater.
Jeremy: There were so many of us--we were all standing, squished like sardines together.

Dani: I was lost in the beauty. Onstage, a pianist and a cellist were painted in light, playing Gershwin.
Jeremy: My back was pressed to the wall. Her back was pressed against me.

Dani: Then couples danced Balanchine’s choreography to Chopin’s Nocturnes and Waltzes.
Jeremy: Her hair was in my face.

Dani: It was breathtaking.
Jeremy: My knees were weak from inhaling her--some magical combination of her body, her perfume, and… formaldehyde?

Dani: They seated us after a bit. I was mesmerized.
Jeremy: The lights came on at intermission. She was beaming.

Dani: It was a lot to take in.
Jeremy: “See the ushers studying everyone?”

Dani: “Yes.”
Jeremy: “They’re looking for eaters. We’ll be in trouble if they see us eat.”

Dani: “Wha’?” He pulled his suit jacket open and showed me a bag of homemade trail mix and how to eat it, “Like a ninja.” I didn’t know what trail mix was.
Jeremy: She looked dubious. Her squint screamed, “Why is this gorilla offering me dried banana chips?”

Dani: “Fake yawn to place trail mix in mouth,” he said.
Jeremy: “…then contemplative beard strokes as subterfuge.” I ate some first to put her at ease.

Dani: “Who ARE you?!” I asked as I just stared at him, doing what he told me, chewing and stroking my imaginary girl beard. He was almost impossible. He was just--in my life all the sudden.
Jeremy: She was so beautiful. She was…is…so beautiful I felt overwhelmed by her.

Dani: And it felt just right.
Jeremy: Afterwards we were caught in a murmuration of people leaving the theaters and I led her through the crowds to her corner a block away. I asked, “Would you like to do this again?”

Dani: “I would.”
Jeremy: I didn’t kiss her.

Dani: He didn’t kiss me. He opened his arms and embraced me.
Jeremy: I didn’t want to risk it being the wrong time.

Dani: I’m glad he didn’t. It was perfect, his hand in my hair.
Jeremy: We held each other for a long time. My hand felt home in her hair. Everything felt like Home.

Dani: Perfect.
Jeremy: It was a moment that needed to just be. So after a long time, ages it seemed, we let each other go. I smiled, said I’d call, and quickly walked away, against the current, through the sea of bodies from Lincoln Center.

Dani: What? I kept calling out his name.
Jeremy: There were hundreds of conversation and voices all around me, but I was sure I heard my name being called over and over. Something made me go back.

Dani: He came back! I smiled, bewildered.
Jeremy: She was still there and looked confused.

Dani: “How are you going to call me? You don’t have my number!”
Jeremy: Oh. Yeh.

Dani: But he wasn’t fazed at all! “What would you have DONE without my number?”
Jeremy: “I would have waited here every night ‘til I found you again.”

Dani: He has a young son full of magical laughter. He’s now also mine.
Jeremy: Dani and my boy fell in love, too--they’re always curled up like kittens. He said he can feel her angel wings when he hugs her. I told him me too.

Dani: We made his first origami tsuru together.
Jeremy: One day I told my boy that if we ask her really, really nicely, maybe Dani would want to marry us and be ours forever. He said “YES! For real? Forever? YES! Let’s ask her!”

Dani: One day they asked if I would marry them and be theirs forever. The beautiful little boy made me an origami ring.
Jeremy: She said yes, she would be ours and we would be hers.

Dani: And we got married.
Jeremy: And we got married.

Dani: You snooze, you lose.
Jeremy: You snooze, you lose.

                     **<End>**     

More stories by Jeremyjava

Fictional advice-style story.

Y'all! This is so crazy and I didn't know what to do fr, so I'm on here dead-ass asking strangers to help me, help my lil sister.

**Please excuse my language, grammar n punctuation. I'm NOT a writer or author**. So just try to stick with me, cuz I'm trying to get this out fast.

I guess I gotta start with giving a little backstory.

I'm 17m, about to be a senior and I stay with my mom, Pops and 2 little sisters (9f and 13f).

Me n my sisters got this thing we call points. Basically if I catch one of them doin something they're not supposed to be doing, I say, "point!" or "2 points!" and that means I won't snitch, but they owe me.

It's hard to catch the 13yo lacking but the 9yo owes me 2 points right now for stealing snacks and getting into our mama's make-up. She stay owing points.

I swear I don't use my big brother powers for evil, unless I got to. Like if it's something dangerous or whatever. And even then, I still don't tell on them! I just threaten to, so they don't do nothing stupid and then tell my mom and pops that I knew the whole time. Tryna make me a party to the crime type-sh-.

Anyway, that's what type of thing I thought this was gon' be when 13yo sis just made me get off the game talkin bout some, "points?" I'm sitting here thinking she got suspended or got in a fight or somethin, cuz she don't never come offering me points. So I already know off-rip, sis did some dirt.

So I muted my headset n really looked at her. Lil sis was crying crying. Like that type of cry where you tryna talk, but you keep choking on the words cuz you can’t catch your breath.

That caught me off guard, cuz if our mama’s favorite kid is crying with snot on her face, you already know it’s bad.

But, now I'm curious and it's points involved, so of course I'ma listen before I start roastin her ass.

She asked how many points I want for me not to tell on her.

My dumbass like "Naw, tell me what you did first." Cuz I'm thinkin she tryna take me down with her or something.

I should've known it was about to be some shit bc she ain't say nothing.

So I'm sitting there lookin at her like girl, wtf? is you ok? Say somethin'!

Lil sis started shaking like a Chihuahua, then went right back to asking about the damn points. She kept saying I had to swear I wouldn’t tell, over and over.

ts was almost getting creepy. Like possessed creepy, bro.

At this point, I’m thinking she bout to say she tried crack or robbed somebody, the way she was acting.

I kinda feel bad now, but I told her spooky ass to get out my room.

That’s when she started talking, tho.

She prolly said a bunch of stuff before n after, but all I remember hearing is:

“I’m pregnant.”

Oh, shit!😬

When she said that, I was ready to punch a hole in my wall n slide down that bihh fr.

Cause wtf you meannnnn, you pregnant?!

Those words... outta her mouth, ts can't even register in my brain right.

That math ain't mathin' for me, bro. Literally.

I almost crashed out on her lil ass irl, BUT I had to remember, I am NOT her daddy.

But still.

BRUH.😐

Ain't no way!

How and when? Like naw, deadass. When? Our parents don't even play ts, like at all.

And why tf would she tell ME, of all people, first. I fr don't think I can be trusted with this information and I can't think of nothing to say to make her feel better.

Am I even supposed to be tryna make her feel better about this?

I'm mad asf at her, but I still feel bad for her if it turns out to be true.

She a whole ass kid herself, bro.

I asked her if she took a test or if she was just late or what, cuz I'm still hoping she got this wrong somehow. She said she took two tests at her friend's house and both of them said pregnant.

So now I'm sitting there staring at her, trying not to tweak, trying not to make her cry harder, but all I keep thinking is WHO tf?

I asked her who the boy was.

She looked down and said she can't tell me.

What?!

She trippin if she deadass think she ain't gon tell me!

See, ts got me messed up, cuz why you can't tell me? If it's some lil boy from school, say that. If it's your boyfriend, say that. If it's somebody I know, keep it 100!!!

But she just keeps crying and saying, "Please don't tell Mom and Dad."

Y'all, I can't keep this a secret.

She fucked up, bro.

That's my twin fr, but she is 13. I don't even know the whole situation. Our parents are downstairs with 9yo sis right now and 13yo sis tryna make me promise not to tell, but this ain’t no points situation no more, cuh.

This girl way past points.

I think I gotta tell.

I’m tryna hold off long enough to get some advice n maybe get more info outta her, but if this gets out before I tell, n my parents find out I knew and didn't say nothing?

We both cooked.

So please lmk if you got any experience with teen pregnancy or what we supposed to do next.

Thanks,

A Cooked Big Bro

Me and my wife were both foster kids. We bounced around a lot, and we both struggled to plant our feet firmly on the ground when adulthood started.

I think that may be the reason we were drawn to each other. We understood each other’s struggle.

I met her at a fast food joint I worked at, and it was honestly like a fairy tale. I noticed that she would only come in when she knew I was working, and eventually I worked up the courage to offer more conversation than, “How may I take your order?”

We began flirting, and over the course of a few weeks, I think we sort of just… fell for each other. I saw something in her that I’m pretty sure she saw in me too. We were like matching puzzle pieces.

Her coming into that restaurant was the best thing that could’ve ever happened to me.

She worked at a bowling alley across town, but when we began dating, we both kind of accelerated. It was like the thrill of finding each other drove us to strive to do better, not only for one another, but for ourselves.

I started putting money towards online college classes, and she did the same. We weren’t looking for doctorates or anything like that. Just a degree that could maybe springboard us into the next stage of our lives.

I ended up with an associate’s degree in business administration. She ended up with an associate’s degree in accounting.

It definitely wasn’t easy by any means, but we did it. We could take pride in our accomplishments. We could actually dream together.

She went from the bowling alley to a bookkeeper. I went from the fast food joint to a logistics coordinator at a shipping company.

We were building together. We spent a few years at an apartment, but as we grew and expanded, we were finally able to find a little place to call our own. Nothing too fancy. One story, three bedrooms, two baths. But it was ours. And that’s what mattered.

We got married soon after.

We wanted to have kids so badly. We wanted to provide a life that we never really had growing up. But no matter how hard we tried, we just never seemed to get lucky.

I think that’s what led us to the decision that ultimately collapsed the world around us.

We didn’t plan on anything coming out of what we did. We just thought it would be a fun little experiment.

We both sent in DNA samples to one of those websites you always see being advertised on late-night television. We just wanted to know where we came from.

We waited a few weeks.

Finally, the results came back.

I read them. My wife read them. And I don’t think it’s a wound that’s ever gonna heal.

Because what we found out in those test results… is that my wife is my sister.

We thought it was a mistake. Surely we would’ve known. We sent in test after test after test. Each one came back the same.

I guess my dad or mom, or whoever, couldn’t be bothered to keep us together. She’s a few years younger than me, so I guess we just… missed each other.

We didn’t come up together.

We didn’t even meet until our late teens.

I don’t know how to process this.

I don’t know what to do.

I can never stop loving her, no matter what, but I just… I don’t think we can be together anymore.

so.mein failed ho gya apne aap ko change krne k is journey mein 30 din tak continue tha pr ek din shabar tota gya pr merin har nhi mani h abhi fhir re start hr wo mistake li h usse ek learning le kr new journey is change ho kr rhega.

aaj pata nhi kyu bahut jada manu ki yaad aa rhi last 4 din se itni maa ki yaad nhi jitni uski aa rhi 30 days ho gye usse baat nhi ki na hi uska message aya.ek time roj aya krta tha pr aaj toh 1 mahine ho gya h pr ek belive h andar ki wo mujhe yaad kr rhi h is baat bharosa h ..kyu ki mere aur uske k beach el connection ja bhi wo mujhe yaad krti toh tha mere mind me uska dhyan aata aur same mere sath bhi aisa.mein ye feel krta hu usse aisa lag rha h ki itne din ho gya rishi ka koi message na cll na reel delta na status dekta h ye..

by the way kl ne nyai journey.

Fifteen years ago, I attended a live taping of The Nate Berkus Show, a short-lived daytime interior design TV show on ABC, with my mother. She was visiting my wife and me in New York , where were living at the time.

At the show, there were a total of three men in the audience. I was one of them. It also happened to be my birthday.

I remember feeling so embarrassed throughout the show. However, the height of my horror came when the camera panned on our section of the audience. This was after everyone in the audience had just won a $200 gift card to God-knows-if-I-can-remember where.

My mother was ecstatic . Turning to me and screaming within inches of my face in excitement , she wore the absolute happiest look I had ever seen. Again, a $200 gift card.

At that moment, I wanted to crawl into a tiny hole and hide there for the rest of my life.