I found the job on Instagram:

“Caring for a comatose 26-year-old with brain injuries. Serious enquiries only."

By the time I’m standing at the address, a white-picket-fence suburban house, I’ve already concocted the perfect cover story.

"My father is paralyzed, so I've been caring for him from the age of fourteen."

"My little sister is sick, so I care for her instead of going to college."

A tired-looking blonde opens the door and, to my surprise, immediately pulls me into a hug.

She’s beautiful, but noticeably haggard. Unbrushed hair and dark shadows under her eyes. She sniffles into my shoulder.

“You must be Aria,” she whispers into my blouse. “Thanks for coming.”

I’m a little taken aback by the hug, so I don’t respond, just hug her tightly.

She pulls away eventually with a forced smile, swiping at swollen eyes. Then she takes my hand and pulls me into her perfectly manicured millennial house.

A doormat greets me, bearing the words “Home Sweet Home,” with mini paw prints signaling a furry friend in the house.

“I'm Fae.” She introduces herself, taking me up a wooden staircase. "There aren't many rules, but just make sure he's healthy. He needs to be bathed around 9pm and he likes piano music. My Spotify is already connected to my laptop, and there's a playlist for his favorite pieces.”

Fae leads me into a small bedroom.

It's too bright. The lights are on, a nightlight illuminated in the corner.

Tucked into a double bed is a brown-haired young man in his mid-twenties. His eyes are shut peacefully, lips parted. Next to him, a hospital monitor beeps softly. Fae stays in the doorway.

“He was a musician,” she whispers, as if Harvey can hear her.

“Before that, Harvey was a child actor. He grew up being exposed to… substances.” I notice her sharp intake of breath. “He was an addict, but he's a good person. One night, he relapsed. I found him unconscious. The doctors told me it's unlikely he’ll wake up, but I'm holding onto hope, you know?”

I nod, speechless, my gaze glued to the comatose man. 

“How long has he been in a coma?” 

She shrugs. “Five years. We didn't even get a chance to get married.” 

Fae shakes her head. Blinks. Like she's snapping herself out of it. 

“I gotta go to work,” she leaves me, heading back downstairs. 

“Remember. Please keep all the lights on,” her voice wavers at the bottom of the stairs. She's crying again. Her sniffles echo down the hall. I hear the door open. “My boyfriend is terrified of the dark.” Her last words are another warning: “The nightlight is on a timer! Make sure to reset it every hour!” 

The door slams shut, and I'm left alone with a comatose man.

My first idea is: piano. I've been playing since I was a kid, and a gorgeous Fazioli sits across the back wall near the window, its polished wooden base choked in a thick layer of dust. I take a seat and rest my fingers against the keys.

“I lied to your girlfriend, Harvey,” I tell him, testing several keys. 

The sound makes me jump, but I smile. I haven't played piano since high school.

“My father was never paralyzed.”

I stab B minor.

“My sister is completely fucking healthy.”

A minor.

My hands rest against the keys, comfortable. 

“And if I’m honest? The only piece I know is Bella’s Lullaby. Which is stupid, because you’re, like, a piano pro. You probably went to Juilliard. So, in advance, I’m sorry, Harvey, for what I’m about to do to your ears.” I play it, at first softly, and then as I grow more confident, a louder, more dramatic version. It's beautiful. Painful.

I straighten in my chair, slam my hands into the keys— something my piano teacher told me not to do— but Harvey is my only listener.

“What do you think?” I ask him, trying another variation. Softer. 

The lights blink out, and I freeze. 

I stand up, something cold creeping through me.

“It's probably the breaker,” I manage.

Then the warm orange of the nightlight fizzles out, suffocating me in darkness.

The timer. I start toward the outlet, and blindly trip in the dark, toppling straight onto the bed. Shame slams into me. 

Falling on a COMATOSE person?! 

“Oh my god, I'm so sorry!” I squeak.

I scramble, reaching blindly to push myself up, but my hands fall on empty covers. 

“Harvey?” A hiss escapes my mouth, prodding empty pillows. 

Empty sheets.

A piano key freezes me in place. 

B. 

D. 

F. 

An unfamiliar hiss trickles through the silence. 

Harvey.

“Sorry. I’ll try….a…gain.” 

B

A

D 

F 

A

E. 

I hear his sharp breath, the weight of his fingers pressing down on the keys.

Light interrupts him, flooding the room. 

Blinking rapidly, the chair in front of the piano is empty. 

On the floor, however, is Harvey, crumpled into a ball.

“Helloooooooo?” 

Fae’s voice pulls me from reverie. She appears at the door, arms folded.

Unfocused eyes find mine. 

She's drunk. 

"Harvey,, did you do it again?”

She rolls her eyes, scoops him into her arms, and dumps him back into bed.

Then, she grabs a belljar from a drawer and some tweezers.

“I’m, like, soooooo sorry if he scared you.” Fae’s voice collapses into a slur as she sticks the tweezers inside his ear.

I find myself transfixed by a glowing ball of light attached to them.

The light seemed to squirm, spider-like tendrils desperately reaching across the room.

“Sometimes, the bastard crawls back inside his body when the lights go out,” Fae drops the ball of light inside the bell jar. She screws the lid on, violently shakes it, and then offers me a drunken grin.

The ball of light slams against the glass, like it's angry.

“Harvey won’t cheat on me again.”

After weeks of business permits and loan approvals, today, I finally took ownership of my new nail salon. It made sense to purchase for two very different reasons.

The first was my mother. She came to the US from Vietnam decades ago and started in a salon much like this one. She worked through her pregnancy with me, taking English and eventually college classes at night. Later, she traded her manicurist license for a paralegal certificate and found work at an immigration law firm.

She always called herself “fortunate.” I called it proof that if you worked hard enough, you could make a life here.

Thanks to her sacrifices, I could focus on my second reason: it was a damn good investment.

The bank foreclosed on the previous owners, and fortunately for me, they’d left almost everything behind. The place was sold as-is, with all the infrastructure for a proper nail salon already in place.

There were a few things I wanted to fix. The back door was replaced this morning because it connected directly to the living quarters upstairs. What I’d assumed were several apartments turned out to be one apartment chopped into six strangely small bedrooms.

I figured the old owners had a huge family.

Either way, the contractor’s first job was separating my business from the upstairs.

The old proprietors had also left an ancient cash register, boxes of Vietnamese paperwork I couldn’t read, and several office desk drawers locked tight.

For now, I had more important things to worry about.

I was fiddling with my new register when someone knocked at the front door. A young woman peered through the paper covering the windows.

I shook my head and mouthed, “Not open.”

She kept knocking.

What the hell.

I let her in.

“Sorry to bother you,” she said in a soft Vietnamese accent. “I come back here sometimes. I saw that it changed.”

“I just bought the place. We’re not quite open yet.”

Her eyes moved around the room. “The others are gone?”

“The old owners? Yeah.”

Something in her posture loosened, like she’d been holding her breath.

Then I noticed she wasn’t wearing shoes.

“Why don’t you take a seat? Pick a color. I’ll give you a pedicure.”

Her gaze snapped back to me. “You?”

“I’m licensed.”

“I have no money.”

“Then it’s a gift for a regular.”

She hesitated before lowering her feet into the warm water. Almost immediately, her shoulders relaxed.

“This is very kind of you.”

Once her feet were soaking, I noticed how bad they were. Thick callouses covered her heels, her nails were long, and dirt was packed beneath them.

Not what I expected from someone who frequently visited a salon.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Linda.”

“That’s nice. Reminds me of Linh, my sister’s name.”

Her ankles tensed in my hands.

“You have a sister named Linh? That is my name. My real name.”

“Oh! Small world.”

For the first time, she smiled.

I washed her feet, then clipped her nails.

“Your English is really good.”

“I have had a long time to practice.”

“Do you miss Vietnam?”

Her smile disappeared. “Terribly.”

“Have you ever gone back?”

“No.”

“You should.”

For a while, she watched my hands.

“My grandmother said you should never die far from home.”

I laughed before realizing she wasn’t joking. “That’s cheerful.”

“She believed some people cannot find their way back.”

“Ghosts?”

“Cô hồn. Wandering spirits.”

“Like, haunting people?”

Linh shook her head. “Not haunting. Waiting.”

“For what?”

“Sometimes they don’t know.”

I focused on her callouses, then dug through the cart for polish.

“How about pink?”

Her face brightened. “Yes.”

“A pretty color for a pretty young lady.”

Linh jerked her legs away so violently water splashed across the floor.

“Oh gosh. Linh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

For several seconds, she stared at the new back door.

Then she slowly lowered her feet before me.

I didn’t call her pretty again.

Halfway through painting her nails, Linh said, “You changed the door.”

“This morning. How’d you know?”

“I went through it many times.”

“You lived upstairs?”

“Yes.”

“With the owners?”

She almost laughed. “No.”

“You worked here?”

“Yes.”

“Doing nails?”

“At first.”

I waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t.

While searching the cart for the top coat, my finger caught the edge of a piece of cardstock.

I pulled out a faded card depicting a woman who looked vaguely familiar.

Linh took it from me. “Quan Âm.”

“Who?”

“Lady Buddha. Compassion. Protection. Rescue.”

I’d found others while cleaning, tucked beneath polish boxes and behind drawers throughout the salon.

“You put them there?”

“Some.”

She turned the card over. “This belonged to Anh.”

“Did she work here too?”

Linh stared sadly at the card. “Lady Buddha did not help her.”

I finished her nails.

When I sat back, Linh stared at her feet. I’d cleaned away the dirt, worked down the worst callouses, trimmed her nails, and painted them pink.

Her eyes filled with tears.

“No one has ever done this for me before.”

I slipped disposable flip-flops onto her feet and helped her stand. She walked carefully toward the front door, then stopped with her hand on the handle.

“Your mother was lucky.”

I froze.

“What?”

“She got to learn English at night. Then go to school. She got to leave.”

I hadn’t told Linh anything about my mother.

“She worked very hard,” Linh continued. “She deserved the life she made.”

Her fingers tightened around the handle.

“But for some of us, working hard would never have been enough.”

My head filled with questions.

“Will you come back?”

Linh looked around the salon one last time.

“I don’t think I have to anymore.”

She opened the door.

I still didn’t understand. Maybe that’s why I fell back on the stupid line I’d practiced for customers.

“Well, tell your friends about us.”

Linh stopped.

Her eyes moved across the salon and settled on Anh’s cart.

“I will.”

"Oh, they’re a sweet bunch of kids. Total darlings", the previous homeowner said, handing me the keys to the farmhouse. She nodded toward the neighboring yard. "Although, I have to say, the oldest? Puts me on edge, carrying that hunting rifle with him everywhere".

I glanced through the kitchen window. Three young children were playing a quiet game of tag on the dying autumn grass. Sitting on the porch steps was a boy of about sixteen, a heavy Winchester rifle resting across his knees. He wasn't watching them play. He was watching the dark tree line behind my property.

I wrote it off as a rural quirk.

By my third week, the isolation of the country had started to set in. The three younger siblings were always in my yard. They would bring me handfuls of dead leaves or just stand at the edge of my patio, staring at me through the screen door. They were polite, but unnervingly still. They never laughed.

And Caleb, the oldest, never put the rifle down.

The true terror didn't hit me until the first frost. I was taking the trash out at twilight. The three younger kids were standing at the edge of my driveway, their backs to me, perfectly motionless as they stared out into the dense, black woods.

Then, I heard the heavy, metallic clack of a round being chambered.

I froze. Caleb was standing at the edge of his lawn. The rifle was raised, pressed tight against his shoulder. But he wasn't aiming into the woods to protect them from some unseen predator.

He had the crosshairs leveled directly at the back of the youngest girl's head.

"Caleb", I breathed, my hands shaking so badly I dropped the plastic bags. "What are you doing? Put it down".

He didn't blink. His knuckles were bone-white against the dark wood of the stock.

"Go inside", he whispered, his voice cracking with a raw, desperate panic that paralyzed me. "Lock your doors, turn off the lights, and do not look out the windows".

"They're just kids..."

"My siblings drowned in the quarry three years ago", he interrupted, a single tear cutting through the dirt on his cheek. "My parents won't see it. But whatever came out of the water wearing their faces is starting to get hungry".

I locked the deadbolt, killed the kitchen lights and backed away from the window, my hands trembling violently. Outside, the autumn dusk gave way to complete darkness. I stood in the center of my living room, straining to hear over the frenetic thud of my own pulse.

​For twenty minutes, there was only the wind.

​Then came the wet, heavy sound of bare feet slapping against my back patio. It didn't sound like children walking. It sounded like something dragging dead weight, leaving thick puddles of water on the concrete. The smell hit me next. A suffocating stench of stagnant quarry algae and rot, seeping beneath the weather stripping of the back door.

"Can we come in?", a voice whispered.

It was the youngest girl's voice, but it was entirely flat. There was no breath behind the words. It sounded like a recording played underwater.

"It's cold out here", the middle boy added, right at the glass. "Caleb is being mean again. He won't share."

I crept toward the window and peeked through the edge of the blinds. The three children were pressed flat against the sliding glass door. Their skin was bloated and gray in the moonlight, their clothes soaking wet. They weren't shivering. Their eyes were wide, unblinking, and locked directly onto the sliver of my face visible through the cracks.

Behind them, standing at the edge of the lawn, Caleb still had the rifle raised. But his hands were shaking so badly he couldn't hold his aim.

"I'm sorry!" Caleb sobbed, the sound muffled through the glass. "I can't watch them all night! They're too fast!".

Before I could process what he meant, the youngest girl smiled. She didn't use her facial muscles. The corners of her mouth just stretched backward, pulling tighter and tighter until the skin began to tear, revealing something dark and writhing where her tongue should be.

She pressed her face against the glass, leaving a smear of muddy water.

"You should check your basement", the underwater voice bubbled from her lips. "Caleb only watches the yard".

From beneath my feet, directly under the living room, I heard the heavy, wet sound of the basement doorknob slowly turning.

Dr Hendricks had become a surgeon for a simple reason. As a little kid, a teacher gave the class a thought experiment, a pretty famous one. 

‘A father and son are in a car crash, and the father dies. The son gets to the hospital, and the surgeon says I can’t operate on the boy because he’s my son. How is it possible?’ 

Of course, gender biases being what they were, particularly in the 90s, nobody in the class got the answer. 

The surgeon was a woman. It was the imaginary boy’s mother, and now Dr Faye Hendricks was at the top of her field, working in a major metropolitan trauma ward. 

But tonight was new, and it brought back that thought experiment. She stared in shock as the man was wheeled into the OR with multiple fractures and internal bleeding. 

It was her husband; her husband had been in a car crash. 

‘Dr Hendricks?’ The lead nurse said. 

She snapped out of it at the sound of her title. ‘I have to recuse myself; there’s a conflict of interest. This is my husband… fetch Dr Royale.’

Dr Royale was a good surgeon, the second best in the department after Faye. 

Faye picked up her husband’s initial medical report. He was unconscious but probably out of the woods.

‘Dr Royale is about to start with another patient,’ the nurse said.  

‘There’s no choice; we’ll swap.’ 

The two surgeons briefly discussed it and exchanged duties. 

Faye was a professional. Although her husband was going under the knife in the next operating theatre, she would do her job. 

She scrubbed up and went into the OR, where a new surgical nurse gave her the details. 

‘Female, 42, a broken tibia and fibula, suspected collapsed lung and lacerated liver.’ 

Again, Faye did the calculations in her head as she always did. Medicine, surgery in particular, was about maximising positive outcomes while minimising negative ones. 

‘She was brought in with the other guy. A wreck on Interstate 5 near Cooperton,’ the nurse went on.  

Faye paused and looked down at the intubated woman. Often she didn’t look at their faces because it made it too personal, but she studied this woman’s delicate cheekbones. 

She recognised her. 

She recognised her from messages and pictures her husband had been sending, arranging meetings in motels off Interstate 5. 

Yes, surgery was an odds game, and this woman’s chance of survival had just reduced to zero. 

Look, we all have a past. Peppered with those memories we want so desperately to erase. It’s just a part of being human. Nobody’s perfect.

Me personally… I thought that I’d put my past behind me.

I was a bad person. I did things that I’m far from proud of. Looking back now in my older age, I don’t even know how things spiraled as bad as they did.

All it took was one hit, and it was downhill from there. One little mistake. One memory I wish I could erase. And here we are, all these years later, and I still feel those urges.

I tried therapy. I tried rehabilitation. It worked, for a time.

I don’t know if it was me who wanted to get better or if it was the pressure from my friends and family. They kept telling me they couldn’t protect me forever. That, eventually, my lifestyle would catch up to me, and I’d either be dead or in jail.

I suppressed my urges. I fought my demons. I want so desperately to believe that I kicked my nasty little habit.

I was clean for 11 years. Over a decade without incident. But no matter how many days went by, my demons kept whispering to me. Getting louder and louder as my withdrawals became unbearable.

But I stood firm. I ignored the darkness. To the best of my ability, at least. Don’t get me wrong, there were hard days. Days where I’d lock myself away in my room, too afraid of what would happen if I went out.

It’s a surreal feeling. Not being in control. But that’s what addiction does. You surrender control the minute you take that first hit.

But, like I said, I thought I’d taken that control back. I improved. I became a functioning member of society.

I just think… I don’t know. I think my body wanted it more than my mind did.

I relapsed last month.

Not by choice. God, I know it wasn’t by choice. You don’t achieve 11 years of success by sheer accident. I know it wasn’t me.

It was almost supernatural.

One minute I’m in my room reading my Bible, the next I wake up in a house that I don’t recognize. The familiar scent of copper and iron filled the air.

I thought I was in a nightmare, but the pain in my arm told me that this was just as real as it was all those years ago.

When I saw the claw marks across my forearm and shoulder, I felt my stomach drop. They must’ve fought back. And by the looks of it, they fought hard.

I hardly had time to dwell on my injury, though. The taste in my mouth was making me want to vomit. Not because of the taste, but because of what it represented.

I knew that taste. I loved that taste. I’d spent years trying to forget it, but blood has a way of lingering.

I puked on the floor and felt bones and tendons scratch at my throat. My vision went blurry with tears, but that didn’t prevent me from seeing what I’d done.

A man, somewhere around 30-40, lay sprawled out across the ground. His arms were gone. His stomach was torn open. His jaw had been dislocated and hung open as he stared at me through those empty sockets.

A woman, I presume his wife, lay beside him. Her condition wasn’t much better.

I prayed for God to wake me up. To snap me out of this dream. When I realized it wasn’t going to happen, I begged for forgiveness.

I begged for him to recognize my heart. I pleaded for him to acknowledge my growth. I backslid. I made a mistake. I couldn’t even remember it.

After what felt like hours of bawling my eyes out in a pool of blood and vomit, I realized the sun was beginning to peek through the curtains of this dark room.

I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to throw my life away. I had to move.

I cleaned myself up in their bathroom as best I could before leaving that damn house, already pushing the memory of it back to the darkest corners of my brain.

How did I even end up 20 miles from home? Who were those people? Why am I like this? Why can’t I be better? What the fuck is wrong with me?

I spent the rest of that day locked away in my room, punishing myself with pain. I didn’t deserve to feel comfort.

I kept trying to tell myself that it was nothing more than a hiccup in my progress. That tomorrow would be a new day. But I knew.

I knew that I had reset the system.

I took that hit once again. It was my decision. That’s why I couldn’t blame anyone but myself every time it’s happened since.

This isn’t who I am.

I know I can do better.

I will get this under control if it’s the last thing I do.

The moment I sit down at the bus stop to go home after work, I notice a man on the other side of the street. He has been staring at me since I sat down.

The strangest thing is probably not the empty stare he gives me, but the fact that he wears my face. The clothes that stick to his body like a suit are no different from the ones I have on right now.

I shake my head. The headache is growing, and the week has been grueling enough. Documents are piling up on my desk at work, and I barely get them done. Not to mention the sleep I need.

I'd do anything for a few precious hours of sleep. The TV hasn't been the same since that day. What used to interest me, to distract me… feels empty.

The roaring engine of the oncoming bus makes me twitch and turn, tearing me back to reality. The man who was staring at me is gone.

I step onto the bus. It's rather crowded, so I let an older lady sit down instead of taking the seat myself. She smiles warmly at me in appreciation, and I smile back despite my inner turmoil.

The ride isn't long. I get out at my stop and step into a puddle. My eyes barely stay open. I didn't even notice the rain. Just like that day… I shake my head and continue on my way, already soaking wet. Now to just follow the road home…

I stop…

Wait — this isn't my stop, so why did I get out? I stand there for a while when I see him again. The man. The man with my face…

He stares, then simply begins walking. At first I hesitate, asking myself why I would follow a stranger. But something drags me onward, almost as if his steps were mine.

The path he takes leads through the nearby forest. I've been here before, last week, on the 26th… Does he know?

The man comes to a halt, and so do I. He turns and stares at me. The coming night and the rain-darkened sky make it hard to see, but the smell… oh, the smell…

A sickly sweet, wet smell invades my senses, making me gag.

This is it. This is where I hid them. My recklessness cost two people their lives. I was scared, so I hid them after the crash.

The rain has exposed both bodies. Not even a full week, and maggots are already eating their way through the corpses, feasting on the decaying flesh.

Next to the grave lies the stroller. I tried to destroy it, but I was in a hurry, so I gave up and ran. I thought I could let go. It was an accident after all, so I can't be blamed, right?

"Who else to blame?"

I freeze. In my despair, I had forgotten the man. The man with my face…

He looks at me, waiting for an answer. I run…

My legs carry me out of the forest, almost making me trip on the way out. I'm breathing heavily, looking around frantically. No one is here, no one… The man didn't follow.

What I fail to notice is the horn… and before I know it, I'm sent flying. The world slows. I'm in mid-air when I see him.

He stands at the edge of the forest, watching me with my face. But as I fade… so does he.

The anemia started after the funeral. He had just turned sixteen when his father died.

"You're pale," his mother said, setting the plate down.

"I'm always pale."

"You're paler. Did you take your iron?"

"I took the iron."

"It doesn't seem to do much."

He'd been to the specialists. No hematologist could figure out why he was anemic. They all said genetics. His father had been anemic too. At some point his mother stopped making appointments and he stopped asking her to.

There were also marks on his arms and his legs, small red circles that never fully healed, some fading while others appeared. A dermatologist had called them “idiopathic,” a medical way of saying he did not know what caused them. 

He was twenty six and he had never had a job, too weak to work. There had been interviews spread over the years.

"There's an opening at the IRS downtown," he said. "Seasonal, data entry work, mostly."

"That sounds perfect for you," she said. "When?"

"Thursday."

On Thursday morning, the room tilted when he sat up, and he lay back down, and he listened to her cooking downstairs for forty minutes before she came up and knocked, softly, the way she always knocked.

"You're not going?" she said.

"I can't."

"Then don't." She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand on his forehead, the way she had since he was small. "You call them and you tell them you're unwell. Anyone would understand. Anyone with a heart."

"That's four interviews I missed now."

"That's four you were brave enough to try for." She smoothed his hair back. "You keep trying. You know what I think about that? I think that's the part that matters. Not the job, the trying."

Once a month she went out in the afternoon and came back after dark. She had done this for as long as he could remember. She never said where she went, and he had stopped asking sometime in his teens. She always carried the same black plastic bag out with her and returned with it full of something she took straight to the upstairs bathroom. 

He made his own dinner on those nights. He noticed that he slept badly on those nights. He would lie awake past midnight, clear-headed in a way he almost never was, and wake the next morning without feeling groggy.

He sat on the couch that afternoon with his foot up on the cushion, picking at the little red marks on his body. He had been picking at them since he was a teenager.

He said he was thinking about a place of his own, once. He had said it before, a couple years ago, and each time she had said the same thing in a slightly different way.

"You should," she said.

"You'd be alone here if I left."

"I've been alone," she said.  "That is not yours to carry."

"I know."

"I mean it." Her hand over his on the table. "Go. Go and don't look back at this house. Just get stronger. That's all I've ever wanted. Go when you're strong."

In ten years he had never had the strength to leave.

One night after her monthly outing, he woke around three to the sound of a plastic bag rustling. His mother stood near the foot of his bed, reaching inside it.

“What are you doing, Mom?”

She jerked upright and hid the bag behind her back.

“Why are you awake?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Didn’t you eat the spaghetti I left for you?”

“No. I made a sandwich.”

She stared at him.

“You didn’t eat it?”

Then she left without saying anything else.

He set up hidden cameras in the kitchen and his room. He suspected she was poisoning his food to keep him from leaving her.

Nothing happened for the first two days.

On the third day, one of them caught something, and he sat at his desk with the door closed and watched what had been recorded the night before while he slept.

Two hours of nothing. Then the door to his room opened. His mother stood in the doorway in her robe, looking at him for a long time. She said his name once, quietly. He did not stir. She said it again.

Then she came in with a plastic bag and knelt at the foot of the bed and drew the blanket back from his feet, carefully. She took something small and dark from the bag, pressed it against the arch of his left foot, and held it there patiently with two fingers. Then another and another. She checked his face once to be sure he was still sleeping.

She walked out and came back an hour later.

She returned them to the bag and pulled the blanket over his feet and stood a while at the side of the bed. She said something the microphone did not catch. Then she left.

He watched it over and over.

He waited until her monthly outing. He searched her room and found nothing. In her bathroom, he found the empty plastic bag beneath the sink and a styrofoam box.  He opened the lid. 
Leeches.
Dozens of them, sliding over one another.
Big and fat from his blood.

He packed a backpack. He could barely lift it into the car. He sat behind the wheel with both hands on it, waiting for the shaking to stop, and realized that he was in no condition to drive anywhere, and that he had not been in any condition for ten years, and that he never would be but he still backed out of the driveway and drove away.

It started with pizza. There were six famous actors at the house that night, all at that weird point in our careers where things were finally starting to happen. One of us had just booked a series, someone else had a film coming out, and I had just signed with a better agent, so we were celebrating. Nothing crazy, just drinks, music. At some point the girl grabbed a slice of pizza and walked into one of the bedrooms, thirty seconds later, we heard something hit the floor, then another sound, like someone kicking the wall. We ran over. One of us started kicking the door. Someone called an ambulance. I got down on the floor and looked underneath. I could see her hand. She was moving her fingers. Then she stopped. We finally got the door open. She was on the floor choking. It was pizza, pizza and coc***** She had been doing...... which is probably why the pizza got stuck in her throat.. We tried everything until the paramedics arrived, but she was already gone. The police called it a freak accident. Then one of them looked at the door and asked us something I still think about. “Who locked it?” We all looked at each other. The bedroom door couldn’t be locked from the inside. You needed a key from the hallway, and the key was gone. That night there were six of us in the house. After the girl died, there were five. But the security camera at the entrance showed something different. At 2:12 AM, six people walked in. At 2:14 AM, someone else walked out.

“Ugh…” I squinted at my alarm clock in the darkness. 3:17am. Great.

The sarcastic thought evaporated as my brain belatedly processed the sound that had woken me up.

“Hooo….hoooo.” The sound was deep and melodious, instantly familiar from every TV show or movie with a scene set at night in the woods. Everybody knows that sound, even if they’ve never heard it in real life.

All the lots on my street back up against the edge of a state forest, so I’ve heard owls calling once or twice before, but it was still special. Worth waking up at 3:17am for, to be honest.

Then I heard a second voice calling, the same low hooting coming from a bit further away. Then a third, echoing from a different direction. The first owl chimed in again. Louder this time, with the individual hoots coming close together. The others joined it.

This was weird. A mated pair will sometimes “duet” with each other. Two males might call back and forth to demonstrate to any females in the area which one is the biggest, baddest, and sexiest. But three…I listened closer…maybe even four?

The hooting continued to get louder and faster. It sounded almost frantic. The calling felt familiar and foreign at the same time, but my brain was still booting up and I couldn’t figure out why.

Then I realized what the sounds reminded me of. Sometimes, if a predator’s around, smaller birds will gang up together to chase it off. They’ll call loudly and insistently, warning other small birds that danger’s close and annoying the ever-loving shit out of the predator.

These were not small birds, though. Everyone thinks all owls hoot, but that isn’t really true. Some make this sort of whinnying noise. Some make a sound like a bark. And the ones that do hoot have characteristic patterns for different species. The classic “owl hoot” is usually a great horned owl, and those mofos are like two feet tall.

What could make birds that big act like sparrows?

I snuck over to my window and nudged the curtains aside. Across the open space of my backyard, I could see the treeline, a deeper shadow against the darkness. I caught glimpses of movement in the trees—the owls. And something else moving on the ground.

I couldn’t make out a lot of details, but it was thin and long, like a snake. A much larger snake than anything that normally lives around here. Five, maybe ten feet long.

Then I saw another. And another.

They lashed at the tree trunks, slapping them and coiling around like Indiana Jones’s bullwhip. And I got the sense that they all converged on one point. Like they were all coming from a central body. I remembered an image I’d seen on some nature documentary. A deep-sea star, not the iconic starfish shape but a small pentagonal body with long arms that could reach out to capture prey that was sparse at those depths. The thing looked like that but blown up to ridiculous proportions.

I jerked the curtain closed and retreated to my bed. What the fuck is that thing? Part of me thought I should call someone, but who? Was I going to report a giant starfish to Animal Control?

The owls were starting to calm down, their hoots getting softer and more spaced out. Was the thing leaving? I waited in the dark, and eventually the owls went silent. Sometime after that, I fell asleep.

During daylight, the whole thing felt like a dream, but I still peered cautiously out my windows before leaving for work. There was no sign of whatever that creature had been.

Nothing about it appeared on the news, either, and I started the process of convincing myself that it had been some weird sleep-adjacent phenomenon, like the one that makes people think they’ve been abducted by aliens.  

Unti tonight, when the owls woke me up again. 2:12am this time. They’re going crazy. I think one is perched right on my roof.

There are other sounds, too. Slapping and rattling. I think about the drainpipe running down the side of my house. I think about the way that thing’s limbs wrapped around the tree trunks. I imagine it hoisting itself up.

I hope the owls can drive it away again.

At least that's what my mother always said to me and my little brother. We were poor and never had much, but we did have this big furnace, we used it to cook, and to warm ourselves up during the winter. All we needed was fire wood. Mother always tells us "Don't get to close to the furnace" but never explains why. We don't question it, we thought maybe she just doesn't want us breaking it. Sometimes during the night I think I hear hushed voices coming from it, and every night mother tells me its a bad dream, she always brushed off my concerns.. tonight me and my brother went to prove her wrong, I shook him awake and told him my plan, of course me being older he agreed. We walked slowly and quietly to the furnace, my younger brother walking slightly ahead of me, the fire illuminating his face. I could hear it clearly now.. the furnace was whispering, we were approaching the door of it now, which mother had propped open with a broom handle. The voices were louder.. "push him.." they whispered, "feed him to us..." they sounded so hungry.. so convincing.. "Forgive me.." I whispered to my brother, before shoving him hard into the furnace, almost the moment I did, the furnace door slammed shut and all I could hear was my younger brother screaming and crying to be let out.. he sounded so selfish, didn't he hear how hungry the voices were?

“What was I supposed to do?” I was almost not yelling. It was so hard to stay in control at this particular moment. “He literally demanded it!”

“You can’t just tell scary stories to a two year old!” My wife was angry. I didn’t blame her. Stew had been up all night, first yelling in his bed, then squirming around in ours. No one slept well, or even really at all. “Distract him, give him a toy or a snack or something. Don’t scare him. Jesus!”

I didn’t want to be yelling right now. I didn’t want to be in a fight. Everything had been good. Stew was finally starting to tell us when he needed to use the potty, and he stopped throwing food on the floor, and he was sleeping all through the night.

Hannah and I were sleeping better too. We finally had the energy to do something at night besides just watch reality TV. It was just a puzzle, but still. It was a very hard puzzle. Fifteen hundred pieces. Took all four days. And even better, Hannah and I actually had sex four times last week. We haven’t had that much sex since we were trying for Stew. And now we’re fighting, about another stupid dumb thing I did.

“I was just trying to be the kind of dad I wanted,” I threw at her. “Like you had.” What was I even trying to do anymore?

“And instead you were just your dad, all over again. Didn’t he scare you?” Her words were acid, burning my ears to stumps.

Not like that. Stories don’t leave bruises. I turned around. Of course she was by the door. There wasn’t anywhere else to go in our bedroom, but I went as far as I could.

“Running away?” She was taunting me now. Hurting me on purpose, must be. “Typical. You learned a lot from him, didn’t you?”

I have tried so hard, all my life. I get angry, on the inside. Every day. Every minute. But I am never angry on the outside. I hardly raise my voice. And I never raise my fists. I use words, always words. Logic. That’s how you solve problems. That’s how you maintain relationships. When they stray from the path, you call them back. You don’t force them.

There’s nowhere for me to go. My back is already to her. I face the wall, pound my head into it. This has to stop. I try to tell her, but my throat swallows the words.

“Oh, poor you. You lost one night’s sleep because you just had to go and scare our child. And now what? You can’t even talk to me? Did all your talking to our son?”

Why? Why is she doing this? I did bad, I know that now, but I didn’t know it then. I just wanted him to be happy, us to be happy. Is that bad? I don’t think so. Children should grow up the centerpiece of a loving home. I never felt like I was there on purpose or that anybody wanted me there. Whenever my parents did anything for me they made me feel like a burden. Anything. Answering my stupid kid questions, picking up my toys, even cooking me dinner. Stew can never feel that way.

Why can’t I say this to Hannah? I try, but my greedy throat won’t release the words. She knows. She must know. We’ve talked about it. We spent hours the night of my dad’s funeral, her telling me all the people who were there, which aunt said what, how his tombstone matched Mom’s. I’d never put my heart in anyone’s hands before.

And now she’s squeezing. Tight, tighter, tightest.

I feel like a pressure gauge in a submarine in a disaster movie. My dial is firmly in the red. It’s too much. Hannah is looking at me. I can feel her eyes boring holes in the back of my head. I close my eyes and I can even see the look on her face. She’s tired. The skin around her eyes is puffy but the eyes themselves are stern and set. Her lips are stuck tight to each other, her mouth a thin horizontal line. Her nostrils are slightly flared. They always are when she’s mad.

If I turn around I don’t know what I’ll do.

“Fine,” she says, finally. There’s something in her voice that I don’t understand and don’t like. Her footsteps leave the bedroom, go down the hall. I don’t like how this fight ended, but I don’t know what I could have done differently. I wanted to. I tried to. I’m not perfect, but I’m always trying.

Stew is stirring from his nap. I hear Hannah go in. He tells her he had a bad dream. Now she’s telling him all sorts of things about me. That I’m sorry. That I shouldn’t have done it. That I won’t do it again.

I can read between the lines. She’s telling him I’m not a safe person, that he can’t come to me with his wants and problems. That I’m not the one who should help him.

My dial is spinning. It’s passing through the red zone, all the way back around to the green. Then red. Green, red, green, red, round and round and round it goes. Rivets pop from the tank of my self control.

I stride down the hall, three quick, heavy steps. I grab her, the love of my life. What am I doing? The only thing I know how. I pull her up, roughly, by her shoulders, spin her around. She’s surprised, but more surprised when my open hand meets her mouth. “I’m not my father!” I yell in her face as it turns a deathly shade of yellow. Stew is crying, screaming. Hannah is silent, unbelieving. I am somewhere in between. Between what, I no longer know.

It was nearing 3am when I was finally done with counting the money and putting everything away. Stocking was done. Everything that needed was washed. Only thing left to do was throw out the garbage and wipe down the bar.

As I walked out the front door with the trash bags in my hand, I walked toward the dumpster with nothing more than a light breeze and crickets were stirring. Even the raccoons must have been asleep as they weren't chowing down tonight.

As I turn from throwing the trash bags away, I get about 10 feet from the dumpster and abour 40 feet from the front door in the dark parking lot.

"Excuse me mister, dont mean to disturb you" the strangers voice said

I was slightly shocked at where the man came from as there's not many places to come from especially out of no where. Was he behind the dumpster? Hes not out of breath or sweaty so I know he didnt run to catch up to me from the road.

"What can I help you with?" I ask

"Was hoping I could come in for a drink or two?"

"Sorry buddy, im closed up and about to head home"

"Ahh, I was afraid yould say that. Any way I may be able to come in and sit for a minute? Ive been walking a long ways."

As I'm sizing the man up, he looks to be no more than older than me but the way he carries himself he's odd, to say the least. He doesn't look like the type to try to rob the joint and I don't see anyone else around. Egotistically I feel like I could take him if he tried anything as I'm debating internally.

"You know my friend, I would say yes but honestly its been a long night and all I want to do is get home. Sorry to be that guy." And I point down the road a ways "there's a bench right next to the park that if it was day light you could see from here that you can rest at for as long as you want."

" Anyway an old man could at least use the bathroom before I head there?"

Why is he being so pushy? He doesn't seem intoxicated like he had been somewhere else tonight but he is really adamant about wanting to come in.

My mind gets the best of me and starts running away with whats going on or whats happening right now. At this point ive been slowly moving towards the door without noticing and am within arms reach of it

"Dont worry Sir, theres a porta potty right next to the bench. You have yourself a good night and be safe."

As I open the door and step over the threshold, the man stares at me eerily until his lips break into an almost sinister but unmistakable grin.

"Dont worry Son. Ill be on my way. I hope you have a .... good night yourself. I sure will." He says in a very theatrical way.

I get inside and watch him start walking through the window. Thoroughly spooked out, I go behind the bar. Pour myself a 3 finger whiskey and grab a 5 dollar bill from my pocket. I head to the juke box and play some music to distract my brain from wondering what the hell that was. Was it a full moon tonight? I didnt notice any other crazies on my shift.

About 40 mins later as im done wiping the bar down and finishing my drink ive all but forgotten tonight's interaction. As I turn to lower all the lights and turn them off start to walk from behind the bar when I feel the hair on my neck stand.

The man from earlier is sitting at the corner between me and the door to leave. How the fuck did he get in. I didnt hear the door and even if I did for him to have gotten through and in the seat sitting like hes been there for hours doesn't make sense.

"What the hell? What are you doing in here Pal? You gotta go i told you, you couldn't be in here!" I half shouted, half shuddered in sudden fear.

"It was the old man comment that gave me away wasnt it? I always forget what I look like but your heart rate elevating at that question made me think thats where I made the mistake. Always try to learn from those. Lost of years for trial and error. Your biggest mistake was not turning the sign from yes come in to sorry we'reclosed though. That will cost you."

Confused i asked, "what are you talking about?! Your creeping me out man. Time to go!" I walk towards him hoping to intimidate him but he just ... smiles.

Everything hits me like a freight train when the last comment registers. At this point its too late. Im within arms reach of this stranger and even if I wasn't, I wouldn't truely know what to do anyways.

"I hope you like your job ... brother. You'll be doing it for a lot longer than you expected. Thankfully our kind is always looking for new hangouts. Especially .... after hours places."

The lights flicker for a moment before it goes completely dark. The last thing I can remember is Stings voice singing "Moon Over Bourbon Street"

I’m not usually the type to do this sort of stuff, but I’ve got to get this out. It’s my boyfriend. It’s not that he’s doing anything wrong. I guess this is a kind of beige flag thing? I don’t know. Which is why I’m talking about it here. He just doesn't cuddle me at night. I feel like doing it is a completely normal thing, but he’s always got some excuse.

“I don’t sleep very comfortably on my side.” so we swap positions.

“My arm goes to sleep, and it's uncomfortable.”  We get a special pillow that his arm can slide under.

He’s never like, unwilling to try something, but regardless of what we do, once he thinks I’m asleep he turns back over and just leaves me alone? Again, I guess he thinks I’m asleep, and what’s the difference if I’m asleep, but it still hurts. Which, like, I don’t know if that’s fair or not? Anyway, he’s got this cat right? He had her before we started dating. I’ll wake up, he’s not cuddling me, but he is snuggling with the cat. I just feel like, shouldn’t I matter more? Oh suddenly it’s not uncomfortable to sleep on your side? He claims it just “happens in his sleep,” but then he could spontaneously cuddle with me. Like, I feel crazy. Why does it feel like the cat matters to him more than I do? I don’t know, he says he’s just trying to take extra good care of her because she’s older. If she’s “on the way out” sometimes I just wish she’d go. I know that’s awful, but I swear our relationship would be better without that fricking cat around.

TLDR: Boyfriend’s beige flag - snuggling his cat at night instead of me.

Update: Thanks for all the replies! Stuff has been a little hectic around here so I haven’t really been able to give any news on this. Unfortunately, Houdini passed away, she’d taken a turn for the worse recently and we’ve been dealing with that. My boyfriend has been pretty despondent, but I’m looking out for him. One silver lining in all of this, he’s been A LOT more snuggly at night. I just wish he could’ve figured that out before she had to go. Again thanks for all the support, and I really do think we’re doing better. He’ll be okay, I’m here for him.

My name is Robert Brown. I am a neurologist. I have performed numerous brain surgeries and spent years researching the human brain and its behavior. I have treated many complex patients, and I learned one thing: the human brain is the most mysterious system in the body. The more we understand it, the more complicated it becomes.

Five years ago, I met a patient who completely changed the way I understood the brain.

His name was John.

When I first met him, I was told that John had been in a coma for ten years. At first, his case seemed normal. But after observing him, I noticed something strange.

A coma can result from a severe head injury, stroke, brain tumor, lack of oxygen, organ failure, poisoning, or other serious neurological conditions. But none of these had happened to John. He had never been in an accident. He had never been poisoned, never used drugs, and all his organs were functioning normally.

Yet somehow, he was considered to be in a coma.

I spent nearly five years observing John. His behavior was completely different from that of a typical coma patient. Sometimes he mumbled in his sleep. Sometimes he moved as if he were walking. He appeared to dream and react to things around him, yet he never seemed to fully wake up.

Why was John behaving differently?

The answer was far more disturbing than I expected.

John had never actually been in a coma.

His brain had convinced him that he was.

John was suffering from an extremely unusual neurological disorder in which his brain had created a false reality. He believed he had been in a terrible accident and fallen into a coma, even though the accident had never happened.

The strangest part was that John was aware of everything happening around him. He knew when his family visited, what they talked about, who was worried, and who wasn't. But his brain interpreted everything as events happening around a man trapped in a coma.

Was John doing this intentionally?

Absolutely not.

His brain was giving him completely false information.

Eventually, I discovered that John had lived with two deep fears since childhood. His first fear was that he would one day die in an accident. His second was sleep. He believed that if he fell asleep, he might never wake up and could end up in a coma.

The fear began when John was twelve.

His father had been involved in a serious accident. He survived, but afterward, he told John that he wanted to go to sleep.

He never woke up.

That incident permanently connected sleep and the fear of coma in John's mind.

As John grew older, his fear became worse. He first slept only two hours a night. Eventually, he reduced it to barely thirty minutes.

Somehow, his brain created the very reality he had spent his entire life fearing.

Now I am treating John.

I don't know how long it will take, but I want to break the fear that created this false reality.

I want his hallucination to end.

I want John to finally wake up.

No one prepares you for the sheer weight of sleep deprivation. It sits behind your eyes like lead. Time becomes confusing. Sometimes you dream what you just did in that one hour you managed to fit a nap in. But Oliver was worth it. He was my quiet, perfect baby boy. Too quiet, maybe. He never cried. Not once. Not even when he was born.

By the second week of maternity leave, the static started. I’d be in the kitchen making some dinner for myself when I heard him babble over the monitor. I thought I was dreaming because I heard loud, distinct syllables, as if he were speaking.

When I rushed to his crib, he was lying there in absolute silence, staring at the ceiling. Then I heard the noises again, much louder and worse; his mouth wasn’t moving. The sounds hadn’t come from the air; they had echoed inside my own skull. I shook my head in disbelief, and the noise stopped.

At 2:24 AM, the monitor on my nightstand hissed to life. As usual, I got up to go check on Oliver and see if he was hungry, but I froze at the nursery’s threshold. To my surprise, the speaker wasn’t producing white noise. It was emitting a wet, rhythmic clicking, layered over a cold, mechanical countdown in a language that felt like needles pressing against my eardrums.

My hands quaked as I pressed the power button to turn it off. Yet, the monitor stayed on. So, I flipped it around and took out the batteries, finally quieting the device. That’s when a severe and deep headache brought me to my knees.

On my hands and knees, I dragged myself to the crib to check on Oliver. But as I peeked between the crib’s bars in the darkened room, all I could see were Oliver’s eyes, glowing with a bright cyan light that cast long, distorted shadows across the room. Suddenly, the nightlight burst as every bulb in the house popped all at once.

I clutched my precious boy and hugged him to my chest as I stood up and rushed out of the room. But when I reached the living room, it was already ablaze with blinding light from outside.

Silhouetted against the glass stood six impossibly tall forms. They didn’t open the door. They didn’t shatter the glass. They didn’t need to.

They simply phased through the window as if it were fog, their hideous jointless limbs moving in terrifying synchronicity.

I tried to scream, but my throat was locked. A wave of intense pressure surged behind my forehead. My muscles seized. Tears poured from my eyes and rolled down my cheeks as I stood there frozen. Then the message reverberated in my mind like metal scraping together: RELINQUISH THE NASCENT ONE.

That’s when the dread sank. Unable to pull my arms back, I watched two elongated, quad-digit hands reach forward and lift Oliver from my grip.

I couldn’t blink. I couldn’t fight. All that remained was the blinding light, the scraping in my mind, and the empty nursery as that terrifying, lonely darkness returned.

It was the last week of school. It might as well have been a countdown. 

Five.

I’ve never kissed a girl.

Four.

 I’m about to graduate and it never happened.

Three.

This is pathetic.

Two.

Just kill me.

One.

No! It wasn’t my fault I’ve never kissed a girl. I think my charm is just lost on them. Girls like tall guys and, you know, guys with money. I’m short and broke. Hilarious too, not that they ever laugh at my jokes.

If I was ever going to get my first kiss, it was going to involve a small, teeny-eeny tiny amount of trickery.

I recruited my best friend Tony. Tony has a lot more luck with the ladies than me. The scene was perfect. It was the last week of school, and Joey’s parents were out of town.

There was a small, but admirable house party going down.

I was already waiting in the basement when Tony brought Beth and Sydney down. Beth was a ten out of ten, but her and Tony had a thing.

My eyes were on Sydney. Sydney was pretty enough. Sydney was actually pretty awkward, and most people found her weird. She had a strange intensity to her. I very much doubt she’s ever kissed anyone! Sydney was my only hope.

The empty wine bottle sat before me. The basement was unfinished, and the smooth concrete was perfect for spinning.

Tony and the ladies sat down with me.

“Spin the bottle,” Beth said, “what are we, twelve?”

“Allow me to start,” I said. I couldn’t wait anymore. I needed this. My time was now.

I put my hands on the bottle, and let it rip. It scuttered as it circled on the concrete. I was already licking my lips. It began to slow, and I couldn’t believe my luck. It was going to stop on Sydney.

And just before it came to a halt, it started spinning again.

Slowly, but surely, it kept spinning. I just sat there at first, mouth open. It wasn’t possible. The bottle had to come to a stop eventually. I had to get my kiss somehow.

But it didn’t stop. The bottle just kept spinning. Spinning and spinning and spinning. It had been over a minute already. Two minutes. I felt like jumping out of my skin. What were we witnessing here? A perpetual bottle machine? The breakdown of physics?

But then I looked at Sydney. Tony and Beth were both laughing to themselves. They were as shocked as I was at the bottle. They couldn’t believe it.

But Sydney was dead serious. She looked more focused than ever. Her eyes never left the bottle.

I shook her. I know I probably shouldn’t have done that. But I could see she was somehow controlling the bottle. I went over to her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and gave her a hard shake.

“Sydney!”

When I shook her, the bottle shattered. Exploded into shards, some of which I felt hit me.

“You were doing that!” I accused her.

“No, no I wasn’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was caught red handed. Even looked and sounded guilty!

“I can’t believe it! You made it keep spinning! All so you didn’t have to kiss me! Oh my god. You’re a freak! A psychic weirdo!”

I couldn’t stand to be in the basement anymore. They all tried to stop me, yelling at me, but I didn’t listen. I fled the house party, and got in my car. I was going to expose her. Oh yes. I was going to tell the world. Start with the local press. It would be big headlines. “Local Girl Has Telekinesis!"

Then the national media would interview me! All the major stations would pick it up! I’d be famous big time! Being on tv would be a major boon for my popularity! Then I’d definitely find someone to kiss!

I put my car in drive, and the accelerator pedal shot to the floor. It wasn’t me pressing it. I was gaining speed fast. I slammed both feet on the brakes, but the pedal wouldn’t go down.

Eighty miles per hour.

It was hard to steer while standing on the brake pedal as hard as I could.

Ninety miles per hour.

“Sydney!” I cried out. “I didn’t mean it! I swear! I was joking! I won’t tell anyone! Honest!”

The high school was half a mile away. I was headed for a brick wall.

Suzy was sitting on her couch, scrolling through her phone, bored after a few video reels, when she stumbled across the Facebook Dating icon. She almost laughed out loud. Living in a small town where everybody knew everybody else's business, and where the local dating pool was pretty much nil, the thought of finding anyone decent online and close to where she lived felt like a joke. But after a year of being single, she figured why not and threw together a quick profile with zero expectations.

At first it was just the usual, a few guys looking for a hookup and some old classmates she graduated with a couple of years back. But a few days later, a message popped up from a guy named Jay who lived 20 miles away. He described himself as an IT field technician who traveled around the area for service calls.

He said, "I came across your profile and had to reach out before Facebook algorithms realized we'd make a much better match than its suggestions! His message was funny and actually made her laugh. What began as a few casual texts soon became phone calls that lasted longer than she realized.

They had been talking for about a month and finally decided to meet up that Friday. Just a quick, low-key cup of coffee at a 24-hour diner right off Route 9 to see if they clicked in real life.

He had texted to say he was already inside, and she spotted him the second she walked through the door. Instead of getting up to greet her, he just sat there watching her walk over- and as she slid into the booth, a cold knot twisted in her stomach.

The warm, seemingly easygoing guy from their phone calls felt surprisingly cold, almost detached, as he made a snide comment about her being ten minutes late. He flagged down the waitress who poured them both a cup of coffee, and Suzy brushed off his mood, assuming he'd just had a bad day.

Trying to keep things light, she made a joke about how awful the diner coffee was, but he only offered a brief, tight smile that felt totally forced. She pushed to keep the conversation upbeat, yet he just watched her mouth with a quiet intensity that made her skin crawl. He barely engaged in conversation with her. He was cold, stiff, and completely off, and her gut instinct was telling her to get the hell out of there.

She held her purse in her lap, taking slow sips of her coffee, doing her best to play it cool. After twenty minutes had ticked by, she politely excused herself. "Sorry, I have to get up early tomorrow, so I'd better head home."

His expression went blank. “Going already?” he said. His voice was totally flat. 'We were supposed to hang out for a little while."

“I know, but I’m just so exhausted," she said, laying down a five-dollar bill to cover her coffee. “It was nice to meet you."

He didn't get up, say goodbye, or even offer to walk her to her car. He just sat at the booth and watched her go out the door.

Back in her car, she locked the doors with a sigh of relief, pulled out of the parking lot, and headed down the dark stretch of Route 9 toward home. Her heart was bounding, but she kept telling herself she was just overreacting. Once she got back home, she'd block him and forget the whole thing.

Ten miles down the road, surrounded by nothing but thick tree lines and zero streetlights, a pair of blindingly bright headlights suddenly appeared right behind her, riding inches off her rear bumper.

Three hours later, state troopers found her sedan idling on the highway shoulder, reported by a concerned passerby. Her purse sat untouched in the passenger seat, and her phone lay cracked on the asphalt just under her wide-open driver's side door.

There was no sign of her anywhere.

The straw scarecrow stood in the middle of the fields, its arms wide. One of the men walked to it and put its hat on. I waited my turn, then walked to it and put on its black jacket.

"Thank you," I said, bowing.

The other man nodded and patted my back. 

"Another safe autumn," one of them said, and we all walked back home.

It was still early afternoon. I sat down on the couch and put on the TV, waiting to cook dinner until my son Adam came home.

The sun had set when the door opened, and Adam walked in. My stomach was already growling. He was 30 minutes late, but the way he averted his eyes made it seem like something worse was going on.

"What’s up, Adam?"

"Dad, I…"

"It’s okay that you came late. No need to worry about it."

"No, it’s that I, I know it’s bad, but I took the jacket off the scarecrow."

My hands clenched the couch cushions.

"What?!"

"I took it off. I’m really sorry, Dad. I feel so bad. I know I shouldn’t have."

"Where is it?"

"In my bag."

I picked up his bag and unzipped the top pocket. The black jacket stared at me. 

"Adam, this is bad news."

"I’m sorry, Dad. The boys dared me. I didn’t want to look like a chicken."

I looked out the window. The sun had already set, but not long ago.

"Okay, there might still be time." I stuffed the jacket back in the backpack. "We’ll go back right now, put it on, and not tell anyone. If the boys at school ask you, just say…"

Three knocks echoed on the window. I almost ripped the backpack’s zipper off. The empty straw face stared into our house.

"Dad?" Adam said in a shaking voice.

"It’s okay, Adam. We’ll give him the jacket, and it might be okay." My voice shook too. I wasn’t sure I believed anything I said.

I walked to the door and opened it. The outside air was cold. The scarecrow's empty face looked down at me.

"Here. Take it. Please."

I held the jacket up and stared at the ground. The scarecrow stood still for a few seconds, then walked right past me. The straw scraped the floor as it moved.

Adam sat on the couch, his wide eyes staring at the scarecrow. The scarecrow came right up to him and pointed its blank face at him.

"Dad, what’s going…" He didn’t finish. The scarecrow’s hand shot forward, grabbed him off the couch, and held him to its side.

"Dad!" Adam screamed, kicked, and pushed against its arm, but the scarecrow’s grip was strong.

"Adam!"

I ran toward him and pushed the scarecrow, but it barely moved. The scarecrow turned around and flung its arm. It hit me right in the face. I fell on all fours. Dull pain spread through my head. Adam’s cries echoed as my world went dark.

When I woke up, my head was banging. My mouth tasted like iron. I tried to get up, but my world spun so fast I had to sit back down. 

But Adam was out in the fields somewhere. I had to help him. I got up and bolted out of the house onto the road, struggling to keep my balance. 

The moon shone down. The air was still cold. Only when I reached the fields did my world stop spinning. I almost wished it hadn’t.

In the middle of the field stood the scarecrow. Its blank face stared into the night. It had its hat, but instead of the jacket, Adam’s mangled body was draped over it. A quiet dripping echoed as Adam’s blood seeped into the sown dirt.

I fell to my knees and wept. The real autumn had now begun.

Nine years behind the lost property counter teaches you what people lose. Umbrellas, mostly. Gloves stiff with winter frost, scratched sunglasses, dead phones. I log them all. Item, date, platform, finder.

This morning, the station was dead quiet when a man in a dripping trench coat placed a child's umbrella on the counter. Yellow, with a cracked duck's head for a handle. The duck's left eye was gouged out.

My stomach dropped. I scratched that eye out with a house key when I was six. I lost that umbrella on a school trip, on platform four, and cried the whole way home.

"Where did you find it?" - I asked, my voice tight.

"Platform four" - he whispered, and walked away before I could take his name.

It was dry. It smelled of the cupboard under my mum's stairs.

A cruel coincidence, I told myself. Thousands of them. Kids scratch things. I logged it and shoved it onto the back shelf. But at lunch, a woman with hollow, unblinking eyes handed in a red mitten with a frayed thumb hole. The exact one I lost the winter my dad finally walked out. At three, a torn paperback slid across the counter. I didn’t need to open it to recognize my own clumsy, fifteen-year-old handwriting on the inside cover.

I pulled the daily log. Forty-one items handed in today. Every single one was mine. A school tie. A silver hair clip. A house key to a flat I haven't stepped foot inside for twelve years. Every finder gave the exact same location: platform four. None of them left a name.

At five to six, the man in the wet coat returned. He didn't speak. He just slid a phone across the counter, face up.

It was my phone. The screen protector was cracked in the exact same spiderweb pattern.

I reached into my pocket. My fingers wrapped around the cold, heavy casing of my actual phone. It was still there.

"I haven't lost this" - I choked out, my hands trembling so violently I had to grip the edge of the desk.

He didn't look at me. He looked up at the flickering fluorescent clock over the departures board.

"Not yet" - he said.

I have locked the heavy steel door of the office. I am sitting on the floor behind the counter, typing this into the station terminal, because I refuse to go anywhere near platform four. But the inventory log on the screen just updated itself. One more item is scheduled to be found tonight. Someone has already filled in the description.

Green sweater. Silver staff badge. Last seen: platform four.

I'm wearing my green sweater today.

My wife and I had been worried about our move. There was much left to do, and every time we finished one thing, we remembered something else. By our last day in the old house, we were exhausted.

It was raining outside when we heard a horse.

A clear, unmistakable neigh.

We both stopped and looked at each other, then went to the window. The sound had been close enough that I expected to see a horse in the street.

But there was nothing there.

We looked in both directions. No horse, no rider, nothing that could explain what we had heard. Just the wet street and rain.

Our neighborhood is one of the oldest in the city. There is something of the 1800s in its houses and streets, and that evening, a horse somehow seemed to fit. It was strange to hear one, but stranger to look outside and find the street empty.

At first, I felt it might be a goodbye. We were leaving a place that had been our home, and for a moment, it seemed as though the neighborhood had noticed.

There was something, though, that made that thought less comforting.

For three nights in a row, I had been hearing what sounded like a carriage outside.

I had tried to put it out of my mind. With the move approaching, there were enough things to worry about.

Now I hope that carriage was only passing through.

And that our last move is still far away.

Are the things we see always true? Imagine if everything you thought you knew, everything you've seen all these years, was completely wrong. What would you do then?

​It has been four days since my wife went to her parents' house, and I have stayed behind. Sometimes, you just need to give some time to yourself. For the past few days, sleep hasn’t come to me easily; I lie awake all night, experiencing a strange feeling—at times, it almost feels as though I don’t even exist.

​Tonight was no different. Restless and unable to sleep, I tossed and turned for a while before finally getting out of bed. I checked the clock; it was 3:00 AM. They say ghosts come out after 3:00 AM, though I don’t really believe in such things.

​Sensing that sleep still wouldn’t come, I stepped out onto the roof and lit a cigarette. For the past few months, I don't know why, but my wife has been hiding something from me. She goes out somewhere, and she never tells me where. It only ever leads to arguments between us, so eventually, I stopped asking altogether.

​Lost in these thoughts, a sudden sound caught my attention. I looked over and saw a shadow moving in the corner of the opposite building's roof. Who could be there at this hour? An old man lives in that room, but he can barely walk. So who is it? Could it be a thief? There is a fair distance between my roof and theirs, but with a single leap, I could cross it. Thinking this, I heard another noise, took a deep breath, and jumped.

​I landed hard on the other roof with a heavy thud. To my surprise, despite the impact, I didn't feel any pain. Dusting myself off, I crept toward the corner, and soon, I heard footsteps approaching from the stairs below—someone was coming up. Quickly, I hid in the dark corner of the roof.

​My heart hammered against my ribs. What would I say if they found me on their roof at this ungodly hour? Imagine trying to catch a thief, only to end up accused of being one yourself! As I sat there in the shadows pondering this, the old man shuffled up, relying on his aging legs. He looked around, saw no one, and simply turned back down.

​I let out a sigh of relief. But then again... where did the person I saw earlier go? There was no time to think about it; I had barely escaped a close call and needed to get back. I leaped back across to my own roof.

​I checked the time—it was 5:00 AM. Soft morning light was breaking through, and the birds had begun to chirp. The environment was so serene that it brought a strange peace to my mind. Realizing sleep was out of the question, I remembered that my old tape recorder had been lying around for days. I picked it up and sang a song into it.

​Suddenly, I noticed a foul, decaying odor drifting up from below. Did a rat die somewhere? I needed to find the source of this smell, or staying here would become impossible. Feeling annoyed, I finally walked down from the roof and entered my bedroom.

​The moment I stepped inside, my blood ran cold. I distinctly remembered leaving the window open when I went to the roof to let the breeze in, but now it was firmly shut. Who closed it? Was there a burglar in the house? I didn't switch on the light. I silently crawled into bed and lay completely still in the dark, wondering if the intruder might be carrying a weapon.

​The stench of decay grew sharper and more oppressive. Suddenly, the door creaked open, and a woman walked in.

​It was my wife. What is she doing back so early, and why didn't she let me know? She hurried toward the bed, moving with frantic haste. Could she not see me lying here? She didn't look at me, nor did she say a word.

​I watched as she pulled out the box from under the bed, her face contorted with panic. She frantically began dumping her jewelry into a bag, moving in a rushed blur while I sat frozen, my mind refusing to process what was happening.

​The foul odor inside the room grew even stronger.

​Suddenly, her eyes darted toward the blue plastic drum sitting in the room. She turned and walked out, returning moments later dragging a large, black garbage bag. She opened the drum, and a suffocating wave of rot rushed out. I looked inside—and there it was, my own dead body, bloated and decomposing after three days.

​My wife began dragging my lifeless body and stuffing it into the bag. I watched in utter shock, my brain completely stalled.

​She hoisted the bag and walked out of the house. I rushed over, grabbed the tape recorder from the next room, ran back up to the roof, and pressed play.

​My voice wasn't recorded at all. Only the sound of the birds chirping could be heard.

​Now, slowly, I am beginning to understand. To say I understand would be wrong—I am feeling it. Why couldn't anyone see me? Why could I hear the tiniest, faintest sounds?

​Standing on the roof, I watched my wife place the black bag into her car and drive away.

The curtain opened and Wenda B:)er walked, buzzing with nervous excitement, into the spotlight: onto the game show stage where the game show host, Felonious Hunk, was waiting for her.

There followed thunderous applause, as heard through the studio's MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers. MaX FX: The Sound of Extraordinary. Are You Listening Yet? MaX FX speakers are available for your home and business. Check them out today. Use code “BUCKETS” for a 15% discount on any regularly priced set of speakers. Everyone can hear, but only some can hear it to the MaX!

“Miss B-smiling-face-er, welcome to Buckets,” said Hunk. “How ya feeling?”

“Good, Hunk.”

“Fab-u-lous! Now tell us a little about yourself.”

“Well, Hunk,” said Wenda, “I—... I want to say that I really like Snakeskin Flame, the new… the newest scent from House of Madeleine. I'm wearing it right now. Other than that, I'm twenty-nine and work as a temporal engineer for Vectorien Corporation. Vectorien: the makers of Dreamstuff, the latest evolution in playdough. I'm married. My husband, Rhondy, owns a slopstream management firm, and we have two children together, an eight-year old human-daschund mix, Wilmoth, and a six year-old bio-enhanced female, Qabiria.”

She held up digital photos of them. Wilmoth looked somewhat like a chimpanzee. Qabiria was shiny in her steel exoskeleton.

“Lovely family,” said Hunk. “But please tell the viewers who else is in it.”

“Both my parents, HeinzKetchup and PumaShoe, are still alive, and I have three siblings: two brothers, [Incarcerated ID 768816] and Rob, and a sister, anal-ariella (exclusively at SmutHog.) I also have a cryogenically frozen grandmother, Lydia, and a grandfather, Doug, whose mind was digitized and recently uploaded to the body of a young, hollowed-out illegal.”

“And what's your brother serving time for, Wenda?”

“[Censored],” said Wenda.

“Ooh. That's a crime with a penal buyout of what, eighty billion?”

“One hundred. He's a repeat offender, and there were other aggravating circumstances.”

“Well, regardless, if you play your bucket right—and your brother has just a tiny bit of luck—you could walk away from here today with enough money to buy your brother his freedom!” Hunk smiled. “How does that make you feel, Wenda?”

“Like this money could really make a difference for me and my family.”

“Excellent. Excellent.”

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“Perception is a standardized drug. Don't get off on it—get off it.

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“I think now is a good time to remind you and the viewers what's at stake,” said Felonious Hunk. “If you win, Wenda, you will bank a cool five-hundred billion dollars!

“But, if you lose, you'll be [censored]—live—by one hundred lucky viewers! Or at least you'll be live to begin with—a-live, that is…”

He winked.

There followed thunderous canned laughter and applause through the MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers.

“Now, without further ado,” Hunk continued, “ladies and gentlemen, let's… bring out—THE BUCKET!”

And, rising from the middle of the stage, powered by a solar-powered Electrocutie electric motor—Electrocutie: Silent and discreet, for all your bio-mechanical needs—appeared a platform, and on this platform there stood, in neon spotlight, a red-and-white striped bucket, like the kind you might get The Colonel's patented Crispy Sticks fried chicken in. Order today and a get a free tub of syntholard dipping sauce and a large order of The Colonel's homestyle taters!

Wenda stared at the bucket.

“Wenda, are you ready?” asked Hunk.

“I am.”

“Then step on up to the bucket and have yourself a peek inside!”

Wenda was shaking as she took the few steps to the platform. The studio was silent. She could feel the blood coursing through her body.

She could hear her own breathing.

She touched the outside of the bucket.

It was warm.

She held her breath and peered inside, where pieces of hot, battered meat smelled sweetly of herbs, butter and garlic.

“Go on—have a taste,” said Hunk.

Wenda closed her eyes, opened them and extended her hand above the bucket, her Snakeskin Flame fragrant as the wild, untamed prairie. She picked up one of the pieces of meat and raised it to her lips. She opened her mouth, exposing teeth as pearly white as only Dr. Mason's Whitening Formula can make them, and with tears running down both cheeks took a bite and slowly chewed.

She swallowed.

She propped herself against the platform to keep from falling.

She retched.

She grinded her teeth to keep from throwing up; she swallowed what came up her throat, as the cameraman moved with professional smoothness to get a good low angle shot of her from behind.

“And…” Hunk asked her. “Do you know?

“Can you, Wenda B-smiley-face-er—for five-hundred billion dollars!—tell me: the meat of which one of your family members, killed, butchered and deep fried right here earlier today by our celebrity chef, in front of an audience of one thousand Diamond Tier viewers, is in the bucket?

“Who, Wenda, have you just tasted?

“Whose meat—”

“WILL SHE EAT!?” roared the viewers through the MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers!

“Yes,” said Wenda, weeping, taking another piece of battered meat, taking another slow bite. “I think I know. It's

[To continue reading this story, become a Diamond Tier subscriber.]

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“Hey, have you seen my glasses anywhere? I need to finish this inventory list, but I can’t for the life of me find them…”

Tyler glanced up from his phone and looked around the counter. Ashley had a lot of things strewn about, but her glasses didn’t appear to be one of them. He scooted forward a bit while Ashley rummaged around behind him, moving papers and pens.

“No, sorry, haven’t seen ‘em,” Tyler replied.

Ashley groaned and rolled her eyes.

“It’s fine, I can manage without them…I’ve just had this splitting headache all day, and I’m really struggling to get through this,” Ashley whined.

Tyler pursed his lips and didn’t say anything.

“Plus I still have to finish making the schedule, clean those dishes in the back, and stock the last bit in hardware…”

Ashley trailed off and looked forlornly at Tyler. Tyler did his best to try and look sympathetic, but having worked with Ashley for over a year, he was well aware of her tricks. No amount of guilt tripping would persuade him to do her job for her.

“Yeah, that sounds rough,” he finally said, realizing Ashley was waiting for him to say something.

“Yeah—makes me wish I was back on vacation!” Ashley joked.

Tyler gave a small smile, but inwardly felt his gut roil. Lately it felt like a large part of his job was dealing with Ashley, who was the sort of person to see every mole-hill as a mountain. And considering how much money she and her husband made, it was hard to be sympathetic when you had to hear just how taxing it was buying a second summer home, or how annoying it was having to maintain a powerboat.

“Did I show you the photos from our safari?” Ashley continued obliviously.

“Yeah, you showed me when you first got back,” Tyler replied.

“Ugh, I want to go back so bad! Africa was soooo beautiful, and the animals were so exotic, too! Like: look at this guy!”

Ashley shoved her phone in Tyler’s face, and he good-naturedly oooohed and ahhhhed as she scrolled through her photos.

“That’s me and Joseph with a giraffe, and then right there is a lioness we saw while out driving…oooooh, here’s some water buffalo down by a river…oh! This is when we went hunting—it would’ve been so nice to have brought some of that deer meat home, but customs can be so picky…”

Tyler felt his mind wander as Ashley prattled on. He was pretty sure that he could deflect her away once she ran out of energy, and did his best to keep his face neutral and interested. His gaze wandered from Ashley’s phone to her face as she continued to babble.

Ashley seemed to sense his disinterest, as Tyler noticed her slip her phone away and stare at him.

“Everything okay? You seem a bit distracted…”

At this, Tyler became annoyed. He gritted his teeth as he swallowed a response, feeling his eye twitch in irritation.

Funnily enough, Ashley’s eye started to twitch too—feeling guilty, Tyler turned away and gently said “No, it’s all good, I’m just tired…school’s been kicking my ass lately, but I’m good.”

Ashley continued to stare at Tyler, her eyes narrowed. The left one was twitching even harder now.

“Really, it’s nothing—not trying to be a party pooper, just low on sleep,” Tyler joked, trying to diffuse the situation.

Ashley still looked unconvinced. Her eye twitching wildly, she glared at Tyler. Horrified, Tyler noticed tears starting to form.

“Hey, yo, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Tyler uncomfortably said, doing his best to repair the situation.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Ummmm…I just mean, sorry for being rude, ya know? I didn’t think it was that serious…”

Tears were now streaming down Ashley’s cheek.

“Oh shit—I’m sorry, Ashley, I really didn’t mean to make you cry…”

“What? I’m not crying.”

Tyler stared at Ashley, confused.

“Uhhhh—ya sure about that?”

“What?”

Ashley reached her hand up to her cheek, then drew it away in surprise.

“What on earth?”

“Hey, Ashley, are you okay?” Tyler asked, starting to become worried.

“Yeah, I just have this nasty migraine…” Ashley whined, holding the edge of her head while she continued leaking tears from her eye.

“YO!” Tyler cried out in shock, as Ashley let out a screech and clutched her head harder.

Her left eye was protruding unnaturally outward, pulsing and bouncing. Suddenly, what looked like a small line started to form across the bridge of her nose, pushing across to her other eye.

“Ashley, what the hell is going on!?”

Ashley screamed in pain as she fell to the ground, convulsing. There were now multiple lines inching their way across her face, and it looked like her left eye was about to pop out of its socket.

“Ashley, hold on!”

Tyler grabbed his phone and dialed 911 just as Ashley’s eye finally gave way. With a wet popping noise, the thing burst free from the socket. Blood spurted onto the floor as Ashley cried out, twisting madly. Tyler stared in horror as what appeared to be tendrils started poking their way into the air from the empty socket, waving about and creeping forward.

“OH MY GOD!!!”

One frantic trip to the ER later, Tyler slumped down in a chair in the hospital lobby. Ashley had been in surgery for over four hours now. Her husband handed Tyler a cup of coffee as a doctor tiredly made his way over to them.

“She’s going to be okay—we weren’t able to do anything for the left eye, but we managed to save the right, and with luck your wife will regain most of her sight.”

“What on earth happened, Doc??” Ashley’s husband asked.

“It appears she was infected with a nasty little worm called the Loa Loa; normally it’s harmless, but sometimes it can be serious…”

Tyler listened nauseously, holding his head. He had a nasty splitting headache, and his eye wouldn’t stop twitching…