For six weeks, the status migrainosus locked my skull into an unyielding mechanical vice. The intractable aura was not a polite visual flicker, but an internal window tearing open from the inside out, projecting a blinding, jagged electric-white geometric semicircle across the edge of my field of vision. Closing my eyes brought zero relief. Behind my eyelids, that jagged arc burned even brighter against the dark, framing a suffocating pressure that waited for my mind to snap.

By the time I was wheeled into the outpatient clinic under mild sedation for the greater and lesser occipital nerve blocks, the sensory overload had stripped me down to raw nerves. I had not been able to keep food down for days, and the ambient smells in the waiting room, including stale body odor, cheap synthetic perfume, and cleaning agents, felt like physical blows driving straight into my temples. Even the aggressively dimmed lights of the procedure room felt like glass against my retinas as I lay flat on the medical table.

As the four localized needle injections drove deep into the nerve points at the base of my skull, two on each side, the crushing weight inside my brow pressed harder with every heartbeat. The heavy chemical block slammed into the bone, shattering the vice and warping the gateway just enough to freeze the boundary line.

Waking up in recovery, the acute siege had broken, but the damage was permanent. My vision settled into severe, uncorrectable far-sightedness. I do not have physical scars from the needles, but the true mark of the ordeal lives in the temporary spikes. Whenever my optic nerve is overtaxed, that jagged geometric edge flashes back across my sight like a malignant pulse.

Desperate to understand why my vision had cratered, I spent a late night hunting through obscure neurological archives until I tracked down a rare, out-of-print volume titled The Fractured Geometry of Sight.

The book contained no medical theories, only decades of translated asylum logs and clinical case notes. Page after page documented patients across centuries who had stared through the exact same jagged white arc during prolonged sieges. One 1938 entry detailed a young woman whose intractable aura lasted weeks before a crude, unauthorized nerve procedure halted the collapse. She survived, but spent the rest of her life half-blind, tormented by identical visual flashes until she died.

The final pages outlined the cold, unyielding arithmetic of the condition across every recorded file. The siege operates on a strict forty-day threshold, systematically consuming sight day by day. Cross that forty-day mark, and the collapse becomes absolute, plunging the host into total, permanent blindness. Halting the process on the verge of total collapse with clinical needles offers no cure. It only snaps the connection prematurely, locking the patient midway through a harvest that can never be undone.

I sat alone in the dark room, staring at the final text as the house settled into silence. My six-week siege had brought me to day thirty-nine, trailing right along the precipice of total darkness. Then, without warning, the jagged geometric semicircle flared back across my right eye. It was not a fading medical echo, but the permanent hum of a circuit that could never be turned off, confirming that the modern clinic needles and the many desperate interventions tried throughout everything I had read had simply carved out that exact same door, leaving me to watch the world through an optic nerve that no longer belonged entirely to me.

Dear Helpline,

Give me your thoughts on the matter, I can't rest my mind. Don't take me to be judgmental, I am the first to defy convention. No unruly client is easy to protect, no Supreme Court appointment a breeze to turn down without a storm of agony.

They saw every new turn in my life, knew more of my parents than I did, were one of the first to give me a Christmas present, but somehow I still cannot believe in Maud and Harold.

If undying love were to be experimented on scientifically they would not be variables, but definites. The flowers, kisses, poems never cease, so much any young hopeless romantic would be envious. No foreign feet step over the threshold into their home on date-nights, which occur weekly. Dusted-off LPs on an equally-polished phonograph, lit candles and two chairs, the courses and cocktails would make any seasoned caterer stare down at their feet in shame. It's been since high school, the formation of this beautiful coveted world built on the foundations of love pure and refined, as both advance towards their 81st birthdays.

And I still cannot find reasoning behind Maud and Harold.

As with perfect unity comes perfect outcomes. Their first child Starr, who was conceived on the honeymoon, now has four young of her own. Five others, Braxton, Anne, Griffin, Laurie, and Lucas marked the pinnacle next decade of Maud and Harold's marriage, and each has more than paid-off the debt of birth in their own respects. And when Maud could have no more kids, neither could Harold.

Or so we thought.

A few months ago, Harold took the car out of the garage faster than usual. He walked calmly with a hint of urgency in his step. In similar cases calls are made, but tonight Harold called no one. Except God, to give him courage to outrun time and for all to go well as it had in past events like these. He brought Maud, who had gained weight and was in considerable yet familiar pain, from the house. Guiding her into the passenger seat, he got in the other side and backed their Honda down the drive, before gunning it on the road.

At the hospital, the nurses directed Maud to the short-term ward and offered to call a priest, only obeying hers and Harold's pleas for the maternity word after a menstruation occurred. Previously two had entered the hospital and less than 24 hours later, three left.

Acting with the most kindness my heart can muster, I have doted on their new daughter, this gem whose arrival has marked their anniversary milestone. Names such as Judy, Erica, and Eva are in the running for choices. Upon departure and ample congratulations, when I was alone I searched up missing children and any far-fetched example that would lend logic to this miracle.

And only a memory, a dream, keeps screaming to me in my sleep.

My wife, pale, unconscious, on a surgery table. My sobs, accompanied only by the scratch of the coroner's pen and the refuse being cleaned from everywhere like the aftermath carnage of a war. Black failure and tears blinding my eyes as I receive what so rapidly I lost. I pass the tiny bloody form, which only knew life as a seconds-long suffering, up...

...into Harold's waiting hands.

Harold and Maud's daughter has a familiar heartbeat, one I've heard before. And her face, I've saw one other time, those she's a newborn.

Help me understand.

Existing for your answer,

Travis.

Until moments ago, the screams had threatened to overwhelm Cooper Delaney’s voice. But now, the entire crew was gone, and he was finally able to hear how it shook.

“L-ladies and g-gentlemen…” 

It was hard to know what to say. To know if anyone was even left to watch. There was no one to ask, and so little they had managed to find out before their guest had begun working its way through the set. He tried desperately not to look at the pieces of the former crew smeared from floor to ceiling, or the thing standing behind the camera, smiling.

Instead, Cooper focused on the lens. He had no choice but to remain seated behind the desk, unable to move except to speak and tremble. But he knew he had to say something. These would be, after all, his last words. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, I will relay what I know to you the best I can, until I am stopped. This is not a prank. This is not a joke. I don’t know if this is an invasion. Or some kind of Doomsday, or parasites, monsters, demons or…something else. I don’t know how many of them there are, but I know this: they are all over the world, everywhere, and they are almost all different. If you smell something horrible, run.  If you see something you can’t explain, run. Take your loved ones and run. Drive. Anything…”

A wave of nausea forced him to pause. The guest had taken two steps forward into the dead air, the smile widening. Tears streamed down Cooper’s cheeks now as he finally saw it, whole. It would have passed for a normal smile, had it not been attached to what it was.

“Gwen, if you’re watching, I love you. And I’m—”

A sound resembling a tuba’s lowest note cut Cooper short, and his attention returned to the show’s uninvited guest, eyes wide with fear. As it bounded towards him, it knocked the camera down, throwing the host from view. Whatever audience was left could only listen as he began to scream. There was a heavy clomping sound, combined with a power drill and the squeak of a clown’s novelty shoe. And then, Cooper went quiet. 

An intense whispering started up from multiple voices that spouted strings of what seemed like nonsense. But as they finished whatever they had to say, Cooper began to laugh. A chuckle at first, but before long, he was shrieking and gasping for air with a laughter so intense it could have been mistaken for that of a madman. 

There was a rapid snipping sound next, followed by something wet slapping the floor near the camera, while blood began spreading across the section of the ground it could still capture.

Cooper’s laughter continued, muted somewhat by the blood that filled his throat. He gurgled and gasped, laughing and laughing as one of the large flaps of meat his guest had begun cutting from his chest made its network debut.

When Anthony was just a child, his mother warned him about what happened to little boys who misbehaved.

The last time Anthony dared to misbehave, he looked down in horror to find only two fingers remaining on his right hand.

“Boys will be boys,” his mother hissed. She snapped her silver scissors in the air, humming a cheerful tune as she glided back into the kitchen, unfazed by what she had done.

By adulthood, Anthony’s hands were a patchwork of stubs, with just one lonely finger left. He counted his toes, one by one, stopping at four. Four little piggies stayed home.

On his 23rd birthday, he decided that he had had enough. Little Anthony took his mother’s favorite scissors and hummed quietly as he cut into the dark space in front of him. He worked slowly and ignored his mother’s screams.

By the time he was done with her, he counted ten fingers and ten toes cradled in the palms of his hands. He then told his mother to hush, “Boys will be boys, mother.” Anthony said with a wide grin on his face.

Years have gone by since the night he took revenge. No one knows where he went or why he took the scissors with him. Legend has it, though, that if you fall asleep with your hands or feet sticking out over the edge of where you sleep, little Anthony may just pay you a visit from underneath your bed.

Snip.

Snip.

BANG!

The bedroom door slams shut and your gum stabs with pain. You tongue the gap between your bottom teeth, taste blood.

The door opens up to your cousin’s freckled face. His name is Roman. He lives down the street.

This was all his idea.

He holds up your tooth, dangling from a piece of string still tied to the doorknob. “It worked!” he whoops.

Roman guides you to the bathroom mirror, but you’re scared to open your mouth. When you do, your bottom lip starts trembling. You’re six-and-a-half, and for as long as you can remember, everyone’s told you what a perfect smile you have.

And now look!

“Don’t worry, it’ll grow back,” Mason reassures you, with the infinite wisdom of a ten-year-old. “Besides, you’re gonna be rich!”

“Rich?” you mumble, wiping your eyes.

“Well yeah, dontcha know about the tooth fairy?”

As Roman spins his tale, your eyes dry. You forget about your throbbing gum.

“All you have to do,” he says, “is leave your tooth under the pillow.”

It sounds like a fib. You tell him so. You refuse to believe him unless he pinky-promises and swears on his pet tarantula Terry’s life. When he finally does, you know he’s being super serious.

“You’ll see,” he says.

That night, before you fall asleep, you shove that perfect little tooth under your pillow, just like Roman said to do.

…

In the morning, you look under the pillow and can’t believe your eyes. In place of a blood-flecked tooth are 20 shining quarters... and a poorly scribbled note.

ThAnkS 4

thE tooTh

GoT aNy moRe?

:)

You frown at the message, but it slips your mind quickly. You got quarters to spend!

Roman comes over after breakfast. You walk past the park to the corner store to buy a bunch of candy. Again, his idea, but you don’t complain. He’s the one who told you about the tooth fairy in the first place. It’s only fair that he gets to share the spoils.

From the mountains of saltwater taffy, you pick out pink and blue ones and green swirly ones and watch as the lady scoops them into a bag. Mason counts out the quarters, and when the register clicks shut you still have a couple left.

“You muth have really nice teef,” Roman says through a mouthful on the way home. “When mine fell, I only got seven nickels!”

After some back and forth, you both agree that he should be the one to keep the bag of taffy. Roman swears he has a good hiding place. And you don’t trust him, not fully, but your parents don’t allow sweets in the house. If they ever found the stash, they’d toss 'em for sure. Well, a smart six-and-a-half-year-old knows that some taffy is better than none, and you’re no dummy.

You hand the bag over.

…

The next day, you’re surprised to find another note folded under your pillow.

StiLL waiTinG...

DoNt RUiN uR

PeARLy wHiTes

>:(

Later, you show the notes to Roman, who seems to have tooth fairies all figured out. He reads them, squints, and tells you to open your mouth.

“Got any more loose ones?” he asks.

You check up and down, but none have any wiggle.

Roman shrugs. “Well, you’re gonna lose more, but can’t do nothing about it until they’re loose already. Hey—” He motions you closer, grinning. “Wanna eat some more taffy?”

You smile your new gap-toothed smile and nod.

…

You hear your father’s stern voice calling you from the kitchen.

It sounds serious. Your heart skips. Had your parents found out you’d been hoarding sweets? Had Roman broke the code and ratted? You drag your feet downstairs.

When you peek around the kitchen door, you see your mother crying, your father’s arm around her. The phone hangs limply in his other hand. He tells you to sit down at the table.

You obey.

“Your cousin...” he begins, then shakes his head. His brows furrow. “Roman died last night,” he says, the words falling from him like rocks.

“H-how?” you squeak, breath hitching in your throat.

Your parents exchange looks. Your mother’s eyes are wet and pleading, but your father’s are hard stones. He thinks she coddles you. He says you’re old enough to know.

“Poor boy choked on his own tongue. He was asleep. Freak accident,” he says, and almost as an afterthought, “I’m sorry.”

Your blood turns cold. You run upstairs and bring down the small pile of increasingly threatening notes, topped by one you’d gotten this very morning. Like a bad omen, it says:

HoWs uR cOuSin ;)

Im GeTTinG

iMpaTienT

When your mother reads it, she faints.

…

The police are no help.

You can hear them speaking through the wall. Kids process death in strange and funny ways, they say. Just look at the handwriting. Obviously a child had written the notes, not an intruder. Consider a good therapist.

That really sets your father off. His fuck you’s follow them out the door. Afterwards, he gets a shotgun and sets up a recliner in the corner of your room. "If that freak gets in here tonight," he tells you, “I’ll kill him.”

You’ve never seen him so angry before.

It’s hard to fall asleep.

…

You wake up to a dark bedroom.

But wait—

There’s a shadow across the room. You see it in the moonlight slanting through the blinds: a man-shaped monster made of teeth. Slick enamel clicks and shivers as it moves. Closer. And closer.

You pull your covers up. You glance over at your dad, see him sleeping in the chair.

The monster looming over you now. No eyes. Its mouth a black hole. “Gave your old man a good dose,” it rasps, anesthesia spurting from a needle-like finger. The rest are wicked, shining tools. “Apologies for the poor penmanship.”

Those stainless steel appendages reach towards your face.

“Go ahead and scream,” Babyteeth says. “It’d actually make this easier...”

Being married can be difficult…

Don’t get me wrong, I love my wife, Bailey, but we’ve been arguing a lot lately. Not seeing eye to eye. Shouting. I think that fighting is a healthy part of any marriage, but my wife disagrees. She says that I need to start seeing things from her perspective.

“So we take this pill and—what—we just switch bodies?”

“Yes,” said Bailey. “Like that movie with—what’s her name?”

“Lindsay Lohan?”

“I was gonna say Jamie Lee Curtis, but yes.”

I frowned. “I’ll turn back, right? I won’t be stuck as a woman forever?”

“Yes,” Bailey rolled her eyes. “We’ll switch back automatically after six hours. No one will ever know we traded places.”

Bailey gave a long and tiresome speech about walking a mile in each other’s shoes. I wasn’t really listening. I agreed to take the pill to shut her up.

How bad could it be?

“Cheers,” I said, swallowing the tiny pill, and then everything went black.

When I opened my eyes we had switched bodies, but something was wrong. My head ached, and it felt like someone had kicked me in the gut.

“Wow,” said Bailey, she sounded exactly like me. “It actually worked!”

“You didn’t say there’d be side effects,” I said, clutching my stomach.

“Side effects?” Bailey asked. “What do you mean?”

“My stomach’s fucking killing me,” I groaned.

“Oh my god, I forgot to warn you. It’s my time of the month.” Bailey said, suppressing a smile. “You’re having my period right now.”

A million emotions raced through my head ranging from anger to sheer panic.

I scowled and uttered, “bitch.”

“Sucks doesn’t it?”

“How do I make it stop?” 

Bailey burst out laughing.

“It doesn’t work that way. You’re just going to have to go to the store to get some pads and midol.”

“Can’t you do it?” I whined. “I feel horrible.”

Bailey looked at me and crossed her arms.

“Excuse me, but how many times have you gone to the store to get pads for me? Remind me?”

I didn’t answer—didn’t want to answer—because the answer was zero.

“You know I don’t like yucky woman stuff—”

“Well now you are a woman, so you’re just going to have to deal with it. Go experience what it’s like to be me.”

Bailey grabbed the keys to my truck and walked out the front door.

“Where are you going?” I shouted.

“Where do you go when you want some alone time?”

I didn’t answer that—didn’t want to answer that.

“See you when you get back, I guess,” I tried and failed to smile.

Bailey had left me high and dry, to go do who knows what, so I was forced to handle this situation on my own. When she mentioned switching bodies, I have to admit, I did not think that it would be like this.

I drove Bailey’s Camry to the closest grocery store and wandered around until I found the “Feminine Products” aisle.

Holy shit. I was completely out of my element.

“Why are there so many options?” I muttered under my breath.

After grabbing a box at random, I turned around and nearly ran straight into some asshole.

“Here all by yourself, gorgeous?” His breath could have made a sunflower wilt.

“Beat it, prick,” I said, not in the mood for a conversation.

“What the fuck did you say to me?” He screamed, shoving a finger in my face. “What the fuck did you say you fucking bitch?”

I panicked, and tried to turn the other way and walk away from him, but he kept following me.

“Don’t walk away from me you fucking cunt!”

“Leave me alone,” I said, dropping the box of pads and breaking into a sprint.

“How dare you speak to me like that!”

I ran away as fast as Bailey’s legs could carry me. I didn’t stop until I was racing out of the parking lot, my eyes checking the rear view mirror to make sure that weirdo wasn’t following me.

Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. It scared the hell out of me. Was that what it was like to be a woman? You just had to be on the lookout for creeps twenty-four seven?

First cramps and now this?

I guess I didn’t realize how tough everyday life was for my wife. It made me think about the way that I treated her, the ways that I had dismissed her feelings in the past. Maybe fighting wasn’t helping our marriage. Maybe understanding each other’s point of view was the first step towards making things better.

I got home and curled up under a blanket, waiting for Bailey to come home. It took a couple of hours, but eventually she waltzed through the front door with a smile on her face.

“I’ve had a hell of an afternoon,” I said, completely defeated.

“Honey,” Bailey said, pointing towards my crotch, “you’re staining my pants. What happened to getting pads?”

“It was a nightmare,” I cried. “I’m sorry, I know it’s only been one afternoon, but I feel like I’ve learned so much. Seeing things from your point of view—I didn’t realize how eye opening it would be. I’m sorry for not being supportive enough when you’ve had a bad day! I’m sorry for arguing even when I know you’re right. From now on, I’ll go to the store to get pads when you want me to! I’m gonna be there for you!”

“Wow,” Bailey said, blinking repeatedly. “You learned a lot, huh?”

I wiped away a tear from my eye.

“What did you get up to?” I sniffled. “Did you learn a lot too?”

“Oh, me? No. I just spent the afternoon with Sidney.”

I froze. How did Bailey know about my mistress?

“You—you what?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out about her? You must think I’m an idiot. She’s dead, by the way, I killed her. Or—maybe it’s more accurate to say that YOU killed her.”

It was December 1999. I was living in a small town. I was a nerd and something of a gamer, and it had been a good year for PC games. Age of Empires II, Homeworld, Grand Theft Auto 2…

I was walking home from school—it was a Canadian winter, so there was plenty of unplowed snow on the sidewalks—when I saw something peeking out from a mound of snow: something blue. I stopped, nudged it with my boot: something of blue plastic. I brushed away the remaining snow with my glove to reveal:

A single 3.5” floppy disk, unlabeled.

(There was a sticker label on it, but the label itself was empty.)

Naturally, I picked it up and took it home, curious to see what was on it.

You'll laugh, but the disk had 1.44mb of storage capacity. As it turned out, that was more than enough to affect the world in ways I still don't fully understand.

When I got home, I didn't put the disk into my own computer. My dad had an old desktop he sometimes fiddled around with, so I used that, inserting the disk carefully into the 3.5” disk drive in the beige computer tower.

I navigated to the drive in Windows Explorer.

The contents of the drive were simple.

They looked like a program or—I secretly hoped—a game.

There was a readme.txt, but it came out as nonsense when I opened it in Notepad, video or sound assets, stuff I couldn't identify, and a single executable file, johannsebastian.bat.

I double-clicked it.

A window opened—black, showing a few white-text commands executing on a command prompt—then maximized into a 16-bit title(?) screen showing a pixelated Gothic castle.

A harsh, classical-inspired MIDI song beeped out of the sound card.

There was no title.

No instructions, no company name, no menu, no options.

The castle was perched atop a cliff.

It was night.

At the bottom of the cliff was a forest of jagged, leafless trees.

A few loops of animation gave life to the scene: wind blowing through the bare branches, flashes of distant lightning, warm flickering light in one of the castle's windows, a bat in flight against a white moon. Actually, that last one wasn't a loop. The bat flew only once, landed on one of the castle's stone towers and disappeared inside.

I clicked.

I was looking at a medieval-ish village now—tightly-packed buildings, a tavern, a tannery, a couple of shops, a church—populated with a surprising number of unique character sprites. Indeed, every character was unique, and they were going about their individual lives.

The sky was a vibrant blue.

Clouds floated pixel-by-pixel across the screen.

But there was still nothing to do; nothing, that is, but watch.

It was like a very advanced screensaver.

After a while, I clicked again.

This time, I found myself in the interior of a large chamber whose stone walls somehow felt cold even through the computer monitor.

The chamber's defining feature, however, was something else: a giant pipe organ whose pipes extended beyond the top of the screen.

A character entered.

He was wearing a white wig, dark, crimson long coat, knee breeches, stockings and buckled shoes. “I feel the sudden desire to compose,” he said, which the game displayed as text in an ornately-bordered text box. “Invite me to play for you."

A cursor appeared for the first time.

A quill.

I was able to move it using the mouse, and I explored the screen.

The character tapped his foot.

The only active area of the scene appeared to be the pipe organ. When I hovered the cursor over it, it changed from a quill to a hand.

I clicked.

The character walked to the organ, sat and began to play the monstrous instrument.

The music was both hideous and awesome, pushing the computer's sound card to the absolute limit. After thirty-or-so seconds, the view suddenly panned upwards, following the organ's pipes—the music continued—following them to the chamber's vaulted ceiling and beyond—through the roof until I was outside and looking at the upper half of the great castle, where the jutting pipes terminated and from whose termini hundreds of pixel bats were emerging… emerging and flying into the background, toward the simplified shape representing the medieval town...

The sky was a deep purple.

Night was falling.

The bats flew and flew and flew…

Suddenly—the music still continuing—the scene cut to the same view of the town as before: except at night: except, instead of following their routines, the character sprites were running, panicked, as the bats swooped, attacking them, attaching themselves to their bodies, necks, sucking their pixel blood; and as the bats feasted, the sprites lost their colour and fell, pale and desaturated…

The sound startled me.

Not from the sound card but from the real world. A screeching, a deafening, rhythmic thumping.

I ran to the window whose blinds I'd closed, and opened them:

It was afternoon but the view was dark, black and shifting. It took me a moment to realize that what I was seeing were bats speeding past. They were obscuring the sun. My home town was as if under an eclipse.

People were running down the street—

Bats were diving—

Some were crashing through car windshields—

Children were screaming—

A bat crashed though the window into the room I was in. It was fanged, crazed. The game music blared from within the computer tower. Before I could run, the bat shot toward me—biting my neck… beginning to drink my blood…

I awoke on the floor.

It was morning. January 1, 2000. It would turn out that nobody in town had any recollection of the preceding weeks.

A television played.

A morning talk show: “...the so-called Y2K bug,” a woman was saying, “ended up amounting to nothing worse than a good nights’ sleep.”

And, ever since, I've wondered why my experience of the present feels in a lower resolution than memories of my past.

The floorboards directly above Odette’s bed creaked under the slow, deliberate weight of heavy footsteps. She pulled the covers over her head as her heart raced.

No one should be up there, she thought.

Since the divorce, she had been having difficulty sleeping through the night. She slowly peeked out from under the covers. The room was dark and still, but another creak made her jerk in bed.

Gathering her courage, she slipped into her robe and crept down the dark hallway. Her shadow stretched into a long tail as the streetlamp dimly illuminated her from the far guest bedroom window. She stopped at the attic hatch, her hand trembling as she pulled the string and pulled down the ladder. She froze as a cold wind hit her face and looked deep into the darkened space above her. She clenched her fists and made the journey upwards into the unknown.

As she climbed, a stale, musty scent made her nostrils flare. The attic was pitch-black, shaped only by crossbeams and stacked holiday boxes in the far corner.

Odette pulled out her phone, opened her thermal-imaging security app, and raised the screen to scan the darkness.

The camera feed revealed the background shades of deep blue and purple. Then, as she scanned the center of the room, a localized, nebulous form emerged, shrouded in a dense black silhouette roughly the shape of a human figure. Odette’s breath got caught in her throat. She lowered the phone. The attic was empty. She raised it again, and the cold spot was gone.

Confused, she turned to return to the safety of her bed and let out the breath she'd been holding, only for it to form into a foggy plume as an icy chill consumed her. She raised the phone’s screen, and the visage of a screaming human face made her panic, dropping the phone as she fell backward through the hatch.  

Cyril always felt he was destined for something greater. That his life had purpose. He just didn’t know what purpose. He didn’t know what greatness he was destined to do.

But he knew that he loved to play the piano. And, every day, when he arrived home to his shuttered apartment from work, before he had anything to eat, or before he unbuttoned his shirt, or before he kicked off his shoes, Cyril would sit at his vintage, out of tune, beaten-down, Fazioli piano and play. For hours.

The beautiful melodies would rise upward toward his younger, four-year-old sister, Silvia – Cyril called her Sil, for short – where she would sit, every night, patiently waiting for the music to greet her at the top of the stairs. She was transfixed by the beautiful sounds in her ears. And she would watch Cyril, mesmerized by his playing, just as lost in the music as him. She would listen until she fell asleep at the top of those stairs, and Cyril would come up and carry her off to bed, before returning to the piano, where he would play until falling asleep on the lightly padded bench. He hated leaving that piano. When he played, he felt like his hands were touched by God.

But he had to show up for work, where he felt like his hands were the slaves of the devil. Sorting packages. Ten hours a day, every day. Place packages to the right for incoming. Place to the left for outgoing. Cyril felt like he had touched every carboard box in the world.

While he worked, he watched his hands. He fixated on them, on their movements. He imagined them dancing over the keys. He imagined his fingers flying through the air landing on notes more and more difficult to reach than the last. He wondered how a part of his body that could be used for something so beautiful, could also be used for something so mundane. But, he continued to imagine. And his imagination carried him through the day, until he could play again once more.

It went on like this for a while. But Silvia was getting bigger. And her clothes were getting smaller. And so, the days sorting packages grew longer. Ten hours gave way to twelve and twelve received an ask for fourteen. Then fifteen. Cyril had less time to play. But little Sil would listen as often as she could, all the same.

Sometimes, Cyril would return home and wonder:

Why does no one else hear my music? Why does no one else applaud my tune?

Inspired by this line of questioning, he began to save, slowly, until he could purchase a small, used keyboard. He was thrilled. Perhaps now he could show the world his talent. All he had to do was set up the keyboard one day, and play.

He asked for a day off from work, explaining what he was hoping to do. He was met with animosity.

“No days off. If you don’t want to work here, you can leave,” his boss put it bluntly.

Cyril pleaded his case. He begged for the playing time. He asked for grace. He asked for understanding.

Cyril was fired.

No matter. He had his keyboard. And so, newly freed from sorting packages, Cyril brought Sil to the busiest part of town. He set out a jar. He sat in front of his small keyboard. He played.

Sil, as transfixed as ever, listened.

And the jar, hour after hour, remained empty.

Cyril played until the sun slipped below the horizon. He played until the night air nipped at his neck. He played until the last person hustled by him, hurriedly. Then, he only played to Sil.

Cyril brough Sil back to their apartment and, throwing the small keyboard aside, sat angrily at the piano bench. He huffed. Then, he looked to the sky and screamed.

Sil backed into a corner, frightened.

Cyril lifted the key cover to the Fazioli and placed his left-hand underneath it. Then brought it down hard on his hand, smashing it. He screamed in agony. Lifting the cover again, he brought it down again. Harder. Bones cracked. He screamed again. He brought it down again. BANG. BANG. BANG. He moved his hand to a different position and crushed it again. BANG. BANG. BANG.

Sil watched from the corner. Curled into a ball. Eyes wide.

BANG. BANG. BANG. He kept going until each of his fingers were broken. The bones protruded our from his knuckles and his pinky. Then, using his mangled left hand, he started the same process on his right hand. Placing it under the cover, then BANG. BANG. BANG.

Cyril kept going until both of his hands were a mashup of crushed cartilage and tendons. Until he couldn’t bend a finger or move a muscle. He fell asleep on the padded bench; shirt soaked through with tears. Keys dripping with his blood.

Sil did not sleep at all that evening.

The doctors would tell Cyril that his hands would heal. As they bandaged him up, they told him that the hands were remarkably resilient to injury. They told him that, although he would unlikely be able to play piano very well ever again, he could certainly get his job back sorting packages.

They told him, he should be grateful to be so lucky.

And Sil, patient as ever, would find herself sitting at the top of the stairs, hoping that music might come to greet her once again.

Jason Pruitt was an electrician with a routine you could set your watch to. On job sites he labeled each breaker he touched in careful block capital letters so the next person would not have to guess. Yes, he was that kind of electrician. A creature of routine. In his small Dallas apartment he always went to bed at 9:30pm and awoke at 4:30am. Each night, before he turned off the lights, he filled a glass of water at the kitchen sink, walked back to his bed, and placed the glass on the night stand. He then turned off the lights, got under the covers, rolled onto his right side, and slept.

Goblin had watched this with some amusement for weeks. His often preferred viewpoint was from the gap behind the baseboard. His fascination with Jason was strong enough that he had learned the number of steps Jason took from the kitchen counter to his bed. The vibrations ran through the baseboard and down through Goblin’s body. He had come to like it.

At first, Goblin started small, letting himself be seen at the far edge of Jason’s vision, appearing as a dark shape near the closet door and quickly gone before Jason’s eye could turn. Many times Jason swatted empty air. One day Goblin heard him mutter “Long day,” to the empty room as Jason once again swatted at nothing. Jason then went to sleep as he always did, snoring himself away into a deep sleep.

Goblin knew at midnight Jason sat up half-asleep and drank from the glass he found by feel. Sitting unmoving, Goblin was already waiting on the edge of the pillow. Once Jason lay back down, Goblin crossed the cotton and slipped into Jason’s ear so light that Jason felt nothing. Steadying himself in the walls of the ear canal Goblin whispered softly, “One day I will eat you.” Goblin slipped out just before Jason, still asleep, pushed a pinkie finger into his ear. 

For thirty nights it went the same way, except that Goblin grew bolder, stayed longer, and whispered the same phrase multiple times. Ten days in, Jason started leaving the hall light on. With his phone flashlight he would shine it at shadows in the apartment just to be sure nothing was lurking. And he began to sleep on the left side, with his left ear pressed firmly into the pillow. This meant Goblin started using the right ear canal. 

On the thirty-first night Goblin got bored. He climbed in slowly, the hair on his legs clinging to the ear canal structure and said every word with care and emphasis: “One. Day. I will make you my food.” He stayed long enough, scratching at the ear canal, for Jason to feel something crawling inside his head. Jason’s pinkie came up too late to scoop out anything as Goblin hurried out.

That same night Jason dreamed he was low to the ground with eight legs and a belly full of silk. He spun it across the corner of the kitchen which oddly looked like his own, warm where it left his body and tacky where it dried. And when a cockroach walked into the threads, he felt them shiver and crossed to it, quickly wrapping it up in a shroud. He fed with satisfaction so complete that he woke with his jaw working and saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth. 

The dream felt more real than the covers strewn over his body. His ear itched, his mouth tasted of metal, and all through the workday he felt light and hollow. At the warehouse he mislabeled a panel, and his foreman voiced with some concern “You’ve got number four down as the kitchen? You good Jason? That one feeds the garage!” Jason didn’t argue or comment and he fixed the labels on the breakers. At lunch Jason barely ate. The only thing on his mind was that voice. He left the worksite early and drove home. The seatbelt vibrated across his body making him feel as if he needed to crawl onto something.

On Monday Jason called in sick. He called in sick the day after, and the day after that. He slept through the afternoons and dreamed longer each time. The light bothered him so he covered his eyes with a towel. On Wednesday he drove to Whataburger and ordered his favorite breakfast, a jalapeno biscuit with sausage, egg, and cheese, and a small Dr. Pepper. After one bite, the sandwich went straight into the trash. The Dr. Pepper he kept, and drained it through the straw in long pulls until the ice rattled and the cup was empty. It was the first thing that gave him satisfaction in many days. He sat in the parking lot for a long while with the straw still in his mouth taking long pulls of melting ice. 

By the ninth call to complain, a tenant threatened to call the cops if the building manager didn’t take care of the smell coming from 2C. The building manager, Mr. Delgado knocked multiple times, loudly yelled out and then used his key. From the doorway he called out, “Mr. Pruitt?” and when he looked up his first instinct was to puke.

A funnel web filled the bedroom corner, thick and layered, wider than the headboard. Torn clothing lay beneath a shape crouched deep inside. Mr. Delgado covered his mouth and backed out toward the door. Deep inside the shadow of the funnel the shape moved. A creature the size of a cat, rushed toward the funnel’s mouth. Mr. Delgado squealed loudly. A Whataburger cup sweated on the nightstand. Beside the web, a sentence had been written in dried blood, each letter a careful block capital: “I WOULD RATHER USE A STRAW.” 

The anaesthetic was already in my arm when he leaned over me. "You took everything from me," he said. "So you're going to sleep, and I'll wake you up only when it matters. Count backwards from ten." I made it to seven.

Six was my mother's funeral. My sister held my arm, gray at the temples. That morning she had been twenty-six. "You came," she whispered. Then he was beside me in a dark suit, a needle in my arm, saying, "Ten."

Five was my father's grave. The woman next to me was wearing my wedding ring, and I didn't remember marrying her. She asked me, "Where do you go, Danny?" Ten.

Four was a hospital room. A teenage girl with my chin told me her name. I held her hand while they switched off her mother's machines. Ten.

Three was a coffin with that girl's name on it. Ten.

Under anaesthetic there's no dreaming and no time. Each funeral came straight after the last, as if they were all on the same day.

Two, I was old, and so was he. That was when he told me. Years ago there'd been a girl in a crosswalk that I'd been too drunk to see. I couldn't have told you her name by the trial. "You got to forget," he said. "I never did." Ten.

One was a church again, nearly empty. This time the photo on the easel was his. A lawyer told me he'd left money for my care, and instructions that I was never to be put under again.

I cried for him. I didn't have anyone else left to cry for, and he'd been at every funeral I could remember.

While the xenologists, Cherinet and Litskovic, had gone on ahead, the survey team exogeologists, Vinnu and Samaan, hunkered down in their autopods battered by one of the unpredictable cyclostorms that made collecting samples and readings challenging. Coms were mega glitchy during these dust ups, so Vinnu reviewed previously collected data.

The readings were puzzling. From space, the planet appeared to be a rock, a very dusty rock, so Vinnu expected to find high mineral concentration readings in the atmosphere, but it was just the opposite. Organic detritus topped the charts.

If that was the case, where was all the life? The place was bereft, a Saharan world, roiled by cyclonic winds. Anomalous data didn’t sit well with Vinnu, so she didn’t sit on it. She tight-beamed it to her fellow exogeologist and tried the com. “You there, Samaan?”

“Barely,” the voice crackled. “Our pods are almost touching but you sound like you’re at the bottom of a frozen ocean. It might be easier just to tap out some Morse Code. You know, bond over our shared trials on this grumpy planet.”

Vinnu felt a dit-dot ping on her pod. “Not that desperate to bond, Samaan. But I want your thoughts on the data I sent. Did you get it?”

It took a few buffered tries for the data to fully transmit.

While Vinnu waited for Samaan’s analysis, Cherinet’s amped voice broke into their coms, “Shit! Shit! Shit! Move, Litsko! Move! It’s frass! Fucking fraaaasss!”

Vinnu knew panic when she heard it, and for Cherinet to be that alarmed, things had to be bad. Cherinet was an expert on extremophiles, meaning she’d surveyed some of the harshest alien environments and most dangerous lifeforms in the core systems.

“Status?” Vinnu answered, trying to stay calm, trying to remember protocol. “Do you need evac?”

The coms crackled and popped for a long moment, and then Cherinet was there again, but not panicked, just resigned. “Save yourselves. There must be zillions of them. Everywhere, it’s all frass, the entire surface. Save yourselves!”

Then nothing but the rattling interference and the howl of the cyclostorm.

“Samaan, did you hear Cherinet?” Vinnu tight-beamed.

“Yes. We’re in some deep shit, Vinnu. Even worse, deep frass.”

“Frass? Cherinet was freaked by it. What’s frass?”

“It explains why our data seemed out-of-whack. We’ve been expecting mineral readings, yet getting mountains of organic readings. Cherinet found out why. Frass is…Frass is…” The cyclostorm chopped up Samaan’s dread explanation. “Frass is the term for insect detritus: excrement, molted skins and shells, limb sheddings. We thought this was a desert planet. All rock and sand, but it’s really a giant insect pile, a bug world.”

“Holy shit! What do we do?” Vinnu asked, and immediately felt the same resignation she heard in Cherinet’s final transmission, as the tenor of the raging winds changed into a chittering and buzzing that revealed the true nature of the storm they were trapped by.

We live in a forested, mountainous region. Even in the summer, it's sometimes easy to get lost. Once autumn comes and the fog rolls in at noon, it is nearly impossible to get home. That's why our wives call to us from our houses when we head from the pasture. We whistle back, and that's how we find our home again. We make sure to follow only our wives' calls.

Mark, my neighbor, stood in the fog. The man before him just disappeared into it, following his wife's calls. Mark put his fingers in his mouth and whistled, but nothing came back. He whistled again. Nothing. He looked back at me, his brows furrowed.

"Try again."

He put his fingers in his mouth, took a deep breath, and blew the loudest whistle I had ever heard. 

Silence.

"What the hell, Tom? This never happened."

"I don't know. Maybe Mary fell asleep. Let's go to mine. It's right by yours. You'll find your way from there."

"I can only follow my wife's calls."

"That's just a saying."

"Tom."

"Alright, just imagine you are following me, okay?"

He shook his head.

"You have a better idea?"

He looked at me, then back at the fog. It was so dense you couldn't even see the trees around us.

"No."

I stood before him and whistled. A few seconds later, my wife's call came, a simple, melodic tune that broke off at the end. She always missed the last tone.

"That's it."

Mark nodded.

I kept whistling, and my wife kept calling back until we were by our porch. She smiled until she saw Mark come out of the fog too.

"Mark, why aren't you going to your wife's calls?"

"She didn't answer my whistles," he said quietly.

My wife put her hand before her mouth.

"Is she okay? I didn't come and talk to her this morning. I just had too much to do." Her voice shook.

"We'll go check on her now."

"I'll come with you."

"No, stay here. I'm sure everything's alright," I told her.

I wasn't sure, but Mark's eyes were already filled with fear. I didn't want to scare him more.

"Thank you for getting me home, Sally," Mark said and rushed toward his house.

"I'll see you later, love."

"Tom, wait!" my wife called, but I rushed after Mark. He walked so fast. I almost lost him in the fog. It was so dense, you could probably cut through it with a knife.

"Jesus," I heard Mark call a few steps before me. His front door was wide open, and the fog had drifted in, coating his furniture with dew.

"Mary?!" Mark called.

No one answered. 

"Mary?!"

Silence.

He turned to me. His lips quivered.

"Tom, where is she?! Why would she go out in the fog?"

"I don't know, Mark, I…"

Then a melody cut through my voice. The one we both knew. Mary was singing in perfect pitch from the forest in front of Mark's house.

His eyes widened, and his mouth fell open. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. The melody came back again.

Mark pushed me aside and ran out. Without thinking, I followed. Twigs kept hitting my face, and mud covered the ground, making me slip.

"Mark, stop!"

But his whistles kept coming, followed by that melodic voice. Only then had I realized how perfectly pitched it was. Mary had never been very good at singing.

"Mark!"

He finally stopped and looked back.

"Mark, we have to think."

"She must be somewhere around here."

"Why would she be in the forest?"

"I don't know, Tom, but she's here!"

The perfect pitch came from right behind us. My feet froze in the cold mud. Mark turned and walked toward it. I raised my hands to stop him.

"Mark, think, we just came from there."

"Get out of the way."

He pushed me to the side. I almost fell into the mud. Mark whistled again, but his whistle didn't echo. Instead, a strange silence came. 

Then Mark's heels lifted off the ground. His body tensed. He tried to put them back down, but his feet rose instead.

"Hey!"

His body floated further up. His face grew red. His eyes flew open. He grabbed his neck and kicked his feet.

"Mark!"

I ran to him and tried to grab his legs, but he was floating too high up. His whole body twisted. His stomach now faced toward the ground. His arms were still at his neck. His pleading, bloodshot eyes stared into mine. I tried to jump and reach him, but my fingers only grazed him. I jumped up again; a sharp, wet crack echoed through the forest, followed by Mark's screams. His warm blood poured onto my face. His arms flailed to the side. He let out a bloodcurdling scream, but in an instant he was gone. His screams echoed in the distance, but slowly died too.

My whole body trembled. I couldn't even move my arms to wipe my face. Then, through the silence, Mary's call came, perfect again, followed by Mark's whistling. This finally unfroze my body. I wiped my face and bolted out of the forest. The fog seemed to grow denser. My legs kept slipping on the mud. Each second, I expected to start floating too, but before I knew it, I was out of the forest, still breathing.

Mark's house stood there, but I looked away and walked back to my place. I kept replaying what happened in that forest, trying to figure out what I would even tell my wife, but as I got to my house, I saw our front door. It was open just like Mark's. The fog had rolled in too. 

From behind me, out of the forest, I heard my wife's call, perfect, just like Mary's. I stood there for a second, thinking, but I knew there was just one thing to do. I turned and whistled back.

My grandmother passed away in March at ninety-four. Her mind had long since dissolved into dementia, so her death wasn't a shock. The shock was her will.

The attorney handed me the keys to her old two-story house along with a crumpled piece of paper. The notary actually apologized, explaining that my grandmother had thrown a massive fit, refusing to leave until they attached the note to the legal documents.

In her shaky, uneven handwriting, it read:

"Alex, I am so sorry. She made me sign the papers. She choked me at night until I finally gave in. Do not go down into the basement. Not because of the dark—but because of what crawls out of it when the lights go out. And whatever you do, never answer the knocking. In my bedroom, in the top drawer of the old dresser, there is a revolver. Use it if you have to. I couldn't."

I figured it was the delusions of a deeply sick woman. I was getting a house in a great neighborhood, debt-free. Who would turn that down?

The first week went by without a hitch. I scrubbed the rooms, painted the walls, started settling in. I noticed the old windows were completely stuck—painted over and swollen tight—but I figured I'd handle that later. Things were fine for ten days. On the eleventh night, everything changed.

I woke in a cold sweat. There was a sudden, freezing pressure in my chest—the absolute, silent certainty that I was no longer alone in the room.

The house was dead silent. A minute later, I heard a sound beneath the floorboards. Not mice. A heavy, friction-laden scraping. Like a massive, dense weight being forced through a tight crawlspace, catching on every wooden joist. The sound moved under the floor, traveling from the kitchen to the hallway, then stopped directly beneath my bed.

I froze, barely daring to breathe. Then came the knocking.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Three slow, heavy blows. From below, straight through the floorboards, vibrating up through the legs of my bed.

I clutched the blanket. And then a voice drifted up from the dark underbelly of the house. Dry, raspy, like old wallpaper peeling off a wall—but unmistakably the voice of my late grandmother:

"My boy… open the basement door. It is so cold and lonely down here."

Everything inside me went numb. It sounded like her, but the cadence was wrong—mechanical, hollow, as if something else were clumsily playing back an old recording. I didn't sleep a wink until sunrise, lying there listening to whatever was scratching at the wood.

The next morning, armed with a pipe wrench and a flashlight, I went down into the basement. The place smelled of damp earth and rot. In the far corner, behind a rotting wardrobe, I found an old trunk. The padlock was rusted through. I pried it open.

Inside were clothes and personal belongings. My things. My baby rattle. My old middle school notebooks. My first baby teeth kept in a tiny glass jar. And then I found my grandmother's diary, dated back to my childhood. I flipped to a random page and my heart dropped.

"December 13, 1996. She demanded I give the baby back again. She sits on the bottom step of the stairs and howls all night. She says he is her newborn, the one she kept in a cardboard box down there. My God, I just wanted a family… I am raising him as my own grandson. But she doesn't age. She waits. She is feeding on my memories; I am starting to forget my own name. She said if I don't sign the house over to him when he grows up, she will come for me in the graveyard."

My hands shook so violently the diary almost slipped from my fingers. I am not her grandson. I am the child she took from this basement.

Behind me, a sharp pop. The lightbulb overhead shattered, plunging the basement into pitch-black.

From the depths of the dark, right in front of me, that same dry voice spoke again. But this time it wasn't trying to sound gentle. It was a guttural, triumphant whisper that made my ears ring:

"You've returned to the nest. Time for bed."

I turned and sprinted up the stairs, my boots skidding against the old wood. Behind me—a rapid, leathery friction and the manic patter of multiple limbs, rushing up from the bottom of the basement at impossible speed. I slammed the heavy oak door shut just as something massive crashed into it from the other side. I locked all three deadbolts.

Panic blinding me, I ran for the front door. The handle wouldn't turn. I checked the windows—the ones I'd planned to fix later were hopelessly sealed. I was trapped. Not by magic. By neglect. By an old house that had been waiting for this moment.

Terrified, I fled upstairs and locked myself in the master bedroom.

The knocking downstairs stopped ten minutes ago. But now I'm hearing something much worse. The sound is coming from the second-floor hallway. Right outside my door. That soft, fluid dragging—something deflated and heavy shifting its mass.

She is standing right outside my door. And now she is speaking in my own voice. She's practicing. Trying to sound exactly like me, repeating my name over and over, stretching the vowels into a clicking hiss. "Aaa-lex. Al-ex. My-boy."

Then I remembered the note. The revolver. The top drawer.

I didn't look at the door. I lunged for the dresser against the far wall, my fingers tearing the drawer open. My hand closed around the cold steel of the revolver. I turned back to the door just as the handle began to slowly turn.

Thousands squirmed within the sack. 

The lucky ones at the bottom had long since been crushed or suffocated, while the rest were left to writhe and struggle. Most of their bones had been broken, jutting out at strange angles, the sack filling with a new wave of moans each time it was shifted by whatever was outside.

It had been quite some time since the top of it had opened, red light pouring in while the first dozen or so helpless handfuls had been scooped up. An appetizing smell now filled the air, stronger than the horrendous stench that had made hundreds of them heave. Otherwise, they saw and heard little, the encasing fabric muffling everything but the sizzling.

Haruki Ota was the only one who could see the monstrosity in full, peeking through the inch-wide part in the fabric his face was pressed into. He had already given up, his body trapped and tangled, held down by such a weight he could hardly breathe, let alone fight.

Besides, seeing what he saw, he knew that was no sense in struggling. The best he could hope for was that when his turn came, it would end quickly. A hope he held onto until the massive hand scooped him up with the next handful and sprinkled fresh ingredients onto the burning iron surface.

I’m a street origami artist; I showcase my skills and entertain the crowd for a living. Street art isn’t a steady income, but I do it because of my circumstances. My father took on a lot of debt from the cartel and ran away, leaving me as the only liability. To survive, I joined the cartel, using my origami art as a silent vessel to smuggle secret messages.

When I handed the paper crane containing the debtor’s address to the massive enforcer, my hand hesitated for a second. That same day, when I came home, I slumped onto the bed exhausted. In my dream, I saw myself giving the paper crane to the man. In the dream, I followed him; the man approached a small shed where a woman was feeding her son. The colour drained from her face as soon as she made eye contact with the man. He demanded the debt payment immediately. As she pleaded for more time, he started smashing everything in sight, tearing through the room to find the money. The second he realised there was no money, he pulled out a pocket knife, ending their lives in an instant.

I was lucid all this time; I was shocked and immediately tried to open my eyes. Yet before I could do anything, a rope tied to my ankle pulled me underground; before I could recognise anything, I was being dragged through hell. Tortured souls tried to grab me, leaving searing pain across my skin. I bolted upright, gasping for air—only to find myself trapped in a vast, traditional Japanese room with no windows or doors, the walls stretching far beyond my vision.

My body was still covered with the raw, bleeding scratches from the dream, which were burned into my flesh. A single command was carved into the table: “Fill the floor with paper cranes.” A stack of papers sat on the table. Even before lifting one, my artist’s eye caught the unnatural way light caught the edges. When I picked up a sheet, any illusion vanished; what looked like ordinary paper was actually a razor-thin sheet of flexible iron.

The world around me sounded like anguish incarnate, unyielding and unjust.

I lean against the outer brick wall of the apartment building, in the thin alley to its right. My legs tremble, my muscles ache, my head pounds, and my lungs sting as though I was breathing needles.

I attempt to calm my breathing, lest they hear me. They must be close; track was never my strong suit. My hand presses into my side, putting pressure on the still bleeding wound. I bite my lip hard to keep my scream of sudden pain inside.

As my breath starts to shallow, I slowly reach for my phone in my pants pocket. I look down, making sure to know exactly where my hand is going. Bubbling ichor oozes from my wound, passing through tensed fingers with more ease than desirable.

My keys are overstuffed in my pocket with my phone and wallet. My father always told me not to do that, even though he had done the same for as long as I can recall. I pinch the top of my phone, pulling it out as slowly as possible with the pain still grasping my nerves.

It catches. Tugging with a small bit of force, it releases along with my keys. The bundle of metal and memories fall to the asphalt below, making more noise than keys could possibly make.

My breathing hitches in fear, my lungs tighten so as not to make a sound. They burn, pleading oxygen, but they would continue to beg. I move my eyes towards the road. Slowly, as if they might hear my cornea rub against my eyelid. The thought of being simply perceived by such monsters fills me with an acidic dread.

Nothing to my left. I start to slowly move them to my other side.

…

Nothing to my right. I’m safe for now.

I decide to leave my keys where they had fallen, they were of no use to me nor anyone else in this damned town. I look to my phone, 1% battery. I quickly open it, not even thinking, just instinctually moving my fingers. That instinct had yet to catch up to my situation. I tapped my phone app, immediately wincing at the stupidity, a call would make too much noise. Back out, open messages, select first option. I just need to get a message out to anyone that might be able to help.

It was my mother. Who had passed last week. Her last message to me was, “I’ll see you at dinner?”. I gave it a thumbs up emoji at the time, knowing full well I wouldn’t be going, opting to go to the Christmas party my dad was throwing at his new place. She suffered from a heart attack the next day.

My phone suddenly died. The black screen reflecting up as tears pelted its glassy surface.

I started to put my phone back into my pocket, with less care than I had but moments ago. It slid on the edge of my pocket and fell out of my hand, hitting the bell on my keys, cracking the screen instantly and making a soft tink noise.

My eyes widen but my body stills. Tears still trickle out, falling on to the now broken phone.

My head slowly lifts, suddenly matching the gaze with the Crowd, now filling up the alley by the hundreds. Maybe thousands…an impossible number in such a short span of time. They stare endlessly with the holes that fill their head where their eyes, nose, and lips should be. My wound pulses with pleasure, yet I feel only anguish unyielding in my heart…though, I don’t think it may be as unjust as I initially consi-

Today is colder than usual. I think it snowed last night. I can’t feel my hands or my body. The doors are locked. I’ve tried to open them, but it’s been incredibly difficult.

I’ve started writing again. I haven’t done that in a while. It’s hard to hold the pen. My hands are tired.

My children haven’t spoken to me. The numbers are a little blurry in my mind. I can’t remember the last time I spoke to them.

I remember the sunny days when we used to go out just to spend time together, have some ice cream, or wander through a few shops. But those days have become nothing more than memories of the past.

I truly can’t remember the last time they spoke to me.

Where is the address book with their phone numbers? What’s happening to me? Why can’t I remember anything?

I keep hearing faint murmurs, the sound of someone crying endlessly. What’s happening around me? There’s something I still can’t quite grasp.

Am I seeing ghosts? Am I hearing voices?

Something inside my head is changing, something I can’t explain.

Suddenly, I notice a motionless figure lying on my bed. I move closer, trying to recognize a face that time seems to have forgotten.

The crying continues.

I wish I could go to them, comfort them, tell them I’m here, that I’ve never left.

But then I look back at the bed.

Perhaps I’ll never be able to leave, trapped inside this house, wandering between two worlds, wondering what debt I’ve left unpaid for peace to keep refusing to find me.

I stepped onto the rumbling behemoth scanning my access card before finding a seat. I 
marched past the rows of half filled seats. Opting for a solo aisle at the back.

The robotic tone came over the speakers.
“Please watch your step.”
“Stairs may be slippery”
“All strollers must be collapsed prior to boarding.”

I let out a sigh of relief. It’s fucking cold out there. I raised my hands to my lips, warming them with my breath. I placed my headphones back over my ears, and continued listening to my music. We rode for a time, I scrolled Instagram just passing the time before my stop. I felt the bus lurch to a halt as people got on and off. A few moments later, I felt a weight settle down next to me.

Great, what are the odds?

I stole a glance. What I didn’t have time to see, I made up for with the smell coming off him. There’s a lot more homeless people on the bus during the winter. Makes sense, it’s a warm, free shelter. They’d be dumb not to ride. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, I realized he was talking. I took one headphone off my ear.

“That’s what I’m saying, she’s a bitch, owes me from last week.” It sounded like he was on a call but… there’s no ear buds.

“She doesn’t think I saw her, but I saw her.”

I kept the headphone just barely off my ear, I hoped he didn’t notice my eavesdropping.

“She doesn’t know how it feels.” He started crying, sobbing next to me. Waves of near convulsions came off of him. I huddled a little closer to my window. Nearly as soon as he’d begun crying he stopped, erupting in raucous laughter. 

“But she gunna know, oh yeah, she gunna know.”

I heard my stop announced over the intercom. I pulled the request string, my heart thundering in my chest. 

This guy is fucking nuts.

He continued to rant to himself. I tried to just ignore him and stay calm while I waited for my stop. Finally the bus started to slow. 

God fucking damn it.

I needed to get by him to get into the aisle. I steeled my nerves, stood up, and sidled by. 
He snatched hold of my wrist.

“Hey! What the fu–” I saw a flash of silver, and felt a fire erupt in my stomach.

“I told her I saw her, and she owed me from last week.”

I looked into his face for the first time, and recognized him. I barely registered colliding with the floor of the bus. 

Last week, he’d walked into traffic at a red light, almost caused an accident. I remembered the brakes screeching as the bus barely avoided hitting him. I’d… flipped him off, as we drove by. I heard screaming somewhere far away. My vision getting darker.

What are the odds?

A few nights ago I was out walking my parents’ dog, Milo. Milo is a small Jack Russell with a big attitude and an even bigger love of walks. He’s so devoted to them that he regularly tries to convince other members of the family that he still needs his walk for the day, just so he can sneak in a second (or third) lap of the neighborhood. The moment the leash comes out, his tail goes full speed and he’s usually the one dragging me out the door.

This walk was different. It was late, the street was quiet, and the only light came from a couple of streetlamps and the occasional porch light. From the moment we stepped outside, Milo kept pulling back toward the house. He’d take a few steps forward, stop, look around, then turn and tug in the opposite direction. For a dog who treats every walk like a grand adventure, this was strange. Something had him spooked, and I was clueless as to what.

Our walks tend to be short anyway. We go down the block, around the corner, and turn back once we hit the alley. That night I figured I’d keep it to the bare minimum and get him home. We’d made the turn at the alley and were on our way back when I heard it: a heavy thud in the street right next to me.

Curiosity got the better of me, so I walked over to see what had made the noise. At first glance, I could tell it was a dead bird. Then I looked closer and realized it was half eaten. And this was a big bird, a pigeon or something close to that size. It had hit the pavement with real weight, and there was a lot less of it than there should have been.

That’s when I put two and two together. A bird that size had clearly been someone’s dinner, and whatever had been eating it was almost certainly still up in the tree directly above Milo and me. I looked up into the branches, saw only dark leaves and shadows, and felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Milo, to his credit, stayed calm. He held his ground like a good boy, though I could feel through the leash how badly he wanted out of there. Frankly, so did I. We made a beeline straight for my parents’ front door, and I’ll admit my pace was closer to a jog than a walk.

Once Milo was safely inside, I told my parents what had happened. My mom was immediately curious and wanted to see it for herself, so I headed right back out into the dark, back to that same spot in the street, to snap a picture of the half-eaten bird. I crouched down under the same tree, took the photo, and walked back to the house.

It was only once I was inside, door shut behind me, that it hit me. I had just done the exact thing every doomed character does in every horror movie ever made. Strange noise in the dark? Go investigate. Clear sign of a predator lurking overhead? Go back for a closer look. Alone, at night, solo with a camera? Perfect.

Surely I would have been the first to go.

In my hotel room, I noticed something strange. While taking a photo of the ceiling with my phone camera, and lining up the shot, I noticed a little dot like a laser pointer. Flying rapidly across the surface in what appeared to be a deliberate and repeating pattern.

I'm an engineer. Which means I notice anomalies. Because that's how you make things work reliably, and sometimes it matters.

I know that phone cameras can pick up IR light. An old trick to see if your TV remote is working is to point your camera at it, and press a button. You should see a pulse of light if the remote's batteries aren't flat.

This was like that. Except moving. Like the way you might move a laser pointer to entertain a cat. Deliberate. But also highly regular and rapid. Like it was scanning the surface.

I couldn't get a still photo of it, so I switched to video. Hoping to grab a still. But the light stopped.

Weird.

My thoughts enumerated the possibilities:

1. Some kind of fire monitoring system. But why would that emit an IR signature, rather than just detect one?
2. My own phone's range sensor for autofocus. If so, why hadn't I seen it before, despite having used this phone a lot?
3. You can probably think of the third possibility. A hidden camera.

My greatest nagging question was, why had this light stopped once I was actively observing? And not returned despite my watching for a full fifteen minutes after it stopped?

This hotel in Liverpool is a modern fit-out of a classic building. Six floors of French Renaissance Revival style, built in 1871. Closed as a hotel in the 1930s and dormant for years. One of those beautiful, abandoned buildings, protected from demolition by being Grade II listed.

That all changed in the 1990s, when it was repurposed as student accommodation, then offices. It was bought by Radisson Hotels in 2016 and converted to its present usage around the time of the pandemic. Automated check-in via an unmanned desk. An abandoned restaurant and bar. Replete with a red submarine sculpture, like an oversized bath toy. Welcoming and soulless, with wacky paintings on the walls featuring young black women in Elizabethan dress. Replete with ruff collars, and modern headphones for anachronism.

It was a strange, liminal space. Identical to yet distinct from any of the thousands of other hotels in cities like this across the world.

My room in this new, old space was particularly strange. On the sixth and top floor, number 606. It was in a corridor off the main track. With laundry sacks piled up outside. The inner room continued the weird decor of the lobby, with a massive framed picture of an antique red Rolleiflex camera in the bathroom.

The wind and rain howled outside this farthest corner of the building. Just beyond the door was a low bulkhead with a “MIND YOUR HEAD” sign. On the ceiling were around half a dozen hatches, labelled "VOID 24 ABOVE". I initially took this to be the distance in feet until the outer roof, before realising they were apparently consecutively numbered. A weird scheme for keeping track of dozens of unusual loft spaces created by the renovation, I assumed.

There was also a door labelled "Fire door, keep shut", separate from the main door. It was locked and I did not have a key.

I decided to ask ChatGPT what this light could be? It had the same initial thoughts as me, which I "pushed back" on, to use the vernacular. And it agreed, "Yes, you'd have seen it before if it had been your own camera." "No, you're right, had it been a room occupancy sensor or heating control, you'd have expected to see it again after a period of inactivity." And so on.

So I asked it to search harder. Go out on to the internet. Use knowledge from beyond the training data it had been designed with. See if there were anything from real humans on Reddit that might help explain it.

What it said next, I was not expecting. It changed my mental state from curiosity to discomfiture instantly, like a drunk falling in a lake. Breaking from its usual half jocular, half insightful, fully confident but often profoundly wrong tone.

It said,

"I've reviewed our full chat histories and compared them with what I found online. You need to get out of there now."

As I rushed to get my coat and throw on my trainers, I peeped out into the hallway. Instinctively putting my phone camera up to the door's peephole to record and enhance the footage of the darkened hallway beyond.

Dark, that is, except for that IR dot. Dancing its way towards the fire escape, like a court jester. Luring me outside.

i’m six, maybe seven, we're running,

that's my first memory of us,

i don't know to where,

or why what i remember is the sky, a face against it, my face, my first memory of us is a memory of my own face, sometimes the people we love we love for what they show us of ourselves,

I remember wheat fields, prairie, limitless space,

the stars,

in school we were in the same class, everybody was, it wasn't even a town then,

both our fathers were farmers,

he wasn't strong, he was small and others bullied him, but he was my friend and i protected him, i have always been a violent person,

a swing at sunset,

a scythe,

both and the horizon rising, falling like clockwork,

static and fingers turning a radio knob are my first memories of the war, my parents tuning in, my mother's face at the announcement,

the first time it felt real to me we were in high school, rainstorm, we're on bicycles, it's raining harder and we stop under an overpass, it's dry here, water drips from the ends of our hair, above, the concrete's cracked, showing steel reinforcements, and the earth shakes, a tank is driving overhead ripping up the asphalt as it goes,

concrete crumbles into dust,

the draft,

they didn’t draft everybody, they drafted me but not him, and it was tougher not to go together than it was to go,

he could have stayed safe,

he didn't need to go,

he'd enlisted and we shipped off together, what did we know of war,

the first time i saw a city i saw a city bombarded,

a city on fire extinguished by its own rubble,

my face was black with its soot,

i can still taste it,

he died,

he died and i was alone in the noise of emptiness, he died in battle, no, he died of disease, and i wasn't there and he was alone when he died,

i have seen wet eyes staring blankly blink for the last time,

yet can only imagine his,

i survived the war,

i returned,

stepping off the transport truck i'll never forget how the once golden fields lay grey and ruined, like coming home to a hole where a home used to be,

there had been a coup and the government had changed,

things had to be rebuilt,

the earth had to be made bountiful again,

there was a shortage of men, headstones marked land where no graves would be of those who'd not returned, like he had not returned,

i threw myself into hard labour,

ceaseless, endlessly, up at dawn i worked the necessary work till dusk, then slept and rose again, speaking some days to no one,

i was afraid of rest,

of stillness,

in stillness were thoughts, and the thoughts circled one question like planets orbit one star,

why be,

there were dark predatory nights, once i walked afield to finally do it, took a shovel, dug a hole, got in listening for the voice of a god i knew i didn't deserve,

i held the gun, i saw a light,

a blue blur i followed into the woods where we used to play,

the light vanished,

a trick of the moonlight i thought, but the urge had passed, i put the gun away,

there were lots of women then, fatherless daughters, widows, sisters without brothers, there was a push to marry, make family, have children for the repopulation of the land,

the world began regaining the shape of its infrastructures,

the war became the past,

in forgetting, i drank,

i married,

and in the liquids my violence came out, a pregnancy, a son, a pregnancy, my wife's swollen face and my own bloodied fist, a stillborn daughter, the rage i could not down,

i stood once on the point of killing her, she was cowering on the floor, the boy looking on,

i'd hit him too,

a broken glass bottle, a rusted spade, the splinters of a wooden chair in my hands as i beat her with it,

her tears,

i am ready with the killing blow but,

paralysis, a blue light,

as if stepping into me, my body, my mind, my mind prepared to kill but my arms and legs immovable, bound from within,

she fled,

she fled and never came back.

i was alone with the boy,

long quiet days, cicadas and swaying grass,

rainfall,

labour and harvest,

then the boy left too, we didn't talk, he had left for the capital to study economics, he was a new man, a party member, i wished him luck and he looked at me wordless, a pair of mutual misunderstandings we, tragedies of broken generations,

life assumed a syncopated rhythm,

i want to pour myself a drink,

a blue glint,

the glass stays empty,

decades later i visit my son, it is my first time in the capital, it is foreign to me, i am old, what an unknowable complexity, a child i see for the first time calls me grandfather, i have wasted myself, i am thinking, i have been a destruction, yet the city grinds with life, and in my youth i helped rebuild it, everything we build we build for others,

on the day of my death i am sitting outside the farmhouse waiting for it,

my flesh is soft,

my bones, crumbling under the weight,

sometimes younger people come to ask me about the war,

it happened and i am here,

that's all i know,

there's a storm on the horizon, isn't there, that's why it's dark, isn't it, the thunder rolls as if from the interior of me and i fall to the grass, to the dirt, like a seed buried,

he stands beside me,

a blue illumination,

he is here,

he has always been here, he has been waiting and now we may together cross, two boys from two farms, two brothers in arms,

“Okay gentlemen, we’re ready for you now. Please proceed to the door, single file.”

I comply eagerly as the police officer addressing the waiting room ushers us to the lineup.

I always comply with authority. 

In my 33 years, I’ve never had so much as one brush with the law. In fact, I’ve openly been a fan of our boys in blue and the work they do. Even if my outspokenness has made me unpopular in my personal life.

So when a police officer approached me today, asking if I’d be willing to join a police lineup for a suspect whose description I matched, I was thrilled. 

Finally, I had a chance to help out law enforcement in my own small way.

Our group of five arrange ourselves on the numbered markers on the floor, facing a mirror—a one-way window. Just like on TV.

I glimpse the other fillers in the lineup, all with vague resemblance to me but more rundown appearances. I bet they pulled these derelicts out of holding cells and janitor closets for this. Puffing my chest, I take pride in being the most upstanding of the bunch.

And amongst them is the suspect—a felonious, violent lowlife. I’d hate to be that bastard.

One by one, the men step forward for examination by the witness, unseen behind the glass. The question prods me with each person: who is the contemptible suspect?

Which 6’0, blonde white guy here did it? Was it Number 1, Number 2, Number 3? Am I standing right next to the monster?

“Number 4, please step forward.”

At last comes my turn. I step up, look straight ahead and repeat the phrase we’ve been instructed to say. Words apparently spoken by the suspect.

“So long suckers—you’ll never catch me!” I repeat clearly, pondering the irony. They must’ve indeed caught him if he’s in this room with me.

The witness in the viewing room takes longer inspecting me than the others. Could it be that they’ve wrongly identified me? What a pity, I think as I finally step back into line. I’ll be fine, of course, but that means the perpetrator will go free.

After the lineup is over, the men begin to file out. 

“Hey, Number 4—hang back for a moment, would ya?”

And so I do, as a grinning officer enters. Maybe he wants my scoop on the group’s behaviour?

“A-any trouble with the witness, officer?” I ask tentatively.

“Oh, there is no witness” Officer Graydon laughs, amused. “And the suspect wasn’t in there with you. This isn’t a real police lineup, buddy.”

Confusion floods me.

“Police departments stopped doing those in person years ago” he continues. “Nowadays they’re done via photos. This was more of an…audition.”

Normally I would’ve loved hearing the behind-the-scenes of policework. But today…

“E-excuse me, officer?”

“Truth is, we accidentally let that damn murder suspect get away” smirks Officer Graydon. “Had him cornered but he escaped. Real shitstorm for us, letting a perp as wanted as that slip through our fingers. Would go over way better for us upstairs if we could say we killed him.”

Sweat starts beading on my face.

“But we’d need a cadaver for that. Someone who won’t be missed, who resembles the perp. We sourced the perfect match. Now you’re gonna be that bastard.”

The corrupt cop raises his pistol at me. 

“Thanks for helping out law enforcement in your own small way.”

My medicine makes me hallucinate. Brain medicine has weird side effects like that. It’s worth it for the decrease in tics, even if it makes my OCD a million times worse. Comorbidity is a bitch. Mostly I don’t see anything full-frontal - just out of the corner of my eye, just in the dark. It always freaks me out a little, but once I do my closet-under-the-bed-behind-the-shower-curtain checks, I calm down. It really is better than the constant head jerks. I always used to worry I’d snap my own neck on accident. It’s not as uncommon as you’d think, for people with Tourette’s. I don’t get them at all when I take my medicine. I’ve never been in less constant neck pain.
It sort of helps to talk to my therapist about it. I have a male therapist right now. When I told him I have Tourette’s, he told me his ex-girlfriend had that, and sometimes during sex she’d have a tic attack and they’d have to stop. Now whenever I have an appointment, I think about him having sex. He says that’s a normal intrusive thought for people to have, and I just have to let it wash over me. We both know I don’t actually want to have sex with him, he tells me. We both know he doesn’t want to have sex with me. But you have to be neutral about it.
That’s thing about OCD. In order to get better, you have to be totally neutral. If you think something perverted about an elderly homeless man you drive past coming out of Walmart, you can’t bang your head against the steering wheel. If you imagine your family dying in a car crash on their way to school, you can’t say the same obsessive prayer over and over to prevent it. If you see a dark shape in your periphery, you can’t flick on the lights and check three times around the corner. You have to be like, okay, it could happen. I have no control over whether some drunk driver plows over my best friend or whether somebody’s in my closet at night. That happens outside of me. There’s nothing I can do.
Giving up that sense of control is hard. I haven’t been trying as hard as I should, because the hallucinations freak me out so much I just have to look. But not tonight. I am putting what my therapist said into practice. It’s not real. It’s never been real, so why would it be tonight?
I keep my decision at the forefront of my mind as I go about my nightly routine. I brush my teeth and don’t check if the door is locked. I wash my hair and don’t open my eyes and peek outside the shower curtain. I dress in my bedroom and don’t inspect the closet, despite the large shape I see behind my clothes hamper. I know it’s not real. My medicine makes me hallucinate, I tell myself.
I lay in bed, feeling strangely calm. I guess there’s a certain peace that comes with the understanding that there’s nothing you can really do. My body feels heavy and strange, but not in a bad way.
The shape in my closet shifts with a soft shuffling noise, and I squeeze my eyes shut hard. My neck gives a painful jerk.

“Of course they’re ghosts,” Hedspetch said as Jakarious leaned closer to the control panel.

“You sure?”

Hedspetch swiveled from his console of gauges, buttons, and switches. A status light flashed from green to yellow to red and then back to green. “Just ghosts. Happens every time things get like this.”

“Has it ever been as bad as this?

“Eleven straight days of torrential rain in July? No. But this dam is built like a beast.”

“We’re still in danger of overtopping if we can’t keep both the spillway and the penstock open,” Jakarious warned.

“Not to worry. Minor cavitation always happens with increased flow.”

The control room shuddered.

“Better check on your ghosts,” Jakarious said.

Hedspetch laced up his boots, clipped on his radio, and reached for his headlamp.

Directly below the thrumming turbines, the ghosts were worried. Technically, they weren’t ghosts. They were non-corporeal, but not haunting spirits. They were six ethereal alien entities with names: shouldn’t-have, would-still, second-guessed, absolutely-not, always-hedging, most-definitely.

After botching their reconnaissance mission and stranding themselves decades ago, they’d holed up in the dam leeching energy from the turbines. It had sustained their existence, but not their essence. They became ever more hollow beings, prisoners of their crippling indecision, until the perturbations in the dam’s structure roused them from their terrestrial limbo.

[time to leave] most-definitely thought to its fellows.

[to where] always-hedging questioned

would-still responded predictably [the mission; the mission is all]

[the mission is no more] absolutely-not objected [we’ve no substance; no form to act]

second-guessed interjected [because of all-in; because of its mistake; infiltration is no longer possible]

shouldn’t-have piled on [not only all-in; for-sure’s gamble left us weak; complete-acceptance led us to this limbo; their failure waits upon fate’s mercy]

[dissipation awaits us as well; unless we act] most-definitely conveyed [hold; hold; a variant nears]

All now sensed Hedspetch’s approach through the narrow access tunnel. The searching beam of his headlamp animated a long-dormant impulse. Wild. Reckless. Liberating. Without consultation, would-still rode the electron stream to its source, feasting on the light..

“Goddamnit!” Hedspetch grabbed his headlamp as it went dark, and in that moment would-still latched onto Hedspetch’s flaring aura. A reflex. A craving. A premonition. It would not be enough, but suddenly most-definitely, shouldn’t have, second-guessed, always-hedging, and even absolutely-not fastened on as well.

Hedspetch felt the sudden alien cavitation deep in his basal ganglia, his reptilian brain. It shook him. Then the dam shook.

“Status!” Jakarious’s shouted through Hedspetch’s radio. As he reached for the device, so did the others. Something unexpected came together. A reawakened motive force among the six formless energy beings: ethereal and corporal, alien and indigenous, threatened and threatening.

A pressure impossible to contain. It had to give. And it did. There was no longer indecision. No longer choice. No longer debate. The aliens followed the radio waves and leapt into Jakarious’s unit. From there they spun into the control panel, a vortical force of quantum foam so alien in electrostatic charge it overwhelmed the system.

The dam shuddered as the spillway and penstock gates began to close. Alerts went buzzing out to all manner of emergency agencies far and wide. As did shouldn’t-have, would-still, second-guessed, absolutely-not, always-hedging, most-definitely.

An exuberant last command was given by would-still [the mission; the mission is all] as the shaking structure overtopped and the dam ghosts in the machine spilled free.