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Everyone expected me to open the door.That was the whole point of gathering in the hallway at midnight with flashlights and whispered theories. Something was inside the apartment at the end. Something that had been scratching for weeks. Mrs. Dalrymple swore she heard crying. Mark from 3B said it sounded like claws. Someone else said the tenant had moved out months ago, which only made it worse.Abandoned spaces are supposed to hold terrible things.I had the key because I was the building manager, which made me the reluctant hero of this situa...
Weekly Contest #322
Eleanor Whitford had always thought of herself as good. The word stuck to her like a name tag, affixed early and reinforced by teachers, neighbors, friends, even strangers. “She’s the helpful one.” “Such a sweet girl.” “She’ll do big things, selfless things.”By the time she was thirty-four, she wore that identity like a crown. It guided her decisions, her smile, the careful way she spoke to people. At the nonprofit where she worked, an organization that raised money for rural medical clinics, she had become the face of compassion. Her boss o...
Weekly Contest #321
It began with the postcards.Every autumn, without fail, one appeared in my mailbox. No return address. No postmark. Just my name, written in looping ink as though the pen had been guided by a hand unwilling to stop. The pictures were never cheerful cityscapes or beaches. Instead, they showed the same house from the same angle: a gray two-story with shutters like narrowed eyes, a porch sagging under invisible weight.Each year, a small difference. One shutter missing. A window cracked. A light glowing faintly in an upstairs room.By the tenth p...
The first thing Daniel noticed was the silence. It wasn’t the ordinary kind—the muffled hum of a refrigerator, the distant chirp of a bird outside the window, the steady rhythm of his wife’s breathing. This silence was deeper, heavier. It pressed against his chest like a weight.He sat up slowly, realizing he wasn’t in their bed. Instead, he stood in the living room, barefoot, wearing the jeans and T-shirt he remembered pulling on that morning. Or was it yesterday morning? Time felt slippery, unreliable.The house looked the same: framed photo...
Weekly Contest #320
The whispers began as a rumor—a thin, persistent thread woven among cedar and birch. Mara first dismissed them as wind, the same way she had once dismissed small frets in her life as nothing more than passing weather. But the sound was too deliberate: syllables tucked beneath birdcall, a breath between branches that shaped itself into her name.It happened that spring when the town still smelled of thaw and detergent. Mara had been walking because the house made her feel too small: bills that sat like paperweights on the kitchen table, a radi...
Weekly Contest #319
I was born between the walls where the plaster flakes fall like snow and every sound has an echo. My mother named me Splinter for my tail, but I renamed myself Thimble. A mouse should choose a name small enough to hide in.We lived inside a Victorian with a roofline like crooked teeth. It was never empty—no house is—but this one was crowded with the wrong company. It hoarded whispers, drafts that moved against the wind, shadows that lingered. My earliest meals were ancient crumbs: sugar grit wedged in floorboards, petrified cheese, a crust of...
I. ArrivalThe road into Wren Hollow had always been wrong. Evelyn noticed it the way you notice a lie—something slightly off in the way it bent through the trees, something crooked about its silence.She’d been driving for hours when the last gas station disappeared behind her. Her uncle’s lawyer had said the house would be easy to find: Follow County Road 16 until you see the gate. It’ll be waiting.Waiting. The word had stuck.By the time she pulled up, dusk had spread its bruises across the sky. The gate leaned on rusted hinges, one post spl...
The house had a name before we arrived: Black Gull House. In the brochure it looked sun-struck and serene, but in person the wings sprawled farther, the moss had crowns, and the windows stared too directly at the sea. The door was painted a hungry red, a shade that looked black in certain weather and feral in others.We were five: Mira and Sloane, who argued about verb tenses; Jonah, with his portable keyboard; Henry, who kept one hand wrapped in a scarf; and me, Clara. A driver dropped us at the porch and left without ceremony. Inside, the f...
Weekly Contest #318
The first time Mallory noticed him, she assumed he was just another piece of theater clutter.Old theaters attract ghosts, both living and not. There are always odd stagehands who drift in from nowhere, props that no one remembers buying, shadows that look too deliberate. So when she saw him hunched in Row Six, dragging a mop over carpet that didn’t need cleaning, she thought: Of course. Just another one of them.The place reeked of mildew and fading grandeur. The velvet curtains were older than most of the cast, frayed at the hems like moth-e...
Weekly Contest #317
Department: Rockland County Sheriff’s Office, Maine Case #: 25-48812 Date/Time of Report: October 14, 2025 – 02:37 A.M. Reporting Officer: Det. Sgt. Laura Kent (Badge #4711) Incident Type: Disturbance / Possible Homicide / Unclassified Phenomenon Location: 11 Barrow Point Road, Owls Head, MESUMMARY:At approximately 00:41 hours, Rockland County Dispatch received a 911 call originating from landline (unregistered, no subscriber found in databases) at residence 11 Barrow Point Road. Caller provided no verbal information. A recorded line capture...
The first time he spoke to me, my keys were already in the ignition.“Wait,” he said. “Count to three before you turn it.”It was midnight in the parking garage, the kind of place where even your own footsteps sound like someone else’s. He stood one row over, in an old wool coat, watching me like I was the last bus of the night.“One,” he said. “Two. Three.”I turned the key. The engine coughed to life just as a black SUV shot down the lane—wrong way, tires screaming. If I’d been reversing, we would’ve collided at full speed. Instead, the SUV cl...
On a Wednesday in late May, the city of Arroyo put on its good blazer. Banners went up along Riverfront Avenue. A stage was rolled into the sun, and someone ironed the creases out of a ceremonial ribbon so red it looked like a slice of watermelon rind. Coffee carts hissed, cameras arrived in tidy vans, and the mayor rehearsed a joke about civic pride.Lila Duarte stood in the wings of the stage with her phone set to silent and her mouth already shaped around the first line of her speech. She could recite it a third of the way asleep. She had ...
Weekly Contest #316
he newsroom is never quite silent. After the last intern leaves and the sports guy mutters out, the lights hum and the drink cooler sighs. Beneath it all comes the sound Nadine never names—the soft, workmanlike chattering of a typewriter nobody owns.She lets it run. She doesn’t look toward the corner it favors or hunt behind cabinets. She keeps the obituary file open, fingers hovering, and waits out the tapping. Eventually it slows, like rain reconsidering.At 10:12 on a November Thursday, the typing starts again. Nadine closes her eyes. Name...
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