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Your character sees something unfamiliar out of the corner of their eye. What happens next?

Posted in Horror on Oct 17, 2025

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✍️ 30 stories

THE QUIET FRIEND

Submitted to Contest #325

Eden woke up to silence.Not the good kind. The heavy kind. The kind that meant Mom was already upstairs in his room and Dad had left early for work.She stayed in bed for a while. Counted the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling. Forty-three. She'd counted them every morning since the funeral. The number never changed but she counted anyway.Her stomach growled.She got up.The kitchen was cold. The heat didn't work right anymore. Or maybe it did and nobody remembered to turn it on.Eden pulled a chair to the counter. Reached for the cereal box....

42 likes 27 comments 27
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The Glad Man

Shortlisted for Contest #325 ⭐️

Ever since the divorce, Alain found himself avoiding mirrors. It wasn’t a conscious decision at first. Except for the bathrooms, his house had become barren of them. Sylvia had taken the large cheval mirror that had sat quietly in the corner of the bedroom, the sole spectator of a marriage doomed from the start. Once it had followed Syliva to her new bungalow across town, Alain’s reflection could typically only be found above the sink while he brushed his teeth or washed his hands, a sight that he could easily avoid by occupying his attenti...

39 likes 27 comments 27
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The Passenger Seat

Submitted to Contest #325

Something was sitting in the passenger seat when I drove past the streetlight.I didn’t see it straight on—just a shape, like someone ducking their head in a hoodie.But when I turned, the seat was empty, and I was already doing seventy.My hands stayed steady on the wheel. Three years of driving nights, you learn not to jerk the car every time shadows play tricks. The Camry’s dashboard glowed green against the dark stretch of Route 37, that dead zone between Mechanicsburg and nowhere. No cell towers. No houses. Just trees pressing close to the...

24 likes 15 comments 15
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Fish Eyes

Submitted to Contest #325

Dallas, a hot summer day and the line in the 7-Eleven store never ceased. Slurpees and Big Gulps were the favorite choices of the day, followed by Marlboro cigarettes and money orders sales. Yes, it was another typical Saturday afternoon on Denton Drive in Dallas, and I had the pleasure of working the registers by myself that day, but the typicality was about to be interrupted. I was in the zone. Ringing up customers and serving their personal needs, I was able to send them on their ways, satisfied, with smiles on their faces. The customers ...

13 likes 4 comments 4
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Peripheral

Submitted to Contest #325

The doctor told him there would be floaters.“Just the brain adjusting,” she said, sliding the neural interface into its sterile case. “Your mind’s relearning how to see again. The peripheral distortions will fade.”Elliot nodded, though the word floaters felt wrong. They didn’t float. They crawled.The first one appeared three nights after the surgery. A glimmer in the corner of his eye while he brushed his teeth. It was a small, translucent thing like a spider made of glass. When he turned his head, it vanished. When he looked back, the air s...

12 likes 2 comments 2
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I’m in Love with my Sleep Paralysis Demon

Submitted to Contest #325

I’m in love with my sleep paralysis demon. I’ve only ever seen him out of the corner of my eye. He freaked the hell out of me the first time he came to me. Tall – at least seven or eight feet, but hard to know really when you’re lying down, your vision is blurry, and your visitor will not stay still. I tried to scream but try as I might, I couldn’t prise my mouth open. My arms were glued to my sides. He was there, he was here, he was close, he was far. He was slow motion, he was fast forward. He was sliding across the ceiling, he was crawli...

11 likes 4 comments 4
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The Last Lamp

Submitted to Contest #325

The fog tastes like coal smoke and the Thames at low tide—which is to say, it tastes like London in November, thick enough to chew and twice as uninviting. I hoist my ladder over my shoulder and start my route. Forty-seven lamps from the embankment to Clerkenwell, two hours at dusk to light them, two hours at dawn to snuff them out. Been doing this for three years now. Good work. Steady work. The kind that keeps your hands busy and your mind blessedly empty. First lamp: corner of Drury Lane. I prop the ladder, climb, twist the key to open th...

11 likes 2 comments 2
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Ritual without Faith

Submitted to Contest #325

The blood she painted along the door was meant to protect her. The carcass at her feet was intended to destroy her. It was fortunate Celeste had been the first creature to find this sheep, chained to the cattle guard at the edge of her property. She was able to kill it swiftly and cleanly. The creatures that looked on from the cornrows, which she only knew by their throaty huffs and the clack of teeth too large in their mouths, would not have offered such a mercy. The wooden porch creaked beneath her feet as she lifted her brush to the corn...

10 likes 1 comment 1
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The Maidens

Submitted to Contest #325

It was a pleasant August night, despite the heat of the day, and the waning moon cast its light on the country road, bathing the picturesque landscape in its silvery rays. He liked to walk this road on each harvest time, and the distance between his small farm and the wheat fields was not so great as to tire him any more than he already felt, his drooping shoulders bearing the burden of hard agricultural labor.Radu wiped away a drop of sweat that was slowly sliding down his dusty forehead with the back of his sleeve. The itching sensation on...

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Something in the Grain

Submitted to Contest #325

Elias Corbett arrived at the farmhouse just after dawn. Headlights sliced through fog so dense it pressed the world flat, turning the fields into pale, unbroken sheets of gray. The gravel drive wound between stands of bare trees, their black limbs slick with dew, leaning inward as if conspiring.Out the corner of his eye, he caught a flicker: tall, pale, gliding between the trunks, but gone before he could turn to see it properly. Only the hush of the misted field remained, though it seemed to breathe.The house sat on a low rise, roof sagging...

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What the Sea Remembered

Submitted to Contest #325

He was at the seashore, finally.For the first time in years, there was no screen waiting, no notifications, no deadlines tapping their fingers behind his eyes. The world felt strange without the low hum of his computer fan — that mechanical breath that had become his own. He had spent a decade staring at the same flickering light, typing numbers that meant nothing, answering messages that went nowhere. The days blurred, the walls closed in, and he forgot how silence sounded.Now, standing before the sea, he realised silence wasn’t empty — it ...

10 likes 1 comment 1
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Termite House

Submitted to Contest #325

Hare Kin Content Warning:Descriptions of gore, implied mental health issues, mention of suicide, mentions of murder ___ I haven’t been home in a long time. Not since I was eighteen and eager to escape the oppressive prison that it had been. I’ve had a whole life since then, thirty years away from home and every bit more meaningful, every choice mine to make, every outcome mine to own. Yet here I am again. I've made and forgotten memories in equal measure, but I'm never able to quite scrub the persistent stain of my hometown from mind: my nei...

9 likes 3 comments 3
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The Mouth in My Ear

Submitted to Contest #325

The Mouth in My Ear By Antonino Giannetto “We’re over Helen! Got it? We’re over! I want you out of my life. This has gone on far too long. You are too much. I can’t take it. I’m quitting my job at Amazon.” “You better think twice. I'm begging you, don’t do it. I will track you down. You can’t leave me!” She pleaded. “I’m leaving you” he said, putting his foot down. “No stop. No don’t. I need to breathe. Stop, you will kill me if you leave me.” She was in full blown anxiety mode. They both worked at the Amazon distribution center and caught e...

9 likes 6 comments 6
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Floater

Submitted to Contest #325

I stared at the crumpled shopping bag on the landing before me. It was the fastest I’d ever destroyed $300 worth of anything. I stood like a mall mannequin, frozen and uncomprehending. The last ten seconds played on repeat in my mind.I had just completed a ‘grocery’ trip and was hauling a shopping bag filled with the inedible. Today’s flavor of impulse buying? Candles. And I’d learned they were equals parts smellable and breakable.To be fair, I’d also picked up groceries. I was just planning on bringing in the first non-grocery ‘grocery’ bag...

8 likes 3 comments 3
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Lost Blinkers

Submitted to Contest #325

CW: Themes of psychological distress and trauma He went to the opticians. But he couldn’t tell them what was wrong. Kept his fingers crossed and willed them to find a physical defect. Something easily rectifiable. He hoped a new prescription would do the trick. Failing that, he’d agree to surgery. He hated the thought of going under the knife, but sometimes a greater fear triumphed and in this case he was compelled to do something to address the nightmare that was taking a hold of him. And he was scared. Sometimes scared to death. His fear w...

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