At 2:13

2:13 a.m. The number hums on the clock — blue, steady, absolute. Belinda doesn’t need the alarm anymore; her body keeps the time for her. She lies still, listening — the soft tick of the fridge, the wind pressing against the window, the faint hum under her ribs. The world feels paused, waiting for her to begin.

She reaches for the notebook without turning on the light. The paper is worn thin at the corners, pages furred from her fingers.

The pen sits exactly where it should — capped, angled toward her hand. Left thumb to spine, right hand poised. The small choreography of control.

She writes before the dream can scatter.

Fragments first — a hallway of teeth. A phone ringing underwater. Her mother, whispering something she shouldn’t have heard. She writes fast, the words dragging memory into shape.

Then she stops. The ink looks darker tonight. Thicker. There’s a metallic tang in the air, faint but sharp.

She closes her eyes and counts backward from ten, the way Dr. Alpert taught her. Ten, nine, eight — breathe — seven. But the rhythm slips. The words keep forming behind her eyelids, letters pushing at the inside of her skull.

When she opens her eyes, a new line waits at the bottom of the page. Not hers.

You missed last Thursday.

She stares until the letters lose their edges, until her hand cramps around the pen.

The clock’s colon blinks again — 2:14, 2:15.

And in the hush between blinks, she understands the rule she’s made without meaning to. If she doesn’t write, something else will.

She touches the edge of the page, tracing the words that aren’t hers. The paper feels warm. Not freshly written warm — living warm, as if it’s been holding a pulse of its own. She snaps the notebook shut.

Silence folds over her. The house returns, all creaks and ticking. The sound of the pen rolling once, softly, then stopping.

Belinda exhales through her nose, long and steady. “Control,” she says aloud, her voice rasping from sleep. It’s a word she says often, to remind herself what this is for. The ritual is order. The ritual keeps the noise at bay. She repeats it again, quieter, as if the word itself were an incantation — control.

She opens the notebook. The words stare back unchanged. Her heartbeat steadies.

Then, carefully, she adds another line beneath the intruding one- I didn’t miss Thursday. The ink is thin again, ordinary, her own. She feels a small relief — the soft, chemical satisfaction of balance restored.

She smooths the page with her palm before closing it, presses her hand flat against the cover until she feels the cool of the cardboard seep into her skin. The gesture is part of the ritual too — the sealing. The world must be closed properly, or it leaks.

The clock reads 2:18. She always finishes by 2:20. That’s the rule. She returns the pen to its place — capped, angled — and slides the notebook halfway under her pillow, spine facing left. Another rule.

Lying back, she listens for the sound that tells her she’s safe again — the faint scrape of branches outside, the hush of the house settling. Then, somewhere in the stillness, the low sound she loves most — paper breathing as it cools.

Sleep comes slowly. Not rest, exactly — more like a slow descent into another chamber of the same dream.

The next night, she wakes a minute late.

2:14.

The number looks wrong — crooked, somehow, as if the clock has shifted its face.

She blinks twice, heart hammering too loud for so small an error. A minute isn’t much. Just sixty seconds, an exhale. But her body knows it’s off. Her pulse won’t sync.

She reaches for the notebook, but her hand hesitates above it. The air feels thicker tonight, damp and metallic, like breath on glass. She uncaps the pen. The click sounds too loud.

She begins to write, but the dream is already fading, fast — slippery, rebellious.

She grasps at fragments — a mirror, a stairwell, a white shape with too many joints.

The words drag, reluctant, leaving smudges of ink where they shouldn’t.

The clock blinks 2:15. She’s behind.

Her fingers tighten around the pen. She forces herself to keep going, faster, messy, the letters collapsing into one another. The rhythm is wrong — wrong, wrong, wrong.

She can feel it under her skin, the pulse of disorder.

Then she feels it — the paper trembles.

Not visibly — more like the faint vibration of sound through wood. The notebook quivers against her hand.

Belinda freezes. The pen drops.

She listens.

Nothing. The air holds its breath with her.

Then, from somewhere deep in the house, a single creak — a sound she’s heard before, but never at this hour.

The clock turns 2:16.

She shuts the notebook, too fast. The pen clatters to the floor.

She doesn’t pick it up.

For a long moment she sits motionless, eyes fixed on the dark window, her reflection floating faintly in the glass. Behind her reflection, another shape moves.

Just a shift of shadow — or maybe her own head turning — but she feels the truth of it ripple through her like static. The ritual has noticed.

She tells herself it was nothing. Houses make sounds; air shifts. The human brain, starved of sleep, invents ghosts out of insulation and plumbing. She repeats this silently, each sentence a rung she climbs back toward reason.

But her hands won’t stop shaking.

She leans forward and picks up the pen.

The tip has snapped, a thin shard of metal curling away from the plastic. The sight of it makes her chest tighten — like seeing a bone out of place. The pen is part of the ritual. It can’t be broken.

She goes to her desk in the corner, opens the drawer, and finds another pen. Identical brand, identical color. She holds both in her hands, weighing them. One whole, one ruined. She feels a faint nausea, as if replacing it were a betrayal.

Still, she returns to the bed, opens the notebook.

2:19. She still has a minute. If she finishes before 2:20, maybe — no, definitely — it won’t count as a failure.

She writes fast, the words tumbling out —

Late but done. Still in control. Late but done. Still in control.

She repeats the line until the page fills, until her handwriting blurs into a single dark mass.

When she stops, she realizes she’s written past 2:20.

The clock reads 2:21.

A quiet panic unfurls in her gut — small, cold, and precise. She shuts the notebook again, but it doesn’t feel closed. The edges feel warm under her fingers, faintly alive, like breath through fabric.

She tells herself to put it away. Sleep.

Reset. The word echoes thinly in her mind, but her body refuses to obey. Instead, she lifts the notebook again, almost gently, as if it’s something wounded.

The last line she wrote has sunk into the page. The ink glistens wet and red.

She wipes at it with her thumb, but it smears darker. The stain clings to her skin, metallic, unmistakable.

Blood.

She stares at her hand for a long time.

Then she whispers, barely audible, “It’s just ink. It’s just ink. It’s just ink.”

But the notebook breathes once under her palm — so subtle she almost convinces herself she imagined it.

Almost.

She doesn’t tell anyone about the pen. Or the page. Or the hour that keeps her in its loop.

There’s no one to tell, really. Dr. Alpert retired last winter, and the new therapist — Dr. Mendes — keeps smiling in a way that feels rehearsed. “Routine helps you stay grounded,” she’d said last session. “Keep writing. Same time, same place. You’re building a pattern of safety.”

Belinda almost laughed.

She doesn’t write about the dreams anymore, not exactly. Now she writes to keep the ink calm. She writes weather reports, grocery lists, fragments of radio jingles from the next room. The words don’t matter; the motion does. As long as the pen moves, the pages stay quiet.

By the third week, she notices the shift — daylight creeping in where it shouldn’t.

The first time, it happens in the laundry room. Noon sun pouring through the window, soft and harmless, but she catches a flicker — a number where light shouldn’t hold shape. 2:13, stuttering faintly on the washing machine display. The hum of the cycle deepens, takes on a heartbeat.

She blinks. The number’s gone.

She doesn’t mention it to anyone.

That night, she sets an alarm for 2:12, but it never rings. Her eyes open before it, as they always do. Her body’s clock stronger than any device.

The notebook lies waiting on her nightstand — not under the pillow anymore.

She doesn’t remember moving it. The pen rests across the open pages like a limb placed in repose.

She tells herself- just write. Keep the lines neat. Keep the ink steady.

But when she touches the paper, her skin prickles. The surface feels textured now, grain like shallow scars. The faint scent of iron drifts upward.

She begins with something harmless — a sentence about the wind.

The wind tonight sounds like fabric tearing.

Then another, without thinking- It’s learning my name.

Her hand pauses mid-word. That’s not what she meant to write.

The notebook hums faintly beneath her wrist, a vibration almost tender. The clock turns 2:14.

She shuts the book and shoves it under the bed.

The sound it makes sliding across the floorboards is wet.

The next morning, there’s writing on the mirror. Condensation, curling letters, her own handwriting.

Still in control?

She wipes it away too fast, the motion smearing a ghost version of the words.

By evening, she finds more- a note on her kitchen counter, her grocery list rewritten in an unfamiliar order. Every seventh word crossed out, replaced with fragments — return, open, answer.

She throws the notebook into the hallway closet, under winter coats and unused boxes.

That night, she dreams of paper — endless sheets breathing in stacks, a sound like lungs learning to imitate speech. She wakes with her cheek pressed to the pillow and realizes it’s damp, faintly red at the edge.

Her hands are clean.

Daylight no longer feels safe. The numbers appear anywhere with reflection — on her phone, the kettle, the window. Always 2:13.

Always pulsing faintly.

When she blinks, they vanish.

When she looks again, they’re closer.

Her sense of time begins to splinter. She checks the clock one afternoon — 1:45 p.m. — and then again seconds later. 2:13. Then 2:13 again. The digits frozen, patient.

She unplugs the clock. It keeps glowing.

Three nights later, she breaks her rule.

She doesn’t write. She waits.

2:13 arrives as it always does — not with sound, but with stillness. The air thickens.

The hum in her ribs syncs with something deeper, older. The house holds its breath.

Then, softly, from the closet, a page turns.

Another. Then another.

She rises from the bed, slow as if underwater. Crosses the floor. The sound continues — rhythmic, gentle, almost kind.

When she opens the closet door, the notebook sits in the dark, open on its spine.

Pages flutter in a wind that isn’t there.

On the latest page, a single sentence sprawls in her own handwriting- You were never the one writing.

Her throat closes. Behind the words, the ink ripples, darker, alive — something moving beneath, like depth or muscle. She drops to her knees, whispering “control” again and again until the syllables fall apart. The notebook quivers once, then stills.

The clock blinks 2:20. She closes the closet door.

In the days that follow, she stops sleeping. Not from fear — time has stopped asking her to. The hour follows her now. She feels it behind her eyes, in the slow pulse of her fingertips.

Sometimes she catches herself mid-sentence, mid-step, mid-thought — holding a pen without knowing when she picked it up. The cap is always off. The ink always wet.

She burns the notebook on a Wednesday afternoon, out in the yard. The smoke rises thin and gray, carrying the faint smell of copper. The pages curl black, then crumble.

She waits until the last ash dies, her pulse counting down from ten.

When she returns inside, the clock on the wall blinks blue. 2:13.

On the kitchen table, a clean notebook waits. Same brand. Same corner wear. A pen rests beside it, angled perfectly toward her hand.

Late that night, through the window, the neighbor across the street sees her silhouette at the table. The clock’s glow halos her face. Her hand moves fast. The pen never lifts. The window writes with her.