Author: Louee

There was a rule in our house: If you think of something bad, knock three times to keep it from happening.

It wasn’t a superstition we grew up with—Mom made it up when I was about eight. At least, that’s what I used to think.

The first time I remember her saying it, we were sitting at the kitchen table. She’d been chopping onions for dinner while I told her about a kid at school who said his uncle got struck by lightning. Half-joking, I said, “What if that happened to Dad?” She froze, knife poised mid-air, and turned to me with an expression I couldn’t quite place. Fear? Anger? No, it was deeper than that. Something primal.

“Don’t say things like that, Eli,” she said sharply. Then, softer, almost pleading: “Knock three times. Quickly.”

I laughed, thinking it was just a silly game, but she didn’t. Her eyes stayed fixed on mine until I rapped my knuckles against the table three times. Only then did she relax, returning to her chopping as though nothing had happened.

That was how it started.

As I got older, it became a reflex. Thinking about failing a test? Knock three times on your desk. Imagining your bike skidding on wet asphalt? Three knocks on the handlebars.

It felt dumb, sure, but harmless. And honestly, it worked. Nothing bad ever happened.

Until the week I forgot.

It was a Wednesday morning in October, gray and drizzling. I was running late for work and spilled coffee on my only clean hoodie. As I changed, I thought about the rain and muttered, “Watch me skid out on the highway.”

I didn’t knock.

By noon, the call came. A ten-car pileup on the I-95. I was fine, but my best friend Caitlyn—the one who took the same route to work every day—wasn’t.

She’d been in the middle of it, her car crushed between two semis. They said it was quick. Merciful, even. That didn’t help me sleep at night.

Mom never asked why I suddenly started knocking on everything, all the time. Walls, countertops, my knees under the dinner table. She just nodded like she understood. Maybe she did.

The second time I forgot was a month later. I’d been at a grocery store, staring at a shelf of canned soup. Mom had been sick with the flu for a week, and I’d been stressing over whether it was really just the flu. “What if it’s something worse?” I whispered under my breath.

I realized my mistake the moment I got home and found her on the kitchen floor.

The thing about knocking three times is that it’s not a guarantee. It’s a bargain. An acknowledgment.

When you knock, you’re not just pushing bad luck away. You’re asking it to take notice of you instead.

After Mom’s funeral, I tried to stop. I told myself it was all in my head, a coping mechanism twisted into something grotesque by grief and guilt. I ignored every dark thought, every irrational urge to knock.

For a while, it worked. Nothing bad happened. Life went on.

Then, last week, I heard it.

It was late, sometime after midnight. I’d been lying in bed, half-asleep, when there came a soft, deliberate knocking from the wall above my headboard.

Three knocks. Perfectly spaced.

I froze, my pulse pounding in my ears. “Eli,” I thought to myself. “It’s just the pipes. Or a branch hitting the side of the house. Something normal.”

But it wasn’t.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

This time, it came from the closet. The air in my room turned cold, heavy, like I’d just stepped into a meat locker. I’d lived in this house my whole life. I knew its sounds, its creaks and groans. This wasn’t one of them.

I got up, heart hammering, and opened the closet door. Nothing. Just rows of hanging clothes swaying slightly, as if disturbed by a passing breeze.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Now it was coming from the window. But outside, there was nothing but the empty yard, slick with rain.

I didn’t sleep that night. I stayed in the corner of the room, knees pulled to my chest, and waited for dawn.

The knocking hasn’t stopped. Sometimes it’s soft, a faint tapping on the bathroom mirror. Other times it’s loud enough to shake the walls. Always three knocks. Always somewhere just out of sight.

I’ve tried knocking back. It doesn’t help. If anything, it seems to make it more persistent. More eager.

I don’t know what it wants. But I think it’s waiting for me to slip up again. To think of something bad and forget to knock. Or maybe it’s just reminding me that no matter how careful I am, I can’t keep it away forever.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

That was the front door.

I’m not expecting anyone.

There’s a small antique shop in the middle of town, tucked between a laundromat that smells faintly of detergent and damp carpet and a café no one ever seems to visit. It doesn’t have a name, just a hand-painted sign above the door that says, “Come In, Come Out.” Most people assume it’s a thrift store or some old woman’s junk shop. Hardly anyone notices it unless they’re lost or curious or desperate.

Ellie wasn’t desperate. Not yet, anyway. She was on her way home from her shift at the diner, her apron still smelling of grease and syrup, when she noticed the shop. She couldn’t recall seeing it before, though she’d walked that street a hundred times. The lights inside were dim, casting the interior in a warm, golden glow. Against her better judgment, she pushed open the heavy oak door. A bell tinkled softly above her, the kind of sound that felt too delicate to belong in a place that smelled like old wood and mildew.

Inside, it was cluttered but not dirty, the air thick with dust motes and the faint scent of something sweet and metallic. Shelves lined the walls, sagging under the weight of books, porcelain dolls, mismatched tea sets, and strange little knick-knacks that didn’t seem to belong anywhere else.

“Looking for something?” The voice startled her. Ellie turned and saw a man standing behind a counter she hadn’t noticed. He wasn’t old, but his face had the kind of stillness that made it hard to tell his age. His smile was thin, almost apologetic.

“Just browsing,” Ellie said, though she didn’t know why she stayed. She should have left right then, but her feet felt heavy, like the floor was tilting ever so slightly forward, urging her to step deeper into the shop.

“Take your time,” the man said, and then he disappeared into the back, leaving her alone. Ellie wandered the aisles, her fingers brushing over cracked leather spines and tarnished silver. Something about the shop felt wrong, though she couldn’t put her finger on it. The objects seemed… watchful, like they were waiting for her to do something.

Then she saw it.

It was a small box, no bigger than her palm, sitting on a shelf between a chipped ashtray and a stack of faded postcards. The box was plain, unadorned, except for a tiny inscription on the lid: A Blessing, for You.

She picked it up. It was lighter than she expected, and when she opened it, she found a single slip of paper inside. In looping handwriting, it read:

One wish granted. Use wisely.

Ellie laughed under her breath. It was some kind of gimmick, a joke. But the moment she held the box, a strange warmth spread through her chest. Her exhaustion melted away, her headache from the lunch rush faded, and for the first time in weeks, she felt… good. She set the box down and backed away.

“Do you like it?” The man’s voice made her jump. He was behind her again, his hands folded neatly in front of him.

“It’s, uh, interesting,” Ellie said.

“It’s a blessing,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “A little something to help with life’s burdens.”

“How much?” Ellie didn’t know why she asked. She didn’t want the box, didn’t want the strange, creeping feeling that came with it, but the question slipped out of her mouth like it wasn’t hers.

“For you? Nothing,” the man said. “A gift.”

Ellie hesitated but took the box. She stuffed it into her bag and hurried out of the shop, the bell’s soft chime following her into the street.

That night, as Ellie lay in bed, the box sat on her nightstand, its plain surface catching the faint light from her lamp. She told herself it was stupid, childish even, to believe in something as ridiculous as a wish. But as the minutes ticked by, her curiosity gnawed at her. She opened the box. The slip of paper was still there, the ink shimmering faintly.

One wish granted. Use wisely.

Ellie thought about her bills, her overdue rent, her crappy car that barely started in the mornings. She thought about her boss, who snapped his fingers at her like she was a dog.

“I wish for a better life,” she whispered.

The paper dissolved in her hand.

The next morning, Ellie woke to silence. No creaking pipes, no distant hum of traffic. She rolled over and saw that her room was… different. The peeling wallpaper was gone, replaced by fresh paint. Her thrift store dresser had been replaced by something sleek and expensive-looking.

Her phone buzzed on the bedside table.

“Ellie!” It was her boss’s voice. Except he didn’t sound angry or impatient. “We’re so excited to see you at the meeting today. Don’t forget, you’re leading the presentation!”

“What?” she croaked, but he had already hung up.

The rest of the day was a blur. Her diner uniform was gone, replaced by crisp business attire. Her car was no longer the rusted clunker she’d been driving for years. People treated her differently, smiling and nodding, calling her “Ms. Harper” with a strange deference.

At first, she thought it was a dream. But as the hours passed, the truth sank in: her wish had come true.

But the box hadn’t warned her about the cost.

That night, Ellie found the box back on her nightstand, though she didn’t remember bringing it home. It looked… different. Darker, heavier. When she opened it, the slip of paper was there again, but the handwriting was different this time, shakier.

Every blessing has its price.

The whispers started soon after.

Soft at first, like wind through the trees. But they grew louder, more insistent. Ellie heard them in the shower, in the hum of her car’s engine, in the dead silence of her apartment.

It’s not yours. None of it is yours.

The whispers were right. The life wasn’t hers. It was someone’s, though she didn’t know whose. At work, people would sometimes stare at her, their faces blank and unfocused, like they were trying to remember something.

And then, one by one, they began to disappear.

Her boss didn’t show up for the Monday meeting. Her neighbor’s apartment was suddenly vacant, though Ellie could have sworn she’d seen the woman just the day before. Each time someone vanished, Ellie found another slip of paper in the box.

Debt collected.

She tried to return it, to take the box back to the shop, but the shop was gone. The space between the laundromat and the café was nothing but a narrow alley now, choked with weeds and broken glass.

Ellie smashed the box with a hammer, burned it in her kitchen sink, even tried to bury it in the woods. But every morning, it was back on her nightstand, waiting for her. And the whispers never stopped.

One night, as the shadows in her apartment grew long and the air grew thick with the smell of sweet, metallic decay, Ellie heard a new voice among the whispers.

“Make another wish,” it said, low and honeyed.

Ellie stared at the box, her hands trembling.

Because she knew, deep down, that the only way out was through.

Thomas always knew he was perfect. Not in the way a child might claim to be the best at a game, but in a quiet, unshakable certainty that seemed to have settled into his bones since before he could remember.

They’d sit at the dinner table and tell him he could be anything, do anything, and when they looked at him, they saw a kind of magic, a promise of something extraordinary. 

Thomas didn’t just believe it. He knew it. The world had been laid out for him like an open book, and he was its perfect protagonist. But in the back of his mind, there was always the question: What is it that I’m meant to find?

By the time Thomas hit his twenties, he’d earned everything society told him he should desire. A prestigious career. Friends who laughed at his jokes. Money that came in such abundance it no longer felt like something to strive for. And yet, when he sat alone in his penthouse apartment, gazing out at the city lights below, a strange emptiness gnawed at him. A persistent, elusive feeling that no accomplishment, no matter how grand, could fill. It was something deeper. Something that couldn’t be named. And the harder he searched, the more distant it seemed.

In the beginning, he’d brushed it off. Perfect, he thought. I’m perfect. I’ve always been perfect. Surely, the world was simply playing a trick on him. But that trick didn’t stop. It followed him like an insistent whisper at the edge of his mind, growing louder, more urgent. What am I missing? he would ask, but the question hung in the air like a ghost that refused to speak.

It was on a rain-soaked night, as he walked through the city streets in a fog of indecision, that he saw the door.

It wasn’t a door he recognized, not even in the usual places. It appeared suddenly in the alley behind a pub he’d passed hundreds of times, standing tall and dark against the drizzling rain. There were no signs, no handles, just a door framed in shadows, like it had always been there, waiting for him. In that strange way of things that feel both unsettling and inevitable, he approached.

As his hand touched the cold, smooth wood, a tremor ran through him. He hesitated, but only for a moment, before pushing the door open. The room beyond was so dark, so thick with shadows, that he could not see a thing. Yet, as soon as his foot crossed the threshold, the world outside disappeared. No rain. No street. Only a vast expanse of darkness. A sky, without stars. A silence so deep it pressed against his ears.

But then, from the void, a voice. It wasn’t a whisper, but a melody, haunting and familiar. “Thomas.”

He froze.

“You’ve been looking for something,” the voice said, not from one place, but all around him. “For something that’s always been here.”

Thomas opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. The voice seemed to know his thoughts, to read them like an open book. It hummed a soft, eerie tune, and he felt a presence growing beside him, just out of sight. His skin prickled with cold, and in the silence, his own breathing was the loudest thing he could hear.

And then he saw it. Or, rather, saw him. 

Standing before him was a figure, the outline of a boy, but one who looked like he could have stepped out of a forgotten memory. He was young—too young—but the same age Thomas had been when he first thought he was perfect. His eyes glowed faintly in the darkness, sharp and piercing, but empty, as though they had once seen something too horrifying to understand.

“You,” Thomas whispered, but the boy didn’t answer. Instead, he raised his hand, and with it, the world around them began to shimmer, as though it were made of smoke, twisting and bending like liquid. Shapes began to take form—too quickly for Thomas to process—and suddenly, he was standing in a place he couldn’t recognize, a realm between places, somewhere in the world and somewhere out of it.

“This is the space between,” the boy said, and though his voice remained soft, there was something otherworldly about it now. “The place where things that should have been fall through the cracks. You’re searching for the piece of you that slipped through.”

Thomas looked around. The air was thick with memories—his memories, but twisted. He saw himself as a child, his hands dirty from playing in the mud. He saw himself at a family dinner, laughing with his parents. He saw moments he didn’t remember, parts of his life that shouldn’t have been there, yet they all felt… real.

“I was perfect,” Thomas said, his voice a fragile thread, barely clinging to his confidence. “I always knew I was perfect.”

The boy tilted his head, eyes narrowing. “You were perfect, yes. But you weren’t whole. And that’s what you’ve been searching for. The pieces of you that you lost in the wanting.”

Thomas took a step forward, but the ground shifted beneath him, swirling like quicksand. “What do you mean? What is this place?”

The boy smiled, a smile that seemed to stretch, unnatural, as the world around them began to blur even more. “This is where everything you wanted goes… when you don’t know what you need.”

The shadows began to consume them both, growing and twisting, until Thomas couldn’t tell which way was up. The boy’s figure flickered like a candle in the wind.

“Are you me?” Thomas asked, his voice trembling now, his mind unraveling at the edges.

The boy’s eyes glinted, as if he had known this question would come, but the answer was not what Thomas expected.

“No,” the boy said, his voice fading. “But I was what you were always afraid of.”

The last thing Thomas heard before the world folded in on itself was the boy’s voice, distant but somehow close, whispering a final riddle:

“Perfect is never complete.”

Curiosity killed the cat. Or so they say. But for Clara, it wasn’t curiosity that got her into trouble. It was a simple mistake—a flick of the wrist, a careless gesture, something as small as the rice she threw down the drain. It should’ve been forgotten by now, the kind of thing that vanishes the moment the water swallows it up. But nothing disappears so easily, not in this world, and certainly not in the other one.

It started on a Tuesday. Clara had spent the whole afternoon in her cramped kitchen, cooking dinner for herself. The stove hissed and the clock ticked too loudly. She hadn’t been paying attention when the rice overflowed—just one of those tiny things, a slip, a little accident. So, she grabbed the bowl, leaned over the sink, and without a second thought, tossed the excess rice into the drain.

That’s when it happened.

The drain didn’t swallow the rice like it was supposed to. It spat it back out, a small sound, like a strangled gasp. 

The rice piled up at her feet, too much for her sink, too much for her world. Clara froze, staring at the strange mound of rice. It was a lot. Too much, considering how small the pot had been. She bent down to scoop it up but stopped when something shifted beneath the surface—like the way a shadow moves when you’re not looking directly at it.

A low, almost imperceptible hum filled the room.

“That’s odd,” Clara murmured, but the words felt heavy. She glanced around, as if the walls might be watching her. She shook her head, trying to dismiss it. Rice doesn’t hum. It doesn’t move. But in that moment, it seemed to pulse with life, like a thousand tiny hearts beating in unison.

Clara didn’t know it then, but that rice had come from a place she couldn’t see, a place that didn’t belong in her world. The world beneath the drain.

And she had opened a door.

The next day, things started changing. Tiny things at first—no big deal. The bread didn’t taste like bread. It tasted like something… else. Not sour, but wrong in a way that made her stomach twist. Her reflection in the mirror—her eyes, they were too wide, too eager, like something was pushing its way out from behind them. The shadows seemed to whisper her name.

At night, the hum returned. Faint at first, but louder every time she went near the sink. By Thursday, the air in the kitchen had turned thick, as if the room had grown too small for her, too close. And when she opened the drain, she saw it—beneath the metal grate, just beyond reach—a flicker of movement. Something watching her from the depths.

“Hello?” she whispered, leaning closer, but the word tasted wrong on her tongue.

And then it appeared.

Not a thing, not a person. Not a shape, really. Just… a presence, a wave of cold that sucked the warmth from the room. It was like staring into a storm cloud, and she knew in her bones—this thing didn’t belong. 

She should have backed away, should’ve slammed the cupboard door shut, but something inside her, something deep and buried, urged her to reach deeper.

She reached for the drain.

Her fingers brushed the cold, metal edge… and everything shifted.

The world around her cracked, like glass splintering in slow motion. She could hear the high-pitched whine, the hum that was now deafening. The rice, all of it, began to wriggle and shift on its own, each grain becoming a crawling thing. And the voices—so many voices, all whispering in languages she couldn’t understand—echoed in her ears.

Suddenly, there was a figure. Not a human figure, not entirely. A silhouette, made of shifting shadows and light, something else. It reached out, its hand too long, too thin, and it spoke, its voice echoing deep inside her skull.

“You shouldn’t have thrown it away.”

Clara’s heart hammered in her chest. “What are you?” she whispered, but the words felt like they were stolen from her mouth.

The figure didn’t answer. It didn’t need to. It leaned closer, and for a moment, Clara could see its face, if you could call it that. It was a patchwork of everything—eyes, but not human ones. Teeth, but not the kind you could bite with. A mouth, wide and endless, stretching impossibly.

“You released us,” it said, its voice soft but sharp, like nails dragging across glass. “You opened the door, and now we will collect.”

Before she could move, the room around her buckled and the world flickered. Everything spun, her kitchen, her apartment, her very existence—and then there was nothing.

When Clara woke up, the drain was empty. The rice was gone, the hum was silent, and everything seemed… normal. But it wasn’t. She could feel it now, deep inside her, the echo of what she had let loose, the thing that had followed her back.

And that’s when she knew the truth. 

Curiosity had killed the cat. But the rice—that rice?  It had killed much more.

It began as something Claire barely noticed. The first night, she thought it was nothing. Mark had never talked in his sleep before, but people develop strange habits over time. Stress, maybe. She was scrolling through her phone in bed when she heard him murmur, “No. Not yet.”

She glanced over at him. Mark was fast asleep, his chest rising and falling in the rhythm of deep rest. She smiled to herself and went back to scrolling.

The second night was different. Claire was half-asleep, drifting on the edge of dreams, when Mark spoke again. His voice, low and steady, said, “They’ll notice soon.” She froze, blinking into the darkness.

“Mark?” she whispered, but he didn’t respond. He lay still, his breathing even. Then he spoke again, this time quieter, but with the same deliberate tone. “They’re always watching. Waiting for someone to slip.”

Claire leaned over and shook his shoulder gently. “Mark, wake up. You’re dreaming.”

But Mark didn’t wake. His face was serene, and his lips curved into a faint, unsettling smile as he said, “Don’t let them see you.” Claire pulled back, her pulse quickening. She stared at him, waiting for more, but the room went silent again.

In the morning, she mentioned it at breakfast. “You were talking in your sleep again,” she said, her voice light. She didn’t want to sound too alarmed.

Mark shrugged. “That’s weird. I don’t do that.”

“You were saying some strange things.”

He looked at her, amused. “What kind of things?”

“Something about someone watching. It didn’t make any sense.”

“Probably just a dream,” he said, brushing it off. “You know how work’s been lately. Stress can do weird things.”

Claire nodded, though the memory of his words lingered in her mind. She tried to forget about it, to convince herself it didn’t mean anything.

As the week went on, Mark’s sleep-talking became a nightly event. At first, it was just fragments, words that could have meant anything: “Not yet,” or, “It’s under there.” But soon, the phrases became sharper, stranger. One night, he murmured, “Don’t open it. If you touch it, it’ll know.” Another night, it was, “They’re in the walls. They know you’re listening.”

The worst was when he said her name.

“Claire,” he whispered in the dark. “They’re watching you now.”

Her blood ran cold. She turned to him, shaking him awake. He groaned and opened his eyes, bleary and confused.

“You said my name,” she said, her voice shaking. “You were talking in your sleep again.”

“So? People talk in their sleep.” “Not like this,” she insisted. “You keep saying these… creepy things.”

Mark frowned. “It’s just dreams, Claire. You’re overthinking it.”

But Claire couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. She started staying up later, trying to catch the exact moment when he began talking. Each night, his words became more detailed, more unsettling. He spoke of things that made no sense—places they’d never been, people she didn’t know. And always, always, there was a warning.

“It’s getting closer,” he said one night. “You shouldn’t have listened.”

By the second week, Claire noticed other things. Mark began acting differently, even when he was awake. He’d zone out mid-conversation, staring at nothing. Sometimes, he’d hum a strange tune under his breath, one she didn’t recognize. He seemed… distant, like a different person wearing his face.

The noises started shortly after. At first, they were faint: the soft creak of floorboards, the distant sound of footsteps in the hallway. She dismissed them as the house settling. But as the nights went on, the sounds grew louder, more deliberate.

One night, while Claire lay in the guest room trying to sleep, she heard Mark’s voice drifting down the hall. “They’re here now,” he said.

Her heart raced. She sat up, clutching the blanket. The sound came again, clear and deliberate.

“They’re waiting for you.”

Claire crept toward the bedroom, her phone clutched tightly in her hand. The hall was dark, the kind of dark that felt heavy, alive. As she reached the door, she saw Mark standing by the window.

“Mark?” she whispered.

He didn’t turn around. His shoulders were hunched, his head tilted at an unnatural angle.

“Mark, what are you doing?”

Slowly, he turned to face her. His eyes were open, but they weren’t his eyes. They were blank, like something else was looking out from behind them. His lips curled into a faint smile.

“You shouldn’t have listened,” he said, his voice hollow and strange. Before she could move, the lights flickered and went out.

The next morning, the neighbors called the police when they noticed the front door standing wide open.

Inside, the house was empty. Mark’s phone was still on the kitchen table, Claire’s keys hanging neatly by the door. But neither of them was there.

In the bedroom, scrawled across the walls in jagged black letters, were the words:

“DON’T LISTEN.”

They told him it was pneumonia. Something small at first, but it crept in, insidious. Henry Marlow sat in the hospice bed, the white sheets wrapped around his shrinking frame like a shroud.

The air smelled faintly of antiseptic and lavender, the latter courtesy of the nurse who came in once a day to hum cheerful tunes and remind him to eat. He never did. Food felt unnecessary now, a weight he no longer needed to carry. The weight that mattered was elsewhere.

It was the candles that brought the realization.

His granddaughter, Emily, came by one afternoon holding a cupcake. She had a sweet, stubborn smile, and her face was streaked with the grime of playground adventures. The cupcake had a single candle, stuck crookedly into the frosting, and a matchbook dangling between her small fingers.

“Make a wish, Grandpa,” she chirped.

He stared at the candle. One solitary flame waiting to exist, waiting for him to bring it into the world. His chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with his lungs.

The memory came, sharp and unbidden. He was five, standing at the head of the table, his father’s booming laugh filling the room as a cake covered in flickering candles was placed before him. Henry had stared at the flames, the golden points trembling slightly in the summer breeze sneaking through the open window. His mother told him to blow them out and make a wish. But he didn’t want to. The idea of extinguishing something so alive, so bright, had filled him with an unnamed dread. He refused, and his father grumbled, his mother sighed, and eventually, the candles had been pinched out by impatient fingers.

That was the first time.

Over the years, there were other birthdays. Some he remembered, others blurred together like smudged ink. Each one followed a similar pattern: the cake, the candles, the chorus of voices urging him to blow them out. Sometimes, he did. But not always.

Sometimes he made an excuse—a headache, too much fuss, no time for wishes. The candles would remain unlit, sitting like silent accusations on cakes that grew larger with age.

As Emily’s candle flickered to life in front of him, something cold curled around his spine.

“Grandpa, you’re supposed to blow it out,” Emily said, her voice pulling him back to the room.

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

That night, Henry dreamed of flames. Not bright and cheerful, but dull and sullen, burning low in a room that stretched endlessly into the dark. Each flame was perched on a cake he recognized from years past—cakes with uneven frosting, cakes from forgotten office parties, cakes baked hastily by his ex-wife when their marriage was still warm enough to make such gestures.

The flames were waiting.

Henry woke gasping, his chest heaving against the weight of something invisible and oppressive. He could feel them now, the unlit candles of his past. Not just candles but moments, choices. The times he had turned away, refused to engage, let the world’s smallest celebrations pass by unmarked.

The first real consequence came the next morning.

The nurse entered the room to find Henry’s breakfast tray untouched, as usual, but this time the coffee mug had a faint scorch mark on its handle, as if it had been briefly exposed to an open flame. She muttered about faulty machines, swapped out the mug, and thought no more of it. But Henry noticed.

By the end of the week, the scorch marks were on his sheets, the bedframe, even the walls. They spread slowly at first, little singes like the touch of an impatient match, but they grew bolder with each passing day.

When Emily visited again, she brought a photograph she had drawn in school. It was simple—a cake with candles, a figure blowing them out. Henry stared at it for a long time.

“I’ve been thinking about the candles,” he told her. Emily tilted her head. “The ones on your cake?”

“Yes. Do you think it matters if you don’t light and blow them out yourself?”

She laughed, a small, carefree sound that made him ache. “No, Grandpa. It’s just a game.”

But it wasn’t. He knew it now, knew it deep in the marrow of his brittle bones. The candles weren’t just candles. They were moments of life, connections, opportunities to make a wish, to claim something, however fleeting, for himself. Every time he had left them unlit, every time he had turned away, he had left something undone.

The scorch marks became burns. His pillow smoldered one evening, filling the room with the acrid smell of ash before he swatted it away with trembling hands. The flames were growing bolder, hungrier.

By the second week, Henry stopped sleeping. He could feel the heat at the edges of his consciousness, hear the crackling in the silence of the night. They were coming for him, all the unlit flames, all the ignored wishes.

When the nurse brought his dinner one evening, he asked her for a candle.

She frowned. “A candle? What for?”

“Just bring one,” he rasped. “Please.”

She returned with a small white taper, puzzled but obliging. Henry lit it with the trembling matchstick hands of a man desperate for absolution.

The flame flickered to life, and for a moment, the room grew unbearably bright. He stared into it, his vision swimming with shapes he couldn’t quite grasp—faces, places, fragments of things that might have been.

He blew it out. For the first time in weeks, Henry Marlow slept.

But when he woke, the scorch marks were gone, replaced by something worse.

Shadows danced on the walls, shifting and stretching like living things. Each shadow bore the faint outline of a candle, a flame unlit. They were everywhere—on the ceiling, the floor, the windows. His life etched in shades of black.

There was no escape now. The unlit and unblown by the celebrant are candles that were deprived of being a part of ones memories. And every year missed has consequences.

And they will come to collect, on your last few moments.

There was once a star, or so the old stories said, though nobody could quite remember its name. It wasn’t a brilliant thing, like the ones that dotted the constellations or ignited the imaginations of dreamers. 

This one was different. It hung in the sky, unnoticed, tucked between shapes and constellations that were known to the world but forgotten by time. There it sat, still and silent, hardly ever remembered, and yet never truly gone.

At first, people noticed it—some, anyway. There were whispers of a star that didn’t quite fit. It didn’t shine the way the others did; its light was faint, fragile, like the memory of something lost. 

They called it “The Forgotten Light,” but the name never quite captured it. They searched for it, but it was never quite where they thought it should be, and eventually, they gave up, as people tend to do when something doesn’t quite belong.

And so the Forgotten Light was forgotten. Not by the sky, of course. The sky never forgets. It waited.

The truth was, the star had never really been lost. It had just been waiting for something—or someone. The kind of person who would understand its riddle, the one who could see beyond the surface of things. 

But it didn’t want a hero or a great discovery. 

It just wanted to be remembered.

But you wouldn’t find the star through a telescope or a dream. It was more than that. No one knew this, not even the most experienced astronomers.

Then, one night, a strange thing happened. 

The star, that forgotten thing, flickered—not like a dying flame, but like a secret just about to spill out. And from somewhere, a cat appeared. Not an extraordinary cat—just a black one with a tail that curled in three neat stripes. It had been around for a while, probably, but nobody had paid it much attention.

It sat, unremarkable, staring into the sky with eyes that glittered in the moonlight. For a long time, it had gazed at the stars, the constellations that people knew by heart. But tonight, its eyes caught something else. 

Something faint. A glow. The star.

For a moment, the cat blinked. And then, something happened. A small shiver rippled across the world—an odd twist in time, barely noticeable to anyone else. The cat’s fur bristled, and its gaze hardened. 

For just a moment, it wasn’t a cat at all. It was something else, something ancient. And as it meowed, soft and low, the star—The Forgotten Light—shifted.

The world didn’t end, and the heavens didn’t crack open. But something strange happened. 

Something changed.

The star didn’t fade away. Threads of light began to snap and drift into the air, not fading, but scattering, breaking into pieces that seemed to stretch across the edges of time. It wasn’t the end of the star; it was its beginning—again, and again, and again.

The cat’s task was complete. It turned, its three-striped tail flicking in the quiet night. And in the distance, the star was gone, shattered into a million fragments of light and shadow, splintering across time in ways no human could understand.

The cat walked away into the darkness, leaving no trace. But somewhere, if you listened closely enough, you could hear the whisper of a memory. 

A forgotten light. A secret star. 

A cat who had seen it all.

And it would never be remembered again. 

Not until it was needed, for there are things that wait. And sometimes, when you least expect it, you’re part of something that’s already been.