Author: Louee Gonzales

This town’s mirrors were not like any others. They did not reflect the present. They showed the future. The townsfolk called them “smart mirrors,” though no one knew who had coined the term.

No one could say exactly when or how they appeared. One day, they simply were—sleek, obsidian rectangles hanging in every home, their surfaces gleaming like liquid night.

At first, it was a marvel. Each morning, as the mist clung to the ground like a burial shroud, the people of Millbury would gather before their mirrors, their breath fogging the glass as they peered into what lay ahead. Glimpses of joy, of love, of lives unfolding in sunlit perfection.

A child’s first steps.

A wedding ring slipped onto a trembling finger.

A promotion, a retirement, a life well-lived.

But as the days grew shorter and the nights colder, the reflections began to twist.

The mirrors, once heralded as gifts, became curses. They showed not just what could be, but what would be. A car skidding off a rain-slick road. A cough that wouldn’t go away, deepening into something darker. Faces twisted in rage, hands slick with blood. The townsfolk recoiled, covering the mirrors with sheets, smashing them to shards. But the whispers began—soft at first, like the rustle of dead leaves, then louder, more insistent. They slithered through the cracks, coiled around thoughts, and burrowed deep.

And then there was Eleanor.

Eleanor lived on the outskirts of Millbury, in a house that seemed to hold its breath. Her mirror was different. Silent. Empty. While others saw their fates unfold in vivid, horrifying detail, Eleanor’s mirror showed only her—her face, her room, the quiet stillness of her life. It was a refuge, a sanctuary from the chaos that gripped the town. But then, one evening, the whispers began.

At first, they were faint, almost imperceptible. A murmur here, a sigh there. Eleanor would turn, expecting to find someone in the room, but there was only the mirror, its surface dark and unyielding. The whispers grew louder, more insistent. They didn’t show her the future; they spoke it. Fragmented words, half-formed sentences, slipping through the glass like secrets too heavy to keep. “Watch,” they hissed. “Listen.”

Eleanor couldn’t look away. The mirror, once a blank slate, now pulsed with a strange, otherworldly energy. It drew her in, not with images, but with sound. The whispers became voices, layered and overlapping, each one carrying a fragment of truth, a shard of something vast and unknowable. They spoke of things Eleanor had buried deep within herself—fears, regrets, the hollow ache of a life half-lived. They spoke of the cracks in the world, the thin places where reality frayed and bled.

The town descended into madness. Neighbors turned on each other, their faces pale and haunted, their eyes darting to the covered mirrors as if they might come alive at any moment. But Eleanor’s mirror remained uncovered. She couldn’t bring herself to hide it, not when it seemed to hold the key to something she couldn’t quite grasp. The voices grew louder, more urgent. They called her name, beckoned her closer, until one night, she pressed her ear to the glass.

The cold seeped into her skin, and the whispers became a roar. In that moment, she understood. The mirror wasn’t empty.

It was full—overflowing with possibilities, with paths not taken, with lives unlived.

It wasn’t showing her the future; it was showing her herself.

A thousand Eleanors stared back, their eyes wide with knowledge, their lips moving in silent unison.

They were her, and yet they were not.

They were the echoes of choices unmade, of roads untraveled, of a life that could have been—or might still be.

The townsfolk whispered of Eleanor, of the woman who stared into the void and found herself staring back. They said her mirror was cursed, that it held a power too great for any one person to bear. But Eleanor knew the truth. The mirror wasn’t cursed. It was a mirror, nothing more. And yet, it was everything. It was the past, the present, the future. It was the question and the answer, the whisper and the silence.

In the heart of Millbury, where the woods whispered and the mirrors watched, Eleanor’s house stood as a beacon, a place where the line between reality and reflection blurred. And in the depths of the glass, the voices still called, soft and insistent, weaving a tapestry of truths too vast to comprehend. For in the end, the mirror didn’t show the future. It showed what had always been there, waiting to be seen.

But as the days passed, something changed. The whispers grew louder, more urgent, more desperate. They began to speak of things Eleanor had never known, of places she had never been, of people she had never met. They spoke of a door, hidden deep within the mirror, a door that led to a place beyond time, beyond reality.

And they begged her to open it.

Eleanor hesitated. She had seen what the mirrors could do, the chaos they could unleash. But the voices were insistent, their pleas growing more frantic with each passing day. And so, one night, with the wind howling like a banshee outside her window, Eleanor reached out and touched the glass.

The surface rippled like water, and for a moment, Eleanor felt herself falling, tumbling through darkness and light, through time and space. And then she was there, standing before the door. It was old, its surface carved with symbols that seemed to shift and writhe as she watched. The whispers were deafening now, a cacophony of voices urging her forward.

With trembling hands, Eleanor reached out and turned the handle. The door swung open, revealing a void so vast and empty it made her heart ache. And then, from the darkness, something emerged. It was formless, shapeless, a thing of shadows and whispers. It reached out to her, its touch cold and electric, and in that moment, Eleanor understood.

The mirrors had never been about the future. They had been a warning, a plea for help from something trapped beyond the glass. And now, it was free.

The last thing Eleanor saw before the darkness consumed her was her reflection in the mirror, her face twisted in a scream that never reached her lips.

Losing your parents in your twenties feels like being trapped in someone else’s story. You didn’t ask for this plotline, and yet, here you are. The world keeps moving—people keep living their lives—but something is missing. Something fundamental is absent, and it’s a gap you can never fill.

The loss doesn’t strike you once, like a lightning bolt. No, it’s subtle. It lingers in the corners of your mind, in the shadows where you used to think you knew what was real. It comes when you wake up in the morning, ready for the world, only to be slapped with the knowledge that you don’t have the luxury of calling them anymore. The phone feels too heavy in your hand. You don’t realize it until you reach for it, fingers already dialing, that you’ll never hear their voices again.

But it’s the empty spaces that get you. The silence where their laughter used to be. The absence that lingers like a pressure in your chest. It’s the little things, the minutiae of life, that come crashing down in those quiet moments. You realize you don’t remember the last conversation you had with them. You don’t know exactly when you said goodbye—when that last word fell between you, unspoken, unnoticed. It’s gone, slipping from your memory as if it was never there at all. And the world tilts.

Nothing feels right. You reach for the routine, try to hold onto the habits, but even those are becoming unfamiliar, like clothing that’s too tight or shoes that pinch your feet. You can hear their voices in the back of your mind, but they’re muffled now, distant echoes that seem to disappear before you can catch them. Their faces start to blur, their gestures fading. The things they used to do, the way they moved—those things are slipping away, vanishing as the days go on.

Sometimes, it feels like you’re drowning in that absence. The grief is not loud, not a sudden storm, but a steady, suffocating pressure that doesn’t let up. It’s not sadness—it’s emptiness. A vacuum where they used to be. It’s the silence after you forget to call them, the days you forget their favorite songs. It’s the way everything in your world starts to feel hollow, like the shell of a house after it’s burned down, the framework remaining but no heart, no life.

Your friends try to console you. They say the things that people say in these moments: “It’s what they would’ve wanted. They wouldn’t want you to be sad.” But the words never make it past your skin. They feel like something they’ve memorized, like lines in a play they’ve only ever heard about, never truly lived. How do you move on when the world doesn’t feel like it used to? How do you get out of bed when everything feels wrong, like stepping into a world where the rules have changed without you? How do you keep walking when the ground beneath you feels too soft, as if it might give way at any moment?

But you do it. You get up. You keep moving forward because there’s nothing else to do. You put one foot in front of the other and walk through a world that’s familiar but isn’t. Everything around you seems the same, and yet… it’s not. There’s a sense that something has been rearranged. You don’t notice it at first, but it’s like the air tastes different now. And you can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right.

It’s on a night like any other that things start to shift. At first, it’s almost imperceptible. A flicker at the edge of your vision, a brief shadow that’s not quite where it should be. A noise—a whisper—carried on the wind, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there. You laugh at yourself. It’s nothing, of course. Just the remnants of your grief, the fog in your head, the things that linger when you’re not paying attention. But then… there’s a pressure. A pull. You can feel it at the back of your mind. You can’t explain it, but it’s there—an old, familiar tug. You start to follow it, even though you don’t want to. It’s a memory, but not one you remember living. You know it, though. You can feel it in your bones.

And then, it hits you.

They’re here.

Not in the way you thought, not in the way you had hoped. They’re not ghosts, not shadows that haunt the corner of your eye. No, they are here in a way you didn’t expect. You hear their voices—not in the past, but right now. As if they’ve never really left. You can feel their presence, like a pull in your chest, like something unspoken calling you forward.

You don’t understand it at first. How could you? But the moment the realization hits you, you start to walk—no, you start to follow.

Without thinking, without understanding, you let yourself go. The streets outside your door feel familiar but wrong, as if they’ve been twisted just slightly, just enough to disorient you.

When you reach your old house, it looms before you, but it’s not like it was. The windows are too dark, the door creaking open on its own, and as you step inside, everything seems just a little too still. The walls press in on you, the air too thick, the house too heavy, like it’s holding its breath, waiting for something. But it’s not until you turn the corner and find the door—small, almost childlike, slightly ajar—that you know something is very wrong.

You approach, heart pounding, every instinct telling you to turn back. The light spilling from the crack of the door is soft, warm, but you can feel something else in it, something deeper, something that tugs at your insides and makes your skin crawl. The moment you open the door, you step into an endless hallway. It stretches, twisting, and you feel the walls move in on you, too close, too tight.

There’s no escape.

You don’t turn back, though. You’ve come this far, and whatever is waiting ahead, it’s something you have to see. But the hallway is shifting now, and the air is colder than it should be. The voices of your parents are louder now, stronger, but you can’t place where they are. They’re all around you. There’s no escape. It isn’t a door—it’s a trap.

And then you understand.

The absence, the weight of their loss, it’s not something you can fix. It’s not something you can fill. The truth is worse. The emptiness, the void where they used to be—it’s inside you.

You never left.

And so, you stand there, trapped between who you were and who you’re supposed to be, between the love you lost and the life you’re trying to build.

The house isn’t a memory. It isn’t a place. It’s a reflection of your grief. A labyrinth of what you’ve buried. You’ve been walking it your whole life, each step a mark of the things you thought you could outrun.

But in that moment, you understand. You can’t escape it. You can’t forget them. Not really.

And the thing is, you don’t need to.

Because the real door is inside you. The way forward isn’t through the hallway, through the memories, but through accepting the weight. You reach for it, grasp it, and step into the darkness, knowing that the grief you’ve been carrying wasn’t an end. It was the beginning of something else.

You take a breath.

And you keep walking – through the door.

The last house at the edge of town, just past the bridge, was the kind of place no one looked at for too long. The road leading to it was barely more than a memory, half-swallowed by creeping vines and the quiet patience of things left forgotten.

The house itself had always seemed misplaced, hunched beneath the weight of years, its windows dulled with age and grime. It stood as a secret, pressed into the town like an apology no one wanted to explain.

No one lived there. No one ever had. And yet, one morning, someone left a gift on its doorstep. A loaf of bread, golden and warm.

No one knocked. No one was seen. But the bread remained. The next morning, another gift. A porcelain cup of tea, still steaming.

Then a stone, round and smooth. A key, wrapped in fraying string. A ribbon, soft as breath.

No one ever saw who placed them, and no one ever saw who took them. But each morning, without fail, the gifts would be gone.

Then, one night, a lantern appeared.

It flickered weakly in the cold air, its rusted iron frame older than the town itself. The glass was clouded, its flame humming with a light too deep, too knowing.

And for the first time, something answered inside the house. A whisper.“Thank you.”

No one heard it, but the town was different the following day.

The air hung thick with an unspoken weight. The wind did not move. The sky, though clear, felt pressed too close. And the house at the edge of town?

Gone.

Not abandoned. Not ruined. Just… gone. The earth where it had stood was smooth and undisturbed, as though it had never been there at all.

But the gifts kept coming.

Jessica found a note at her door, bound with black ribbon. The words were simple, inked with a hand too steady to be human.

“Thank you.”

Jane, the baker’s daughter, received a golden coin. Mrs. Cranston, the schoolteacher, found a mirror wrapped in velvet. Even Mayor Harrow received a letter—delivered with no hands at all.

And the gifts did something.

The town changed. People smiled more, spoke in softer voices. Mrs. Cranston grew gentler with her students. Jane hummed while kneading dough. The mayor, who once clutched power with greedy fingers, gave more than he took.

The gifts wove something unseen into their lives, something delicate, insidious.

And then, one evening, a man came.

Tall and quiet, wrapped in a cloak of a woven material that seems heavy and thick. A cormorant perched on his shoulder, watching with eyes like the ocean at night.

He stood at the edge of town and spoke in a voice like an echo from deep earth.

“They’ve learned it.”

His gaze moved over the town, and the people felt the weight of something vast, something endless, pressing against their bones.

“Kindness… is not a gift.”

“It is a debt.”

And just as suddenly as he arrived, he was gone. The cormorant shrieked once, then shot into the sky, vanishing into the night.

But from that day on, the gifts never stopped.

People kept receiving them. More notes. More ribbons. More coins, mirrors, keys.

They had no choice but to accept.

Because kindness is a debt. And debts must be paid.

And somewhere, buried beneath their quiet smiles, a question grew.

What happens when the debt is paid in full?

The penny sat on the pavement, lodged in a crack between two slabs of concrete. Tarnished, scratched, ordinary. Lucy almost didn’t notice it. She was late, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, her thoughts tangled in the weight of another disappointing morning.

But she did notice. And that was the first mistake.

She hesitated, staring at it. Something about it felt off—not in a way she could explain, but in a way that curled around the base of her skull like a cold hand.

She bent down. Picked it up.

It was heavier than it should have been. Too cold, as if it had been sitting at the bottom of a well rather than lying in the open. Her thumb grazed the surface. Tiny markings. Words, maybe. Too small to read.

She dropped it into her pocket.

And the world shifted.

Not in a way anyone else would notice. Not in a way that could be measured. But by the time she reached work, her mind felt… crowded. Not with her own thoughts, but with others. Little flickers of intrusion, like static breaking through a radio:

Hope she doesn’t notice I took the last donut.
If my boss asks about the Henderson file, I’ll say I sent it yesterday.
He’s been acting weird lately. Does he know?

The noise built, a rising tide. And then—Greg. Her supervisor, Greg, with his forced smile and stale coffee breath, walked past, and his thought hit her like a fist:

She’s useless. She’ll never be more than this.

The coffee cup slipped from her fingers. The heat of it barely registered.

Greg frowned. “You okay?”

She forced a smile. “Fine.”

She wasn’t fine.

She knew. The penny had given her something.

A curse. A gift. A trap.

It didn’t stop. The thoughts poured in, a ceaseless flood of secrets and regrets. Mia, the receptionist, was drowning in quiet misery: I’ll never get out of this town. The janitor, silent and invisible, was crumbling beneath despair: No one would notice if I disappeared.

And the penny buzzed in her pocket, warm now, alive.

At lunch, her salad rotted in front of her. The clock on the wall ticked wrong, skipping minutes, then hours, then stopping entirely. When she looked outside, the street seemed… stretched. The people moving wrong—too slow, too blurred, like figures in a dream that had begun to unravel.

She went home early.

At the kitchen table, she pulled the penny from her pocket.

“What are you?” she whispered.

The whispers didn’t answer, not in words, but in understanding.

A penny for your thoughts.

That was the rule. The bargain. The price.

It let her hear. But it took, too.

Thoughts were currency, and the penny was always collecting.

She tried to get rid of it.

She threw it out the window. Buried it. Left it in a gutter. But every time, it came back. By morning, it was on her nightstand. By afternoon, in her pocket.

And the whispers were changing. Not just thoughts anymore. Urging. Guiding.

Pick it up. Use it. Let us in.

By the third night, her apartment was wrong. The walls pulsed like living flesh. The shadows watched. The air stank of rot. And the penny sat there, gleaming with something deeper than light.

“What do you want?” she choked out.

The answer came, inevitable as a tolling bell:

Everything.

Lucy was gone by morning.

No missing posters. No concerned coworkers. Just an empty desk.

And a penny.

The janitor found it.

He stood in the dim breakroom, staring down at the coin in his palm. He had seen it before. He had held it before.

And he had buried it before.

Slowly, he turned it over.

The scratches weren’t scratches. They were letters. A name.

Lucy’s name.

His hands trembled.

It had happened again.

For years, he had watched people disappear, one by one. A stray penny. A lost name. A hollow space where a person used to be.

No one noticed. No one remembered.

Except him.

He reached into his pocket, fingers closing around something cold, solid.

A penny.

Another one.

And another.

And another.

His pocket was full of them.

He had been collecting them for years.

And yet, no matter how many he took, no matter how many he buried…

They always came back.

Now it keeps him wondering, was he really meant to find and keep them, or was he a part of something bigger?

She’d seen her in the store, standing by the test aisle. A girl in a black velvet jacket and a red dress, her presence strange against the cold fluorescent lighting. She hadn’t seemed to belong to that place, that sterile, clinical space filled with small boxes promising futures, filled with waiting and hoping. 

Her gaze, intense and far too knowing, met hers for a moment before she turned and disappeared down the aisle, her steps soundless, almost like she was floating. The strange smile the girl wore lingered in her mind long after. 

Not a smile of joy, but something else—a half-secret, something unfinished. 

The encounter felt like a warning, but she had brushed it off.

The next day, the test sat on the bathroom counter, its faint pink line lingering like a half-finished promise. It wasn’t much—a sliver of hope, like a half-formed ghost drifting just out of reach. It was enough, though. The kind of quiet pulse in the air that makes your veins hum with something electric and sharp, a sharpness you can’t quite name. 

A baby. No—the baby. 

The one she’d been waiting for, the one that had haunted the edges of her days. Not the kind of joy that sends you spinning, not yet, but the kind of breath you hold deep in your chest. Like watching a match flicker, trembling, almost snuffed out, but still glowing.

Days blurred. The house, impossibly still, seemed to echo with an emptiness that whispered of something that might have been. The light streaming through the window was golden and soft, filling her with the joy— for a child who had not been born yet.

She tried to ignore the tiny shifts in the world around her. They were subtle, these shifts—too small to speak of, too quiet to name. But she let it be. Let it grow. Because somehow, it felt like the right thing to do.

It wasn’t long before the small signs appeared, the soft tremors in her body that whispered too faintly to be warnings but too persistently to ignore. 

A little cramp. 

A ripple that passed as easily as breath. She let it go. 

She was used to these things, after all. But now she felt the pain. She saw blood. It was alarming  yet there is a strange cadence to it all. Like the world had started humming, and she was the only one who could hear the song.

Then, it came. Not with the force of a storm, but with the silence of a breath held too long. 

The child was gone. 

No scream. 

No wailing. 

Just a soft, muffled absence, as though something important had slipped quietly through her fingers and was never meant to be caught.

A week after losing the baby, the pregnancy test was still in the drawer. A forgotten relic of something that no longer felt real. And yet, the promise—the pink line—lingered, fading now. It felt brittle, as though it might shatter if she dared to touch it.

That afternoon, the sun streamed through the window in bright golden strips, casting shadows that seemed to move of their own accord. She sat in the living room, wrapped in the strange stillness. She has gone to the doctor but she hadn’t told anyone. 

There were no words for what had happened, no language to describe the in-between. 

The absence felt like a secret—a thing the universe had kept hidden, a thing she was never meant to understand.

But then, there was the stir. 

Not in her body. No, this wasn’t her body anymore. It was something else. A sensation like the whisper of wind through curtains, but warmer. 

A shifting in the very air, like something ancient was stirring.

And then she saw it. A figure, thin and tall, stepping out from the shadows. It was neither man nor woman, neither alive nor dead, but something in between—something that existed on the edge of memory and forgotten dreams. It was smiling, though its smile had no teeth, no edges. It was a smile that wasn’t meant for this world, but somehow was.

“You’ve been waiting for something,” the voice came, not from the figure but from everywhere. The walls. The floor. The air. 

“For something that never had a form. Isn’t that funny?”

She tried to speak, but her mouth felt sewn shut. 

She realized, then, that the child—this child, this thing she had been waiting for—was never a child at all. 

It wasn’t a life that had been lost, but a dream. 

A passing thing, a fleeting thing, woven into the fabric of time itself, too delicate to hold, too ethereal to touch.

But there was something. Something left behind. 

Not loss, but change. 

The room felt different now. Like a river finding a new course, soft and flowing. There was something ancient about it, something that had always been here, rearranging itself.

The figure began to fade, its form melting into the very air, becoming part of the room. 

It wasn’t gone, not really. It was simply… everywhere.

“You’ll never understand it,” the figure whispered as it faded.

“Not yet. But you’ll feel it, always, always in the spaces between… that’s where the healing happens.”

And just like that, the room was still again.

She understood then. 

The loss wasn’t an absence—it was a part of something greater. The child hadn’t gone anywhere. It had changed, become something that could never be held, never fully understood. 

But it was there, in the spaces between the words, in the shadows that flickered just out of sight. She would never see it again, but she would always feel it.

There’s a rule about losing things, you know. Everyone’s been there. A sock gone from the dryer. A pen vanished from your desk. A key that was just in your hand. Mundane, irritating, everyday stuff. But Sarah was beginning to notice that for her, it was something more. Something… wrong.

It started with her phone. She’d been sitting at the kitchen table, scrolling through an article about houseplants that purify the air. Her phone buzzed with a low battery warning. She set it down to grab the charger from the counter. When she turned back, the phone was gone.

She froze, her eyes darting around the table. There was nothing on it but the plate from her breakfast. A moment of disbelief passed. She laughed softly, brushing it off. She had probably carried it with her to the counter without realizing.

Except she hadn’t. The counter was bare.

The phone didn’t turn up until three days later. It was on the coffee table, sitting there as if it had been there the whole time, even though she had checked that spot dozens of times. Sarah had laughed then, a high-pitched, nervous sound she didn’t quite recognize as her own.

It happened again.

Her door keys went next. Then her wedding ring. Small things at first. Always disappearing, always reappearing in the same places she’d searched over and over again. Friends laughed when she told them.

“Maybe it’s gremlins,” her friend Ashley said, grinning. “Or maybe you’ve got one of those poltergeists.”

Sarah didn’t laugh. She just smiled and sipped her wine. Poltergeist. Gremlins. Silly words. But sometimes, in the quiet of her house at night, she thought she could feel something there. Something watching her.

Then came the night of the scissors.

She had been working on a sewing project in the spare bedroom. The little lamp on the desk threw out a pale, anemic light. The scissors were heavy, good-quality ones that made a satisfying snick when she cut through fabric. She’d just set them down to adjust the fabric, but when her hand groped for them a second later, the scissors were gone.

Sarah didn’t panic at first. She just looked around, brushing scraps of fabric aside. Nothing. The room was small, no more than ten feet across. The scissors could only be in so many places.

But they weren’t.

She started opening drawers, pulling out spools of thread and half-finished projects. She moved the chair, crouched down to check beneath the desk. By the time she had emptied the wastebasket, her breath was coming in quick, shallow bursts.

“Where are they?” she hissed.

She stepped back, staring at the desk as if she could will the scissors into reappearing. The room felt… different now.

When she turned, she swore she saw something move in the hallway. Just a flicker of motion, gone as soon as her eyes focused on it.

The scissors turned up the next morning, lying neatly in the middle of her bed.

Sarah’s hands shook as she picked them up. She didn’t remember bringing them into the bedroom. She was certain she hadn’t. The thought gnawed at her as she carried the scissors back to the sewing room. Something about the way they lay there, perfectly aligned with the comforter… it felt deliberate. Intentional.

And then things escalated.

It wasn’t just objects going missing anymore. It was sounds. Voices. She’d hear them in the quiet moments, soft murmurs coming from the next room, just out of earshot. Once, she thought she heard her own name.

One night, she woke to the sound of her front door opening and closing. When she ran downstairs, the house was empty, the locks untouched. Another night, she felt a weight on the edge of her bed, like someone sitting there. She didn’t dare look.

She tried to tell Ashley, but the words sounded ridiculous out loud. Instead, she asked, “Do you ever feel like… things go missing on purpose?”

Ashley frowned. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Just… things. Small things.”

“Sounds like you’re stressed,” Ashley said, patting her hand. “It’s probably just your brain playing tricks on you.”

But Sarah’s brain wasn’t the problem. She was sure of that now.

The last time it happened was a week ago. She’d been holding a photo of her parents, one of the few things she had left of them. She set it down for a moment to answer the door, but when she came back, the photo was gone.

It was the last straw. She tore through the house, screaming, pulling furniture apart, throwing books off shelves. The photo didn’t come back.

Not that night.

But the next morning, it was there. Not in a drawer or on a table, but taped to the bathroom mirror. The glass was smeared with something dark and greasy, letters scrawled in jagged lines:

STOP LOOKING.

She doesn’t touch anything now. She lives in the bare minimum of her house, no longer opening drawers or cabinets. But every now and then, she hears it: the faint snick of scissors in the next room, or the low buzz of her phone vibrating somewhere in the walls. Sometimes, she swears she hears laughter.

One night, she woke up to silence so deep it felt unnatural. Her bedroom was bathed in an eerie half-light, though she hadn’t left any lamps on. 

She felt something—a presence—looming at the foot of her bed. She held her breath, heart pounding, and dared to glance down.

There, staring back at her, was herself. A version of her with hollow, sunken eyes and a twisted, mocking smile. The doppelganger held the photo of her parents in one hand and the scissors in the other.

“I told you,” it whispered in her own voice. “Stop looking.”

When she blinked, it was gone. But the scissors were there, stabbed into her mattress. And in her own handwriting, scrawled across the walls, were the words:

YOU CAN’T LOSE WHAT YOU’VE ALREADY GIVEN.

Now, Sarah doesn’t just avoid searching. She’s stopped sleeping altogether because the things she loses come back stranger than before. She knows it’s only a matter of time before she’s the one that disappears.