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.
