In the Shower

Have you ever been taking a shower while alone in the house and felt like something was moving around behind the curtain?

Or watching you?

Did you look up?

Did you catch the very vaguest hint of eyebrows or a tuft of matted, greasy hair above the curtain rod?

That’s not a good idea.

It doesn’t really like it if you see it.

It likes it the most when you’ve got shampoo on your hair, and your eyes are shut tight so your eyes don’t sting.

Or even better, when there’s soap and bubbles all over your soft, pink face.

It likes that the best, because your eyes are clenched so tight, and even if you did want to open them, like, if you heard a soft scratching against the plastic shower curtain, or a rasping of claws on bathroom tile, or the gentle splatter of drool or cum or… god knows what… well, you wouldn’t open your eyes because it’d burn.

Right?

Right.

Don’t open your eyes.

Because if you ever see its face, catch its eyes…

Well. It’ll notice.

The Bwystfel

When I was a child, I lived in Radnorshire, one of seven children and the youngest of six girls. As my parents had six other girls and an infant boy to take care of, they left me to myself, and I ran about like a wild thing. Not that they didn’t love me, but they had other things to do.

I was about five when I began to see the Bwystfel. It roamed about the farm, slipping in the shadows, and the only way to see it was to look for the shapes that were darker than the spaces between stars. Its mad eyes were like coal sparks, it laughed like a goat in pain, and it was always angry. I watched it from a distance: one spring, I saw it kill a nest of sparrows – closing its hands about the nest until the little naked birds smothered on its flesh — one summer, it poisoned the sheep, biting the ewes’ legs until rot and infection ate into their flesh that no about of doctoring could fix. Later, it skulked into the shed and sliced the handyman’s chest open, then danced his blood up the walls and over the rafters. My parents said it was an accident, but knew better. “The Bwystfel did it,” I told my father, and he boxed my ears for being a liar. No one believed me at all. . . except the Bwystfel itself.

It grew angrier. At night, it crept into my room, giggling and ripping the blankets away and pinching me. I shared a bed with two of my sisters – we didn’t all have separate rooms like you do – and when the Bwystfel came, we shivered together, too afraid to move until morning. We were very little girls, and nobody trusted us with a candle, so we had no way to drive the thing away. It tormented us in whispers, calling us names and telling us we were bad children, because our prayers that it would leave us be weren’t answered. My sisters refused to speak a word of it, and they wore the Bwystfel-inflicted bruises like jewellery – saying they’d fallen over or been bitten by the cat.

I decided I would have to find the Bwystfel myself and scare it away. I took the statuette of Florence Nightingale that my mother gave us to hold when we were sick and a stone with a hole in it, both for luck. As it turned out, I would need the luck.

I walked for ages, got lost, and eventually stumbled into a small wooded copse where I had never been before. Under the trees it was cold air, and pine needles and dried leaves lay thick upon the patchy grass. I clutch Florence. . . and then I saw the bones.

Bleached and ancient, they lay scattered in a circle: small bones, large bones, bones half buried in the loam, bones with scraps of dried flesh still clinging to them. A sheep skeleton hung suspended in the tangle of a blackberry bush, and canes had grown through the eye sockets of birds. I started to cry – I knew I’d found the den of the Bwystfel.

The Bwystfel appeared from nowhere, crouched down on the tawny grass like a cat about to pounce. The ivory of the bones jutted up around it like little fingers, clawing, trying to drag it down. “You’d better run, small girl,” the Bwystfel hissed. “Better run, or your brother-boy will break his bones, snap-snap.” It vanished, only to appear again, behind me. Terrified, I flung my lucky stone at it; the stone passed right through its head, and the ghoul screamed.

I’d seen enough. I bolted, dropping Florence, rushing headlong towards where I thought the nearest road should be. Once there, I kept going, my skirt ripped to ribbons by thorns and my legs stung with nettles, until, turning a corner, I ran smack into my grandfather. He was a big man, my grandfather, and he swung me off my feet and held me as I sobbed.

“What’s wrong, darling?” he asked, when I calmed some. I told him of the Bwystfel and what it had said, and instead of being angry, as my father had been, he listened. His brow furrowed. “Are you feeling brave, darling? Do you think you could be brave for me?” When I nodded, he had me show him were I’d gone – then he sat me on a bank and gave me his best silver snuff box to hold. “I’m going after the Bwystfel,” he told her. “You stay here in the sunshine and I’ll be back soon. If any bad bwcy comes, you hit it with that.”

So I waited, shaking, afraid for my granddaddy and afraid of the Bwystfel and afraid of what Mother would do if I lost Florence. Finally, back Grandad came; flushed, and bleeding from a hundred cuts on his hands. He looked angry, more angry then I’d ever seen him, for he was the mildest of men. “The Bwystfel-beast is dead again,” he told me, “and under the soil where it belongs.” He spat upon the earth and ground the moisture in with his boot heel.

“What do you mean, dead again?” I asked.

Grandad was quiet for a time, then he said. “The Bwystfel was a damned one who hurt small things because he loved pain. When I was a boy, Old Thomas killed him, but Young Thomas found where he lay and let him out. I’ll sort him out for good soon and he won’t bother you any more.” When he arrived at my father’s house, he made excuses for my torn dress and tear-stained face, saying I’d been attacked by a dog, and Florence had been broken as I’d tried to escape.

And then, without another word, he went to the shed and fetched the dead handyman’s bottle of whiskey and gun powder and a box of matches.

I never went back, but I heard of a fire that burned bone den trees to the ground.

In From the Cold

Alec sat in the cold blue glow of the steel chamber, monitors projecting their indecision between camera views outside the small compound. Each switch depicting the bright white of the lunar sands under floodlight, and the unrelenting black of the empty space above. Life in the small research station was similarly dark, oppressively quiet, with nothing but the clicks of recording equipment, inconsistent hums from computer systems, and faint-

CLANG!

The sharp noise from down the hall pierced the envelope of sound that had wrapped Alec in the monitoring room, and the startle had his heart thumping up in his throat. The dizzying adrenaline surge started to calm as he figured one of the backup tapes had probably been vibrated off a shelf by the machinery nearby. Solitary life in a research station had eroded Alec’s sense of tidiness and piles were the easiest sorting method for his work.

He turned his attention back to the screens. The widescreen to the left was depicting a grid of all camera views in small format. Something on feed 42-A caught his attention.

42-A. A form was standing below the camera, looking up. Motionless.

Humanoid, by the looks of it, what would be the head seemed slightly tilted. Alec brought it up on the center view to get a better look, and felt his stomach twist violently in fear.

It was standing still, staring with empty sockets amid a freeze-dried and cracked face of blue skin. It was morbidly recognizable, just enough facial features of his late assistant to make him remember the accident, the airlock seal and the guilt, the attempt to bury the evidence, and the endless solitude that had resulted.

The tilt–obscenely fatal in its arrangement–was due to a neck fracture that had been sustained when the compartment depressurized. The eyes had burst or shriveled with the change, Alec was never sure. He didn’t want to think about it when he had put on his suit and driven the corpse out into the dunes, the direction faced by camera 42-A. He had looked at the flash-frozen skin and abhorrent shapes from the pressure change as little as possible.

But now…now he was staring right into the same grotesque death that had decided to come back. Why? And why was the body just standing there, staring, so motionless? So frozen?

Frozen?

CLANG!!

Frozen! It wasn’t standing still, the feed was frozen! The time stamp on the video wasn’t moving, it was stuck at 16:25. Alec’s fears and mind raced as he looked to the right to check the current clock.

16:40.

CLANG!!

The noise. The time. The rest of the feeds, those that were live, hadn’t shown anything. Alec began to panic. There was an airlock near 42-A, one of a pair, the sister airlock had been his assistant’s coffin. He brought up the access logs, noting with dread that all access keypads had been left active as there had never been anything to keep out. No one knew the codes but the two researchers…

16:28. Access granted, login SRichards, code ******

Inside. It had gained entry 12 minutes ago.

No, wait, not inside, breathed Alec with limited relief, there was no subsequent entry for the inner door. It was still in the airlock. The noise must be it beating on the door! He knew he had to engage the manual lock, keep it out, maybe it would leave.

Summoning up any shred of courage he could manage, Alec stepped out of the monitoring room and turned to face down the sterile metal hallway that ended at the twin airlocks. The black sheen of the thick internal security barrier covered the left entry, while the functional right door sat uncovered, naked and foreboding. The frosted, thick plexiglas porthole …was empty. No hollow eyes, no broken neck or blue flaky skin staring back at him like with the camera. Just silence and solitude.
The silence…the staccato death knell had stopped.

Unsure of what this meant, Alec walked towards the door, an undecided pace between hurriedly reaching the lock mechanism and freezing in place with fear. Every step expecting the face–that horrid, cold, unliving face, bent at the wrong angle–to reappear in the dark transparent circle of the door.

He finally reached the door panel, and with unsteady hands engaged the manual lock. He even dared to peek out the porthole to confirm that it had left. Nothing to see, just the empty airlock and open expanse of sterile lit moonscape outside the external hatch, which sat halfway ajar. A light breeze crept down the hall and stirred Alec’s unkempt hair ever so slightly against the back of his neck as he continued to stare out in fear and disbelief.

It dawned on him as he heard the approaching shuffle of ragged boots on the metal planking back down the hall. The only breezes in the pressurized facility came from airlock use. Rooted in fear, catching hints of ragged research uniform and broken skin behind his own reflection in the porthole, he began to reach again for the airlock door panel…

By: Amused.

A Bad Friend

I’m not really sure how to feel about the events that have transpired over the past week. I suppose I feel some anger, but the two emotions that have been claiming dominance have been despair and fear. This situation has gotten too big for me to handle on my own, yet I have nowhere else to turn.

I met my former friend ten years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school. Her name was Melinda. She had transferred to my school that year, and she was very socially awkward. Her being in the grade below mine, the only class we shared was band, which was the last period of the day. A few weeks into the school year, I decided to befriend her. I had noticed her lack of friends, and I suppose I pitied her a little.

Melinda and I became fast friends, and for months I would regularly decline invitations from others in my group to spend time with her. I enjoyed spending time with her, even though she had continued in her shy state so far into our friendship. One day, seemingly without cause, she began to come out of her shell. I found that the reason she wore so many chunky bracelets was not because of a peculiar sense of fashion, but because she was hiding cuts and scars. I discovered that she was, in fact, emotionally unstable. Being the immature teenager that I was, I decided that her baggage was too much for me to handle. While I didn’t cut ties with Melinda completely, I put a considerable amount of distance between us, never spending time outside of a school sponsored setting.

I wasn’t a very good friend.

We continued in this state until I graduated high school. I had enlisted in the military, and I lost touch with many people I had been close with, including Melinda. I don’t think I even afforded her much more than a passing reminiscent thought during my first two years of service. My excuse for this that I made to myself was that I was far too busy. I had spent eight months in training alone, not to mention my new “important” responsibility of ensuring new student Marines were checked into the unit and that their personal and financial information was correct in MCTFS. I had no time for trivial friendships anymore.

I was a bad friend.

I should mention that throughout this time I kept the same phone number that I had when I left. My father, God bless him, was kind enough to continue paying my phone bill so that I could set money aside for when I found myself a husband and wanted to buy our first house. So I suppose it wasn’t a huge shock when Melinda’s name accompanied a text one day into my third year of my enlistment.

I’m bored

It was random and completely out of the blue. Amused, I sent a text back.

Was this meant for me?

And then nothing. I heard nothing from her for almost another year, shortly before the end of my enlistment. Then, another text came through.

Can we talk?

At that moment all of the guilt I should have been feeling for nearly five years hit me like a ton of bricks. I had abandoned this poor, lonely girl who had had such trouble making even a single friend when she was finally brave enough to confide in me what was probably her darkest secret.

I was a terrible friend.

But I decided to make it up to her. I called her, and in a rush it was like time had stood still in our relationship. We talked for hours, catching each other up on each others’ lives. She was on her last year of college, majoring in history. I had finally gotten a divorce from my husband who somehow managed to convince the monitor to grant him orders to Okinawa so he could be stationed with and bang my former Administration School roommate. Both of our spirits were up by the time our conversation wound down. We began to give our farewells when Melinda said

Please don’t forget me.

We quickly said goodbye after that, and after I hung up I cried. I can’t say for certain how long I cried, but the next thing I knew it was 5 o’clock in the morning. Worried that I would be late for the beginning of my last week at work, I got up in a hurry and ran the shower. As soon as I was finished, I grabbed my phone to put on some music to get ready to. What I was greeted by was a series of text messages that made my skin crawl.

1:23 am: Amy? Can we talk?
1:40 am: Please? It’s important.
1:51 am: Please call me.
1:52 am: Please call me.
1:53 am: Please call me.
1:54 am: Please call me.
1:55 am: PLEASE call me.
2:00 am: Don’t do this to me again.
2:05 am: I can’t take it if you’re going to ignore me again.
2:06 am: Don’t ignore me.
2:07 am: Don’t ignore me.
2:08 am: Don’t ignore me.
2:09 am: Don’t ignore me.
2:10 am: BITCH DON’T IGNORE ME!
2:20 am: The bracelets won’t cover what I’ve done now.
3:00 am: Haha! Gotcha! Just kidding! I’ll ttyl!

That afternoon I called my dad to let him know he could cancel my line. I told him that I wanted to be completely independent, and he told me that he was proud of me for being so mature. I felt guilty. I wasn’t mature at all. I just wanted to change my number so Melinda wouldn’t contact me anymore.

After changing my number I blocked her from all forms of social media. I wanted no part in her craziness. I had enough drama with my life in dealing with the aftermath of my divorce, and I just couldn’t carry anyone else’s baggage than my own.

Last week I was browsing my Facebook and doing what we all do from time to time when we’re bored: I looked up old friends to see how they were doing. I perused for some time until it was near time to go to bed. My husband and my 2-year-old son had been asleep for a few hours, and I figured it was time for me to do the same. Before I closed my browser, I saw something that caught my eye. It was the profile picture of an old high school friend of mine.

Melinda was in it.

I became morbidly curious, and ended up friending the old high school buddy. I just wanted to see what, if any, connection she had with Melinda. Honestly, I was surprised she had any friends at all! I didn’t expect a response until at least the next day, but I received a notification within minutes that they had accepted my friend request. A little snooping revealed that Melinda was in a romantic relationship with this woman, and from their pictures it looked like their life together was a very happy one.

I wanted to congratulate Melinda, but there was no way I was going to give her access to my phone number. So I unblocked her from Facebook. As I went to click on her profile, I got a message.

And another.

And another.

And another still.

And they all said the same thing.

Your son is beautiful.

I had to wait 24 hours before I could block her again, and the messages kept coming. I told my husband what was happening when he woke up the next morning, and there was no hesitation in calling the police. I made a report, and I was advised not to block her until they could find out where she was posting from (she had no personally identifiable information on her Facebook page to give them a clue as to how to contact her, and neither did her girlfriend).

A day later I was informed by the investigator that they had attempted to trace her IP address, and that there was some peculiar behavior going on with the messages. Each message was sent from the same account, but from different IP addresses. Stranger still, each IP address could be traced to different towns around the Midwest.

And the messaged came still. Though, according to the investigator, the pattern was becoming slightly disturbing. It seems as though the location of the messages are travelling from town to town, across the Midwest and closer to the eastern seaboard, which is the region I live in.

She knows I have a family. She knows I have a son. And all evidence is suggesting that she’s coming this way. While I have no impression that she’s ever hurt anyone before, she is scaring me to death. …And yet, I feel sad for her. All she ever wanted was for me to be a good friend to her, and I have failed. Multiple times. Miserably.

I think I’ll send my family to Michigan to stay with my parents for a little while. At least until after Melinda gets here. I can’t ignore her anymore.

—
Credits to: poop_squirrel

Vile Design

It’s a strange fact about the modern age, that in order for a thing’s existence to be confirmed, you cannot trust to your own five senses anymore. In order for reality to be ‘real’, it must be confirmed so by the greater populace. Television, and the internet, have changed our way of life whether for good or ill. Events in my life over the past few weeks seem…so odd, even now, that the act of writing them down and…’publish’ it online may be the only way for it all too feel like more than a slide into delirium.

In my living room, near the door that leads to my bedroom, there once hung a 3 1/2’ by 5’ oil painting. The artist was one William Cartwright, an obscure Wolverhampton native who, the owner told me, had died mysteriously in the early 1950’s. I made the purchase at a garage sale for a princely sum of £10 – the owner, a middle-aged man called Charles Franklin, must’ve been desperate to sell, considering the dilapidation of both his house and himself. The picture itself is a bucolic scene, as wholesome as a Rockwell, and as verdant as a Matisse. It depicts a family picnic within a lush meadow, buttercups blooming around the gathering, a small copse of trees to the left, and rolling hills in the background. The weather is fair, and the subjects – mother, father, three rosy-cheeked children – are accoutred in post-war attire. On careful inspection, however, one can see a rather less cheerful detail. Partially hidden behind the foremost tree is another person, a drably clothed young man with a sour expression on his face. I only really saw it after I’d made the purchase, and it rather ruined the painting’s main mood for me…though not enough that I didn’t end up hanging it anyway.

I bought it six weeks ago, and it was one week after that all this started. It was 6:30 in the evening, and I was returning to the living room from the bathroom when I noticed that the painting had been altered. Maybe it was set at a wrong angle? I inspected it, and found it was hung perfectly straight. Nothing had changed within the frame, either…the picnic still progressed merrily, and the dour youth still looked on with his back to the trees. I turned away, prepared and ate dinner, watched some fitfully funny sitcoms and went to bed.

I awoke in horror at 3:30 am that morning, shivering and soaked with sweat, the riddle of the painting answered. I knew what had changed…the stranger, once partially obscured only a few hours before, was completely visible. The still life had moved.

Over the next week, I kept a wary eye on the painting whenever I passed it. Sure enough, with each passing day the dark figure grew ever so slightly larger in comparison to the foregrounded figures. And, as his features became clearer, I saw that his face wasn’t so youthful, or so angry either…maybe it was a trick of the light, but sometimes his expression was more akin to a smile, albeit a sinister one. It wasn’t just the painting, either. Any horror movie I watched, whenever the monster leaped at the screen, it seemed more vivid and threatening than before. Maybe it was my eyes unfocusing, but it seemed to me that the edges of the screen warped outward each time it happened. Every time I listened to music, I heard occasional murmuring, like somebody…or something… whispering the apocrypha of the damned. The backyard of my house always played host to small animals and birds, most of them visibly sickening. And as for the dreams…the less said the better.

Two weeks ago, a loud thump on the back door woke me up in the early morning. Eyes barely open, I staggered out to the living room to investigate the noise. The noise had been made by a crow dashing itself against the door, and it’s crumpled form lay quite dead in the wan dawn light. With the aid of a plastic bag, and considerable reluctance, I brought the corpse inside, went out to the street and gave it a cursory burial in the nearest bin. I then changed and walked out to get that day’s newspaper and a coffee from the corner store.

Ensconced once more in my home, I received a mild shock several pages into my reading. An article, brief and embellished only with a grainy photograph, detailed the investigation of a suicide in the local area of one Charles Franklin. The picture was of a sunken eyed, somewhat unkempt man fast approaching sixty. The picture also matched the features of the previous owner of the Cartwright painting. An involuntary shiver spasmed between my shoulders, and I became ever more aware of the painting behind me. I had not inspected the progress of the dark figure yet, and so paced towards it, brackish dread filling my stomach with each step. I was right to dread…if anything, I wasn’t scared enough.

Nothing I’ve drunk since then can erase the image of that tranquil abomination contained within the frames. As usual, the menacing figure on the left had inched further, further into the foreground than the background now. And, as before, the family enjoyed a frozen repast in the heatless sunlight. The familiarity, even that of the unfamiliar, had been intruded on twice, though. A bird hovered above the meadow, a bird with the dusky feathers of a crow. And in the mother’s hands a baby, dark eyed and sombre, was cradled. Even with the weight of years and worry lifted, I knew I saw none other than the face of Charles Franklin.

I’ve since covered the painting and sealed it in a cupboard in the spare room – yet still I can sense it no matter where I am. It exudes a suffocating aura, instilling me with a leaden torpor no amount of caffeine can shake off. Many times I’ve thought of destroying the damn thing, yet whenever I endeavour to do so fatigue overwhelms me, and I am left unable to rise from the floor. I’ve advertised it for sale, but so far there hasn’t been so much as a single phone call. I can’t listen to music anymore…it’s drowned out by horrendous babbling, a cacophony of obscenities and hatred. I don’t watch movies either…or indeed, anything. I looked into my bathroom mirror for the last time five days ago, and what stared back at me was the dark man’s murderous leer. It took more courage than I care to admit just to switch this computer on. I do not know the nature of William Cartwright, or the nature of his painting, or the nature of the spectre that haunts me. What kind of man was Cartwright? What kind of monster? How many paintings did he create before consigning his flesh to rot? Did his soul follow? It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now. All I know is that it has consumed me completely, like it consumed Charles and his family.

The sounds of faint hammering drift from the spare room. May the padlock hold out, at least until the pills have rendered me oblivious.

Farewell, dear reader.

By: DarkDecapodian

Short Creepy Stories

·         ALIEN ANATOMY (Link to story)

"What did you bring on our ship?"

"A specimen from the desolate planet we visited. I found it among some ruins, I think it might be one of the surviving sentient species."

"Sentient? Look how unruly it’s behaving, the thing is but an animal."

"Wait, do you see it leaking fluid from those gashes? I think it might be wounded, that would explain the odd behaviors."

"What do you expect me to do? I have not the slightest clue how these creatures work."

"Try something, we can’t let it bleed to death, especially if it might be the last of its kind."

"Fine, I’ll close the wounds, but I can’t promise anything."

The small human child laid still on the operation table. His mouth, nostrils, and eyelids had been stitched closed with such precision that he almost appeared to have a blank sheet of skin instead of a face. The alien creature looked over its work with pride.

"The specimen seems calmer now, have we saved it?"

"Only time will tell, only time will tell."

---

·         THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL (Link to story)

Everyone loves the first day of school, right? New year, new classes, new friends. It’s a day full of potential and hope, before all the dreary depressions of reality show up to ruin all the fun.

I like the first day of school for a different reason, though. You see, I have a sort of power. When I look at people, I can…sense a sort of aura around them. A colored outline based on how long that person has to live. Most everyone I meet around my age is surrounded by a solid green hue, which means they have plenty of time left.

A fair amount of them have a yellow-orangish tinge to their auras, which tends to mean a car crash or some other tragedy. Anything that takes people “before their time” as they say.

The real fun is when the auras venture into the red end of the spectrum, though. Every now and again I’ll see someone who’s basically a walking stoplight. Those are the ones who get murdered or kill themselves. It’s such a rush to see them and know their time is numbered.

With that in mind, I always get to class very early so I can scout out my classmates’ fates. The first kid who walked in was basically radiating red. I chuckled to myself. Too damn bad, bro. But as people kept walking in, they all had the same intense glow. I finally caught a glimpse of my rose-tinted reflection in the window, but I was too stunned to move. Our professor stepped in and locked the door, his aura a sickening shade of green.

---

·         THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED (Link to story)

My daughter, Katy, is 6, and has an overactive imagination. She regularly crawls into my bed at night with my husband and I, telling us about the monsters in her room. One, she said, has a black body that looks almost blob-like, with yellow skin on his face and big black eyes. It pins her to her bed and touches her roughly with black hands, sometimes choking her until she can’t breathe. The other one, with red scaly skin and yellow eyes, is really nice. It lives beneath her bed and sits with her after the black monster visits; she says it makes her feel safe again.

This morning I went to do the laundry, and found blood on Katy’s pajamas. I rushed to her room to talk to her, but instead vomited once I flicked on the light. My husband’s body lay in pieces, pools of blood taking up most of the floor. Katy curled up in her bed, her hands over her ears and her eyes squeezed shut. Next to her was the red skinned monster she spoke about. It stared at me with sad eyes, and too shocked to do anything else, I stared back. He started to move towards me and all I could do was stand still, even when it gently placed a clawed hand on my shoulder then crawled underneath the bed.

I looked down at my husband, now noticing his black dressing gown that was torn to shreds, and the rest of the pieces of the mask he was wearing, small yellow pieces.

Birthday Cake

For my daughter’s fifth birthday, I made her a special cake.

It was different to the other cakes that I had made her before, on her other birthdays. This one had something special, a surprise for my little girl.

The ingredients themselves weren’t anything you wouldn’t expect; eggs, flour, butter, sugar. It had cocoa powder also, but she had had that previously, on her third birthday.

But this cake was different to any cake my daughter had eaten before.

She woke up on the morning of her birthday, excited as usual. She loved celebrating, no matter the occasion.

I chose to give her the cake first thing in the morning, unable to wait. She could hardly believe her eyes, as I always made her wait until evening usually. She placed the red case she carried with her on the table, and sat on the chair, the anticipation clear on her face. I carried the cake to her, candles lit, and sang happy birthday to her.

She closed her eyes and made a wish, probably for something trivial like a doll or a pony or something. If I had one wish, I would wish for peace. Not world peace or anything quite so great, but peace for myself. These past few years, well let’s just say they have been challenging. All of the hospital appointments, health scares, all of it had been horrible.

But luckily she would not have to deal with it any more.

My little girl blew out her candles, probably with the childlike hope for her wish to come true.

Oh well.

She took her first bite of cake, so happy and so completely absorbed in her birthday breakfast that she didn’t even notice me pick up the red case from beside the cake plate and open it up.


She didn’t even notice me take out the syringe of insulin and empty it into the sink, before throwing it all into the bin.

Wouldn’t be needing that any more.

—
Credits to: made_in_brizzle

Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner

Almost a year ago, I was in a car accident. However, it wasn’t until very recently that I realized my accident had left me with a very peculiar capability.

I had been T-boned by a drunk driver, sending me off the road and headfirst into a tree. Both my airbag and seat belt failed, launching me through the windshield a good 10-15 feet from my car.

Apparently I died, but only for a little bit.

From what I was told, my heart stopped beating on the ambulance, but I was resuscitated within a matter of minutes.

Still. Dead is dead, and that’s what I was.

Once I was on the road to recovery, it was a quick one. Like I said, it was less than a year ago, and I’m already up to par again, and have been for a few months. I was fortunate to have a very supportive family. My father, mother, and two siblings were with me every step of the way, and for that I will always be grateful.

It was just two days ago that I realized what I was capable of. I was at the optometrist for a general exam. He checked the pressure of my eyes, which is always a weird sensation. I really hate the feeling of that machine blowing air into my eyeball, and it took several tries to get a proper reading due to what I considered to be a very natural reaction of flinching, much to the annoyance of the optometrist.

Then came the reading of the chart. No real troubles there. I’ve never had a problem with my vision, but a yearly exam never hurt anything.

But then came the point in the exam where the doctor swung his chair around, directly in front of me, and had me close my right eye, so that I could follow his pen with my left. Much like before, no real problems. At least not until we switched to the next eye. I closed my left eye, and looked at him with my right.

You can imagine my shock when I saw my doctor right in front of me, and another person behind him who hadn’t been there before. A person who looked just like my optometrist in every way, except for the fact that he was naked, and happened to be going to town on a woman propped up on the counter of the examination room. A woman who looked a lot like the receptionist that had checked me in.

"What the fuck?!" I yelled as I opened my other eyelid. The intrusive couple instantly vanished before me, and it was once again just the (fully clothed) optometrist and I.

"Something the matter?" He asked with the most startled look on his face.

I didn’t know what to say. I like to think I’m a pretty fast thinker, and I’m pretty sure admitting to this guy that I just saw an exact replica of him banging the receptionist in the same room as us might come off a bit, I don’t know, crazy?

"Yeah, I’m fine. I think. I was in a pretty traumatic car accident a while back, I guess I’m still sorta processing things, and I have my moments where I’m not entirely, you know, all there, if that makes any sense.” It was a lie, but a decent one. Like I said, I’m a relatively fast thinker.

But of course, when we tried to resume the examination, there they were again, just going at it. There was no doubt it was the optometrist and the receptionist. Clearly I was the only one seeing it, but I didn’t really feel like dropping any more hints to my optometrist that I might be on the brink of losing my fucking mind, so I decided to grin and bear it, ignoring as best as I could.

As we were wrapping up the exam, the optometrist began writing me up my prescription for my lenses, and I noticed the wedding band around his finger.

"So, your wife is your receptionist? Does that get weird? I feel like that would get pretty weird."

"Uh, n-n-no, that’s not my wife. M-my wife is an attorney. Why would you think that?" he stammered.

Whoops.

"Oh. Sorry. I guess I just assumed. My bad." I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks in embarrassment.

The rest of the day I spent experimenting my new found ability on strangers. It didn’t take me long to realize I was seeing the last sin committed by someone, on the condition that my left eye was closed and I was looking with my right. This was confirmed pretty quickly when I saw the guy in front of me at Starbucks pull a wallet out of the purse of the lady in front of him. I closed my left eye, and watched an exact replication of the event with my right, combined with the old woman screaming out the word “n****” at the top of her lungs. Double whammy.

This was just one example of many as I experimented with my new ability. Not everything was as cut and dry as the thief, but it was still pretty obvious: I was seeing the last sin committed by these people. It was scary, but awesome.

Gluttony.

Adultery.

Murder.

Hate.

Envy.

You’d be amazed at the fucked up shit people do.

That was just two days ago. I’ve seen a lot of shit since then.

Tonight I went over to my parents for dinner. It’s become a weekly affair. I’m 20 and have been living with a roommate since around the time I turned 18, but I still make it a point to visit my parents and two younger sisters every week for family dinner.

There was a lot of internal debate going on as I sat at the dinner table. With strangers, it wasn’t really a big deal, but with family? That’s a whole new ballgame.

Still. I couldn’t help but wonder. I feel like I know my family pretty well, especially with after all the help I got from them after the accident. I feel like their sins would be laughable. Nobody is perfect, my family included, but that doesn’t mean the imperfections aren’t minor ones.

After a lot of thinking, I finally decided to go for it. As we sat at the dinner table, my sisters going on and on about school, I closed my left eye.

I looked at my mother. Behind her, I saw her standing, leaning against the wall with a phone in her hand.

"Oh, that Lauren. She’s such a slut. She’ll shack up with any single man in the neighborhood. Maybe the married ones too!"

Gossip. Real classy, mom.

I looked over at my sister, Bethanie. She was 12 years old. She was slowly becoming a woman, but she was such a sweetheart and I know she was doing all that she could to hold on to that youthful innocence. I didn’t expect much from her, and got exactly what I expected.

I watched as behind my youngest sister, another version of herself sat away from a group of younger girls. She silently brooded as the other group of girls discussed getting their very first bras.

Envy. Poor Bethany. I guess she wants to be a grown up more than I thought. That’s good to keep in mind when it comes to comforting her.

From there, I looked at my other sister, Jenny. Jenny was 16 years old, and she was beautiful. She was well on her way to becoming her own woman, and I was proud of the woman she was becoming. Full of class, no rebel streak, exactly how you would want your younger sister to be.

What I got was something I could never have prepared for.

Behind her, I saw her partially clothed on her bed. Behind her, a man wearing a black ski mask held a knife to her throat and did his best to maintain Jenny’s thrashing movements as she tried to escape.

"God fucking dammit! Just let me go! Please! God dammit just let me go!" she screamed.

It was no use. I watched as that man did unspeakable things to my sister, leaving her on the ground, crying and cursing the God that let this happen to her.

That can’t be right, I thought to myself, Sure she used the Lord’s name in vain, but who could blame her? How am I ever going to be able to look at her the same again? Do I even talk to her about it? How could I even bring that up? How can you go through something like that and walk out the other side a normal girl?

I wanted to cry. I loved my sister. She was such a wonderful young woman, but I couldn’t break down now. There’s no telling just how crazy they would think I am. I did my best to stifle my rage and my sadness, and I couldn’t look at her any more, so I turned my one-eyed gaze to my father.

You can imagine how I felt when all I saw was that exact same scene being played out again.

 

---

by reddit user LieutenantDanzig