The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

    Maria: I woke up when I was pushing the hat pin into his eye. John: (Startled) What? What’re you talking about? Are you saying you attacked Malcolm with a needle? Maria: (Looking away almost dreamily) Not a needle. A hat pin. It’s bigger and duller, but it still went into his face very easily. John: (Angry and shocked) Why? In God’s name, why? Maria: (Turning to him petulantly, like a child angry for being scolded) Because he asked me to. I first heard about the play called The Shadowed Sea from an old drama professor of mine. He was famous for throwing parties every few months—sometimes it was a sprawling barbeque, at other times, a more intimate dinner party with just himself, his wife, and a handful of his favorite students invited. For a few months in 2008, I was among that group, and me and my best friend Frieda were over there one night when he started telling us about “forbidden plays”. ...

    My sister’s the one that told me about the Kill Bus. It was a stupid name for what was going to be a silly ghost story, but Vicki was excited about it, and we’d both gotten old enough that the times that we actually talked without fighting were few and far between. When I first asked her where she was going that night…on a weekend when our parents were away and we were both supposed to be staying home…I was doing it just to fuck with her. I wasn’t going to tattle on her for going out with her boyfriend, and she knew that, but the power the secret gave me was too much to resist. Usually she’d have just threatened me or called me a booger and coughed up part of her weekend allowance, but this time she didn’t do either. Instead she looked around at me, her eyes bright and dancing, and said her and Tim were going with some of his friends “to find the Kill Bus”, and when I asked her what the hell that was, she actually grinned and started...

    The first time I got one of the videos, I thought it was a joke. My phone buzzed in the middle of the night, despite me having Do Not Disturb turned on. When I unlocked it, a video started playing. It was a single, continuous shot that looked like it might be coming from some kind of body camera, and it shifted between normal and night vision a few times during the video as well, primarily when the person wearing the camera started moving across the parking lot. They were watching a guy putting a heavy-looking messenger bag into the trunk of his car, their raspy breathing the only thing I could hear. I was still half asleep at this point, and I figured my phone had somehow started playing a jump scare video or something. Maybe I’d left a video app open by mistake, or worse, some virus had gotten in and started spamming dumb shit. I really didn’t want the hassle of having to… The thought died as I saw what was happen...

    Browsing I was on the internet, just idling browsing, when I started to notice a pattern. My searches, suggested ads, even words in unrelated articles, were all guiding me in certain directions. I don’t mean cookies or whatever. I mean a feeling of being pushed or pulled down a particular path, or series of paths, until I arrived at a particular point. A specific phrase. Clever Abyss. Drowsing I didn’t know what it meant, and searching for answers didn’t bring me any closer to understanding if it was a coincidence or if something was manipulating me. So I closed the browser. Twenty minutes later, out of boredom and curiosity, I reopened it. I tried to simulate normal looking around, reading, and watching videos, but I knew, in the back of my mind, I was waiting to see if some unseen current drug me back to the clever abyss. Five minutes of browsing and I thought I had my answer. Pictures of wate...

    It all started when my dad found the old car in the woods. I was away at college then, and neither him or mom told me about it when it happened. Instead, they waited to bring it up over Thanksgiving dinner in a tensely casual way that clearly wasn’t casual at all. Like parents soft-pedalling news that they’re turning your room into an office or that, after a lot of thought, they’ve decided to separate for awhile and see how things go. I could hear the nerves in my mother’s voice as she first brought it up with a tight little laugh. They guess they hadn’t told me yet, but back a few weeks ago, my father had found an old car abandoned at the back of our land. Or maybe, Dad added, abandoned wasn’t the best word. There were two bodies inside, after all. I remember choking on my drink a little at that. My first thought was that I had misheard or they were playing a joke on me, though that seemed out-of-character for my...

  I could still taste the river in my mouth when I woke up. I was in my bed, my sheets and clothes clean and dry, but I had that feeling of soggy exhaustion you get after a long swim or being underwater for awhile. The sunlight coming in through the window was too bright, and my head seemed to sway unanchored for a moment as I sat up and tried to wake up enough to understand what had happened to make me feel this way. What could explain the rich, bitterly sour taste of river muck at the back of my throat that made me retch a little as I slid out of bed and went to the bathroom. Looking at myself in the mirror, I saw nothing out of place. An average-looking girl in average pajamas that looked a bit pale in the harsh light above the sink. No signs of having recently gone for a swim or narrowly avoided a drowning. No memory of it either. In fact, I couldn’t tell you the last time I’d been in the water, be it a river, a p...