The message arrived at 11:47 PM, three minutes before Nora typed it.
She stared at her phone screen in the dim light of her Seattle apartment, the rain hammering the window behind her like something desperate to get in. The notification sat there, calm and ordinary, a text from her own number.
It read: “Don’t go to the harbor tomorrow. Please.”
Nora set the phone face-down on her kitchen counter. She told herself it was a glitch. A carrier error. Some crossed wire in the digital ether that routed a stranger’s message to her screen with her own number attached. She’d heard of such things. She’d read about them.
She picked the phone back up.
At 11:50 PM, her fingers moved on their own, the way they always did when anxiety drove her to check in with her sister. She typed the words without thinking, the same words she’d composed a hundred times before when something felt wrong and she needed to say it out loud to someone, even in text form.
She typed: “Don’t go to the harbor tomorrow. Please.”
Her thumb hovered over the send button. The screen blurred. She hadn’t typed her sister’s name in the recipient field. The message was addressed to herself.
She hadn’t noticed herself do that.
Nora put the phone in a kitchen drawer and went to bed. She did not sleep.
By morning, the rain had stopped, and Seattle had that particular gray stillness it wore after a storm, the kind that felt less like peace and more like held breath. Nora made coffee, opened the drawer, and looked at the phone. No new messages. The original one was still there, timestamped 11:47 PM, sender listed as her own number.
She had a meeting at the harbor district at noon. A walkthrough of a converted pier building her architecture firm was pitching to renovate. She’d scheduled it two weeks ago. She’d been looking forward to it.
She went anyway. Of course she went.
The Puget Sound waterfront was quiet for a Tuesday, the tourist season not yet arrived, the fishing boats already out. The pier building stood at the end of a long wooden dock, its old timber bones silvered by decades of salt air. Nora walked toward it with her portfolio under her arm, her breath making small clouds in the cold.
Her phone buzzed.
Another message. Her own number. Timestamped 12:03 PM. She was reading it at 11:58 AM.
“The dock on the north side. The third plank from the railing. Don’t step on it.”
Nora stopped walking. She looked up at the dock stretching ahead of her. She looked down at the message. The timestamp was five minutes in the future.
She thought about turning around. She thought about calling her firm, canceling, going home, calling a doctor. She thought about all the rational explanations she’d been assembling since last night like bricks in a wall she desperately needed to believe in.
Instead, she walked to the north side of the dock.
She counted the planks from the railing. One. Two. Three.
The third plank looked fine. Looked exactly like the others, weathered gray, solid, ordinary. She crouched down and pressed her palm against it. It flexed. Soft underneath, the wood eaten through from below by years of moisture and neglect, a thin shell of surface over nothing. One adult’s full weight would have sent it through.
Below the dock, the Sound churned dark and freezing.
Nora stood up slowly. Her legs were not entirely steady.
She walked around the compromised plank and continued to the building. The meeting went fine. The clients were warm, the space was beautiful, the light through the old industrial windows was exactly what she’d imagined. She smiled and measured and made notes and said all the right things.
On the ferry home, she sat alone on the upper deck and looked at her phone.
Three messages. All from her own number. All timestamped in the future.
The first two she’d already lived through. The third was new, timestamped 9:15 PM. It was currently 4:40 PM.
“You’re going to want to know how this works. You’re not going to like the answer.”
Nora read it four times. The wind off the Sound was cold enough to sting. Around her, other passengers scrolled their own phones, oblivious, wrapped in their own ordinary Tuesday.
She typed back. She didn’t know what else to do. She typed: “Who are you?” and sent it to her own number.
WhatsApp
Telegram
Email
Categories
- AI & Technology
- Contemporary
- Corporate Control
- Creepypasta
- Crime Thriller
- Cyberpunk
- Dark Fantasy
- Enemies to Lovers
- Fairy Tale Retelling
- Fantasy
- First Contact
- Forbidden
- Genetic/Body Horror
- High Fantasy
- Monster Hunter
- Mythic/Folklore
- Paranormal
- Portal/Otherworld
- Post-Apo
- Post-Collapse Society
- Psychological Thriller
- Romances
- SCI-FI
- Second Chance
- Slow Burn
- Space Combat
- Spacepunk
- Surveillance State
- Survival Thriller
- Thrillers
- Time Travel
- Treasure Hunter
- Urban Fantasy
- Witchcraft/Curses
Tags
10min stories atmospheric atmospheric fantasy atmospheric fiction contemporary romance Creepy creepypasta crime thriller dark fantasy debt dystopia emotional fiction enemies to lovers ensemble cast epistolary fantasy female protagonist first person forbidden romance framed narrative high fantasy love story magic Memory mystery Paranormal psychological horror psychological thriller romance sci-fi second chance second chance romance short fiction short story slow burn space station speculative fiction supernatural Survival survival thriller suspense thriller travel romance witchcraft workplace romance
Leave a Reply