Running Toward the Wrong Thing

She was already running when the second message arrived.
The waterfront was quiet at that hour — that particular bruised hour just before dawn when Portland’s Eastside Esplanade belongs to no one, when the Willamette runs black and the steel bridges overhead look like the ribs of something enormous and dead. Elin Falk ran with her phone gripped in her left hand, her breath coming in short, controlled bursts, her sneakers slapping the wet boards in a rhythm that she had not chosen but could not seem to break. She did not look behind her. She did not know, yet, whether there was anything behind her to look at. What she knew was the message. What she knew was that it had come seventeen minutes before she had written it.
The observer had been watching her for most of the night. Not following, exactly — that word implies intention, and what drove the watching was something closer to compulsion, the way you cannot stop staring at a crack in a ceiling that keeps growing. The observer sat on a concrete bench near the south end of the Esplanade, collar turned up against the October river-wind, and watched Elin Falk run north. She had passed this spot twice already. The first time, she had been walking — deliberate, unhurried, the way a person walks when they are trying to convince themselves they are not afraid. The second time she had been jogging, her gaze tilted slightly downward, toward her phone. Now she was running. Something had changed between the second pass and the third, and the observer had not moved from the bench, and so had not seen what changed it.
Three weeks earlier, Elin had downloaded the app because her sister told her to. That was all. Her sister Petra lived in Gothenburg and called every Sunday and worried in the specific, structured way that older sisters worry, and she had said, simply, that the app helped her feel less scattered. It was a journaling app. Clean interface, grey and white, a small flame icon. You wrote your thoughts into it the way you might write into a diary, except the app organized them — flagged recurring anxieties, noted patterns, occasionally sent a gentle reflection back to you based on what you’d written. Elin had found it useful in a mild, forgettable way. She had written in it most mornings before work. She had not thought much about it beyond that.
The first anomaly was so small that she had filed it under tiredness. She had written an entry about a colleague — about the way he stood too close in the elevator, about the particular quality of discomfort this produced — and before she had finished, a reflection had appeared in the app’s sidebar. It read: you’ve been carrying this longer than you realize. She had assumed she’d written something similar before, that the app was pattern-matching, that this was the whole point. She closed the sidebar. She went to work.
The second anomaly was harder to file away. She had been sitting in the break room, had pulled up the app to write something quick about the view from the office window — the way the clouds had stacked themselves above Mount Hood in a way that made her think of her father, inexplicably — and she had found an entry already there. Dated that morning. Time-stamped 7:14 a.m. She had been on the MAX train at 7:14 a.m., her phone in her bag, her eyes on the window. The entry read: I think something is listening to me through this. And then, beneath it, a single reflection from the app: we know.
She had deleted the app. She had put her phone face-down on the break room table and sat very still for a moment, listening to the hum of the refrigerator. Then she had picked the phone back up and seen that the app was still there, its small flame icon unchanged.

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About the Author

Rowan Vale — a student of occult symbolism, for whom every abandoned church is hiding something. Never leaves house without Daisy … his little doll.

— Rowan Vale

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August 15, 2026

10min-stories