I told my friend Emiliano about him and Emiliano said I was pattern-matching, that when we’re scared we see shapes in noise. Emiliano is kind and rational and I think he’s right and I also think he has never heard his own breathing played back to him through a phone that is calling itself.
I have started leaving for work — I go to a co-working space now, I cannot be in the apartment alone — I have started leaving by the building’s back exit, through the alley that smells like sesame and hot sugar from the bakery below. It feels like a rational precaution. It feels like the beginning of a different kind of life, one where I map exits and count steps between doors.
—
The seventh call is different.
It comes at 7:22, as always. My new number on the screen. But this time when I answer, there is no silence.
There is my voice.
Not words — just a sound I make, a small involuntary sound, the kind of thing you don’t know you do until you hear it outside yourself. A soft exhale. The kind I make when I’m reading something that surprises me, or when I sit down after standing too long.
And then the call drops and I realize my hands are shaking.
I don’t know how long I stand there in the middle of my kitchen. Long enough for the coffee to go cold. Long enough for the garbage truck to come and go. When I finally move, I go to my laptop and I pull up the security camera footage from the small camera I installed above my own front door three weeks ago — my private precaution, my documentation instinct made physical.
I scrub back through the footage. I am looking for the man in the gray jacket. I am looking for anything.
What I find is worse.
—
The timestamp on the footage reads 7:22:04.
The door to my apartment opens.
I watch myself walk out. Coat on, bag over one shoulder, keys in hand. I watch myself pull the door shut and test the handle and walk toward the elevator.
Except I did not leave my apartment this morning. I am standing in my kitchen right now, coffee going cold, hands still trembling. I have not left. I have been here since six-thirty.
I watch the footage again. And again. The timestamp is correct. The face is mine — same coat, same bag, same way I always test the door handle twice because I am paranoid about locks. The footage is not glitching. The quality is clear.
Something that looks exactly like me left my apartment at 7:22 this morning.
And then I understand something, and the understanding arrives not as a revelation but as a cold, slow tide coming in over flat ground.
The calls were not a threat. They were not surveillance. They were a signal — something reaching across whatever membrane separates what is from what is almost, trying to tell me in the only language it had access to: my number, my voice, my ambient sounds, the room it knew better than any room because it had been inside it, wearing my face, long before I thought to install a camera.
I look at the footage one more time.
And in the hallway, just before the figure that looks like me steps out of frame, it turns its head slightly — not enough to look at the camera, not enough to be caught clearly — just enough that I can see, in the last frame before the timestamp rolls to 7:22:05, that its eyes are closed.
They have been closed the whole time.
My phone rings.
7:22.
My number.
I don’t answer it. I stand very still and I listen to it ring, and I think about every morning for three years, the coffee and the steam and the same sounds in the same order, and I think about how a person can share a life with something and never once look closely enough to know.
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