The house smelled like old dust, stale perfume, and the faint smell of rotting flesh.

Her mother had been dead for three weeks before anyone found her. Pat, the neighbor, said the mail was what gave it away— the pile of it visible on the front porch.

Meg didn’t like to think about those three weeks.

“You sure weren’t sentimental, were you, Mom?” Her voice echoed softly through the empty house as she sorted the last few things from her mother’s kitchen into boxes.

Drawers filled with takeout menus, old silverware, and half-empty pill bottles. Evidence of survival, not living.

“Well, at least you made my job easy.” Meg taped another donation box shut. “No mountains of rotting newspapers or boxes of old treasures to sort through.”

The box labeled KEEP sat noticeably lighter than the others. There wasn’t much she wanted from this place. Too many ghosts lived here already.

That about did it for the kitchen, time to tackle the bedroom. Meg pulled open the bedroom door and froze.

There it was.

Sitting on top of the table next to her mother’s chair.

Its plastic grin stretched unnaturally wide beneath two protruding red eyes. Its brown fur matted stiffly with age.

Meg reached for it slowly and the cymbals clanged together softly as she lifted it.

“Oh, Jesus.”

Meg recoiled before she could stop herself.

She remembered it instantly.

The monkey had spent most of her childhood in her mother’s bedroom. It was almost always perched on the table in her mother’s room, staring out into the hallway as if it were standing guard.

Sometimes her mother carried it in her purse, one hand resting absentmindedly against its matted fur. “My little pet,” she used to joke.

Meg had always hated the thing. As a child, she used to lie awake, convinced it was watching her from the doorway.

“Absolutely not,” Meg muttered.

She shoved the monkey deep into the donation box beneath a pile of old dish towels and sealed the lid shut before she could second-guess herself.

“ Hey, Babe.”

Charlie said as Meg walked into the first-floor apartment they shared around 5:30 that evening.

“Is this all that’s left from ‘The Trauma House’?”

He kissed her on the forehead and took the box labeled “KEEP” out of her hands.

“Yes, thank god. I dropped the donation boxes off at Goodwill on the way home and already called the realtor to tell her the place is ready to be listed.”

“Whoa…what the fuck is this?” Charlie cut her off, pulling the monkey out of the box.

Frowning, Meg rushed over to grab the monkey. “ I swear I threw this out.”

“ It’s okay, babe, it’s been a long day, you probably just tucked it into the wrong box.” The monkey’s cymbals clanged as Charlie turned it over, “although, this has got to be the world’s creepiest toy.” Laughing, he tossed it back into the box. “ I say we burn it.”

Meg rolled her eyes, setting the monkey on the kitchen counter. “ I’ll take it to the donation tomorrow. But right now I need to get changed, we are supposed to meet the crew at McGinny’s Bar in 40 minutes, and I am all dusty and gross.”

Charlie put his arms around her. “ I bet we have enough time for me to hop in the shower with you before we leave.”

She swatted at him, “You’re ridiculous, Charlie, you’re going to make us late.” She saw the disappointment flash across his face and pulled him in for a kiss

“Later, okay?”

“Meg and Charlie are here, time for tequila shots!” Wren shouted as they walked into the bar and sat down with their group of friends.

“No, thank you! I do not need that kind of energy in my life,” replied Meg.

Meg, Charlie, Iris, Wren, Colby, and Alex had met their Freshman year of college. They were an odd group of friends with vastly different personalities, but somehow they had managed to stay close and spent time together almost weekly.

“I figured with the week you’ve had, you would want the tequila.” Said Wren, waving down the bartender who was looking harried and pointedly ignoring her.

Iris put an arm around Wren. They’d started dating shortly after graduating and had gotten married last year. They ran a very successful wedding photography business together. They had started it three years ago, with an old Canon camera and a small website they built on Wix, but it had quickly taken off, and this year they had been nominated as the Knot’s Best of Wedding Photographers for 2026.

“How’s packing up the old house going, Meg?” Iris asked. She quietly placed a $50 on the counter and winked at the frazzled bartender, who smiled and dropped what he was doing to come over and take her order.

“Still no to the tequila, I have a big meeting at work tomorrow. And I just finished packing the house today.” Meg said.

Sometimes Meg felt a bit jealous of Wren and Iris. They worked so well together. Wren and Iris were a live wire. She and Charlie were fine. Fine like a Tuesday. Fine like a utility bill that wasn’t overdue.

Meg’s thoughts were interrupted when the bartender brought their drinks over-PB&Js for everyone. “Well, at least it’s not tequila.” Meg thought.

“Cheers, everyone! Here’s to facing childhood trauma.” Alex said.

Wren shoved him. “You’re such an insensitive ass, Alex!”

The whiskey bit on the way down and left a warm buzz in its wake. Maybe it was what Meg needed.

“ Speaking of trauma, Meg, what on earth is this?” Alex said, grabbing at her backpack.

Alex’s hand reached past a zipper that had started to come undone and pulled out something small and brown. Meg heard a small clang. It was the goddamn Monkey.

“Whoa, this thing is creepy as hell. Where did you get it?” Alex said, laughing as he turned it over.

Colby took the monkey from Alex. “ I dunno, it’s actually kind of cool, seems kind of avant-garde,”

Meg just gaped at it. She couldn’t make sense of it.

“Meg, what the fuck? Why did you bring that thing?” Charlie said. Clearly annoyed by the unexpected appearance of the monkey,

“ I… I didn’t” Meg stammered.

“ What, you expect me to believe it just appeared in there on its own? Seriously, Meg, this is weird.”

“ Charlie cut it out, you’re being a dick, Meg’s had a really hard week.” Iris jumped to her defense.

“ It...was my mom’s, “ Meg said, taking the monkey from Colby and shoving it back in her backpack. “The packing must have gotten to me more than I realized today. I meant to take it to donate tomorrow, but I must have somehow slipped it into my backpack on the way out. Sorry, guys, the stupid thing genuinely freaks me out.”

“Hey, it’s okay, Meg, managing a funeral and dealing with your mom’s stuff, that’s a lot for anyone. You’re honestly handling this so well. We probably should have rescheduled this for another night.”

“ Yeah… I thought I’d be fine, but maybe I should just head home.” Meg said.

“ Meg, we just got here,” Charlie said, clearly annoyed again.

“It’s fine, Charlie, I can take our car, I’m sure Alex will give you a ride home tonight. Our place isn’t that far out of the way.”

“Yeah, I can definitely do that,” Alex said. “It’s no problem. Go home and get some rest, Meg. And maybe burn that monkey while you’re at it.”

“That’s what I said,” Charlie laughed. He kissed Meg on the forehead. “Get home safe, okay? I’ll be home before too long.”

“Okay.” Meg said, “ Sorry again, everyone. Rain check on those tequila shots.”

“No worries, Meg. You’ll have that big promotion next time we see you anyway, so we can all get together and celebrate!” said Wren.

“ Right.” Said Meg, smiling weakly as she headed for the door.

Rain misted the windshield of the car as Meg drove home. A promotion. Yeah right. Meg thought as she drove back to the apartment. Five years at Verdant. Five years of sitting across from strangers in dim testing rooms, watching them navigate screens she had helped design, and still, she could not predict what they would do. Could not feel her way into the logic of it. Other researchers, much newer than her, read data in a way that felt intimate and obvious. Meg read the same data and saw only static.

Her last project had tested fine. Not badly, just adequate. The word Marcus had used in her review with a smile that meant he was trying to be kind about it.

“Solid foundational work, Meg. We’d love to see you push further.”

She’d been hearing versions of that sentence for five years. She had wanted this since she could remember- had written her thesis on emotional friction in digital interfaces, had believed that she could map the space between what people said they wanted and what they actually needed. She’d actually thought she understood people.

She did not understand people.

Her friends had all figured this out; why couldn’t she? Colby was a senior editor at Hartwell Press. He had skyrocketed to success in a matter of years, brought other people’s words to life, and was an excellent writer himself.

Wren and Iris had over a million followers on their social media and were booked out 18 months in advance.

Alex was in tech sales and closed deals on his personality alone, which was annoying but undeniable.

And Charlie managed other people’s wealth with the same easy competence he brought to everything else in his life.

All of them were good at something. All of them moving forward. Except for Meg. Meg had a folder of performance reviews that said solid foundational work and her dead mother’s ugly monkey.

She looked over at her backpack sitting innocently in the passenger seat. “ Thanks for the inheritance, Mom,” she said to herself.

Meg was tired and soaked when she made it inside. She wanted to go to bed and be done with this day. She threw her backpack on the counter and peeled off wet clothes, leaving a trail behind her.

She opened the refrigerator and poured herself a bottle of wine. She felt incredibly morose. Maybe this whole thing was affecting her more than she thought it would. That was normal, right? You were supposed to feel sad when your mom died. Drinking half the glass of wine in one gulp, she reached into her backpack and pulled out the monkey. He was so incredibly ugly, she thought. Standing on her tiptoes, she placed him on the top shelf, next to the good olive oil and the ceramic bowl of takeout menus they never used. She went to bed without finishing the glass of wine, then she lay in the dark until Charlie crawled into bed beside her. She listened to his rhythmic breathing and told herself she would deal with it all in the morning.

The next day, before work, Meg put the monkey in her backpack.

She didn’t decide to do it. She was getting ready to leave for work, slowly drinking her coffee before heading out, when she looked at the shelf. And then she was wrapping both hands around his small, rigid body and tucking him into the front pocket of her bag as his cymbals clanged softly together.

“What are you doing?”

Charlie was in the doorway in his boxers, his hair mussed straight up like a mad scientist, eyes still squinty with sleep.

“Nothing,” She said as she zipped the pocket closed.

“Is that the monkey?”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you putting it in your work bag?”

Meg picked up her coffee. It was cold. She drank it anyway.

“ I don’t know,” She said, “ I think maybe I’m not as okay with my mom dying as I thought I was.” She said to the counter. “ I have this big meeting today. I know it’s stupid. I just want it with me.”

Charlie looked at her for a long moment. She could feel him weighing what to say next.

“Okay, Meg.” He came over and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll see you tonight.”

As Meg tucked the monkey into her backpack. She thought of the meeting and the dropout data she hadn’t finished and told herself, it would be okay, today was going to be different.

She almost believed it.

Meg had been staring at the same slide for eleven minutes- she knew because there was a clock on the wall behind Marcus’s head and she had been watching the second hand tick by. On the computer screen, the slide said USER RETENTION: MONTH 1-# in clean sans-serif font and beneath it a graph that told the same story it had been telling for eight months, which was that people downloaded Tether, used it for two weeks, and then quietly stopped.

Nobody knew why.

“The onboarding funnel is solid,” said Derek from Growth, clicking to the next slide, “activation rates are actually up eleven percent from last quarter. They’re coming in. They’re just not staying.”

“They don’t find value in the core loop,” said someone whose name Meg could never remember. “The daily check-in feels like homework.”

“We’ve iterated the check-in four times,” Marcus said. He had his arms crossed. He only crossed his arms when he was trying not to sound as frustrated as he actually was. “What are we missing?”

The room did not have an answer.

Meg had her notebook open in front of her, but she hadn’t written anything in it. She’d drawn a small rectangle in the top corner of the page and then a smaller rectangle inside that one, and then stopped. Under the table, her backpack sat against her ankle. She could feel the slight weight of it.

She thought about her mother’s hallway. The table in her mother’s room where the monkey had always sat. How she’d walked past it ten thousand times without really seeing it. How the day she had come to clean the house out, she had sat in her car outside her mother’s house for twenty minutes, unable to move because she couldn’t figure out what to do with feelings that didn’t have a name. The ones that weren’t grief exactly. The ones that were just weight. Unprocessed, inconvenient, and too large for the container of a daily check-in prompt

How are you feeling today? Tether asked its users every morning.

Meg thought about all the people who opened that notification, stared at it, and put their phone face down on the table and never opened the app again.

She looked down at her bag.

The Monkey’s face was visible through the half-open zipper, one glass eye catching the light from the window.

Oh, she thought.

“Can I say something?”

It came out before she knew what she was doing. Marcus looked at her. The whole room was looking at her.

“Go ahead, Meg.”

She sat up straighter. Under the table, she pressed her foot against the side of her bag.

“ I think we’ve been solving the wrong problem,” She said. “We keep asking why users aren’t engaging with the core loop, but I don’t think the loop is the issue. I think the premise is.”

“The premise,” Marcus repeated.

“Tether is built on the assumption that people are ready to process what they are feeling. That if you give them the right prompts and the right tools, they’ll do all the work.” She paused. “ But a lot of people aren’t ready for that. Most of the time, when something is hard, people aren’t looking to process. They’re just trying to get through the day.”

The room was quiet.

“So they open the app,” She continued, “and it asks them to do something they’re not capable of doing yet. And they feel like they’ve failed at their own wellness routine. And they close it and don’t come back because the app made them feel worse, not better.”

Derek put his pen down.

“What they actually need,” Meg said, “is something that doesn’t ask anything of them. Something that just- sits with them. Presence instead of progress. A companion for the feeling you’re not ready to name yet.” She thought of the hallway. She thought of the monkey’s glass eyes in the dark. “We could call it Still Water. Passive check-ins with a character that will just be with you, ambient sounds, no prompts, no journaling, no streaks, just an app saying - I’m here. You don’t have to do anything.”

She stopped.

Marcus was looking at her in a way he hadn’t looked at her before. Like he was recalibrating something.

“That’s a significant pivot.” He said slowly.

“I know.”

“It would mean rethinking the entire value proposition.”

“I know,” she said again. “But I think it’s right.”

Afterward, the room emptied in the usual way, people drifting towards the door in twos, already on their phones. Meg was closing her notebook when Marcus stopped beside her chair.

“That was good work today.” He said.

Meg looked up.

“I mean it. That reframe-I’ve been looking at that retention data for eight months, and I didn’t see it.” He shook his head slightly. Where did that come from?”

Meg glanced down at her bag. The zipper was still halfway open.

“I don’t know,” she said, “ I just got tired of looking at data and not feeling anything.”

Marcus nodded slowly. “I want you to build it out. Full concept, new research framework, bring it back in two weeks. If this holds up, I want to talk about what a lead role on this looks like.”

He left.

Meg sat alone in the warm conference room with her notebook and backpack, completely shocked by the turn of events the afternoon had brought. She reached down and zipped up her backpack.

“Thanks,” She said quietly.

She wasn’t sure who she was talking to.

Meg called Charlie from the parking garage, fumbling to unlock her car.

He picked up on the third ring. She could hear Colby in the background.

“ Hey, where are you?”

“We’re at Colby’s place. What’s up?”

“I have news,” she said. “Good news. Can I come over?”

She heard a shuffling and then Colby shouting in the background, “Of course, Meg, come over!”

Colby’s apartment was warm and smelled like coffee and old paperbacks. Charlie and Colby were sitting on the couch with a bottle of Merlot already open. Charlie looked up as Meg came in.

“What’s up, Meg? You look a little unhinged.”

“Thank you”

“That was not a compliment.”

“Okay, talk,” Colby said. “ We have been anxiously awaiting this great revelation of yours.”

She told them about all of it- the conference room, the retention data, the way she had pitched Still Water, and the idea of being present. How Marcus had talked to her after.

“If it all goes well, he wants me to be a lead on the project.”

Charlie’s face broke into a grin. “Meg, seriously?”

“I know.”

“That’s huge.” He pulled her down onto the couch beside him. “See? I told you the meeting was going to be fine.”

“You said try not to bomb it,” Meg said.

“That’s basically the same thing.”

Colby handed her a glass of wine and sat across from them, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “It’s a genuinely beautiful idea, Meg. Where did it come from?”

Meg looked down at her bag.

“I think it was the monkey,” she said.

Charlie made a sound that wasn’t quite a sigh.

“I know you think it’s weird,” She said quickly, “But I looked down at him right before I pitched it, and I thought about my mom and grief and sitting with things you can’t process yet, and it just- came out of that. I don’t think I would have got there without him.”

“Meg, you got there because you’re good at your job,” Charlie said. “The monkey was just in your bag.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he helped.”

“He’s just a toy.”

“Charlie,” Colby said mildly.

“I’m just saying, it’s a weird toy monkey.”

“His name is Benny,” Meg said.

Charlie looked at her, “Really. You’re naming it now.”

“I didn’t name it. That’s just his name.”

“That’s literally naming him.”

Colby was smiling into his wine glass. “I don’t know, think about it; her mom leaves her this thing, Meg brings it with her, and then she has the first real breakthrough at work in years.” He shrugged. “ Maybe it is a good luck charm.”

“Or maybe Meg had a good idea, and she’s outsourcing the credit,” Charlie said. But his voice had gone softer. He looked at her— at her flushed face, the way she was sitting forward, all of the flatness of the last few months temporarily lifted— and whatever argument he’d been building quietly dissolved.”

“I’m really proud of you,” he said. “ You know that, right?”

Meg leaned into him. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. But I like hearing it anyway.”

Benny sat there on the cushion beside her, propped against the armrest, cymbals poised, forgotten by the three of them as they finished their bottle of wine and the night settled quietly in around them.

They got home a little after ten.

Charlie unlocked the door, and Meg followed him in and turned around in the front hallway and kissed her the way he used to when they were younger, both hands on her face, warm and urgent. She dropped her bag near the door.

“I’m really proud of you,” He said again, quieter this time, against her mouth.

“You said that already.”

“I meant it both times.”

She laughed and pulled him further down the hallway. The apartment felt warm and inviting in a way she’d almost forgotten it could be. She was halfway to the bedroom when she heard it.

A small sound. The metal clang of cymbals.

She turned.

Her backpack was tipped over, and Benny was on the kitchen floor, face up, cymbals slightly apart. She stood in the hallway and looked at him for a moment in the dark.

“Meg,” Charlie called from the bedroom. “Come on.”

She went back to the kitchen and picked Benny up. She carefully set him back on the counter, tucking him safely back where he wouldn’t fall before she let go.

Then she went to the bedroom and closed the door.

The Still Water pilot went live on Tuesday, and Meg spent the whole day obsessively refreshing the dashboard.

By Thursday, the numbers looked different; the drop-off curve was starting to flatten. Not dramatically, but definitely in a steady, measurable way. It was working.

She texted Charlie a screenshot with no caption.

He replied: “ Is that good?

Yes!!

He sent back: !!!

She put her phone face down on her desk and looked at Benny and felt something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Perhaps it was joy?

During the next meeting, she listened to Derek from Growth, droning on about activation rates. What he was saying wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t quite right either, and Meg heard herself say I think we’re measuring the wrong thing before she’d fully decided to say it.

The room turned towards her.

She kept going.

Afterwards, she sat in the bathroom for three minutes with her hands on the flat, cold counter, feeling like she might be sick. Then she went back to her desk, touched Benny’s head, and opened her laptop.

That’s twice now, she thought.

She didn’t let herself finish that sentence.

Three weeks later, Marcus came to her office, which he didn’t do. She was usually called into his office. She heard the knock and looked up with the alertness of someone who expected to be told they were doing something wrong.

“Can I sit down?” Marcus asked.

“Sure. Of course.” Meg rushed to clear the papers piled on the extra chair.

They talked through the phase two rollout.

“Meg, this is going really well. Your idea was a good one. I want you to take the lead on the next steps of the project. I…” He stopped mid-sentence.

He was looking at her desk.

Benny was propped against her monitor, between the succulent she kept forgetting to water and a stack of binders. With glass eyes that caught the light and an expression that managed to be both blank and expectant.

“Ummm”

“He was my mother’s,” Meg rushed to say. “She passed in September.”

“I’m sorry,” Marcus said. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s okay. Having him here helps.” She paused, “ I guess it’s a little weird for an office.”

“No, it’s…” Marcus looked at Benny for a moment. Something passed across his face. “It’s not weird.”

They looked at each other.

“I started doing my best work after he came into my life,” Meg said. “ I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

A beat. Small but there.

“Well,” Marcus said. “Whatever you’re doing, keep it up.” He stood gathering his coffee mug.

At the door, he paused with his hand on the frame. He thought he was going to say something else, but he turned and left.

Meg turned back to her screen. After a moment, she straightened Benny slightly against the Monitor.

“Good meeting,” she said.

Charlie started leaving her coffee on the counter in the mornings.

He’d always been a morning person in a way that deeply annoyed her- up before the alarm went off, far too happy for having no caffeine in his system- but he’d never really been one for thoughtful gestures. Now the coffee was just there when she came into the kitchen. He didn’t mention it, and neither did she. It was just a thing that was happening.

One night, she came home to find he’d made dinner. Not just Mac and Cheese, but actual dinner. Steak and vegetables, the way his father made them, and Charlie claimed to have forgotten. The apartment smelled like browned butter and garlic.

“What’s the occasion?” She said, dropping her bag by the door.

“No occasion.” He handed her a glass of wine and kissed her on the forehead.

She kissed him back, “Thank you, Charlie. You’ve been so sweet lately.”

Benny was on the coffee table. Charlie had moved him to the shelf that morning- she had seen him do it- and at some point during the day, he’d migrated back. Charlie glanced at him over her shoulder and then didn’t look at him again.

It was fine. Everything was fine.

Iris chose the restaurant- somewhere in the Pearl with natural wine and small plates and lighting that made everyone look like a Renaissance painting. Colby was already there, proofreading a novel. He stood up when Meg came in.

They ordered too much and laughed loudly. And at some point, Wren climbed halfway across the table to show everyone a photo from their most recent shoot,

“This bride— a complete bridezilla— wanted the entire shoot to be siren themed and made the entire wedding party wade into this pond. Everyone was completely soaked for the rest of the day. But the photos turned out stunning.”

Iris pulled her back by her jacket without looking up from her phone.

Meg laughed, “Yes, Wren, we get it, you and Iris are sorceresses, and none of us understands how you work your magic.”

“Okay, enough about us. Tell us everything,” Wren said, settling back down. “From the beginning.”

So Meg told them all about the phase two rollout. How Marcus had stood Meg up in front of everyone, saying that she had been foundational in the groundbreaking of Still Water. How he had recently talked to her about the promise she was showing, and how he would like to place her on a big project that Verdant was just starting up. Colby listened with his elbows on the table. Iris had her chin in her hands.

“You seem different,” Iris said.

“Good different,” Wren said quickly.

“Good different,” Iris said, “ I just- I can’t place it.”

“I feel different,” Meg said. She reached back and unzipped the front pocket of her bag. “I’ve been bringing Benny with me; I think that’s helping.”

Colby smiled. Wren looked at the bag.

“The monkey? “Wren asked.

“His name is Benny,” Meg said

“Right. Benny.” Wren glanced at Iris.

It was a fast glance. The kind that held a whole conversation inside it. Meg was refilling her glass of wine and didn’t catch it,

Colby raised his glass towards the bag, “To Benny,” He said

“To Benny,” Meg said.

Iris raised her glass. She was still watching Meg with those careful eyes, waiting for the real thing to show itself.

She didn’t say anything.

The idea came at two in the morning, and Meg knew it was easily the best thing she’d ever thought of.

She’d been awake for an hour already, lying in the dark with Benny on the nightstand and her brain making connections faster than she could write them down, pulling threads from everywhere and weaving them into something she couldn’t quite see the shape of until suddenly she could. She sat up, grabbed her laptop off the floor, and didn’t stop for two hours.

She looked at Benny in the dark.

“This is it,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

His glass eyes caught the glow from her screen.

She took that as a yes.

The Grief Index. A companion feature to Still Water- but bigger, the thing Still Water had been pointing towards all along without knowing it. Users would submit their own language for feelings they didn’t have words for yet. The grief without a category, the 2 am weight with no clinical term. The app would collect it, map it, and build a living emotional taxonomy from real human experience.

And then- this was the part that made it real, the part that gave it actual value in the world- Verdant would license the aggregated data to Pharmaceutical companies developing grief medications. To insurance providers, building mental health coverage frameworks. To researchers who needed the actual language of human suffering instead of the sanitized and clinical approximations that had been failing people for decades.

We are sitting on the most honest emotional data set in human history, she wrote at the bottom of the document. We owe it to the world to use it.

She closed the laptop and lay back down and felt Benny’s weight on the nightstand beside her and slept better than she had in weeks.

She looked at herself in the mirror in the morning, thinking about the Grief index, and by the time she came back to herself, she was already in the kitchen. Her hair was still damp, she’d forgotten to put her makeup on, and she was running late.

Charlie noticed, but he didn’t say anything.

She started keeping Benny on her desk at work instead of her bag. Then, on the table during team meetings. Someone- she thought it was Derek- had said something once, quietly, to someone else. She’d heard the word monkey and looked up; the conversation had stopped. She didn’t think about it for long; she was too preoccupied with the Grief Index to worry about it.

She talked to Benny under her breath on the walk from the parking garage to the office. She liked to check in and tell him what was on the agenda. Asked him how he was feeling about the day. It felt practical. He always listened.

Charlie came into the kitchen one Wednesday in February and stopped.

Meg was at the counter with her laptop and her cold coffee, and Benny propped against the fruit bowl, and she was talking. Not on the phone or to herself in the vague way people sometimes did. She was talking to Benny, directly, explaining the licensing framework and why the pharmaceutical angle was actually ethical if you looked at it right, and her voice had the focused quality of someone making an argument they meant to win.

“Meg,” Charlie said.

She looked up, came back into the room from wherever she had been.

“Hey,” she said.

He looked at Benny against the fruit bowl. Then at her. He did not have the bandwidth for this right now.

“Have you eaten?” he said finally.

“I had something.”

“When?”

She looked at the clock. It was nine forty-seven. She had been at the counter since she had gotten home at six.

“I’m almost done,” she said. “I’ll eat after.”

Charlie opened the refrigerator and stood looking into it for a long time without taking anything out. He pulled out a Balanced Break and threw it on the counter in front of Meg, then turned and went to the bedroom, where she heard him turn the TV on low. She turned back to her laptop, and Benny watched from the side of the fruit bowl as she kept working.

She pitched Grief Index to Marcus several weeks later without running it by anyone first.

She’d thought about running it by someone, but decided against it because she knew what people would say before they understood it, and she needed Marcus to hear it directly from her the right way before anyone else got to it.

She walked him through the whole thing. The emotional taxonomy, the community sourcing, the data architecture, and licensing framework. She’d made slides that morning, and they were clean and precise. She thought they were the best slides she had ever made. She’d shown them to Benny before she left the apartment.

Marcus listened all the way through without interrupting, which she took as a good sign. When she finished, the room was very quiet.

“Say the licensing part again,” He said.

She repeated it.

Marcus had his hands flat on the table and was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t read, but did not like.

“You’re proposing that we sell our users’ grief to pharmaceutical companies,” he said.

“I’m proposing we license responsibly anonymized—”

“Meg.” His voice was careful and controlled. “These are people who came to us in their worst moments. People who trusted us with the language of their pain, and you’re proposing we package that and sell it.”

“ To people who need it to help—”

“This would end the company.” He said it quietly. “If this got out-and it would get out- this would end the company. It would be a scandal.”

“But our framework protects-”

“I’m going to stop you there.” He leaned forward. “Are you okay?”

She looked at him.

“I’m asking genuinely,” he said, “You’ve seemed...I’ve noticed some things lately, and I haven’t said anything because your work has been good, but-” He stopped. “ Is everything okay at home? Are you sleeping?”

Benny was on the corner of her desk, facing the room. Marcus glanced at him.

“I’m fine,” Meg said. “I’m better than fine. I think this is the most important idea I’ve had, and I need you to actually hear it before you-”

“I’ve heard it,” Marcus said. “The answer is no. Unequivocal no, and I need you to let this go.” He stood up. “Take the weekend. Come back Monday, and let’s talk about where we are with the Still Water phase two. Okay?”

She sat in her office after he left, staring into the distance, and told herself he just didn’t understand it yet.

The all-hands meeting was midway through April.

Six weeks of phase two, and the numbers told a story nobody wanted to read. The Still Water retention had plateaued. The Grief Index proposal had leaked somehow- she didn’t know how, she suspected Derek, she didn’t have proof- and there had been two uncomfortable Slack threads and a terse all-staff email from Marcus about responsible data ethics that hadn’t named her but hadn’t needed to. The mood on the Tether team had drastically shifted towards her.

She had been up since four. She was wearing the blazer she had worn to her Verdant interview five years ago, though it was slightly big on her now. Her hair was done up, and she’d put Benny in her laptop bag and then taken him out and held him for a while before she left and told him today was going to be the day she turned it around.

The conference room was quiet with anticipation.

Meg stood at the front with her laptop on the podium and her bag with Benny in it at her feet, and started talking.

She was good for the first few minutes. Steady and clear, walking through the retention data with the composure she’d been practicing in the bathroom mirror at five in the morning. She could feel the room, the attention, the quality of it, which way it was leaning.

It was not leaning towards her.

She went off the slides somewhere around minute six. She fumbled her words and then just kept going. She started talking about the Grief Index because it was always there, the thing underneath everything, and if she could just make them understand—

“Meg, this isn’t—” Marcus started.

“I know what the numbers look like,” she said. Her voice had gotten louder. “I know how this looks right now, but that’s because we stopped too soon, we got scared, and we pulled back. If we had just kept going.”

“Meg—”

“The data is there.” She reached into her bag and slammed Benny on the podium. His cymbals clanged with the impact. “We have six months of the most honest emotional data set this company has ever generated, and we are leaving it on the table because we’re afraid of what people will think, and that is-” her voice cracked, “that is exactly the problem. Exactly the problem that Still Water was supposed to fix. We keep asking people to be okay before they’re ready to be okay, and then we do the same thing to ourselves, we-”

The room was very still.

“Meg.” Marcus was standing. His voice had the specific tone of someone who had made a decision. “I need you to—“

“Benny.” She turned to the podium, her voice dropping to something almost conversational. “Tell them. Tell them it’s going to work.”

Nobody breathed.

The clock on the wall behind Marcus’s head moved its second hand.

Meg looked at Benny on the podium. At his glass eyes and his smile that was far too wide. His expression was blank, patient, and completely, utterly unchanged.

The room came back to her slowly. The faces surrounding her. Derek with his pen hovering above his notepad. A woman from the executive floor with her mouth hanging open. All of them frozen in shock.

Marcus was standing and looking at her with something that was between anger and pity and was somehow worse than both.

She picked Benny up off the podium and walked out.

She sat in the parking garage for forty-five minutes. Benny was in her lap, and she had both hands on the steering wheel. She did not cry. She was past the place where crying felt like a viable option. This place was very quiet and numb and far beyond anything she could name.

Her phone buzzed four times, but she didn’t look at it.

Eventually, she started the car and drove home.

Charlie came home to find her on the couch in the dark.

She hadn’t turned any lights on. It was six-thirty, and the apartment was the dusky grey of an early Portland evening. Meg was staring straight ahead with Benny in her lap and her work bag still over her shoulder like she’d sat down when she’d gotten home and just never gotten up.

He stood in the doorway and looked at her for a long time.

Then he went to the kitchen, and she heard him putting the kettle on and the small sounds of him moving around, and when he came back, he set a mug of tea on the table in front of her and sat down beside her and didn’t say anything.

She looked at the tea.

“I got fired,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “Marcus called me.”

She looked at him.

He was worried about you driving home,” Charlie said quietly.

She looked back at the tea.

Outside, it started to rain. They sat on the couch silently for a long time.

She doesn’t remember who suggested lunch.

It was probably Wren or Iris- they tended to make decisions like a single organism, one of them thinking and the other one saying it. They chose somewhere small and quiet, a place on Division with good soup and windows that let in the grey April light. Iris and Wren were already there when she arrived.

She sat across from them and picked up the menu and said, “ The tomato looks good.”

“Meg, we’re worried about you,” Iris said.

“I’m fine,” Meg said. “I’ve had a hard couple of weeks at work—”

“Charlie told us,” Wren said. “And before you get upset with him- he cried on the phone, Meg. He didn’t know what else to do.”

Meg felt her jaw clench.

“Meg, where’s Benny?” Iris asked.

Meg’s hand moved to her bag automatically. “ In my bag.”

“Can you leave him there? For lunch?”

Meg’s hand had already moved to the strap of her bag. She made herself put it flat on the table.

“I don’t understand why everyone has such a problem with him.”

“Do you remember,” Wren said carefully, “the last time you came to our place? Like, actually came over, stayed for dinner, and were just there?”

Meg opened her mouth.

“November,” Iris said. “It was November. It’s April now, Meg.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“You’ve been gone. You don’t answer texts anymore. You left Alex’s birthday party after forty minutes. You cancelled on us three times, and every time it was because of something with work, and we kept giving you the benefit of the doubt because you were doing so well and we were so happy for you, and then-” she stopped. “And then you weren’t. And you still didn’t come back.”

Meg looked at the table

“Meg, you know what this is, right? We knew your mom. We were there in college when you still talked to her. And we were there when you stopped.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with-” Meg started

“She got weird,” Wren said carefully. “That’s what you said. You said she got weird, and you didn’t know how to be around her anymore. She stopped leaving the apartment. She stopped answering your calls half the time. And when you did go see her, she was just a shell.” Wren paused. “She just sat in that chair. And Benny was always next to her on the table.”

“It’s not the same,” Meg said in a quiet voice.

“You said she sat in that chair the whole time,” Wren said. “That she barely got up. That the house was—” she paused — “that it smelled. That she looked like she hadn’t been outside in weeks. And Benny was on the table next to her chair, and she kept—”

“She kept touching him,” Meg said. Almost to herself. “The whole time I was there. She’d just reach over and touch him. She wasn’t even looking at him.”

“Your mom had a hard life,” Iris said. “You know that better than anyone. Her mother was cruel to her. Your dad left. Every time something good happened, something took it away. And somewhere along the way, she stopped believing she was allowed to have a life and just checked out. She found the one thing that felt safe, and she held onto it, and everything else fell away. Her job. Her friends.” A pause. “You.”

Meg’s jaw was very tight. She thought back to how her mom used to call her stupid. She never raised her voice; she would just say it like a fact.

“ You’re not going to be able to do that, Meg. That’s not really for people like you.” She had spent her entire life trying to prove her mother wrong… tried and failed.

“She talked to him, didn’t she? You told me that once you said it freaked you out.”

Meg said nothing.

Iris reached across the table and put her hand over Meg’s.

“Meg, you are so much more than what you produce,” she said. “You always have been. Whatever your mom put in you that made you believe otherwise — that’s the thing, Meg. That’s the thing to put down.”

Meg pulled away, not looking Iris in the eyes.

She reached for her bag strap, caught herself, and put her hand flat on the table instead.

“I pitched an idea that didn’t work,” she said. “That’s all. I’m allowed to have a hard season.”

“Meg—”

“I should go.” She was already reaching for her bag. “I have things I need to take care of.”

“Please don’t,” Wren said.

But Meg was standing, pulling on her coat. Her eyes welled up, betraying what the rest of her refused to show. She heard every word, but shoved them into the same dark corner as every other truth she wasn’t ready to face.

“I’ll call you,” she said. “I’m fine. I promise.”

She got up and bolted out the door.

Through the window, Iris and Wren watched her go. Watched her pause on the sidewalk, reach into her bag, and take Benny out and hold him against her chest for a moment before she started walking.

Wren made a small sound.

Iris put her arm around her and said nothing because there was nothing to say.

Charlie tried on Tuesday night.

They’d been tiptoeing around each other all week. Two people sharing a space that had gotten very small. She knew he was unhappy, but she kept telling herself they would fix it. They always did. She just needed to sort through this work thing first, and then she would be present again.

He came to the bedroom doorway, and she was at her desk, working on her laptop, Benny sitting on her lap.

“Meg…”

He said her name in a tone that said I’m trying. As he came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, kissing her sweetly, she could tell what he wanted, could tell he was trying to connect, and some part of her wanted it too. She wanted the warmth of October back. The pasta and the wine and his hands on her face, kissing her passionately in the dark.

She reached over and picked Benny up and carried him to the bed,

She didn’t think about it; she just did it.

Charlie stood there watching her as she set Benny on the pillow and didn’t move for a long moment. She watched anger and disgust flood his dark eyes.

“No,” he said.

“Charlie, I just-”

“No.” His voice was flat and final, like something in him had died. “I can’t do this anymore, Meg. I have tried,” he said slowly, “I thought it was grief. I told myself that you just needed time, and I kept waiting for you to come back to me.” He looked at Benny on the pillow, then at Meg. “ I don’t think you’re coming back.”

“Charlie, that’s not fair,” a strained laugh escaped her throat. “It’s me, I’m right here.”

“I’m going to Alex’s for the rest of the week,” he said, already moving away from the door. “ If you can be out of the apartment for the day on Saturday, I’ll come back and get my stuff.”

“ Charlie.” She stood up. “Charlie, don’t do this. ” Her hands found his chest almost frantically, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt.

He gently pulled her hands away and looked her in the eyes. “I love you, Meg, I really do. But I think you need help that I don’t know how to give you.”

The front door opened and closed.

The silence left behind in its wake hit her like a train.

She picked up Benny off the bed and looked at him. At his cold, stupid expression that never changed. Not when she lost her job, not when she lost Charlie, not when she had lost every thread of herself somewhere in between October and now.

She threw him as hard as she could against the wall.

The cymbals shattered the silence with a loud clang as he crashed to the floor.

Meg stood with her hands clenched at her sides.

One breath. Two. She could feel the apartment around her - their apartment, the specific smell of it, his coat still hanging on the chair, her coffee mug from this morning still on the counter, thousands of memories kaleidoscoping off the corners of her brain. It was a weight she didn’t know how to carry. A rogue wave that would hit in silent moments for months to come.

She sat down on the floor and let it wash over her.

She sat like that for a long time- or perhaps it was only seconds- when she noticed the crumpled form against the wall. One of his cymbal arms had bent slightly on impact. His fur was dusty, and his expression was exactly the same as it had always been.

Quietly, she got up and retrieved his crumpled form. She caressed his matted, old fur.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Though she wasn’t entirely sure who the apology was meant for.

She sat in the car for a long time before she could go inside.

The faded blue and green rug was still in the entryway. The floorboards creaked as she walked inside.

The house smelled the same.

She had braced for it on the drive down: old dust, stale perfume, and the slight smell of rotting flesh, but it still hit her as she walked through the door.

Her phone rang.

She expected it to be Iris or Wren. She had 17 messages on her voicemail from them

“ Hi Meg, let’s get coffee soon.”

“Meg, we’re worried about you. Just call us back, okay?”

Or maybe Charlie. He had called once. She had seen his name light up her phone screen at 11:02 pm one evening. She hadn’t picked up, and he hadn’t left a voicemail.

She saw it was the realtor.

“Hi Meg,” Her voice was bright and professional. “I just wanted to know if you’d given any more thought to the offer from the couple who came and looked at the house this last weekend. They are very keen on buying and have submitted a very generous offer…”

Her voice trailed off in Meg’s head as she looked around the house. The paneled wood walls in the hallway, the fading yellow of the curtains in the kitchen, and the bulky TV in the living room with its pixelated CRT screen and tinfoil-covered antennas.

“Hello? Meg?”

Meg stopped outside her mother’s bedroom and looked at the chair.

“Sorry. I’ve changed my mind,” She said.

A pause. “Oh, of course, there’s no pressure, we can absolutely push the timeline..”

“No,” Meg said. “I mean, I’m not selling.”

She hung up before the realtor could respond.

She ran her hand across the back of the chair, feeling the grain of the wood against her hand. She looked at it, then sat down. The warp of the cushions fit around her perfectly; her fingers fit the grooves of the wood on the armrest all too well.

She let her hand run across the old wood of the table, wiping off dust that had settled after months of disuse. Then she gathered Benny to herself, holding him close before placing him there, where he belonged, her hand resting gently against his lifeless brown fur.

It was over. Years of worrying about being good enough, for her job, for Charlie, for her mother, they were all gone now.

“Maybe it’s time to rest now, Benny,” she said.

The grey light of dusk comes through the curtains and quietly washes over them. It swallows the room until the old bed and the dresser, the chair and the woman in it, and the small shape on the table beside her are all the same muted grey.

There is a faint smell of rot that drifts through the room, but the girl in the chair doesn’t notice it. She doesn’t notice the silence creeping through the house until the sound of it is deafening. She doesn’t notice the shadows in the corners growing longer and longer, until it all fades to black.

Archivist’s Note.
Catalogued under: Self-Erasure. Subtype: inherited.

The markers are consistent with prior entries. A fixation upon a single object — in this case, a child’s toy — intensifying during periods of distress. A gradual, uninterrupted withdrawal from the people and interests in life, mistaken by those nearby for grief, or for “doing well,” until it was no longer possible to mistake it for anything.

The Archive has examined the object. It found no evidence of supernatural activity. The object does nothing. It never did.

The haunting predates the object by a generation, at least. It was placed in the subject early, by someone who carried it before her, and was in turn placed there by someone before that.

The file remains open. The subject cannot be retrieved by the Archive, nor by anyone who loved her. She can only be retrieved by herself, and only if she chooses it. Whether she will is unknown.

What is known is this: the case is not isolated. There will be more.

I used to think Mothman stories were exaggerated- until I saw it standing behind my car.

It was around 1 in the morning. I was driving home from a friend’s bonfire.

As I came down a dark country road, I heard a scraping noise underneath my car. I figured I’d probably picked up a stick or some debris along the way, so I pulled over to check it out.

The silence was eerie as I got out of my car. I was completely alone out here, no signal, no houses, no passing cars- just trees and the low, constant hum of insects.

I crouched down and looked underneath my car, but there was nothing there. No tree branches or old debris, everything looked completely normal. I thought that was weird, but maybe it had just fallen off.

That’s when I noticed the shadow. It stretched across the road, distorted and too tall. My stomach immediately dropped when I saw it. Something in me said just get back in the car, but my curiosity got the better of me, and I turned around anyway.

It was standing about 20 feet behind me. Tall- arms too long, wings folded tight against its back, and two huge red eyes that caught the dark light like pools of water. It didn’t move, just stood there watching me. No lights were shining on it. Nothing to explain why its eyes glowed like that.

Whatever it was, I can say with certainty it was not human. At least not fully.

I knew screaming wouldn’t help. There was no one out there except me and this thing. And something about the way it stood, so perfectly still and patient, told me running would be the wrong move.

So I turned around and walked calmly back to the driver’s seat. The second my hand touched the handle, the car alarm exploded: full blast and flashing lights. I flinched and looked back.

It was closer. Maybe ten feet away.

I don’t remember getting inside my car or starting the engine. I just remember my foot on the gas and trees blurring past. I checked the rearview mirror, expecting it to be gone, but it was still there, keeping pace with the car no matter how fast I went.

Getting out of the woods was a blur. But when I got out of the trees, I didn’t see it anymore.

The drive should have taken twenty minutes. It was an hour later when I finally arrived home.

The next morning, I checked my car. There were no scratches underneath, no damage or sign that anything had been there at all. I thought maybe I had hallucinated the whole thing. I didn’t tell anyone about the incident.

I figured that if I ignored it, it would stay contained.

But around noon, my phone buzzed. It was my friend Jenna. She had brought one of those old Polaroid cameras to the bonfire, and she was texting me a photo someone had taken of the two of us the night before.

Her message said: “Hey, what is this?”

At first, I didn’t see it. Then I zoomed in. Back between the trees, farther than the firelight reached- the faint outline of a dark shape, tall and narrow, with two glowing red eyes.

It had been there watching me before I ever left. Before I was alone on the road.

-END OF ENTRY-

Archivist’s Note:

Recovered from a storage box beneath the witness’s bed following the sale of the property in 2018. The account was folded inside a road atlas alongside the Polaroid.

The witness never reported the encounter publicly.

Notably, much of the statement focuses not on the entity itself, but on the fear of sounding insane. This pattern remains consistent across related accounts. Subjects describe the experience with certainty, then spend the remainder of the testimony attempting to invalidate themselves.

The archive has observed that witnesses often fear ridicule more than the encounter.

Catalogued under: Red-Eye Variant / Self-Erasure / Unwitnessed Events

Observation Status: Ongoing

If you wait until you feel ready to be seen, you will wait for the rest of your life.

The Archive has encountered this pattern repeatedly.

The subject delays the work. Revises it endlessly. Hides it. Calls the hiding perfectionism, caution, discernment. Over time the fear becomes difficult to distinguish from the personality.

This appears to be a survival response.

The recommended practice is simple:

Place both feet on the floor.

Take one breath.

Then release the work before the fear has time to rename itself something reasonable.

No apology should accompany the offering.

You do not have to stop being afraid of the dark. You just have to learn to move through it anyway.

Nothing with teeth is waiting on the other side.

Archivist’s Note: this rite has never stopped being necessary. It has been practiced in every century the Archive has documented. It will likely be practiced in the next.
The fear does not go away. Neither do the ones who keep going anyway.

Catalogued under:
Visibility / Creative Resistance / Threshold Rituals

Status: active.

Most people think they are afraid of failure.

But what they are really afraid of is being seen.

We think failure is the monster. But it’s not — it’s just the creaking floorboards, the shadow in the corner of the closet, the thing we think lives under the bed.

Failure is survivable.

The real monster is fear. The fear of others, of ourselves, of unworthiness. All the wounds we’ve been carrying our entire lives. These are not small monsters to face. They are the kind that keep people quiet for months, years, sometimes indefinitely — sealed inside the walls of their own house forever.

We learned early to run away from our monsters. In the moments we were told our voices didn’t matter, our dreams didn’t have a place, our feelings were too much to be allowed in polite company. Visibility has a cost. We were taught that before we had words for it.

This isn’t weakness. It’s conditioning.

There’s a reason haunted houses work.

The monster behind the door is never as terrifying once you’ve seen it. The anticipation of being seen is always scarier than the seeing. So we learned to stay in the walls. Keep the lights off. Don’t draw the monster’s attention.
Staying invisible feels safer. But it virtually guarantees you will never get the things you’re actually seeking. If you only ever learn to hide, you seal your fate of remaining in the walls of that house forever.

This conditioning runs especially deep for anyone who makes art, writes, or builds things from a deeply personal place — because when the work is personal, being judged doesn’t feel like feedback. It feels like someone holding up a mirror and saying this is what you actually are, and it isn’t enough.

It runs deep for anyone the world has historically benefited from keeping silent. Anyone whose visibility has been treated as a threat rather than a right. The system didn’t accidentally make you afraid to take up space. It was designed that way.

But you can’t haunt your own house forever.

At some point, the hiding stops feeling safe and starts feeling like a slow disappearance. The locked doors stop keeping the monsters out and start keeping you in.

That’s the thing horror understands that real life pretends not to: the monster was never outside. It’s the part of you that still believes being seen is the same thing as being destroyed.

It isn’t.

The Archive is proof of that. Everything here was hidden once. Someone decided it was worth recovering anyway.

So are you.

They taught me early how to keep my mouth closed.

Not just in the way children are taught to be polite, but in a way that reached deeper. Structural and spiritual. Like silence itself was a virtue I could wear.

“ Don’t show your teeth,” They’d say, as if it were a kindness, their own smiles a row of whitewashed tombs.

“Nice girls are soft.”

“Good women are pure.”

I was baptized in shame before I ever felt desire.

I learned to press my lips together even when something inside me strained against it. I learned how to swallow. Hunger, mostly. But also anger. Curiosity. Want.

Especially want.

They never called it that, of course. They called it temptation. Something to be corrected and ashamed of. Something to be covered in blood.

So I quieted it.

Or tried to…

But my body spoke in tongues that were impossible to ignore.

At night, I would lie in bed and feel it- this restless, wild thing running through my veins. My breath would catch, and my fingers twitch. My mouth would ache with the sharpness of teeth pressing against my gums.

“You are a wolf,” I would tell myself, all the while I prayed to be a lamb.

They loved me the most when I was starving. When I made myself more palatable. When I made my eyes go soft and my voice sweet, and let them tell me who I was.

Love was conditional, but they called it divine.

I shaped myself into something easier to hold. I built an altar out of my ribcage and sacrificed the heart of me -again, and again, and again.

But hunger doesn’t disappear. It simply watches and waits. It learns the shape of your silence and grows around it.

The first time I tasted blood was an accident.

A split lip. The metallic warmth blooming across my tongue before I could stop it.

Fear’s cold grip around my lungs, and then everything went very still.

Before it burst into daylight.

My body leaned in before my mind could catch up. Before I could remember all the words I’d been taught for moments like this: sinful, unholy, impure.

There was warmth and salt. Something ancient - the briny bite of the sea. Something immediate and entirely mine.

I pulled back as if burned,

but it was already too late. I could not untaste it.

After that, the world felt different. Like the layer of reality I had been kept from now was constantly brushing up against me. Colors louder. Skin awake. My mouth alive alive with longing, for things untasted but remembered.

A hallelujah that must be sung.

I tried to go back. I dulled my teeth on scripture. Asked forgiveness for something I couldn’t quite name anymore. But the language felt thin. Hollow. An old tomb that, now touched, had crumbled into dust.

“ Keep pure,” they said.

But my body didn’t feel impure

It felt alive.

“Control yourself,” they said.

But control felt like suffocation.

“This is love,” they said.

But love-real love- did not feel like disappearing.

My breaking didn’t come gently. It came like shattering glass. Sudden and irreversible, sharp and painful as the moment I was born.

We met behind the church, the boy with the crooked smile that had always tempted me to be myself, alive and unfettered.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

“Neither are you,” I said tentatively back. He took my hand and led me deeper.

We wandered the woods, built worlds among the trees- lives for ourselves we wished we could have. We unbound the chains of holiness with our sharp edges and found not shame, but beauty in their breaking.

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” I asked.

“ I’m more afraid of who they want you to be,” he said, leaning close to me, his neck inches from my mouth. “Who you are now is divine.”

My lips parted. For the first time, I didn’t rush to close them.

There was sharpness, a slip, the smallest break in skin, warmth.

My hips are a heresy, my breath a rebellion. In a bed of moss and broken leaves -a baptism of blood.

I saw myself then, not monstrous, not wrong. Sharp, where I had been taught to be soft. Present where I had always been hidden.

“ I learned to smile without showing my teeth,”

I whispered,

“But I don’t want to anymore.”

After that, it wasn’t just my mouth that changed. It was everything. The way I stood, the way I breathed. The way I let myself feel- fully, without apology.

They drove me away, of course,

Called me a demon, preached of the sin pulsing through my bloodstream.

I may not be a good woman, but I am a whole one.

I am no longer interested in being redeemable or softening myself into something palatable. In starving so that others may feel comfortable at the table.

I don’t pray the same way now, if I pray at all. If there’s something sacred, I think it lives here- in the body they told me to distrust. In the hunger, they told me to silence. In the teeth they told me to hide.

They call it unholy.

I call it a resurrection.

I have found my darkness, and it is divine.

-END OF ENTRY-

Archivist’s Note:

Entry NO. 005 Recovered from a prayer book.

Variations of this account have been received before. The language shifts but the structure does not. Silence, suppression, sanctification, hunger, and breaking remain consistent. In some subjects, the sequence remains constrained. In most cases, it functions as a catalyst.

The subject’s current whereabouts are unknown. Perhaps that is for the best.

Catalogued under: Hunger/ Threshold/

Reclamation Status: Ongoing

It was a normal night, which is probably why it’s so hard to make sense of what happened afterwards.

I was sitting in the living room watching Bonanza- I liked that Ben Cartwright, he had some grit and could make the best out of any situation- when suddenly the screen cut to black and the loud, buzzy noise of static filled the room.

At that moment, Bandit started barking.

I’d never heard him bark like that, so urgent and aggressive, I thought maybe there was a bear or coyote in the yard.

I was annoyed by the interruption, but I figured I should check on what was going on. But the barking didn’t stop. When I opened the door, I didn’t see anything in the yard. It was just Bandit out there, losing his mind.

The TV was still making that awful noise, so I muted it and listened.

I don’t spook easily, but something about the yard just felt eerie. I kept thinking I saw movement in the dark, but when I looked, there was nothing. And there were no insects making noises. Everything except Bandit had gone silent.

So, I grabbed a flashlight and headed outside to see if I could find what had him so upset.

Immediately, that feeling of being watched came over me. That creeping sensation you get when all the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, like your whole body is telling you “ something ain’t right.”

Bandit was at the edge of the yard, completely focused on the field beside the house.

And that’s when I saw them.

Two red points of glowing light that were hovering about 6 feet off the ground.

At first, I thought they had to be reflections- maybe from a flashlight or from something metallic out there. My brain kept trying to make it into something normal.

But they didn’t move or flicker, they weren’t reacting to light at all.

They were just… there.

I took one step off the porch, and Bandit didn’t hesitate, he took off straight towards those lights.

I yelled for him. That should have stopped him immediately.

Bandit always came when he was called; it didn’t matter what else was going on. But that night, it was like he didn’t even hear me.

I started after him, sweeping the flashlight across the ground, trying to keep track of where he was, but the grass was so long that it was hard to keep track of him. I’d catch a glimpse of movement in the tall grass, but he had disappeared into the dark.

Then the lights vanished.

They didn’t dim or move away. They were just gone, like someone had turned them off.

I plunged into the field, calling Bandit’s name again and again. The terror of something happening to him had completely taken over my body. I was hoping to hear him running through the field or barking, but there was nothing.

But it was completely silent.

That’s when panic actually set in.

I moved forward into the field, scanning the ground and trying to find something- any sign of where he went. Any tracks or paw prints in the dirt.

My hands were shaking the flashlight beam, making it even harder to see, but I did manage to find his tracks at first. They were leading in a straight line through the field, like he was chasing something.

I remember thinking, okay, he kept running. I’ll find him.

That thought didn’t last long because the tracks just stopped.

There were no marks on the ground or drag lines. No disturbances at all.

Just a clear line of pawprints-

And then nothing.

And then I realized that I was standing in the spot that I’d seen those red lights reflecting from the house.

The silence around me felt heavy, and I stood there longer than I should have, trying to find some sign of where he went.

I kept expecting to hear something- him running back, or barking, or even just movement in the grass.

But there was nothing.

And the longer I stood out there, the more this feeling settled in.

That I wasn’t alone out there. That someone was watching me.

I called Bandit’s name until my voice gave out that night.

We searched for him for weeks, walking the fields, the woods, the roads- anywhere he could have gone.

But we never found anything.

Losing that dog wrecked me for a really long time.

I kept replaying that night over and over, thinking if I’d gone outside sooner, if I’d called him back faster, if I’d just kept him inside, maybe it would have been different.

But you can’t go back and change something like that.

You just have to live with it.

The whole thing never made sense.

I should have heard or seen something. This town isn’t that big. We should have found his body eventually.

It wasn’t until the reports started coming in over the following weeks that I realized…

what might have taken him.

-END OF ENTRY-

Archivist Note: Bandit ran the same night the lights were reported over Route 62.

There is no confirmed connection.

However, the timing aligns with a pattern observed in earlier sightings- specifically, the agitation and disappearance of domestic animals within hours of visual contact.

Witnesses often describe a pressure in the air before the appearance. A stillness. As if something is watching from just beyond the visible.

Animals do not wait to confirm what they feel.

They leave.

Bandit did not return, and no remains were recovered.

In similar cases, they rarely are.

Encounter 1

Location- Point Pleasant

Witness- Mary Mallette

We weren’t supposed to be out there that night.

It wasn’t even a plan, really. It’s just… there’s not a lot to do in Point Pleasant.

We’d been sitting around with our friends Roger and Linda, just talking, when Roger suggested heading out past the old TNT area outside of town.

People did that sometimes. It was quiet out there. Sort of creepy with those old abandoned buildings. Kids would go out there to party, hook up, or even try to scare each other sometimes. You know, the normal things kids do.

But there was always this underlying feeling… something not quite right. It just made you not want to stay very long.

I remember the road feeling darker than it should have. No streetlights, just our headlights stretching out ahead of us, catching bits of gravel, trees, and the edges of those concrete domes sitting back in the distance. Old abandoned giants that never belonged.

We were talking– laughing about something stupid, I don’t even remember what. I remember Linda was singing along to “California Dreamin’,” which was playing on the radio. Everyone loved that song back then.

And then the conversation just… stopped.

Not all at once, it just faded out one by one.

Because something was there.

At first, I didn’t even register that something was wrong. It was just a shape near one of the structures, standing off to the side of the road, very tall and completely still.

My brain filled in the blanks immediately- a person.

That made sense. Someone else was out here, probably messing around like we were, but something about it didn’t sit right.

It wasn’t moving. Not shifting its weight, not reacting to the car lights, not even turning its head.

As we got closer, the headlights hit it fully and that’s when my brain stopped being able to explain it.

It was too tall; not just tall like a big person- wrong tall. Its body looked stretched, like the proportions didn’t line up the way they should. The shoulders were narrow but high, and its arms- if that’s what they were- hung too long at its sides.

Nobody inside the car said anything.

I remember becoming very aware of my own breathing, like I had to remind myself to keep doing it.

And then- It turned its head.

Slowly.

Like it had all the time in the world.

Its eyes caught the light, and they were bright red.

They weren’t reflecting the light; they looked like they were glowing on their own, in a way that didn’t look like any animal I’d ever seen. They were too large and too far apart. And whatever it was, it was looking directly at us.

That’s when I was hit with the deep certainty that something was very, very wrong.

We should not be here.

“What the hell is that?” I remember Steve asking. Roger was driving, and he replied, “ I don’t know, but I’m getting the hell out of here.” I think Linda and I were too scared to say anything, but I do remember her grabbing my hand.

As we drove past it, I twisted in my seat to look back, because I couldn’t help but look. And I wish I hadn’t because it was already moving.

It wasn’t walking or running, it was lifting off the ground. Straight up, like it had no weight.

For a second, my brain tried to process it like maybe it was a trick of perspective- maybe it jumped, or maybe I wasn’t seeing it correctly in the dark. But there was no motion, no bend of the legs or push off the ground. It just rose. And I saw them… this huge pair of leather wings unfolding behind it, lifting it off the ground.

That’s when Linda started screaming, and it was like everything was in slow motion.

I remember Roger hitting the gas, hard enough that the car jolted forward, kicking up gravel behind us. Suddenly, everyone was talking at once, voices overlapping, trying to make sense of what we had just seen.

“ Did you see–”

“What the hell was that–”

“Go, just go–”

I turned back around slowly. I didn’t want to look, but it was like I couldn’t help it.

It was above us.

Not directly overhead- just behind the car and keeping pace with us. Roger had to have been going at least 80 or 90 miles an hour at the point, and it was keeping pace like it was no problem. It kept the same distance no matter how fast we went.

And that’s when I realized something that still bothers me. It wasn’t trying to catch us. It didn’t need to. It was just… following.

The sound came next.

At first, I thought something was wrong with the car. This high, thin noise- almost like feedback or like metal dragging across something. Then I realized it wasn’t our car, but the thing behind us.

It shouldn’t have been able to make any sound at all, not at our speed. We were going way too fast at that point. Faster than we should’ve been going on that road. The car was shaking, and the headlights were bouncing. And still that thing kept up with us.

Same distance, same height, no effort at all.

I remember thinking, very clearly:

“It could come closer if it wanted to. It’s toying with us.”

And that thought hit harder than anything else.

By the time we reached the edge of town, I felt a wave of relief when I saw streetlights and houses come into view.

We screeched onto the main road, and just like that– it was gone.

I didn’t see it turn or fade into the trees.

It just… wasn’t there anymore.

We didn’t stop driving for a while.

No one really talked. I think we were all trying to make sense of it, but there wasn’t anything to say that didn’t sound insane out loud.

Eventually, we drove to the sheriff’s office to tell them what we had seen. They drove out to take a look, but they didn’t find anything.

I don’t think they really believed us.

At least, not until later. Not until the other reports started coming in.

Nothing was really the same after that. We didn’t really talk to Roger and Linda much after that… It just brought up too many bad memories.

I never went out to the TNT area again.

That was years ago. Life moved on, as it does. Most of the time, I don’t think about it anymore.

But sometimes-

On quiet summer nights, when I’m standing out in the yard with my kids- I get this feeling, like someone… or something, is watching me.

And I can’t help but wonder if it never really left at all.

-END OF ENTRY-

Follow-up attempt unsuccessful. Residence found vacant.

We’re told that when things end, they do so loudly. The earth shatters, cities explode, the world announces its leaving.

But real devastation is quieter.

They told us the ground would give way first. Fault lines splitting, cities collapsing inward like exhausted lungs finally giving out. And that’s exactly what happened. We felt it under our feet before we heard it- the shudder, the deep animal groan of the earth, as if it had decided it was done holding us.

“ Looks like we aren’t going to make that dinner reservation tonight, babe.”

I laugh and pull out a bag of sour gummies from my backpack. The kind we used to buy on long road trips together. When we didn’t always know where we were going, only that we were going there together.

“Okay. So we’ll improvise. Though this wouldn’t be my last meal of choice if I had any real say in it.”

You smile that crooked smile like you always do. Like, even now, you’re trying to make it easier for me.

“What would you choose as your last meal if you could?”

“ Oh, definitely Wildflower. If I had their Cotton Candy Oysters, I would die happy right now.”

The sky behind you burns rust-orange, and the air tastes like metal and ash. I think of other meals we’ve shared- late-night takeout on the floor, coffee gone cold between us, the way you never ordered fries and then stole every single one off my plate. A million tiny ordinary moments that construct an eternity that was ours.

We were negligible in the order of the universe. Two bodies in a city of thousands, in a world of billions, on a rock hurting through a cosmos that would not notice our absence. But you were constitutive in the order of mine. The kind of presence that rearranges everything around it. Undeniably, you mattered.

“ Hey,” you say, “ if we go-”

“ I know,” I say. “Together.”

Our lips meet like it’s a protest. My final rebellion against all that is certain. A scream against the void that insists everything must end.

The collapse is inevitable,

But the dance of destruction is breathtaking

This is the cataclysm I lean into - all your fault lines, all your fractures.

And I know for certain that all the struggle and joy was enough.

That we were.

—END OF ENTRY—

Archivist Note:

Entry No. 002. Type: Artifact. Origin: Found folded inside a coat pocket. No identification on the body.

The account is written in the present tense throughout, suggesting it was recorded during the event rather than after. Whether the subjects survived is not documented. What is documented: The sour gummies were still in the pocket. The bag was open.

Catalogued under: Love/Collapse/Ordinary Things.

Status: Unresolved.

You weren’t a loud haunting — just a familiar one.

The sound of your combat boots creaking on the boards downstairs. The weight of your fingertips on my hips. The taste of your breath on mine.

You are a weight I’ve carried so long that you feel more like comfort than burden now.

You grew up among my chest like an invasive weed, finding every crack and crevice, making a home of who I was. Pieces of you wrapped themselves around my ribcage. Though I am not her anymore, I know I will always carry you. You have become part of my skeleton, woven into the foundation of who I am.

Sometimes I forget you’re there — a dandelion growing through pavement.

Other times I take you out and look at you, turning you over in my hands. I wonder who you are now, other than the shadow I carry inside me.

I wonder if you still laugh with everything in your soul. If your moods are still like the ocean — powerful and quick to change.

I wonder if I would still drown in you, or if after all this time I’ve finally learned how to sail away.

Sometimes I think I’d rather drown.

You once told me I was in love with my fear. I told you that you were wrong. But you’re gone, and she’s still here — tying me to the moors of all that is familiar. Her bonds are a fetid comfort.

And perhaps you were right when you said I chose this.

Because I keep trying to build a life sturdy enough to carry you. Because I mistook endurance for healing.

And even now, I listen for your boots on the stairs- Not because I expect you to return, but because some loves don’t haunt.

They settle.

And I have learned how to live with their weight.

- END OF ENTRY-

Archivist’s Note

Entry No. 001. Type: Artifact. Origin: Found written on the back of a photograph recovered from a burned-down house. Location undisclosed. The photograph itself was too damaged to identify the subject.

The Archive believes the subject did not intend for this note to survive. That it survived anyway was either accidental or inevitable. The Archive has not determined which.

The Combat boots were mentioned twice and are considered significant.

Catalogued under: Greif/ Familiar Things/ Weight of Staying

Status: Unresolved