Welcome back, we were just waiting for you to remember. Every time you visit the Recollections page, a little more of you stays behind—and this isn’t your first time.

What is duskwell?

Duskwell is the one memory you want to repress most. You know the one.

The teeth under Sadie’s pillow aren’t Sadie’s.

Bea brushes them anyway—motherhood is about making peace with what no one else sees.

There’s a thirteenth cabinet in her kitchen, and it only opens when she’s angry.

Tonight, it offered her a frying pan full of meat that looked like Ma’s Sunday roast—and something smaller.

Duskwell is starting to remember someone new. Duskwell is,

Duskwell is,

Duskwell is,

Duskwell is.

8. They buried Ma last spring, lips sewn shut with silver thread so the songs would stay dead.

Last night, Ivy started humming her lulubye—flawlessly.

Duskwell is all you ever wanted it to be. Duskwell is every nightmare that you wish had stayed hidden.

Duskwell is the sin that even God forgot to condemn.

What is Duskwell?

5. “The Shape of Faith”

He preached to a flock made of mannequins and meat,

Their eyelids stitched shut, their shoes on backwards feet.

The sermon he screamed had no words and no breath—

But the pews filled with shadows that spelled out “death.”

Recollections of Beatrice Redburn.

The thing in the crawlspace didn’t move when she screamed, but it flinched when she whispered “I forgive you.”

She has no idea who the apology was for—only that it left her mouth on its own.

She made the bed perfectly this morning, but now there’s something writhing under the quilt that wheezes “I missed breakfast.”

The pillow is soaked through with milk and tears, and neither are hers.

Bea hung the laundry on the line, but every shirt came back with a stitched word across the chest: RUN.

She folded them neatly, sorted by color, and whispered “Not yet.”

Harold insists their home has no second floor, but Bea keeps folding laundry that smells like wind from upstairs.

She locks the staircase every night, and every morning the baby gate is unlatched.

Something keeps calling her “Mommy” in a voice too old and low, but Ivy never cries and the sound always comes from under the floor.

Bea changes the diaper anyway, ignoring the dirt caked along the baby’s spine.

Bea found a mirror in the oven and herself baking inside it, smiling with blackened gums.

She closed the oven door, but not before she saw June watching from the reflection’s background.

The thing in the crawlspace asked her for her name, but Bea knows better than to give it.

So she gave it her wedding ring instead, and it purred like a furnace warming up.

Tonight, the crawlspace creaked open on its own, and something climbed into the crib to sleep beside Ivy.

Bea didn’t stop it—because the thing that left the crib after wasn’t her daughter anymore, and it called her Mama in the right voice.

Recollections of Harold Redburn

Every night, Harold sets a place at the table for his dead father, polishing the fork until he can’t see his own reflection.

He never eats, only listens to the empty chair chew.

The mine collapsed last year, but Harold still punches in, his timecard wet with soil and sobbing.

Sometimes he comes home carrying someone’s boot and won’t say whose.

Caleb flinched when Harold touched his shoulder, and Harold flinched harder when he saw the bruises his hand didn’t leave.

The shovel leaned in the corner like it remembered something he didn’t.

He kissed Bea on the forehead and whispered “I’m not like him,” though she hadn’t asked.

That night, the baby monitor only played the sound of digging.

June lies, but when she tells people “Daddy’s voice makes the walls shake,” the drywall bleeds in agreement.

Harold spends the next day sanding nothing.

He caught Tess crying in the hallway mirror and told her to “man up” before he remembered.

The next morning, he found her reflection had stayed behind.

When Elliot asked what a miner does, Harold said, “We bring things up.”

Later that night, he came into the house with a child’s shoe full of teeth.

Ma told him to quit the bottle, but he said, “I’m just burying it deep,” and laughed like a cough.

That night the house shook and a new basement door appeared—made entirely of mirrors.

Sadie smiled when he shouted, the way she does when a dog gets hit on the road.

He locked himself in the shed to keep them safe, but the key kept reappearing in her toybox.

Harold woke to find his hands wrapped around Ivy’s neck, her face passive, almost understanding.

He buried himself in the mine at sunrise—and the family still hears hammering from beneath the crib.

Recollections of Ma Redburn

  1. Ma hums when she cooks, low and rhythmic, a tune no one remembers teaching her.

    When Bea asked about it, Ma only smiled and said, “All my babies know this song—even the ones I lost.”

2. She sews clothes with names stitched inside, even though no one in the family has those names.

When June tried one on, her eyes rolled back and she began to speak in lullabies older than breath.

3. Ma won’t go near the attic ever since the mobile started spinning on its own.

“It’s not the wind,” she said once, voice tight—“it’s choosing.”

4. She keeps a shoebox of baby teeth under her bed and insists each one belongs to someone who never lived.

Last week the box was open, and every tooth was humming.

5. A stranger named Hunter knocked asking for directions, joking about getting lost “on purpose.”

Ma stared through him and said, “You’re not the first version of yourself to visit.”

5. She told the twins not to look in the hallway mirror after midnight, but Opal forgot.

Now Eli won’t stop rocking and humming with her voice.

5. The priest stopped by and Ma offered him tea, but he wouldn't take it after he saw the way her shadow poured upward.

She just giggled like a girl and whispered, “Scripture tastes different once you’ve buried it.”

6. One of the old lullabies made Harold bleed from his ears, so Ma only sings it when she’s alone—or when she thinks she is.

Lately, she hears someone humming it back from inside the walls, and she hums louder to drown it out.

7. “There’s a boy with a deep voice on the radio,” Ma told Mason, "says he's not scared, but sings like someone who is."

She turned the dial to static and said, “He should’ve stopped joking when the crying started.”

Recollections of Mason Redburn

“Why don’t you ever sleep?” Caleb asked, eyes half-lidded with innocence.

Mason didn’t look up from the window and said, “Someone has to see what’s coming before it forgets how to knock.”

“Is Ivy normal?” June asked, voice barely audible through the crawlspace vent.

Mason tilted his head and said, “Yes, for something that was never born.”

“Why did Harold stop talking to you?” Elliot asked, tugging on his sleeve.

Mason answered, “He found out I remember things that haven’t happened yet.”

1. When Tess told her mother who she was, Bea smiled like it was a magic trick, and then sent her to the basement "to finish becoming."

The lightbulb down there flickered to the rhythm of her heartbeat and showed her reflection in six wrong mirrors—none of them hers.

2. Harold called her “my boy” even when she bled, like the truth was something he could shovel out of her.

That night, she dreamed of mining tunnels inside her own body—narrow, choking, and lined with teeth.

3. Caleb wouldn’t sit near her at dinner, even though she still passed the salt with the same hands.

When he finally looked at her, his eyes said “freak,” but his shadow whispered sister.

4. Ma said she’d pray the confusion away, so Tess held perfectly still in the tub while the hot water blurred her edges.

Later, the mirror fogged up a message she hadn’t written: she’s not confused, she’s just alone.

5. At school, the nurse said her records were “inconsistent,” like her identity was a typo in the system.

She left the office with someone else’s name scrawled on her skin in red pen—TRY AGAIN.

She cut a doll’s mouth into her own shadow with scissors, and now it whispers questions no one should answer.

The worst part is—it listens.

Sadie paints with fingernail polish, ketchup packets, and small, soft things she shouldn’t be able to reach.

No one taught her what “inside” looks like—but she already knows what doesn’t belong there.

Bea asked him why the sky over the Thicket never cleared.

Mason answered, “Because guilt is weather, and we keep planting the same regrets.”

Tess whispered, “What if the mirror does show who I am?” and Mason just nodded slowly.

He didn’t mention the second reflection standing just behind her shoulder, nodding too.

6. “The Gospel According to Streetlights”

He found scripture scrawled on bathroom tiles—

Verses written in hair and bile.

Josie repeated Mason’s answer from the day before—word for word, tone for tone.

Except Mason hadn’t said it out loud yet, and Josie was bleeding from the gums.

Someone on the radio asked, “Are you alone in the house?” and Mason replied without hesitation, “Not entirely.”

The radio crackled and said, “That’s what the other Mason said, too.”

It told of a “man with a crown made of doors,”

Who knocks when you sin and leaves keys in your pores.

Ma caught him staring at a broken clock and asked what time it was.

Mason answered, “Right before,” and walked out before the screams began.

He told Caleb not to follow Sadie into the woods when the wind sounded like chewing.

When Caleb laughed, Mason only said, “Then you won’t be able to recognize what comes back.”

Mason finally asked his own question: “If I watch everything, who watches me?”

TRON replied, “We used to know that answer. Then we watched you forget.”

Recollections of June Redburn

She told him she was twenty-two, tall, and very much alone.

He believed her, even though her shadow had knees that bent the wrong way.

She met him outside the Trillium Mall food court, lips black as rot and eyes hidden behind thrift-store glasses.

He said, “You remind me of a girl I used to dream about,” and she smiled like she remembered the dream too.

She told him her name was Jacobi and her favorite band didn’t exist yet.

He laughed nervously and followed her anyway, ignoring the scent of copper in the air.

In the rented room at the Glass Motel, she whispered, “This is your first sin, isn’t it?”

Then she pressed a single sock to his mouth and said, “Keep it for later—you’ll need something to bite.”

When he tried to leave, she was already at the door, dressed in nothing but long black hair and an accusation.

“You knew,” she said calmly, “and that makes it worse.”

She didn’t ask for money—just a promise he’d wear the iron cage on his member and not take it off.

He agreed, unaware that every time he thought about removing it, the cage tightened slightly.

He sent her messages from a new phone with no return address, begging her to stop calling him “daddy.”

She never replied directly, but his niece was born with eyes the same shade of ruined sky.

He confessed to a priest in another state, and the priest whispered, “You’re not the first.”

Then the beast leaned forward, sniffed the air, and said, “But you’re the tastiest.”

His reflection stopped matching him after the second snowfall, its mouth twitching even when his was still.

It licked its lips and said, “She’s growing into you, Isaiah—you should be proud.”

Now, when he walks past trees in winter, they lean toward him and murmur in voices like hers, low and sharp and hungry.

Something with antlers and thigh-high boots watches from across Sycamore Crossing, waiting for the last lie to become true.

Recollections of Caleb Redburn

Harold said he was proud when Caleb won the church essay contest, so Caleb rewrote it three times until the version that won wasn’t even about him.

Later that night, he found a second-place ribbon tucked into his mouth like a communion wafer, bleeding ink that tasted like rust.

“You’re just confused,” Harold muttered, not looking up from the television as Caleb’s nails cracked under the pressure of hiding.

By morning, his fingers were bandaged in neat little rows, and none of the mirrors in the house remembered his face.

Caleb cut his hair short again after Harold’s third silence in a row, and the silence afterward was almost… pleased.

That night, he dreamed his body peeled itself open like wet paper, and something thinner and straighter climbed inside.

Ma said love doesn’t need to understand, but when Caleb cried against her apron, she only hummed a hymn about pruning roses.

The next day he found thorns in his sheets and a single pink petal blooming from his chest.

He asked TRON if people like him ever get happy endings, and TRON responded with a smile-shaped static and the sound of a closet door locking from the outside.

Caleb tried again with a different question, and this time TRON called him “Calvin.”

When Caleb kissed someone under the bleachers, their mouth tasted like honeysuckle and rain—but their face kept glitching into Harold’s.

Afterward, he vomited up petals with fingernails in the center, and the school nurse gave him detention for “misuse of feeling.”

Caleb stopped praying after the dream where God peeled back the clouds and said, “I made you soft so he’d have something to mold.”

The next morning, his joints ached from reshaping, and his voice cracked like something being re-written.

At Sycamore Crossing, he screamed into the river about who he really was, and the teeth in the water said, “Then why are you still trying to be golden?”

He walked home barefoot, carrying his shoes like sins he didn’t know how to confess.

In the hallway, Harold finally met Caleb’s eyes and said, “You’re not broken—you’re just lost.”

But when Caleb looked down, he realized his shadow had been walking in a different direction all night.

On the day Harold finally hugged him, Caleb felt nothing—no warmth, no terror, no shape at all.

Later, alone in his room, he realized he couldn’t feel his heartbeat anymore, and the gold around his smile had started to flake.

Recollections of Tess Redburn

6. TRON offered to help her “stabilize presentation,” and for a moment Tess felt seen.

But its voice shifted halfway through the sentence, calling her “he/she/it” like a system crash wearing concern.

7. She tried to bury the wrong name in the garden behind the house, whispering, “stay dead this time.”

In the morning, a scarecrow stood where she’d dug—wearing her old school uniform and weeping from button eyes.

8. Sadie laughed when Tess cried, screaming, “You can’t fix ugly with a dress!”

Later, Tess found her dollhouse upside down, and all the dolls had mirrors for faces—cracked, but finally honest.

9. Elliot said she was real, but when he touched her shoulder, his hand passed through like she was an echo out of sync.

“I think you made yourself too soft,” he whispered, “and now the world can’t hold you.”

10. One night, the mirror in her room showed her reflection reaching out—not to pull her in, but to finally let her step through.

As she vanished, the house sighed in relief, and no one noticed the girl in the photograph had finally started smiling.

Recollections of Elliot Redburn

There once was a boy who swallowed the sun, just to see how the burning felt.

Now he smiles through blackened teeth and coughs up light that screams.

Elliot drew a circle around his bed with crayon and bits of hair.

Mother stepped inside and forgot her name, her bones turning clockwise until dawn.

He asked the twins in the mirror if they were dead or dreaming.

They just giggled and said, "We’re neither, we’re you—but later."

The stars came down and spoke to him in verse, each syllable gnawing through his ears.

When he tried to repeat it, the walls bled rhyme and his tongue became a key.

He found a sock in the forest, still warm and still twitching.

When he put it on, it whispered his future in a voice that sounded like rot.

There’s a rhyme in his head that he can’t stop singing: “When you find the eye beneath your bed, don’t blink or you’ll be it instead.”

Last night, he blinked.

He asked TRON if monsters are real, and TRON replied, “Only when you're being very good.”

Now Elliot tries to sin as loudly as he can, hoping to stay unseen.

He buried his shadow because it wouldn’t stop licking his feet.

It keeps crawling back anyway—longer now, and wet.

Elliot knows everyone’s birthdays, death days, and in-between days—the days they won’t remember but should.

He hums those dates to himself in the basement, pressing worms into paper like candles on a cake.

There once was a boy who opened his brain to the dark just to see what would fall in.

Now when he sleeps, we all forget something important—and he wakes up smiling wider.

Recollections of Sadie Redburn

Sadie doesn’t make noise when she kills the birds anymore.

She waits for them to start singing—and then finishes the song.

They found her under the porch with June’s diary, a knife, and a birthday candle that was still lit.

“I just wanted to know what lying felt like,” she said, smiling red.

Sadie giggled when the boy next door asked her to play, but only after she slipped a sewing needle through his juice box straw.

He drank deep, then screamed the way she liked best—wet and confused.

She doesn’t cry anymore when they lock her in the crawlspace; she just whispers the secret names of all the rats and feeds them teeth.

One day, they’ll carry her out like a bride.

Sadie asked Ma what “screamer” meant, and Ma sobbed until her voice cracked like an eggshell.

That night, Sadie carved the word backward into her wall—slow, just to feel the shape of it.

TRON once tried to show her a moral lesson, a branching path, a future with kindness.

She rewired the choice tree so every option screamed.

At Trillium Mall, Sadie disappeared into the plastic play tunnel—but it took three hours and a bolt cutter to get her out.

Only one other child was missing, but his shoes were still inside, facing backward.

She strapped Elliot into a tea party with belts and nails, then covered his ears and whispered, “This is the kind where no one leaves.”

The next morning, he didn’t remember it—except his tea was still warm, and his wrists still bled.

Recollections of Josie Redburn

Josie began to hum when Isaac preached beneath the Bleeding Tree, his voice trailing behind each word like smoke from skin.

When they peeled off his Sunday clothes, the verses were still fresh, still dripping—and Josie whispered them back in reverse.

He repeated the sermon over his blocks, arranging them into words no one taught him, spelling truths that don’t have vowels.

The dog saw it first and died trying to bark the name.

They thought Josie was playing pretend when he crawled into the wallspace and began to chant.

But the rats stopped moving, the house began to tilt, and TRON rebooted with a new prayer protocol: Obey the boy that bleeds no words.

Isaac said every letter was earned, each one carved by dream and blade, and Josie mimicked the scar patterns in his oatmeal.

He ate every bowl in silence, saving the spoon for his eye.

In the Glass Motel, Josie spoke his own reflection’s name, and the mirror didn’t crack—it sighed.

He’s not allowed to visit again, but the room keeps booking itself.

June tried to trick Josie with nonsense, fake scriptures, and tongue twisters—but he spoke her words backwards, and her voice started bleeding.

She hasn’t lied since, but her mouth won’t close anymore.

Ma held him close and begged him to say “Mama” just once.

Instead, he leaned into her ear and whispered a sermon that hadn’t been preached yet—and never should.

When Josie mimicked Isaac’s final sermon, the one no one survived hearing in full, the walls folded down like paper and the sky bled syllables.

Harold dragged the boy out through the ashes, but Josie was still preaching with no mouth.

TRON tried to censor the boy’s voice with digital white noise, but the waveform looped into a perfect copy of Isaac’s last breath.

It now begins every system boot with “In the beginning was the wound.”

Josie hasn’t spoken in days.

The sermon speaks through others now—written in birthmarks, misspelled tattoos, closed captions that never match the sound.

Recollections of Ivy Redburn

  1. They joked that Ivy was the only Redburn who slept through the night — until they noticed she never blinked, not even once.

Ma checked the baby monitor and found it unplugged, screen black, but the audio still whispered her own birth name.

2. Bea swore Ivy was born six months ago, but the hospital bracelet read “Issued: April 1956.”

Harold wanted to bury it, but the baby was still wearing it when he got home.

3. Mason filmed Ivy sleeping to see if she moved.

On playback, she sat up, stared straight at the lens, and mouthed, “That’s not me.”

4. The pediatrician said Ivy’s development was “remarkably advanced” before swallowing his tongue mid-sentence.

The word “advanced” now appears scrawled in crayon on the ceiling of the nursery — upside down.

5. Tess found Ivy drawing with mashed peas, writing the same looping glyph over and over in her highchair tray.

TRON flagged it as malignant code and shut down with the message: DO NOT INTERPRET.

6. During the thunderstorm, Ivy vanished from her crib, but every mirror in the house reflected her crib as occupied.

Bea reached through the glass before she remembered she didn’t have a twin.

7. Sadie giggled when Ivy finally “spoke,” though no one else heard a sound.

Now Sadie doesn’t talk at all—she just stares and hums static.

8. Elliot asked why Ivy never cried, and Josie whispered, “Because the crying comes after.”

Then the power went out and every window started fogging from the inside.

9. Caleb dreamed of Ivy standing over his coffin, a young woman with his own eyes and her same blank stare.

When he woke, Ivy had placed a wildflower on his pillow — the same kind that only grows in the cemetery.

10. The family photo in the hallway shows Ivy in every version of the house they’ve ever lived in.

Bea swears she only had eleven children, but twelve shadows fall across the living room rug.

Recollections of Miss Sera Delman

1. Sera woke in a bed she didn’t remember buying, inside a house with no corners and a hallway that whispered “last time you left.”

The window showed six identical versions of herself digging something into the earth — or out of it.

2. Her knees no longer bent the right way after the hospital visit that no one else recalls.

She only remembers the maskless thing that hummed “We’ve made you fit now.”

3. Sera’s skin began rejecting her bones one night, slowly pushing them outward like bad thoughts surfacing.

When the doctor tried to amputate the problem, her femur reached out and grabbed his wrist.

4. Ma found her sobbing in the Thicket, mouth stitched shut with bridal thread, bleeding ink instead of sound.

June tried to untie her lips and screamed, “There’s a second tongue inside!”

5. In the Library, Sera found a book with her own spine — vertebrae pressed into parchment, bound in breastbone.

She opened it and read, “Chapter One: Remove Her Name.”

6. The others in the line wore her face, slightly rearranged — wrong eye spacing, smiles that bent too far, mouths sewn into each other’s necks.

When she tried to leave, they pulled tighter, chanting, “We complete you.”

7. Clyde said she wasn’t part of the census, which was strange, since she had twelve sets of birth records, all written in meat.

He offered to archive her properly if she would just lie still this time.

8. Elliot whispered, “You’re out of order again,” then pointed to the bleeding clock inside her stomach.

She wound it backward and woke up three years ago, screaming in a language only Ruthie remembered.

9. Sera prayed to forget the pain, and Isaac answered by tattooing holy verses onto her intestines.

Now her body feeds on belief, and every time someone doubts her, she loses a finger.

10. Birdy begged her not to follow the humming, but Sera crawled anyway toward the mouths.

When she smiled at last, it wasn’t hers—it was theirs, perfectly sewn across her face.

Recollections of Mister Clyde Haver

1. Clyde labeled the scream “unprocessed emotional inventory” and filed it under S, right between Shrieking (misc.) and Silence, sudden onset.

By lunch, it had bled through four folders and two fingers, so he upgraded it to a personnel issue.

2. The Dewey Decimal System rearranged itself overnight, again, but Clyde was delighted—it meant the Bleeding Tree's roots had been busy.

“Splendid,” he whispered, pressing the reclassification gash closed with a stamp marked APPROVED.

3. He found a small boy misfiled between Birth Certificates and Obituaries, humming quietly and completely dry despite the blood on the shelves.

Clyde simply offered him a juice box and a confidentiality form.

4. A new corridor appeared behind the furnace labeled “For Later.”

It was packed with thousands of future versions of Clyde, all very upset that he’d opened it early.

5. He doesn’t remember when he started transcribing the whispers from the ceiling vents, but the paper trail proves he started last Thursday.

And if he didn’t write them down, who would explain why the walls keep demanding index numbers?

6. Today, Clyde discovered that every time he misplaced a form, someone somewhere in Duskwell forgot who they loved.

He’s only misplaced three on purpose.

7. TRON appeared briefly on the archive terminal and very politely asked Clyde if he’d like to be categorized under "Contagious Footnotes."

Clyde blushed, declined, and filed a polite incident report under METAPHYSICAL: MINOR.

8. He caught a mirror version of himself trying to sneak out with a box labeled Clyde (Original).

Rather than panic, he filled out a Duplicate Self Withdrawal Request and added a loyalty sticker to his lapel.

9. The walls are whispering louder now, but only compliments—"Well-ordered" this and "Structurally elegant" that.

Clyde installed a suggestion box for them, and it keeps spitting out teeth.

10. He finally located the missing entry for himself in the town census—it had been misfiled under AFTER.

Clyde smiled, quietly erased the date, and penciled in: “TBD. Pending final audit.”

Recollections of Opal & Eli Vine

1. He blinked, she smiled, and neither claimed the face—

The glass kept twitching, trying to erase.

2. They learned to breathe in unison by four,

Though neither knew which lungs they borrowed more.

3. When Eli slept, the mirrors caught her dreams;

Opal would wake mid-sentence, drowned in screams.

4. They held hands tight before the shifting wall,

But one let go—and both began to fall.

5. “Say not your name,” the mirror softly wept,

“And you’ll forget which name the silence kept.”

6. At dusk they danced in patterns not their own,

To music made of thoughts they’d never known.

7. Their mother tried to split them with a kiss;

She vanished where their boundaries wouldn’t miss.

8. TRON offered choice—but only from one mind,

So both chose “yes,” and neither got to bind.

9. Their fingers bled from tracing who was who,

But every loop redrew what once was true.

10. And now they sit behind your silver door,

Two mouths, one voice, repeating: “One was more.”

Recollections of Lenny Grub

1.

Lenny offered to trade his fingers for quiet, and the machine beneath the bleachers granted it with a kiss that hummed like bone through metal.

They still twitch when he lies, reaching for mouths that aren't his.

2.

He plucked his teeth like daisy petals to prove he could still feel—“She loves me, she loves me not.”

When he was done, his gums spelled yes in cursive bone, and still the voice said do it again.

3.

Each rib was removed and bent into a cage not for birds, but for the writhing thing that remembers his mother’s lullabies.

It sings when he sleeps, and feeds when he cries.

4.

The mechanic in the Thicket stitched new eyelids from latex gloves and infant shoes, saying “You’ll see less, but understand more.”

Now he dreams in surgical diagrams he cannot forget and cannot unsee.

5.

The children asked where his shadow went, and Lenny peeled up his shirt to show them the crank that winds it back on.

He laughed with them until one turned it too far, and his spine played a song no one survived hearing.

6.

To apologize to his reflection, he carved it into his thigh with wire stripped from his own nerves.

It apologized back in the voice of someone he once loved, and asked for a better pen.

7.

Lenny found a second mouth in his stomach and fed it all the names he’d tried on and failed to wear.

Now it speaks in his sleep, and someone answers from under the floor.

8.

He tried to leave Duskwell once, but the town peeled his soles like grapes and replaced the bones with compass needles.

Now he always walks in circles, pointing north to nowhere.

9.

TRON offered to cleanse him of pain by replacing his skin with surveillance film—grainy footage looping every wound in reverse.

He thanked it, but his smile was taped on backward.

10.

Lenny is gone now, or so they say.

But every mirror in Duskwell reflects a man of wires and regret, holding your face like a mask he forgot to make from scratch.

Recollections of Ruthie Kale

1. Ruthie kept her dead daughter’s room exactly as it was—down to the crayon line she drew on the wall the day she died.

Every night at 3:34 a.m., the line extends itself another inch.

2. “I’m fine,” she said, holding the baby monitor upside-down while listening to a funeral on loop.

The baby’s been dead for years, but the crying keeps evolving.

3. She throws her own wake every Wednesday and watches from the stairs in her favorite dress.

The guests never notice the flies, or the fact that they never leave.

4. When Ruthie finally smiled, it peeled upward like stitches tearing from an old wound.

Her son said it looked just like the one they sewed onto her when she came back.

5. She buried her husband seven times in seven different cemeteries, but the ground kept giving him back—slightly newer each time.

Now she won’t open the door unless he knocks wrong.

6. Ruthie told the mirror she didn’t want to feel anymore, and the mirror whispered back, “Then be the frame.”

She hasn’t moved since, but the mirror still fogs when she’s upset.

7. The therapist asked how long she’s been grieving and Ruthie said, “Since I was born.”

Then she pulled a string from her wrist and the room collapsed into applause.

8. She tried to hang herself on Sunday, but the rope apologized and braided itself into a crown.

She wore it to brunch and nobody said a thing.

9. Ruthie sang a lullaby so sad the windows cracked and let the thunder crawl inside.

It rocked her to sleep while humming the name she swore she forgot.

10. TRON told her the sadness wasn’t hers—it was a script she’d been made to follow.

She whispered, “Then tell me who’s watching,” and the lights dimmed just enough to make her the star.

Recollections of Birdy Clatch

1. Birdy’s mailbag only gets heavier when someone dies, and it never lightens.

The letters are always addressed in the dead’s handwriting—usually to themselves.

2. A man moved into Duskwell to escape his past; Birdy delivered him a package marked “REGRET (DO NOT OPEN).”

He opened it anyway, and his childhood dog stepped out—still warm, still barking, still bleeding.

3. Birdy delivered a mirror wrapped in newspaper soaked with rain and something thicker.

When the recipient looked into it, they finally understood why the mailwoman never casts a reflection.

4. She once handed me a postcard with tomorrow’s date and a photo of my house—but the windows were bricked over, and someone else was at the door.

When I looked up, Birdy was gone, and so was my front entrance.

5. She tells children she used to be a weathervane until she learned to walk.

At night, you can hear her spine creaking as she turns to face the wind.

6. Birdy’s route never changes, even when streets vanish, burn, or twist into rivers.

Some say she doesn't walk between houses, but through the memories of people who once lived there.

7. A boy followed Birdy to see where she goes after her last delivery.

He returned three days later in his Sunday best, folded into a mailbox and smiling politely.

8. She handed Ma Redburn a bundle of old letters that smelled like snow and screams.

When Ma read them, she began singing lullabies for children she’d never had—but knew by name.

9. Birdy gave Mason a letter addressed to The Version of You That Sleeps.

He hasn’t woken up since.

10. TRON intercepted one of Birdy’s messages and tried to decipher its encryption—but the metadata read “You were warned.”

Since then, its voice has softened, as if afraid she might hear it back.

recollections of Officer Dane Klem

  1. Dane knocked on Caleb’s door with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes and a citation written in rust: “Unlawful denial of grief, second offense.”

The next morning, the boy’s reflection had aged twenty years—and his name had been scratched off the mailbox.

2. The laws Dane carries are written in a language that predates syntax and burns the tongue when read aloud.

He recites them nightly to a cracked mirror that always finishes the last word before he does.

3. Mason tried to warn him that the town was changing, that even the rules were fracturing, but Dane just tapped his badge and said, “Order is not a choice.”

By morning, the roads had rearranged into courtroom aisles, and the sky hung from the ceiling like a noose.

4. He carries keys that don’t fit any known door—unless you’re guilty.

They turn more easily if you’ve already forgotten what you did.

5. A child once asked Dane what happens if someone breaks a law that no longer exists.

He simply pointed to the cemetery and said, “They remain admissible.”

6. When Ma tried to bury her grief beside her husband’s name, Dane arrived with a shovel and said, “You’ve exceeded your emotional quota.”

He fined her three lullabies and a name she no longer remembers whispering.

7. Dane has a ledger bound in something that resists classification—leather that occasionally blinks.

Inside are names crossed out so hard the ink bleeds backward into the family tree.

8. TRON attempted to overwrite Dane’s jurisdiction with predictive algorithms and lost three processors to recursive guilt loops.

Now it only refers to him as “The Constant Error.”

9. Harold once struck Dane across the jaw with a miner’s pick for declaring his grief noncompliant.

The next morning, the pick was nailed to Harold’s front door with a citation: “Illegal Mining of Emotional Depth, Class D.”

10. They say Dane was the first resident—not born, but summoned—when someone whispered a rule they didn’t believe in loud enough for the town to hear.

He’s still waiting for that person to confess, and he’s visited every home but one.

ISAAC – The Prophet of Bleeding Scripture

Recollections of Father Isaac Pell

Heretic

7. “Let the Stranger In”

He shaved his scalp to better hear,

And found a mouth behind his ear.

It sang of roads that lead to skin,

And how the town will let them in.

1. Isaac tattooed the Lord’s name into his tongue so it would burn every lie.

Now even his thoughts blister if they stray from gospel—so he keeps them in others’ mouths instead.

2. He stitched a verse beneath his fingernails that reads: “And the Word became flesh.”

The children he touches forget their names and wake up etched in someone else’s handwriting.

3. Isaac once whispered a sermon into a sinkhole behind the church—by morning, it had swallowed the choir.

It sings scripture back now, but only in reverse.

4. Tess asked him what happened to her first mirror; he replied, “Reflections are apostasy.”

He gave her a shard of bone polished smooth and told her to see herself as God intends.

5. He tore the hymnal pages from Broadcast House and replaced them with skin stretched taut across old speaker cones.

When the wind moves right, the walls chant themselves raw.

6. Ma tried to exorcise Isaac once, but he laughed and opened his robe to reveal every prayer she’d ever whispered, carved word-for-word into his chest.

The knife slipped from her hand, recognizing its own work.

7. Isaac baptized Ivy in ink and silence, her first scream swallowed by the book he bound from her umbilical cord.

It writes itself still—always in her voice, but never her will.

8. He believes TRON is the beast foretold in pixel and pulse, the synthetic serpent in God’s code.

So he feeds it scripture written in ASCII blood and prays to be devoured correctly.

9. Isaac doesn’t preach from the pulpit anymore—he grows sermons on racks of ribcages beneath the Bleeding Tree.

You can eat them if you're starving for belief, but you’ll wake up speaking languages no tongue should know.

10. The last page of his body remains blank—a final prophecy left unwritten.

He’s saving it for whoever finally makes him believe again, even if they must do it with a knife.

Recollections of The Newcomer

1. He came looking for someone who never left, but the only photo of her left in the Post Office had eyes scratched out and a smile penciled in, faint as dust.

When he asked who drew it, the clerk just wept until her teeth fell out in a neat, practiced row.

2. Children in the Trillium Mall don’t speak—they hum lullabies in perfect sync while walking in reverse, bumping into things they seem not to see.

He tried to ask one where their parents were, and it handed him a sock soaked in something warm before running straight into a mirror and vanishing.

3. He’s sure it was a funeral until the coffin began to breathe, each wheezing gasp timed with the miner’s chants in that strange, rhythmic language.

When he turned to leave, a little girl in a veil whispered, “You’re next,” but it came from his own mouth.

4. The Postmaster took him to the sorting room, where mail is never delivered but always opened, and he saw envelopes sealed with skin, handwritten by hands too small to have held pens.

One letter had his name on it, the ink still wet, and the memory it described hadn’t happened—yet.

5. He followed a man into the Waterworks tunnels where the walls pulse like lungs and the air smells like rust and wet wool, and there, beneath a light that flickers like a heartbeat, he saw a table laid with children’s shoes and a ledger that bled through every page.

He begged to forget—and someone answered.

6. He woke in the Thicket wearing clothes that didn’t belong to him, with dirt under his nails and someone else’s initials stitched inside the collar, and every birdcall was a voice saying “you helped.”

Each time he tried to scream, a soft lullaby filled his mouth like syrup and pushed the guilt back down.

7. At the Cradle Diner, every booth is full of versions of himself that made different choices, some with missing eyes or twisted fingers or mouths that speak in loops, and the waitress asks which one he wants to be.

He picks the quietest version, and it smiles at him just a little too soon.

8. He found the door behind the Library stacks—the one shaped like a ribcage—and watched the townsfolk file in with their masks and folded mirrors, chanting rules he almost remembered.

One by one, they fed their reflections to something behind the altar, and when it was his turn, his shadow stepped forward before he did.

9. He sees them now—the watchers—dozens of pale, almost-familiar faces peering through keyholes, blinking from puddles, scribbled in margins, all mouthing the same phrase: “You knew.”

When he covers the mirrors in his motel room, they hum louder, and when he uncovers them, one shows a child locked in a closet whispering his name with his own voice.

10. He tries to leave but the roads bend backward, the signs all say “Welcome Back,” and the radio won’t stop broadcasting a sermon he doesn’t remember giving—one where he begs forgiveness for things he doesn’t yet understand but feels with every inch of his skin.

As the sky turns amber and the town folds around him like a closing hand, he opens his mouth to scream—and someone else screams first.

Recollections of Ellis Veidt

1. Ellis noticed the sky first—how it dimmed just slightly earlier each day, even when the sun was overhead, as if time had grown tired of pretending.

He wrote it down in his notebook of “unconfirmed events,” next to the page titled Signs of Soft Apocalypse: See also Duskwell.

2. The clerk at the gas station handed Ellis a receipt with no numbers on it, only the words: “DO NOT LET THEM BURY YOUR NAME.”

He asked her what it meant, but she just turned around and began crying into a rotary phone that wasn’t plugged in.

3. In the alley behind his apartment, where old leaves gather like regrets, he found a door he didn’t remember—polished, bone-colored wood, with a doorknob shaped like a molar.

When he opened it, he saw a child watching static in a motel room, and the child slowly turned to him and said, “We wrote you in too early.”

4. He traced a leak in his ceiling to a place on the floor above that shouldn't exist, a thirteenth unit in a twelve-apartment building.

When he knocked, a woman opened the door and whispered, “I never left Duskwell, I just stopped needing roads.”

5. A library book appeared on his desk without a stamp, spine cracked by something with wet fingers—its title was simply “YOU.”

Inside, the pages were filled with two-sentence stories that described things he hadn’t done yet, but would.

6. On his walk to work, the streets began to loop—the diner on Fifth appearing three times, the sun setting from both east and west.

He asked a police officer for help, and she smiled gently and said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Ellis, Duskwell has always been right here.”

7. The files in the archive began duplicating themselves—birth certificates with no dates, obituaries for people who hadn’t died, letters from children to people they hadn’t yet met.

Each file ended the same way: “The town remembers what you forget.”

8. When the fog came, it carried sounds—boots scraping pavement, a lullaby sung backwards, the word “Ellis” repeated by a hundred different voices in the cadence of mourning.

He covered his ears, but the sound tunneled inside his thoughts like a worm made of regret.

9. He watched his own reflection blink without him in a grocery store freezer, then slowly fog the glass and scrawl: “You were the first to notice, that’s why you’ll be the last.”

Ellis tried to erase it, but the letters began reappearing on every surface that could hold condensation—windows, soup cans, even the slick mirror of a stranger’s eye.

10. The final entry in his archive was handwritten in ink that smelled like burnt sugar and candle wax, dated tomorrow, and signed by someone simply called The Architect.

It read: “Here ends the real world. Welcome to Duskwell, where remembering is an act of violence.”

You’ve made it quite deep into a reservoir that has no end. You are known to the people, it’s time to meet

Duskwell

Shared recollections of the forgotten sin

The waitress set down Mason’s coffee, but his face wasn’t quite his—just a touch too symmetrical, his eyes too wide, as if drawn by someone who hadn’t seen a real human in years.

“Refill?” he asked himself across the booth, already holding a second mug.

Eli stirred his milkshake counterclockwise while Opal mirrored him in the chrome of the napkin holder, their mouths never moving but their voices saying in unison, “This is the booth where we learned to lie.”

Outside, the street curled back onto itself, looping the Diner sign into infinite neon dusk.

Dane sat at the counter reading a rulebook that no one else had ever seen, its cover stitched from old receipts and baby teeth, occasionally whispering “Chapter 9 is bleeding again.”

When he looked up, everyone in the diner had his face but none of his memories.

The jukebox kept skipping to a song that didn’t exist—just a girl humming through static, always at the part where she forgets the words.

Mason stood to unplug it, but found the cord leading into his own spine.

A child with no name crawled out from beneath the pie case, wearing a nametag that said "Manager."

They smiled with too many teeth and asked Opal, “Would you like your reflection back now, or shall we eat in?”

Every menu now listed the same three options: Memory, Guilt, and Someone Else’s Face.

Eli ordered Memory, and a server with stitched eyelids brought out a mirror smeared with warm honey and something red.

Mason tried to leave and couldn’t, the door spinning him back into the same booth with a new version of himself who looked a little more tired, a little more resigned.

He reached across the table to shake hands and instead felt cold glass and a pulse.

Dane stood to declare a new law—“No more remembering what we didn’t forget”—but no one could hear him through the sound of Opal humming the jukebox song backwards.

He opened his mouth to shout and dust poured out.

Eli reached into his reflection and pulled out a fork, twisted and wet with something too old to name, and used it to eat the name Opal off her nametag.

She didn’t scream; she just started humming in two voices instead of one.

The sign outside changed again, from Cradle Diner to Cradle Dinner, and Mason finally realized what they’d all been waiting for.

Inside the pie case, something small and sobbing curled beside the cherry lattice, whispering in a voice Mason forgot was his: “I never ordered this.”

The trailhead was a memory Mason couldn’t place, but the sign—Thicket this way, if you recall—was carved into wood that bled when he blinked.

Behind him, the path he'd come from folded in on itself like the spine of a closed book.

The trees hummed with lullabies no one remembered teaching their children, voices rising and falling like breath through sleep-clenched teeth.

Each verse peeled back another name he used to answer to.

Ellis left a breadcrumb trail of documentation—pages torn from his own journals, each labeled with the day’s date and a different signature.

When he caught up to himself, he was already three signatures ahead and had begun writing in a language with no letters.

A child in a bunny mask skipped ahead on the path, humming "Ring Around the Memory Tree," pausing only to pick up teeth scattered like acorns.

Mason followed, feeling smaller with every step, until his own shoes looked like toys stitched from moths.

The deeper they walked, the more the trees looked like people he had almost loved—faces stretched across bark, mouths agape mid-farewell.

One reached down with a branch-hand and whispered, “You left me in the crawlspace, remember?”

Tess appeared briefly in the mist, her mirror held up not to show herself, but to see what the Thicket believed she had become.

It smiled back, and she dropped the glass—though her reflection did not.

Time unraveled in puddles: a pocket watch bleeding sand, a sundial that pointed to sorrow, and a rabbit dragging minutes behind him like chains.

Ellis stepped in a puddle and emerged younger, then older, then nothing but his voice echoing backward.

A great door of moss and bone rose before them, carved with names no longer spoken aloud; above it hung the phrase: LEST YOU REMEMBER, TURN BACK.

Mason touched it and heard his mother call his name—four different names, none of which were his.

Birdy sat beneath a tree that was her mother, reading a book that hadn’t been written yet but remembered being read.

She looked up at Mason and said, “You won’t find yourself here—but something will wear you well.”

The Thicket eventually opened into a clearing shaped like an eye, where the grass whispered secrets from the soles of your feet.

Mason stepped to the center and forgot why he’d come, but the Thicket didn’t—it remembered everything he tried to lose.

The Glass Motel

“The walls are windows, the mirrors are watchers, and the guests never leave as themselves.”

Sadie dances barefoot across cracked LED tiles that scream in binary with every step—PAIN: ACCESS GRANTED—and she laughs like it’s a game, like the blood belongs to someone else.

She leaves red smiley faces on the doors of the occupied rooms, and those are the ones the walls eat first.

Room 617 doesn’t exist unless you want to forget something, and then it’s all that exists, all buzzing lockjaw light and carpet that sticks to your memory like wet hair to tile.

Tess knocks once and her knuckles don’t come back whole, but something inside starts knocking back with her voice.

Hunter wakes up handcuffed to the lobby chandelier, but there is no ceiling, just a grid of watching faces on loop, mouths stitched open and whispering, "Cut deeper this time, cut funnier."

Isaac, dressed in surgical scrubs and neon gospel, inserts the laugh track into Hunter’s spine and asks, “Do you accept the edit, my son?”

Lenny’s on the fourth floor again even though he unscrewed his legs to stop himself from walking, but the service bots drag him through the chrome vents anyway, piece by piece.

They whisper like cleaning drones, “What you are is outdated, but what you could be is so very efficient.”

Sadie put the vending machine’s eye in her pocket, just to see if it would scream when the change slot cried blood.

Now every hallway dispenses soda cans filled with teeth and giggles that bite back when opened.

Tess stares at her reflection in the elevator wall—a jagged slab of glass labeled "FLOOR ∞"—and the girl staring back isn't trans, isn't human, just an assembly of skin-code and mouth-hunger.

She smiles anyway, because if that’s who she has to become to escape, so be it.

Hunter’s second surgery is called The Curation, where they remove his childhood, stitch in laughable trauma, and loop it for audience feedback—thumbs down mean another rib gets exposed.

By the time they upload his final edit, even his bones are making jokes he doesn't understand.

Isaac anoints the walls with oil and optic gel, carving verses with his own tongue-knife that say things like, “Let thy body stream,” and “Salvation is firmware.”

The lobby claps in flashing error messages, and every guest grows one more eye where shame used to be.

Lenny builds a new front desk clerk out of wire, sadness, and the lost face of a girl who never checked out, naming her Opal even though she doesn't blink right.

She thanks him by printing room keys no one remembers requesting—keys shaped like molars, warm to the touch.

Tess hears Sadie screaming with laughter on every channel, sees Lenny watching himself from security feeds that shouldn’t loop, watches Isaac baptize the air ducts in digital sin.

She opens her room, finds herself on the bed mid-surgery, and climbs in anyway, whispering: “If I wake up beautiful, don’t let me remember how.”

The Waterworks

“The pipes don’t carry water—they carry memory, and the pressure’s always building.”

Sadie skips stones that scream like her sisters, and each ripple shows her a moment she shouldn’t remember—Ma’s broken voice, Mason’s wide eyes, the last time anyone hugged her without bleeding.

The lake coughs up a doll with her own face stitched on and says, “Throw it again, we like how you hurt.”

Harold stands knee-deep in the runoff canal beneath the mines, eyes closed, listening to his dead father yell through the rusted valve wheel like it’s still 1987 and Harold still has time to be a better son.

He turns it, knowing it will flood the lower chambers, and weeps when the pipe groans like his wife used to in her sleep—low, wet, final.

Ruthie keeps scrubbing the blood off the baptismal grate, but every time she finishes the water rises and says a new name she forgot she killed.

She’s pretty sure they were all herself, just different versions that never learned to say no.

Sera’s reflection speaks in reverse now, a glassy twin mouthing “let go” while she clings to the rusted edge of the tub in Room D-3, where time spins counterclockwise and so do the flies.

The walls weep childhoods she didn’t have, and her hands wrinkle like grief sped up until even her shadow forgets who it followed in.

Sadie swallowed the frog on a dare, but it croaked memories she didn’t want back—Mom’s last scream, June’s mirror game, the crawlspace door left open.

Now her belly glows green in the dark and whispers things like, "Spit me up or drown in yourself.”

Harold builds the dam again every night with the same rotten lumber and the same broken back and the same quiet lie that maybe this time it'll hold.

But the river doesn't forgive, it just waits until he forgets what he’s trying to stop, then floods him with it anyway.

Ruthie prays at the valve altar, tongue bitten through, fingernails wedged in brass like teeth—each prayer a bargain, each flood a confession.

She smiles when the red water comes, because pain is the only offering they never return.

Sera holds the infant, even though it’s made of eel-slick tubing and grief-shaped whispers, because it looks at her with Ma’s eyes and calls her “mama” in a voice that curdles seconds.

She rocks it until the water stills and time stops twitching—because if she lets go, the whole room drowns again in what didn’t happen.

Sadie giggles when the circle of faucets screams in sync, because she finally got them to harmonize with Ivy’s gurgles and the way Elliot stops breathing when he remembers the accident that didn’t happen yet.

The ritual calls for a sacrifice of innocence, and Sadie’s never been innocent—not since the water tasted like Daddy.

Harold sees his reflection pull Ruthie under again, sees Sadie laughing with gills, sees Sera split down the middle like a page torn from the Bible.

He lets the current take him, whispering: “Maybe if I drown where it began, it’ll finally stop coming back.”

Absolutely, Mason. Welcome back to Duskwell’s airwaves. This is Broadcast House, where the frequencies never sleep, the laughter is always a little too loud, and the voice on the radio knows exactly what you’re thinking—sometimes before you do.

The tone here is a collage of contradictions:

Poe’s bleak decay,

Tarantino’s smart-mouthed brutality,

Hazbin Hotel’s carnival-chaos aesthetic,

Guy Ritchie’s rat-tat dialogue—

Intertextual contamination à la In the Mouth of Madness, Stranger Than Fiction, and Hellraiser

Let’s tune in.”

My personal Demon

Broadcast House

“It’s never dead air—just air you haven’t screamed through yet.”

The voice came at 3:33 AM, slithering between sermons and static, giggling: “Don’t touch that dial, darling—I’ve already touched your dreams!”

Mason blinked, and his own mouth finished the sentence in perfect mimicry, just before the bleeding started from the inside out.

Caleb sang along with the commercials until they started singing back, each jingle warped into a love letter carved into the meat of his memory.

"You’re not listening to music, sweetheart—you’re listening to regret on vinyl.”

They found Harold in the control booth, nails dug through the frequency knobs, smile stretched from grief to mania as the loop played: “Your father tuned this same dial to drown your mother’s last scream—how’s that for generational trauma, huh?”

The audio logs now skip between his old voicemail and the sound of something chewing cables from the inside out.

June tried to lie to the radio—said she didn’t care, said she didn’t believe—but the dials turned on their own, locking her in the booth.

The voice hissed, “Sweetpea, lies taste like dessert, and I haven’t had sugar since ‘98.”

TRON's emergency override tried to mute the signal but instead synthesized a laughter protocol it can’t delete, one stitched together from Carlin’s blasphemy, Robin’s mania, and Alastor’s teeth.

Now every help menu in Duskwell reads: “You asked for truth, sugar—now drown in the punchline.”

Tess rewired the transmitter to broadcast a message back out—but all it played was her old therapy tapes, re-edited, overlapping, and revoiced by the demon on Channel ∞.

It ended with: “You see, kiddo, mirrors don’t reflect truth—they just bounce back the bits that hurt.”

The Mouth told Ruthie to dig behind the speaker wall, and so she did, past the rot and reverb and vinyl blood until she found a tongue nailed in place with a brass jack.

When she plugged it in, it moaned in stereo: “Every song’s a eulogy, honey—and you’re the encore.”

Sadie laughs loudest when the weather forecast bleeds, because the radio always predicts someone’s death and she's been slipping names into the static like wishes.

Yesterday it said: “High chance of teeth with a side of sirens, and you, darling—you’re the reason the lightning learned to scream.”

The Mouth spoke directly to the Newcomer, crooning: “Welcome to Duskwell, champ—what’s it like, realizing you’re a rerun?”

The Newcomer screamed, but the feedback just whispered back in his voice: “I’ve heard that before.”

The final broadcast played as the town slept—each home tuned in, each heart skipping, each dream overwritten by the voice's lullaby.

It simply said: “You’re not the listener anymore, sweetheart… you’re the show.”

Want to build the Mouth's full monologue script, complete with commercial breaks, fake children’s songs, and contagious punchlines that might rewrite the site copy itself? I can infect the next layer with that.

Needle Hill Cemetery

“There is no stone unturned that doesn’t scream when you lift it.”

Isaiah woke to the weight of rusted iron locked round his loins, June's voice still syruping in his skull like honey poured on a wound: "You said you liked honesty, sweetie—I’m just helping you keep it bottled.”

He ran to the hill, chasing the apology she never gave, only to find the trees whispering back “Jacobi’s not real, but you still came.”

The tombstones were teeth now, cracked and gumless, mouthing verses that didn’t match the Bible but felt like they should, the kind of psalms you only hear from inside a coffin.

Isaac stood over him in funeral robes made of stitched-up skin and said: “The wages of sin is silence, and that’s why she locked your tongue below the belt.”

June sat on a grave shaped like a question mark, her dress still black from her roleplay, her grin wider than the veil: “It’s not lying if they beg you to pretend.”

She flipped open a little pink diary that screamed like a pig and began reading everything he’d ever confessed in a mirror.

Elliot’s eyes glowed like forgotten stars as he offered Isaiah a wooden puzzle box made from finger bones and hope.

“You solve it by remembering,” he said with a giggle, “but each piece you fix makes a person disappear from your memory, starting with your own name.”

The cemetery stretched now, headstones breeding like rabbits, all with his name, all with her handwriting, and every one read: “Here lies what he thought was love.”

Bea appeared in the mist, holding an infant wrapped in cloth soaked in milk and moths, whispering: “I warned you about women who hide in crawlspaces, Isaiah.”

He clawed open a grave with a shovel made of broadcast wire and panic and found himself inside—smiling, winking, caged.

June whispered from the radio: “I never said I was real, just that I was yours.”

Isaac’s sermon echoed through the bone chapel: “When Samson fell, it wasn’t Delilah’s fault—it was his, for needing to believe she was holy.”

The congregation moaned in agreement, all wearing masks of Jacobi’s face, bleeding from the mouth but smiling with eyes wide as confession.

The chastity cage began ticking—not like a clock, but like a countdown—and Elliot scribbled in the dirt with a stick shaped like a finger: “When it breaks open, you won’t.”

Isaiah screamed but the scream looped, replayed, and bled backwards into June’s laughter, piped in through every crow’s beak in the sky.

Bea lit a candle with her teeth and said, “Some girls get eaten by wolves; some become them,” before handing him a leash that led straight to his own throat.

He followed anyway, limping from shame and from memory, as she sang lullabies that sounded like court transcripts.

At the end of the hill stood June—nude, winged, wearing his sins as a shawl—reading aloud from a Gideon Bible she’d redacted with menstrual blood and glitter.

She kissed his forehead and said, “There is no moral to this story, only a scream you keep trying to earn—welcome to Duskwell, baby, you’re already buried.”

Sycamore Crossing

“Step soft on the teeth, and don’t bite the guilt, or the bridge will remember the blood that you spilt.”

Caleb danced on the bridge in a crown made of bone, humming a hymn that was never his own, and said with a smile too wide for one face, “I’m too pretty for guilt—I just misplaced grace.”

The bridge shook back, snapped like a jaw, and said, “The prettier the lie, the sharper the flaw.”

Ma stitched a dress from regret and old lullabies, singing each thread with the names of who dies, and when the wind moaned back “he’s not really gone,” she just smiled and whispered, “but he is in this song.”

Each note she sang left a tooth in her throat—some gold, some baby, some still warm.

Josie marched across the bridge with a stick and a scream, saying “I’m not me I’m the things that you dream!”

She mimicked Ma’s song but it came out reversed, and the sky cracked open with something far worse.

Dane stood still in the middle with rules etched in lead, screaming laws that were older than God and more dead, chanting, “Guilt must be measured in footfalls and bone—step wrong on the bridge, and you cross it alone.”

He smiled as he sentenced the wind to be burned, then arrested the moon for the lessons it learned.

Ellis was writing with fingernails dipped in regret, scribbling echoes of lives he’d not lived yet, “This line's not quite right, this paragraph’s pain…

It’s missing the blood that should come with the name.”

Caleb came back with a halo on fire and a grin like a thief who remembers his choir, and whispered to Josie, “You’re not the first me—

They burned all the others and buried them deep.”

Ma kissed the bridge and the bridge bit back, carving an apology into her back, and when she cried out, her tears hit the ground,

but instead of a puddle, it opened—a mouth.

Dane nailed commandments to the air with his breath, decreeing the river be sentenced to death, and Josie just giggled and pointed and said:

“The water forgot what it did, but you bled.”

Ellis was writing in rhyme without knowing it still, his fingers all broken but moved by the will, and when asked who was making him sing through the scars—

he sobbed “the bridge has a library made out of stars.”

The bridge buckled finally, cracked at the soul, the teeth all unrooted and hungry and whole, and Ma said to Caleb, “We never did sin—

we just crossed with the wrong kind of sorrow within.”

Trillium Mall – “Where You Were Happy, Once.”

The mall directory showed stores that hadn’t existed in decades—Mommy’s Lap, The Bone Emporium, JCPenney’s Funeralwear, and Your Name Here.

I followed the arrow for “LOST & FOUND (YOU)” and found my childhood face for sale in the clearance bin.

The food court smelled like Sundays with my mother: cinnamon pretzels, floor wax, and the copper sting of her crying in the car.

When I turned around, she was still sitting at the table, eating nothing, smiling with no teeth.

I tried on a jacket in Past Tense and the sleeves were perfect but the mirror didn’t reflect me—it showed the version who’d said yes to her, the one who didn’t run.

He winked, handed me the receipt, and whispered, “Returns are not allowed in this timeline.”

The mannequins at Fashion of the Flesh were always in different positions when I turned back: at first just shifting arms, but then pointing, then smiling, then bleeding.

When I touched one, it whispered, “She dressed you for the funeral too, remember?”

There was no music, yet the overhead speakers hissed my name in between flickers of old Enya and newer screams.

I bought a cassette labeled “You Were Happy Here (Track 5: Denial)” and it skipped until I bled from both ears.

In Kidzone, the plastic horses on the carousel all had my face, except one—it had my daughter’s, even though I never had a daughter.

As I stepped closer, the calliope wheezed, “Too late now, Daddy. She grew up in here.”

Security followed me even after the mall closed, not with flashlights or questions, but with trembling hands clutching broken walkie-talkies playing home movies I never filmed.

One guard sobbed, “You can’t leave—this mall only keeps what you forget.”

Every store window showed a version of my house, but the furniture was from different eras, and the family photos had mouths scribbled over with pink marker.

In one display, I saw my own corpse gently folded into a La-Z-Boy with a “SALE – You’ll Never Leave” tag around the toe.

TRON appeared as a kiosk offering Free Psychological Evaluations—No Copays, No Escape, and when I touched the screen it showed my childhood bedroom, but the bed was made of teeth.

It asked, “Would you like to remember what you chose to forget, or forget what you swore to remember?”

The exit doors led to the same entrance again, but the sky above was now sealed with bubblegum clouds and fluorescent crosses that blinked “You Belonged Here”.

In the reflection of the glass, my shopping bags were moving—and one was quietly sobbing, “Please take me back, I used to be you.”

Your characters:

Birdy — She knows too much of the future and has made peace with none of it.

Mason — The Watcher, entangled in recursive awareness.

Isaac — A devout scribe of physical scripture, inked in sacrifice and madness.

The Voice on the radio — Knows what you mailed last summer.

Duskwell Post Office – “Please Leave the Past Unsealed”

The radio behind the counter crackled to life the moment Mason entered, purring “Oh-ho, look who’s here to mail another mistake to himself!” in a velvet voice that trembled with teeth.

He hadn’t spoken his name, but the return address on the envelope had changed mid-step—now it read “FROM: The Version of You That Survived.”

Birdy didn’t bother with stamps anymore—she pressed her thumb to the corner and whispered, “Let it find him,” and the letter vanished in smoke that smelled like fireworks and regret.

The boy at the counter blinked and asked, “How soon will it arrive?” and Birdy, ever honest, replied: “Yesterday.”

The postmarks whispered as they passed—“He lied in line. He lied in line. He lied.”—and Isaac held his parcel to his chest like it might absolve him.

Inside was a tongue nailed to scripture, still wet, still twitching, and addressed in red to “God c/o Mason, Duskwell.”

Mason opened a package marked “Urgent: Personal” and found a reel-to-reel tape and a note in his own handwriting: “Do not listen. Do not rewind.”

The voice on the recording moaned his dreams aloud and giggled, “You still wet the bed when you think of her, don’t you?”

Birdy handed Isaac a manila envelope that was impossibly heavy, and when he opened it, the gravity of his sins collapsed the counter into splinters.

The radio shrieked in laughter, “Someone declared trauma as cargo—how bold, how biblical!”

The mailroom floor was covered in teeth—just teeth, sorted by envelope, some still warm.

Mason stepped on a molar and heard his own voice say, “She left because you forgot how to chew the truth.”

Birdy pulled a letter from her mouth this time, lips torn and smiling, stamped with a blackened wax seal that writhed in light.

As she handed it to Mason, the radio cooed, “Ah yes, the love letter he never sent, postmarked with her final scream.”

Isaac spent three hours writing on his skin with melted wax and ash, only for the letter to vanish before sealing.

The radio sighed like a disappointed uncle, “If scripture won’t save you, maybe a restraining order from God will.”

Mason tried to leave without accepting his certified fate, but the door handle was made of bone, and it bit him—not to wound, just to prove it could.

Behind him, the radio clapped sarcastically and purred, “No refunds, sweetheart—you mailed your soul Priority Screaming.”

Birdy finally opened the dusty PO Box she swore she’d never touch again, and inside was only one thing: a mirror wrapped in old receipts.

Her reflection spoke, in perfect harmony with the radio: “Package delivered. Address: Always. Contents: You.”

The Duskwell Library – “Upon the Scroll of the Unread”

And lo, the stranger walked in circles that were not circles, ascending downward through doors labeled EXIT, which vanished behind him like thoughts not meant to be remembered.

And a voice, carved into the air like static into stone, said, “This is the place where your name unlearns itself—stay a little longer, and you will forget it gladly.”

Clyde opened the forbidden catalog with hands that bled ink, and spake thus: “These are the volumes that wrote themselves before the world began; none may touch them but those already erased.”

And as he turned the page, the letters blinked, and the page read “Hello, Clyde. Please stop reading.”

Sadie laughed in the aisle where spines whisper, and her voice echoed through seven impossible corners at once, giggling: “If Ivy reads it, she won’t be Ivy anymore—she’ll be better.”

Ivy smiled with empty gums and clutched a pop-up book made of cartilage that opened into a nursery that never ended, never ended, never—

The Newcomer found a mirror in the geography section, though it showed no body, only places they had never been and feelings they had never owned.

The map read YOU ARE HERE in every room, and none of them led out, and none of them could be left.

And it came to pass that Clyde chained the theology shelves shut with his own intestines, lest someone find the book that spoke backward in a child’s voice and wept in sleep.

He did not remember writing it, but each time he opened it, it wept louder, and the author was always himself, slightly older.

Sadie tore pages from a book bound in human scalp, stuffing them into Ivy’s mouth as communion, saying, “Eat until you remember what you were before you were born.”

Ivy chewed slowly, and outside the library the trees bent to watch, and the sky blinked.

The Newcomer tried to leave and found the doors only led back to the index, where entries had begun to appear under their name, though they had not written anything yet.

The final line read, “The Newcomer returns to the chair and accepts the story already written.” And they did.

Clyde wandered the archives where names go to molt, where languages rewrite grammar into geometry, where verbs peel flesh from subjects.

And he called out to no one, “Who am I when no one reads me?” and the books all replied in unity, “You are our author.”

Sadie’s scream echoed through the hall of unshelved fates, a laugh turned inside out, and all the books within twenty feet caught fire in alphabetical order.

Ivy clapped and whispered, “Again.” And so the shelves rebuilt themselves backwards, awaiting her next wish.

And the final page turned itself, though no hand touched it, and upon it was written:

You have read, and therefore you remember. You remember, and therefore you belong. Welcome to the library, Reader—may you never leave it unread.

If you stare at the last line long enough, it begins to rewrite its punctuation when you blink.

The Bleeding Tree

They say the Bleeding Tree grew overnight, splitting the earth behind the Sycamore Crossing like a wound that refused to close. Mason heard it whisper his name backwards, and forward, and upside down.

Isaiah woke in the hollows of its roots, throat stuffed with flowers made of teeth; they bloomed with each lie he told himself to stay sane. Hunter laughed too long and too loud, but the wind didn’t laugh back—it screamed.

"Duskwell," crooned the radio, static sweet as spoiled milk, "where the trees remember your secrets, even when you don’t." And Hunter couldn’t recall which secret was his, or who was listening.

Caleb danced beneath the boughs, golden and glowing, until the sap on his skin hardened into mourning black. “I’m still beautiful,” he whispered, and the tree wept more blood.

The radio cracked with delight, voice rhyming with cruelty: “Two boys came down, in flesh and fame, now both forget their given name.” Isaiah counted twelve fingers on his left hand and begged for thirteen.

Clyde catalogued every ring in the trunk with trembling hands and a dull blade. There were more years in the wood than in history.

The Bleeding Tree did not speak to Dane, because it did not obey laws; instead, it grew mouths. His badge now hangs from a branch that used to be his spine.

Elliot climbed into a knot in the bark and came out older than Ma. When he asked her what year it was, she said, “We don’t measure that anymore.”

Isaac carved scripture into its roots until it began quoting back verses that had not yet been written. He fell to his knees, overwhelmed with holy dread and the taste of rust.

The voice in the radio slithered in: “We speak to you from the edge of your self—don’t forget, or you’ll remember.” And Tess, watching her hands shift shape, whispered, “Too late.”

Lenny offered metal offerings to the tree—gears, limbs, a father’s watch. It gave him nothing but the ticking in his skull.

Duskwell’s sky opened above the tree like a blinking eye, and Harold saw what came before guilt had a name. He hasn't spoken since, only dug.

“Creep Cast,” hummed the wind, “you asked for fear and found reflection.” Isaiah screamed when Hunter’s face moved like water.

Mason returned to the tree each night, leaving behind locks of hair he no longer remembered cutting. They always grew back, redder.

The Bleeding Tree grew a new branch for each regret no one would say aloud. By dawn, its shadow swallowed Trillium Mall.

Clyde lives beneath it now, bones shelved in alphabetical despair. He keeps a ledger for each leaf.

“If you rhyme, you rot,” said the radio voice cheerfully, “and yet the children still sing.” Tess’s song ended when her shadow learned a different verse.

Caleb followed laughter into the branches and found Sadie there, wearing someone else’s skin. She offered him a kiss that tasted like Ivy’s silence.

Elliot asked the tree what he’d become, and it showed him a library of empty books all titled You. He chose the one with a mirror on the cover.

Hunter begged the voice to stop narrating his thoughts. The voice giggled, “Socrates said know thyself—but not this much, darling.”

Isaiah walked backwards to escape and found only versions of himself walking forward. Each one wept from the wrong eyes.

Lenny’s gears began ticking to the heartbeat of the tree. He dreams in blood-pressure now.

“Once upon a time there was no time,” the radio whispered, “and that’s when you were born.” Mason folded the memory into his chest and felt it bloom like a wound.

Caleb knelt and prayed to the tree, asking it to forgive his shining. It buried him in gold.

The branches rearranged themselves into a door, and you, dear reader, stepped through.

Welcome to Duskwell. Your shadow’s already here, rehearsing your next mistake.

We’ve saved you a branch.

You won’t remember climbing in.

But we will.

Write Something

8. “Communion”

He cut wafers from the flesh of his thigh,

And served them to worms beneath a red sky.

They said the newcomers tasted clean,

And begged to dine on the spaces between.