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I’ve been following this artist for quite some time, waiting for the right one to drop. And here it is. A bit of a struggle to find the meaning in it, and there are definitely flaws. But flaws that can be fixed.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Huleeb

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

The kitchen was empty, like X’s head. That’s what he’d been told anyway, although he knew it wasn’t true, but still kept it to himself because it was always better when people thought you had an empty head.

X. His name. It’s what he thought of himself, so it’s what you should think of him.

The kitchen wasn’t empty, in truth. There were other things. Haze for one, like you see in movies, as if no one ever dusts, no matter how wealthy the people appear. At least open a window, he always thought. No one ever did. He assumed the effect was to create drama and atmosphere, so he stood on the outskirts of the kitchen, shoes edging the linoleum so he could get a nice, wide view of this “empty” kitchen in case it was a ruse, because empty kitchens always seemed to be. He didn’t need drama or atmosphere. Though sneaking down here for a snack might create drama if he wasn’t careful.

He checked his suit, which he wore whenever he left his room as a protective measure. Everything was in order. Zippers zipped, pockets buttoned, gloves and boots affixed. He flexed his fingers, then his toes, then both together.

X stumbled back, losing equilibrium, catching himself on the door frame. Something moved inside the kitchen. Not drama or atmosphere. Well, maybe. He stepped onto the linoleum, which was rippled from time and heat. He supposed. He hadn’t been down here since he was a fetus, at least without the suit. Yes, a fetus, still inside his mother as she padded around the kitchen before the linoleum had grown distraut. Before she had.

X kept to the straight lines of the linoleum print, one foot in front of the other, toe pressing to heel with each stride. His name was comprised of what could have been straight lines once, though now angled and crossed.

X held his arms out for balance, head straight, or what served as a head. An empty box, because his head was empty, of course. Scuffed at the edges with a square at the front where his face would be if he had one. He would have smiled if he had a mouth. But he could see, despite having no eyes. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure why he wore this suit at all, not having a head to breath in what could be poisonous dust, spores, maybe, from the fruit in the bowl on the table, which appeared fresh. He knew otherwise, could see the subtle movement of the skin where the scavengers burrowed, decomposing the once-sweet flesh.

X shivered, and brought his arms around himself, hugged himself, really, and something inside him–if he had an inside at all–bubbled. And he saw bubbles then, drifting across the room, mingling with the haze, coated with it, their surfaces transforming from glossy to matte, their transparency dwindling, then gone.

X could reach the table with the fruit if he took two more steps forward or fell over, which he felt like doing now, realizing he stood not the straight lines of the linoleum but on the centers of the squares that were so black they must be bottomless pits.

They weren’t. But X fell anyway, onto the table, where his hands planted at its edge, well, his gloves, because he didn’t have hands. His head, empty yet heavy, bent down from the movement to see something most curious: himself. A miniature version. Little X looked up at him, dressed the same, with the same scuffed-box head and the same absence of expression.

“Who are you?” X asked.

“You,” Little X said.

“But I’m me.”

“So am I.”

X studied Little X for any detail that would prove he was something else, a copy, an imposter. Everything seemed in order, and it troubled him.

“Aren’t you going to hit me?” Little X said.

X’s arm was raised, his hand clenched into a fist. “No,” he said and returned his hand to the table.

“Good, because I know you don’t like that.”

“Don’t like what?”

“To be hit.”

X shivered again, hugged himself again, and found that he did have arms inside the suit. They were thin and hurt from his touch.

“Stop it,” X said.

“Stop what?”

“You’re not me. You don’t know what I like or don’t.”

“I do,” Little X said. “But I won’t hurt you.”

“Like you could,” X said.

“I could. I may be small, but I know things. I know she doesn’t like it when you leave the cabinet doors open, and that earns you one strike. A second strike for the cluttered counter–”

“But I didn’t do it,” X said, hand raised again.

“It doesn’t matter,” Little X said. “Just like your name. You think if you hide behind dead eyes she’ll think you’re dead when she comes into your room and–”

X slammed his open hand down on Little X, who collapsed with a crunch. X went to grind his palm into the table, but a pain shot up both arm, and he staggered back. “I-I’m sorry.”

Little X sat up the best he could with broken arms and broken legs, and X saw a face in that empty square.

“It’s okay,” the face said, small and frail. “I forgive you.”

The open cabinet and the counter in disarray intensified the pain in X’s arms.

“No,” the little face said, because he wasn’t Little X, was he? “There’s no time. Go back to your room, where you can hide. Where you can play dead until she forgets. And then you can try again.”

X picked up Little X with both hands, because that’s who he was. X was sure of it. “I trust you.”

“I know,” Little X said. “You always do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You always say that,” Little X said. “Now, put me down.”

“Why?”

“Because you always do.”

“Not this time.”

“No?”

X smiled. “No. Not this time.”

Little X smiled, too.

Inspired by the current book I’m reading, Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock. A story that took until the end to figure out how it would lead to the artwork. Sometimes, you just need to trust in your subconscious.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Hethe Srodawa

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Mammy always said I’d die at the hands of a pack of wolves. To which I’d answer, “Wolves don’t have hands.”

I’d get the switch real bad every time I said it, but it was worth it, seeing the look in her eyes, which weren’t unlike those of wolves that hit the headlights like those fancy new reflecting things they put out on Nettle Highway. Not that I’d ever seen any, wolves that is. Just heard stories, both from the woman who lashed me good when I spoke of them and from the man who didn’t give a shit if I ever spoke at all.

“Simon Says,” he called me after that game that just came out where you try to remember the colors. He laughed himself ripe every time, seeing as I didn’t talk much. Purple as a plum he got. More like a bruised nut sack with his neck veins running all the way to the top of his bald head, where all was left were a few scraggly black hairs. I hear you, calling him a dickhead would have made more sense, but you didn’t know my Pap. I swear on his grave, which I dug myself in the deep of winter, that his head looked far more like a nut sac than a dick.

I told him that once, all of it, even how his head looked more like a nut sac than a dick. It was like the words had no meaning, and for the span of Reggie’s tongue-curl yawn, who lay at his feet, he just sat there with his hands tucked into the front pocket of his overalls where he kept salt water taffy from California. I could hear the wax paper rustling like the dead leaves outside my window that always woke me from sleep, wind or not. He must have been so stunned I said a damn word. He got so purple it was almost black. And his eyes, the whites usually yellow from all the piss he was full of, glared at me, ready to pop from their sockets. I swear I heard steam begin to whistle from his ears, but I ran like hell before I saw any.

Through the two acres of land we had, I ran, tearing through thickets that lashed me harder than anything Mammy had sent my way. Dove through the tire swing on the old oak just for sport, ’cause I was feeling good, feeling nimble, and I thought even if a pack of wolves was chasing me, I could turn around and blow them a raspberry, even drop trow and shake my ass at them before they’d make it to me, and I’d still outrun them.

“Simon says, fuck you all to hell!” I shouted at them wolves and Mammy and Pap who shook their fists on the porch of our shitstack house, like cartoon villains. Mammy did almost have a mustache, and I laughed at that, still running with my head turned, watching them all dwindle into the distance.

Then something stopped me cold. Cold being the right word, cause that’s what I felt running from my heel to the bottom of my spine, like all the bones in my leg had become one giant icicle. I was afraid to look down, cause I knew it couldn’t be no good, and the wolves were coming. So I kept going, fast as I could, tumbling down the canal bank with my peg leg. I hooked my finger to take my mind off it, but I ain’t never heard of no pirate getting away from a pack of wolves, let alone Pap’s ’52 Chevy pickup, no matter how rusted or beat up it was. And the latter barreled down the old dirt road leading from house to highway, pluming like a freight train running on Pap’s hellfire.

I was halfway across the canal when I saw the blood in the water. I thought maybe it was a trick of the light, the sun being so low and all, burning off the smoke and fire from the coal-fired plant at the edge of town. But it wasn’t that time of year when the sun turned red, so I knew it was me. The cold I’d felt turned to fire, and I couldn’t help but throw my head back and scream. My voice at the time was still riding the edge between man and boy, so it sounded like the dying squawk of one of them old ring-necks Pap is always trying to rid the fields of.

God damn it hurt. Like nothing I’d ever felt. I just knew I had to keep going. Keep going, cross the highway, maybe hole up awhile in that abandoned van behind Molly’s corner store she used for extra storage.

I did make it to the highway, stopped like I did in the canal, about halfway, again to see red in the form of a truck bigger than one I’d ever seen.

Lying here in the bed, some twenty years later, I still can’t see it. They told me what it was, I even saw pictures, but for some reason I can’t see it in my mind. The only picture I see now is on the old TV sitting on a folding chair across the room, which I share with a dead man. They don’t know it yet, and I haven’t bothered to tell. I like the company, I suppose. And if I say something, they’ll come in and take me out and away from my TV, which has been playing the same movie for years, ever since I’ve been here. I never tire of it, even laugh sometimes.

It’s an old western, where this man is running from the law and hides in the woods. He’s alone until he isn’t. Three wolves come out of the shadows, eyes all gleaming like they do. He takes out his knife, but he knows it won’t be enough. And he waits, cornered.

This image struck me with nostalgia. Not that I’ve ever been a schoolgirl before but something about the framing and lighting reminded me of my childhood.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Enze Fu

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Aoi tied her shoes for the third time.

“Hurry up, Aoi!” Ren called from the sidewalk outside the school gates.

The tree Aoi sat under rustled what leaves were left on its spider-leg branches. The wind plucked a single leaf free and hurtled it toward Ren and Niko, who were crossing the street. Aoi shivered, thinking of graveyards and ghosts, then pushed her glasses up on her nose and followed after her friends.

“Wait!” Aoi called as Ren and Niko rounded the corner with the blue fence, the path below spattered with cherries.

They didn’t wait, so she followed their cherry footprints, which faded in the direction of the field they always crossed on the way home every day. But not tomorrow.

Aoi skidded to a stop as the world opened to grass she could get lost in, a sky that might carry her away, and her two best friends wavering on the horizon as if they were made of paper, two brush strokes barely there, ready to be crumpled and discarded.

“No,” Aoi said, but the wind stole her word and tossed it into the grass, which chittered with glee. She stuck her tongue out at it.

“What’s taking so long?” It was Ren, her soft face smiling below a curtain of bangs.

“Sorry,” Aoi said, “I just . . .”

Ren tossed a pebble at Niko who leaped as it hit the ground with a crack and bounded into the grass. Slender white shapes rose from where the pebble landed. Two cranes. Black tail feathers, neck with a red scalp that matched the color of the cherried path.

Aoi looked back the way she had come, to find the other bird. The third one. Finding nothing but the blue fence far in the distance, she said, “There are only two.”

Ren retied Aoi’s braid that had come loose. “Like us.”

Aoi beamed. “Really?”

Ren shrugged. “I guess so.”

“You guess?”

“Why are you being so weird? My parents will be mad if I don’t get home soon. We should go.”

“Why?”

Ren looked at her as Niko approached. “I just told you.”

“But remember when we played out in this field until it got dark and–”

Niko slung her bag off her shoulder. “And we all got grounded for a week. Even the weekend.”

“Yeah,” Ren said.

“But,” Aoi said.

“But what?” Niko said.

“It’s the end.”

Ren and Niko looked at each other and laughed. They both stood and brushed off their knees. The two cranes stood on the path, preening their wings.

“We have to find the third one,” Aoi said. “It’s us. Ren said so.”

Niko made a face at Ren. “Huh?”

Ren blushed, looking down. Her hair whittled her face into a sliver. If she didn’t have bangs, it would have been gone completely.

“You guys are weird,” Niko said. She faced the cranes and mocked their preening, croaking a song that sounded nothing like theirs.

The two cranes ignored her, exploring the edge of the path with their beaks.

“We’re the weird ones?” Ren said and rolled her eyes. She kicked Niko’s bag to get her attention.

Aoi stayed where she was, looking for the third crane that must be there, stalking the shallows she knew were there but couldn’t see. Far behind, like her. Left behind, like her.

Ren joined Niko in her charade, and they giggled when the cranes finally noticed them, spreading their wings wide and taking flight toward the sun where no silly girls were to be found.

Aoi closed her eyes and felt the sun on her face. Her glasses slipped down her nose, but she let them sit there, ready to slip off. All she had to do was scrunch her face and the parts behind her ears would rise over them and the weight would do the rest.

But she didn’t. Instead, she looked through her lenses which were as far as they could be from her eyes without falling off, noting the way they warped and bulged the world, making everything in the middle big and everything along the outside squashed. They did the same to Ren and Niko who had continued along the path toward home. Soon that path would split, and they would go their separate ways.

“And you’ll go away for the summer like you always do,” Aoi said. “Both of you. But it’s different now. You’ll be there and I’ll be here, and then you’ll be somewhere else after.”

Aoi sat down and untied her shoes. She undid her braid and shook it free in the breeze. She let her glasses fall off her face, but the frame caught a lock of hair and swung into the grass.

She searched the blur of color for her glasses. It was green and brown for a time. Then hands joined the search, and her pale fingers reminded her of the two cranes. She suddenly didn’t care about her glasses anymore and balled her hands until they didn’t look like cranes at all. Handfulls of grass were what they found.

“Aoi,” Ren and Niko said together.

Aoi looked up at her friends who didn’t look like cranes at all. Niko taller with hair past her shoulder. Ren shorter with hair above her shoulders.

Then they knelt down to her level. She felt her braid retied. She felt her glasses returned, which allowed her to see their faces, the sun behind them, dabbing the tops of their heads with red, just like the cranes.

Aoi tied her shoes for the fourth time.

“We can wait a little longer,” Ren said.

“We can,” Niko said. “Remember when we played tag out there one time and Ren fell into the stream and pretended she was drownin g?”

“You guys were crying so hard,” Ren said.

“So mean,” Aoi and Niko said in unison.

“Hey, look,” Ren said.

The two cranes picked there way through the reeds ahead before taking flight.

“It’s us,” Niko said to Ren.

Aoi smiled. “It is.”

This was the first time I attempted this style of horror. It was fun playing with what one may call an urban legend. I don’t feel it completely landed for me, but there are some things I enjoyed.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Svetlana Shuvalova

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Jen touched the window. “It’s cold.”

“Of course, it’s cold,” Ivan said. “It’s snowing outside. That’s not the point, anyway. Don’t touch it. Just count.”

Jen’s reflection in the glass was a silhouette of black Longleaf pines, the lamp in the room behind her a–”Hey, what do they call those glowly halos behind angels?”

“A halo. Keep counting.”

“Nimbus,” Jen said. “That’s it.”

“That’s a cloud. The dark kind, full of rain.” Ivan pushed out a sigh. “Goddammit, Jen. You’re ruining it. Keep counting.”

“This is stupid. I’m not staring at a window counting to one thousand.”

Ivan looked over her shoulder. At her reflection, at the trees outside, at himself, she couldn’t tell. He touched her shoulder. “You’re almost there.” His fingers looked strange in the window. Crooked, almost broken.

Jen shrugged his hand off. “Fine. Eight hundred and eighty.” Ivan’s face in the window changed as much as his hand had. She closed her eyes.

“You have to keep your eyes open,” he said. “Or it won’t work.”

She laughed and shook her head. “You actually think this is going to work? I’m only doing this because you promised you’d paint the entryway if I did.”

Jen saw his eyes, then, in the window, hovering among the boughs of the pines, white as snow without irises or pupils. As if the trees themselves had eyes. As if two moons bore a hole through them.

“Count,” Ivan whispered. His breath was cold, his tone laced with static as if a recording.

“Eight hundred and eighty-one.” The lamp at the back of the room, her nimbus, dimmed. Ivan’s heartbeat thrummed on her shouldblade.

“Eight hundred and eighty–” She spun and pushed him away. “I’m done. You’re creeping me out. We can paint the stupid entryway together.”

Ivan’s face was slack. A glisten near his lower lids. His lips were almost blue, but it could have been from her staring at the icy tones of night. She rubbed her eyes.

“Please,” he said, trembling, trails of sweat running from his temples to his jaw. His hands were pressed together in prayer, then the fingers intertwined, and he squeezed, knuckles the color of bone.

Jen’s heart ached. She forgot the stupidity of this game, the frigid air by the window, the eyes in the wall of trees. She almost asked him if he was okay, but he hated that. Always hated that. Especially the last few weeks.

“Fine,” she said.

She faced the window and ran her tongue over her teeth to separate her lips from them, which had grown sticky and dry. The back of her throat felt like an ice cube had lodged there. Yet she could breathe. She swallowed. There was nothing there.

“Eight hundred and eighty two,” she said. “Eight hundred and eighty–”

“No,” Ivan said. “It’s fine. That’s good enough. You were right. This is stupid. Let’s go finish the movie.”

She caught his shoulder as he turned. “You said I had to count to a thousand? Hey, listen to me. Are you okay?”

Fuck.

Ivan narrowed, withered, and she reached out to touch him, to say she was sorry, to say she knew he hated it, knew what he was going through, knew that she wouldn’t understand and she should just stop asking.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

He did look okay. Filled out, taller even. Was that a smile?

Jen wanted to hug him, leap into his arms, buckshot his face with kisses despite the gross beard he’d grown since all of this started.

“Jenny,” he said. “I love you.” That static sound again.

“What?”

His eyes were white, like she had seen in the reflection. She desperately searched the reaches of his eyelids for a sign of iris, a twitch, a strain that he was forcing his eyes back into his head.

Then he burst out laughing, folding over, hyperventilating, then falling to the floor in a fetal position where he rotated slowly on his side, a spiral.

She kicked him, but he continued his strange ritual. Closer now, she saw he was crying, not laughing, as a ring of tears formed around his body, glinting in the lamp light that was so bright. He looked up at her, still sobbing, his neck not quite right, his eyes not quite right, as he focused on the space behind her, beyond her.

A gust of wind hit her back. The window was open, the stand of trees appearing closer, miniaturized, coming into the room in tangled strands. Spiraled strands.

Jen was yanked off her feet, Ivan pulling her across the room through the entryway where sealed paint buckets were kicked over. She burst out the front door onto the stairwell landing, but Ivan kept going, thrown down the stairs face-first, his head bursting on the eighth step, his fingers mangled, the bottoms of his feet as black as the trees.

Through the front door she saw their home, near and far at the same time, the window closed and dark and cold. She could feel it from here. Then she saw it.

She fell against the banister, catching herself, and bolted down the stairs, zig zagging down the five floors until she reached the bottom. Back against the wall, she paused to rest. The angularity of the stairwell had changed, rounded into a–

Jen pounded on the exit door, the knob somehow missing, then searched the frame with fingernails, three snapping off, flinging threads of blood across a white blur of a face who had opened the door, and she ran out into the night, out into the cold.

An owl screeched as the building’s floodlight ignited, and a scream sounded behind her muffled by wood and brick. She ran toward her long shadow, which grew longer with every stride, taller. Blacker.

Ankle-deep in the snow, then on her knees, she faced the trees, connected to her shadow, then on her stomach, where she felt a heartbeat against her back. It was warm. Then cold.