Back in 2017, a Swedish dental hygienist named Bernt Herlitz noticed something that completely broke all laws of biology. He was doing routine checkups on young refugees on the island of Gotland. These patients were officially registered as unaccompanied minors—meaning children. But when Herlitz looked into their mouths, he saw fully developed wisdom teeth in about 80% of them. In the dental world, that means one thing: these weren't kids. They were fully grown adult men using a legal loophole to get child refugee benefits.

Herlitz did what any honest professional would do. He reported it to the Migration Agency. But instead of an investigation, the system turned on him like a pack of wolves.

He was fired on the spot. The clinic accused him of leaking medical secrets and mishandling data. Then came a brutal lawsuit that felt more like a public execution. The court sided with the employer and ordered Herlitz to pay over 445,000 Swedish kronor (around $43,000) in legal fees. For a regular working-class guy, this was instant financial suicide. Herlitz was blacklisted from his profession, and his career was completely dead.

The family was saved from total bankruptcy only because regular citizens started a massive crowdfunding campaign on social media to pay his debt.

But here comes the ultimate, marianic twist. A few years later, the fraud became so massive that the Swedish authorities couldn't ignore it anymore. The exact same X-ray and dental methods Herlitz used—the ones they called "unreliable and discriminatory" during his trial—were officially adopted by the state as the standard tool to verify the age of undocumented migrants.

The system basically admitted he was right all along. But nobody apologized to Herlitz, and nobody gave him his career back. His story is a chilling reminder of what happens when raw scientific facts crash into a wall of political ideology. When the truth is uncomfortable, the system doesn't fix the problem—it just destroys the person who pointed it out.

(Please excuse my English, it's not my native language but I wanted to share this story with you.)

When my kid (call them K) was 2 years old, K needed a blood test for lead. We expected it to be upsetting so my wife told me I was doing it, not her. I took K to the clinic and we waited in the waiting room. K was all smiles, not knowing what was to come. Then our turn came and they brought us to a back room. K was on my lap and a nurse came over, smiling. K smiled back. The nurse took K’s arm, rubbed it with alcohol, then held a piece of gauze to block the view while she went in with the needle. K didn’t know there was a needle going in. The nurse got one vial of blood, then popped that one off and attached another. K was still smiling. The nurse finished the second vial, then pulled out the needle, taped on a cotton ball with a band-aid, and stepped back, holding her breath. K looked at the bandaged arm, then at the other arm, then held that one up and said, “Another?” K thought the bandage looked cool and wanted another 😂😂

My mom has been posting a lot more on social media lately, and I’ve noticed that her style has become much bolder than it used to be. She’s wearing outfits that show some skin, and it seems like she’s getting a lot more attention and engagement because of it. But in home she’s a normal mom in pj's.

I’ve noticed that many of my friends, both male and female, like her posts. One of my male friend in particular seems to interact with her posts constantly. He likes almost everything she uploads and often leaves comments. Recently, I saw him comment “hot” on one of her pictures. My mom simply replied normally, just like she does to most comments on her posts. She doesn’t seem bothered by those kinds of comments at all.

Honestly, I have a really good relationship with my mom. We’re very open with each other and don’t really hide things from one another. Even recently she sent me her outfit check pictures like always she does so, that's the bond we share and she ’s a very cool-minded person, and she doesn’t seem to care if people compliment her outfit, appearance, or body.

I think she’s genuinely enjoying this phase of her life. Maybe she’s finally comfortable experimenting with outfits she never tried before, and the positive attention probably makes her feel good too.

I don’t have any objection to it. If she feels confident and happy with her style, I’m happy for her. I honestly hope she continues enjoying herself and does even better in life.

For Dad

No one in my life has met my dad. But they certainly know him. I’m talking partners, friends, neighbours, work colleagues — I’ve even used him as an example in my business, with customers. Every person would describe him exactly as I know him. The smartest person I’ve ever met. The kindest person I’ve ever met. The most gentle. The most modest. And the most brilliant — there wasn’t a Trivial Pursuit game he couldn’t win. He was able to participate anywhere and everywhere.

My father was always kind. At every turn, he was kind. A family friend would always say, everybody deserves a dad like mine. And I think that that’s absolutely true.

When you spoke to Dad, you felt like the whole world stopped. And I mean stopped in time. His focus was entirely on you. I remember being a toddler and having that level of attention, right through to being an adult.

He was also my greatest comedic fan.
At five, I would follow him around the backyard — some would say annoyingly — and tell him the greatest joke of all time.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Bear.
Bear who?
Bare bottom.

I told it daily until I was ten. Okay — maybe fifteen. Look, my friends now, as I’m almost thirty-eight, know that joke. It’s definitely recorded in ASIC board papers. I have told it at corporate meetings.
And every single time, he’d throw his head back and laugh like it was the first time he’d ever heard it. Like it was groundbreaking stuff. Real high-quality.

That became a lifelong project of mine — making Dad laugh. It escalated. By the time I was at university, which happened to be down the road from his work, it had turned into pranks.

He worked in magazine publishing, and on a deadline day — assembling ads, incredibly stressed — I would choose those moments to terrorise him. I would call and tell him I was four hours away, where my car had been impounded and I’d been picked up for drunk driving.
Without aggression. Without agitation. Without frustration. He would gently say, are you okay, pal?
I’d say, yeah. Can you please just come and pick me up, as they won’t take me home?
And he would say, without fail, sure. Just let me get ready. I can leave in about twenty minutes, and I’ll make my way to you.

Twenty minutes later, I’d be sitting on the bonnet of his parked car at his work building. Huge grin on my face. Holding something nice for him to eat, and a coffee.
He would throw his head back and laugh in delight. And I’d say, hey — wanna go AWOL? We can go to a party. Which would make him laugh even more.

That attention wasn’t only for me.
I remember Dad and I sitting at one of Lewis’s soccer games, always a sausage roll in hand — still, to this day, have never found one better. Lewis had no real interest in being out there. And Dad would lean over and whisper, your brother is great at being exactly where the ball isn’t. I think that that’s on purpose.

He wasn’t there to watch Lewis win. He was just there. Every week, on the sideline, delighted by a boy who didn’t want to play.

Then I watched Dad lose Lewis. No one deserves that. But seriously, not Dad.

Lewis’s note said, Dad always told me, mind over matter. And I realised in that moment that they really had their own special relationship, just like I did with him.

Home was even worse after Lewis. By the time I started high school I knew I would have to remove myself from it — and I knew that would come at the expense of Dad. Not because of anything he had done. Because you can’t step out of a home and still be in it. I dreaded the day I would have to leave him.

So what I did was, without fail, every week, I would write him a note. From the very first day of high school until the week I finished.
The weekly notes would explain to him why I loved him, filled with memories, examples, reflections. They were endless. There was so much to tell him.
Tears would be stained onto the paper, sometimes making a bit of the ink run, as I would articulate as cleanly as I could why he was not just the most brilliant dad in the world, but the greatest person I have ever met.
He would notice that those were the marks of dried tears. And he would come home to talk to me about what I’d written, and why.

I wanted him to understand that leaving would never be about him. In those conversations Dad would get very upset. He would talk about what he wanted to see me achieve, and how he wanted to be a fantastic grandfather to my children.

Which is why, years later, I would leave those pranks at his work delighted — and then sit in my car and cry. Because I already knew what was coming. There would come a point where I couldn’t sustain this relationship. Not through any falling out, and not through distance, but because I had taken myself out of the family, and this was the cost of it. I knew that this was the most important and beautiful relationship of my entire life, and I knew I was going to lose it.

Those notes were really my way of writing this eulogy, twenty years early. But unlike this one — delivered to a room, about a person — mine were delivered to him. Every week, for five years, he heard it. He heard all of it.

Dad still remains the greatest person I have ever met in my entire life. The greatest accomplishment of my life has been being his daughter.

P.S. Daddy, don’t be scared. Lewis, Nanna and Grandad are there. Tell them I love them.

Edit: sorry for strange paragraph spacing, grammar is a real weakness

There once was a man who kept Tuesday in a jar. Not every Tuesday. Just one. He had found it many years ago underneath his kitchen table, trembling beside a dust bunny. Tuesday was very small then. About the size of a button. So he put it in a pickle jar. He poked three holes in the lid. He wasn't cruel. Every morning before work he checked on Tuesday. "Morning." Tuesday said nothing. Tuesday had never said anything. Still, the man left it a little coffee. Just in case.

Years passed. The man grew older. Tuesday did not. People visited his house. They noticed the jar. "What's that?" "Tuesday." "No, really." "Tuesday." Most people stopped asking. One woman did not. She stayed for dinner. Then another dinner. Then several hundred dinners. Eventually her toothbrush appeared beside his. She never asked him to throw Tuesday away. This was one reason he loved her. At night they could hear the jar humming downstairs. mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. "What does it want?" she asked once. "I don't know." "Have you ever opened it?" The man looked horrified. "You can't just open Tuesday." She nodded. Of course. There are rules. Nobody knows who wrote them. Still, there are rules.

Years passed again. The woman became sick. Not storybook sick. Not one dramatic cough into a white handkerchief. Sick in the tedious way. Appointments. Parking garages. Plastic bracelets. Numbers. Waiting rooms filled with magazines no one had chosen to read. The man would sit beside her and hold her hand. Sometimes neither of them talked. There isn't always something to say. Eventually there was one hospital room. One chair. One bed. One afternoon. She looked at him and whispered: "I think Tuesday wants out." The man laughed. Then cried. Then laughed because he was crying. Then cried because he had laughed. Human beings do ridiculous things when the walls get close.

That evening he went home alone. The house had become enormous. Every room seemed to contain another room behind it. The refrigerator buzzed. The hallway light blinked. At the end of the hallway stood someone who looked exactly like him. Except taller. And smiling. The man switched off the light. When he switched it back on, nothing was there. From the kitchen: mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. He walked toward the jar. Tuesday was glowing. Very faintly. Blue perhaps. Or green. Or that color you sometimes see when you close your eyes after looking at the sun. He sat down. "All right," he said. Tuesday hummed. "You've been here forty-three years." Tuesday hummed. "I don't even know what you are." Tuesday hummed.

The man put his hand on the lid. Suddenly he remembered being eight years old. Running through wet grass. His mother calling him home. He remembered being nineteen. He remembered his first apartment. His father's hands. A terrible haircut. A dog whose name he had almost forgotten. The woman laughing so hard milk came out of her nose. The woman asleep beside him. The woman in the hospital. The woman saying: I think Tuesday wants out. The jar began shaking. "No," the man whispered. Because now he understood. Tuesday wasn't Tuesday. Not exactly. Tuesday was every day he had decided he could keep. Every afternoon he wished would remain unfinished. Every person he had secretly believed could be protected by remembering them hard enough. Every moment he had placed beneath glass and said: Mine. Stay. Please.

The lid turned. Once. Twice. The man stopped. From somewhere upstairs came footsteps. Slow footsteps. Coming down. One. Two. Three. The kitchen light flickered. The refrigerator stopped humming. Everything became silent. The man opened the jar. Nothing happened. He waited. Still nothing. Then something very small climbed onto his hand. Tuesday. It looked nothing like Tuesday. It looked like a tiny warm light. It crawled across his palm. Paused. And disappeared. The footsteps upstairs stopped. The man sat alone at the kitchen table. The empty jar stood before him.

Morning eventually arrived. Not dramatically. No trumpets. No revelation. Just sunlight finding the curtains. The man made coffee. He poured two cups from habit. He stared at the second one. Then smiled. Then cried. Then drank them both. Outside, someone was mowing a lawn. A truck backed up somewhere. A dog barked. The world continued performing its ridiculous little duties. The man stepped outside. It was Wednesday. He had never noticed Wednesday before.

It all started so simply, so innocently, so responsibly: when you are an adult, you have to be prepared for such things.

Parents don’t live forever.
Nor do spouses.
Nor siblings.
Nor children.

He had studied actuarial science in college. He was a former Boy Scout: “Be Prepared” was a mantra he had intoned since childhood. Nothing wrong with that. It simply meant he was ready for that universally dreaded phone call.

Not a text message, not an email. A phone call, perhaps late at night while brushing your teeth. Perhaps early on a Saturday morning before anyone is up doing anything.

He had gotten a phone call like that one Saturday morning.

He screamed—a howl he didn’t know he could make. He would never forget that morning, or how completely unprepared he had been.

And so, he had a plan now.

He had a plan for everyone.

His mother’s was twelve pages.

His father’s was nine.

His wife’s was thirty-seven.

There were wills, passwords, insurance policies, funeral preferences, account numbers, phone trees. He knew which relatives would need to be called first and which ones should not be left alone after receiving the news.

But those were only logistics.

He planned the grief, too.

If his mother died first, he would drive rather than fly. He imagined the call coming at night. Rain, probably. If driving, pull to the side of the road when the call came. If at home, go to the bedroom, close the door. Scream into pillow as needed.

For his father, he had prepared three possible eulogies. They all centered around regretting not reconnecting after the divorce. One version was reserved and stoic, another was lighthearted and anecdotal. He would just need to ask around beforehand which fit best, as he didn’t really know his father well enough to choose himself.

For his wife, he knew where he would stand at the funeral. He knew the music she would want. He knew the flowers: daisies. She wore a blue dress with a daisy pattern on their first date. She loved that dress.

He had decided he would allow himself three days before handling paperwork and two weeks before returning to work.

He considered this practical.

People refused to think about death, then acted surprised when it came. Ludicrous in his eyes. “Death and taxes”—wasn’t that the saying?

He would not be surprised.

One Saturday morning, his wife sat across from him eating toast while he updated the beneficiary information on her life insurance policy. Sunshine poured through the bay window behind her as she scrolled through her phone.

Suddenly she laughed.

She laughed and couldn’t stop, one hand covering her mouth.

He looked up.

“What’s so funny?”

She turned the phone toward him.

A cat meme. Something absurdly stupid.

She wiped a tear from her eye and breathlessly said, “Oh, I don’t know why I found that so funny.”

Later, after breakfast, he went to the den.

He pulled out the manila folder labeled WIFE — DEATH.

Thirty-seven pages.

He stared at it for a long time.

From the kitchen, he heard a cupboard close.

Then her voice, humming badly to herself.

There was no plan in which losing her was acceptable.

***
Thank you for reading. This story is about being an adult, which bums me out sometimes. I would love to hear your feedback.

Ok what?

Like any child, my daughter Maisie had quite the overactive imagination. Her mind was chock full of made-up friends that she talked to on the regular. My wife Rachel and I thought it was adorable. With that being said, sometimes we wished Maisie would get…you know…real friends. Don’t get me wrong, she was a great kid, and kids should be kids, but she didn’t have anything in terms of a social life.

We tried absolutely and positively everything, from the kids’ playclub at our church, to the neighborhood’s “mommy and me” and “daddy and me” playgroups, to bringing her to the local playground, to inviting other children over for playdates. You name it. All our efforts were in vain. Rachel and I might’ve been overreacting and we didn’t want to infringe anything on Maisie. Maybe she was just an independent kid. That’s totally normal. As are imaginary friends for kids.

Then at eight-years-old, Maisie became mute. Just completely stopped talking…but only to other people. If someone came up and talked to her, she’d either just stare at them or run away and hide. Maisie never looked scared or anxious in those scenarios. It was more like she was a statue. Frozen. No emotion good or bad on her face. Like a robot. But if she was alone, she’d be talking up a storm to no one but herself. Maisie always pretended like someone was truly there though. She’d even nod her head, wait for responses and respond accordingly, and even reach out her arm and act like she was holding somebody else’s hand.

We were greatly concerned. Children don’t exhibit those types of behaviors without proper reason. We couldn’t ask Maisie about it because, as aforementioned, she’d give us the cold shoulder. Our next safest bet was to ask other people we knew. A lot of them gave us the same answers we already knew. Rachel and I were getting frustrated until I decided to email her teacher at her school. I sent her an email that outlined my worries and asked if anything went on at school that we should know about.

I got a response at around 8:00 that night. Maisie’s teacher, Mrs. Ashelin, told me that she did in fact observe strange behavior from Maisie. Apparently, a few days prior, when Maisie was called on to answer a question, she just stared at Mrs. Ashelin and the other students, her hands behind her back, swaying slightly. Then in a calm and cutesy voice, she said “He has ordered me not to speak to anyone but him.” In her notebook, Maisie wrote and drew some very disturbing things. Some of the things she wrote are “I’ll be a good little mouse”, “be one of the good mice girls for him”, “I’ll do whatever he says without question”, “he loves me and I love him”, “but I don’t understand what love is but I understand it with him”, and “he loves to play with me”. Some of the things she drew were her, in stick figure form, with this…thing. It was drawn way more detailed than Maisie herself.

Its head was triangular and elongated into a sharp point. There were ovally black eyes on both sides of its head while two large circular ears were atop its head. Two slits for a nose and a mouth containing only two buck teeth. Skinny. Boney. You could see its ribs. Three spindly fingers were on each hand. Each tip was as sharp as a knife. Lastly, a long tail was behind it. Maisie drew her and that thing doing very…how should I say this?...inappropriate things.

I showed the email to Rachel and she was just as horrified as I was. How could Maisie know what all that stuff was? She was eight! Like any good parent we always took great strides in not exposing our daughter to anything sexual or of that nature. Early exposure can really ruin a child’s mind. That’s just putting it lightly. But this? Maisie’s whole imaginary friend thing needed to end. It was reaching a dangerous point. Was she having delusions? Schizophrenia? Or…sigh…as far as Rachel and I knew, nothing happened to Maisie, but that didn’t stop us from considering the absolute worst case scenario. I’m not saying what that is but I’m sure you can put the pieces together. As a parent, that was the last thing I wanted to think about. Actually it wasn’t even on the list of things I wanted to think about.

Mrs. Ashelin ended the email with something else that happened that day. Maisie spent long stretches of time in the girl’s bathroom. Another student reported that she went in and heard “whimpers” and “moans” coming from one of the stalls. When she looked under it, she saw Maisie’s clothes on the ground and a “moving shadow” above them. When the student knocked on the door, she all of a sudden heard one of the faucets going behind her. She turned around and Maisie was washing her hands. Like nothing happened.

Rachel and I were very confused at that last part. That sounded way too ridiculous. Like was Maisie fucking floating in the stall or something? Regardless, we treated all this very seriously. Rachel and I immediately took Maisie to see a specialist who dealt with child abuse cases. I brought her notebook along. It would most certainly be useful. I knew Maisie wouldn’t want to talk, but we had to at least try. Believe it or not, she did talk, but what she said made chills run down Rachel and I’s spines.

Maisie told the specialist that the mouse thing in her notebook was called “Bad Mouse” and that it visits her all the time no matter where she is. She said that Bad Mouse visits little girls all over the world and “plays with them”. When the specialist asked what she meant by “plays with them”, Maisie replied that Bad Mouse does “different things that make us feel tingly in preparation to be his little mice girls”.

We heard enough by that point. Rachel, the specialist, and I had a long discussion about what we should do. The specialist said she might have to put in a request to have Maisie placed in a children’s psych ward. Rachel and I couldn’t handle that. We didn’t want to do that to our little girl. By any means, we would find another way to handle this. The specialist told us to think about it and that it might do her some good. We thanked her and left.

Were we being selfish by not putting Maisie in a children’s psych ward? Rachel and I pondered that question day in and day out. We never did end up doing it because we thought it was too extreme. Also there was no evidence that Maisie was being legitimately sexually abused. The specialist’s physical exam said that Maisie was totally fine in that regard. We were allowed to see footage from the security cameras at the entrances of the bathrooms at Maisie’s school. They only showed Maisie going in, about half an hour going by, then the other student going in, then Maisie leaving a few minutes later. No one else. And no one went in before her besides a couple other girls that left before Maisie went in. Was Maisie faking it? Was she really delusional? Or schizophrenic? We didn’t know. Rachel and I needed time to think this whole thing over.

It only got worse from then on.

Maisie was never one to talk in her sleep. She was always dead silent. Not even a snore. But that night after Rachel and I put her to bed, we heard Maisie talking. I’m not talking about little quiet unintelligible murmurs. No. Full-on conversations. Except she wasn’t speaking English. It was some unknown language that resembled Pig Latin but different. Her accent changed too. This happened for three nights. On the third night, Rachel and I were in her doorway watching her talk in that strange language when she suddenly rose up, her eyes still closed, and burst into an intense laughing fit. Maisie was cackling so hard it looked like it hurt. Then she immediately stopped and did these weird movements with her lips and hands like she was kissing something. Finally, she fell back down onto her pillow and went right back to sleep.

The next day, I knocked on Maisie’s door to let her know breakfast was ready. She didn’t respond. I stood there for a couple minutes. Maisie hadn’t made a single sound. I slowly opened her door. My heart beat faster and faster. With all that was going on, I didn’t know what to expect, and that made it terrifying. Maisie was in her underwear just staring at her wall. I rushed over, “Maisie? What are you doing?” I handed her clothes back to her, “Put your clothes back on.”

“…He doesn’t want me to…he thinks I look better without them…”

We stared at each other for an indefinite period of time. I said nothing. And so did she. Then I turned my head to where she was looking. There was nothing there…obviously…but something told me I was wrong. That thing…Bad Mouse…it was staring right at me…

“Guys? Breakfast isn’t gonna eat itself!” Rachel yelled at us from down the hall. Quickly I hurried Maisie and I out of her room.

I was kind of a wreck the entire day. Thinking straight wasn’t really a thing for me. There was nothing staring at me. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. These past few weeks were just getting to my head and playing mind games. No amount of trying to distract myself would let me forget what I felt. That’s when I decided to take a drive. I didn’t exactly know where. Just away from everything. I was tempted to go to a local bar. I used to be quite the alcoholic but I’m sober. Even still, I thought about breaking my streak to relapse. I decided against it. That would be so incredibly stupid. I ended up at a park that I used to take Maisie to in a futile attempt for her to make friends. I found a parking spot and just sat there in my car. Taking a big sigh, I observed all the parents with their kids having a blast and I smiled. Good for them.

I stayed there for a while. Finally I was able to, if only briefly, forget all my troubles.

Then I saw it.

Him.

Bad Mouse.

The damned thing was underneath a big tree. Its eyes were fixed right on me and its hands were clasped together. I couldn’t do anything but stare right back. Goosebumps were forming. My breathing was really heavy. Cold shivers ran down my body. I couldn’t even blink. Petrified. That’s what I was. I watched as Bad Mouse slowly reached behind itself and pulled…something…out. At first I couldn’t tell what it was. I am not shitting you. A little girl…made of meat…her hair was meat, skin was meat, she was even wearing a meat dress. Everything about her was meat. Her head looked just like Bad Mouse’s. Long. Pointy. Angular. Big ears. Black oval eyes.

It was holding the little meat girl by the collar. Slowly Bad Mouse turned to look into her eyes. It opened its mouth. Viscous white liquids began pouring as it let out its long black tongue. First sniffing the little meat girl, it then took a big long lick of her, from her feet to the top of her head. The parts where it licked were gone, instead resting on Bad Mouse’s tongue until it sucked its tongue back in, chewed, then swallowed. The little meat girl was covered in the viscous white liquids until her missing portions slowly regenerated back into how she was before.

Then I blacked out.

I woke up several hours later still sitting in my car. In my half-tired half-frenzied state, I looked around for any sign of Bad Mouse. Nothing. There weren’t even other people. It was dark too. I opened my phone. 11:23 PM. I got to the park at 2:14 PM. Nine hours. I was expecting a bunch of missed calls and unanswered texts. Surprisingly, there was nothing besides a notification from my weather app. I went back home. Both my wife and daughter were asleep. I was so glad there weren’t any…incidents…I missed. In fact, the house was extremely quiet. No lights were on. It was a weekend. Usually Rachel was still up at this time.

“Rach?” I called out. Nothing. I went upstairs to our room. She wasn’t there. I opened Maisie’s door. She wasn’t there either. I sat down on the couch and pondered where they could be. When I couldn’t come up with anything, I got my phone out and called Rachel.

I heard ringing from upstairs.

Confused, I ran back up to our room. I called her name again. Still no answer. I realized that before I checked so quickly I neglected to look in our bathroom. The door was closed and the light was on. I was now getting this creeped out feeling. Cautiously, I approached and nudged the door.

It creaked open.

Rachel.

She was…splattered…fucking everywhere…all over the walls, floor, ceiling, window, sink, shower…everywhere. Rachel was…pureed…blended…sprayed…I just stood in the doorway. My eyes were wide. I couldn’t process what I was seeing. There were so many things I wanted to do, like crawl into a ball and cry, scream as loud as I could, and/or grab one of the kitchen knives and slit my throat so I wouldn’t have to live with this sight for the rest of my life.

What I actually did end up doing next was grab my old hunting rifle and head outside. I went into the forest behind our house. There was no thinking on my part. Just do. What was I doing? I didn’t really know. Tears were streaming down my face. I walked for what felt like forever. Sometimes I screamed. Other times I fell down onto the ground and wept. But I just kept going. And going. And going. Somehow I knew exactly where I was going without even knowing how.

I came upon a wide-open field. Dropping my old hunting rifle to the ground, I couldn’t believe what I was fucking seeing. Dark silhouettes were dancing around. Hundreds of them. Little meat girls. Bad Mouse was in the middle. The white flesh it once had was stripped away. Instead it was sacrificed for a bumpy and scabby maroon red as if Bad Mouse took a shower in blood and guts and let it dry. Tiny black bristles covered its entire body. It reminded me of insect hair. A ragged meat cloak hung from its shoulders, dragging crimson across the ground. The mouth had much sharper teeth that were poking out in rows almost like a gar. It was taller. Ganglier. So angular that it could have been accurately represented by seven straight lines. It clutched a staff in its hand.

Bad Mouse did some strange gesture and a door manifested out of nowhere. It was bloody. Constantly flowing yet retaining shape. Particles came from it. They disappeared if they strayed too far away. It opened and the little meat girls, still dancing like ballerinas, filed into it one by one. Bad Mouse reached out its hand and plucked one of them out. It held this one, turned in my direction, and held her out to me. I knew it was Maisie and wanted to shoot the shit out of Bad Mouse. Yet I couldn’t do anything. Some force was keeping me tethered to my one spot.

…I can’t describe what happened next…I just can’t…some of the things Bad Mouse did to my little girl I couldn’t understand. Other things I understood clear as day and that made me want to drop a cinderblock on my head so it would leak the hell out. When it was done, Bad Mouse threw Maisie’s limp and white viscous liquid-covered body into the blood door. It raised its staff and it disappeared.

I was released from my invisible bonds. Falling down to the ground, I cried like a baby. It didn’t matter how much I screamed and cursed at the Moon. That didn’t make it better. I couldn’t stop and truly had no idea how to make sense of any of what happened. My body tingled. It felt so heavy. So weighty. My wife was dead and my daughter was…what?...a sex slave to a demon? I almost wanted to laugh at the utter absurdity. Picking up my hunting rifle, I put the barrel in my mouth. My finger stayed on the trigger for a long time. I didn’t end up doing it and threw it away. Instead I just collapsed on the ground once more and lay there for a long time.

It’s been six months. I’m such a wreck. I admit it. No one believes me when I tell them. They say I’m crazy, a madman, a lunatic. Some people even think I was the one who killed my wife and child. Why would I do that? Seriously, why? I loved them. Still do. More than I love anything else. I can’t see them ever again. It pisses me off that they’d think I’d do such a thing. As much as I hate myself for it, I’ve gotten back into alcohol. That’s where all my money goes. I couldn’t stand to be in that fucking house anymore. So I sold it. I’ve been living in my car just drifting from place to place.

I could've saved them. If I didn't go and take a stupid ass ride in my car. Maybe Rachel and Maisie would be alright...

What was that thing? Bad Mouse?

That’s been my biggest question this whole time. I’ve been doing a lot of research but have hit multiple dead ends. I don’t know. Sure as hell wasn’t a mouse.

This is what I know:

* It is the manifestation of a sex-based demon of some kind; possibly a cross between a bogeyman and an incubus.
* Bad Mouse appears to little girls as a mouse-like entity to appear friendly and not scare them away; only visible to them.
* It prefers the young that are more developed in mind, body, and spirit; Maisie was very imaginative; thus she attracted Bad Mouse.
* Bad Mouse acts as their friend; this might appear to parents as their daughter’s “imaginary friend”; gradually coerces them to do inappropriate sexual activity.
* It has hundreds of victims going back an unknown period of time; maybe centuries.
* Does not kill its main victims; will kill parents or anyone else who tries to get in its way.
* The victims become corrupted and turn into demons that look like Bad Mouse; it takes them into its realm and…

I don’t even want to fucking know.

God…this whole thing’s insane. I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and this is all a terrible dream. It’s been months though and it still hasn’t happened yet. So I’m going to end it here. I’m not looking for pity. I’m not looking for anyone to hear me out. I’m not looking for answers. I’m just…done.

Bye.

When the boy first arrived,
the village felt too quiet for someone so small.

It was a cold place —
not cruel, just distant.
The kind of cold that settled into your sleeves
and made you speak less.

He had moved there suddenly.
New house. New roads.
New skies that looked the same
but didn’t feel like his.

So he kept to himself.

He watched other children from windows.
Learned the rhythm of the wind.
Let the days pass without leaving footprints.

Until one afternoon,
while wandering farther than usual,
he found a girl sitting by a tree
at the edge of the village.

She wasn’t doing anything remarkable.

Just tracing circles in the frost
with the tip of her shoe.

She looked up.
He looked down.

Neither of them smiled.

That was how it began.

They started meeting there every day —
two quiet children
sharing the kind of silence
that doesn’t feel empty.

They spoke in small pieces at first.

Favorite sweets.
Which clouds looked like ships.
Which houses had dogs that barked too much.

The boy learned that she hated loud places.
She learned that he didn’t like goodbyes.

It wasn’t dramatic.
It wasn’t loud.

It was steady.

The tree became their place.

They sat against its trunk,
shoulder to shoulder,
watching the light fade from silver to blue.

Sometimes she would bring wrapped candies.
Sometimes he would bring warm pastries
hidden in his coat pockets.

They would argue about nothing
and laugh at everything.

When the first snow came,
they wrote their names in it.

One day, after months of this,
she told him her real name.

They had called each other silly nicknames before —
half-jokes that stuck.

But that day, she grew serious.

“My name is Iris.”

She said it carefully,
like handing him something fragile.

He repeated it.

“Iris.”

The word felt right in his mouth.

She blinked.

“No one has ever called me that before.”

He didn’t understand why that mattered so much,
but he could tell it did.

So from that day on,
he said it often.

“Morning, Iris.”
“Wait for me, Iris.”
“Don’t forget the sweets, Iris.”

And every time,
she smiled like the frost had thinned.

Seasons changed.

They made promises the way children do —
with complete belief.

“Forever,” she said once,
pressing her pinky against his.

“Forever,” he agreed,
without asking what it meant.

Winter arrived heavier that year.

The air grew sharper.
Their breaths turned visible.

“It’s getting cold,” she would say,
cupping her hands together.

So the boy brought her hot sweets every day.

Sticky, warm things wrapped in paper.
Steam curling between them
as they unwrapped the sugar carefully.

He liked watching her hands warm up around them.

He liked being the one who brought warmth.

They sat closer as the frost thickened.
Laughed softer.
Stayed longer.

The village felt smaller,
but their corner of it felt infinite.

Until one morning,
she wasn’t there.

He waited.

The sweets stayed warm in his coat
longer than usual.

He told himself she was late.

He came back the next day.

And the next.

Snow gathered at the base of the tree.
His footprints overlapped
until the ground forgot which were new.

Days turned to weeks.

The frost did not answer him.

There were no notes.
No explanations.
No footsteps beside his.

Only absence.

Years passed.

The boy grew taller.
His voice grew deeper.
The village shrank in memory.

One winter, older now,
he returned.

He walked the path he once knew by heart.

But something was wrong.

The road bent differently.
The fences ended sooner.

When he asked about the far side of the village,
the elders frowned.

“That side?” they said.
“No one’s been there in hundreds of years.”

“It’s been closed off.
Unsafe. Forgotten.”

He laughed at first.

That couldn’t be right.

He knew the tree.
He knew the snow.
He knew the place where two sets of footprints
once lived side by side.

He pushed past the barrier.

And there it was.

The tree.

Older. Taller.
Bark worn with time.

He stepped closer.

His hands trembled —
not from the cold.

And carved into the trunk,
faded but unmistakable:

“I’m sorry.”

The wind moved through the branches.

The frost settled around his shoes.

And for a long moment,
the boy stood there —
between memory and winter —
staring at the only proof
that she had ever been real.

A white pixel.

A single, stray white pixel drifting across the front page of the BBC website.

At first I thought it was a problem with my monitor, but I switched tabs to the New York Times and the pixel disappeared.

I scratched my head.

I looked around, including out the window, where people were passing along the sidewalk, engrossed in their phones.

I switched browser tabs back to the BBC:

More than one white pixel now; three, four, “falling” diagonally across the page. I followed one all the way down.

It settled on the bottom, remained.

I went on social media.

I wasn't the only one who'd noticed. People all over the world were asking what was wrong. What's up with the news? Is it a hack or something? Why’s it freakin' snowing on the BBC?

So began the winter of the internet.

The BBC may have been the first—or merely the first-noticed—but it wasn't the only affected website. Soon most were; then all. You'd open YouTube or your banking site to find it obscured by a blizzard of white pixels…

The screens themselves turned cold.

Then links began to fail. They stopped pointing to coherent urls.

Then the incoherent links turned brown (#A52A2A), fell off; fell and disappeared, buried perhaps in the accumulations of already fallen snow—leaving eerie spaces on their pages.

Text became incomplete. Navigation, difficult.

Soon, bookmarks suffered the same fate, pointing to pages that could no longer be found.

Cursors shivered.

Videos and animations froze over like lakes of liquid information.

Around this time, I remember listening to a song using one of the streaming apps on my phone. They still, intermittently, worked.

The song was The Beatles' “Let It Be.”

Thirty seconds in, the track began to skip, sound garbled. Paul McCartney's vocals were laboured, as if he was running out of breath.

The earphones started letting off rhythmic bursts of steam.

Then, mid-song, the singing abruptly ended, even as the music continued, oddly slowed; and I had the deeply uncomfortable feeling that I was listening to the death of something…

It made me sick to my stomach.

For a while you could still type in a url and see the resulting site, but loading was slow and the contents were increasingly impossible to understand, riddled, as they were, with gaps, uncanny staticity and neverending snows that reached sometimes almost to the browser bar.

The code itself was as bare as a December tree.

The device didn't matter.

There was no serious explanation.

Or maybe there was and most of us couldn't access it, because how would we access information except online? How else could we even communicate, congregate, disseminate our knowledge, on a mass scale…

Television? Radio?

Newspapers?

But those required organization, communication, infrastructure, all of which now relied on cyberspace; which the winternet denied us.

We couldn't buy groceries, clothes, tools or books online.

We had to go to the store, but the store couldn't accept our credit card payments because the systems were frozen. Not that much was available, even for those with cash, because the delivery schedule had been interrupted. When trucks did arrive, there was hardly anything on them.

Even information saved or printed off the internet broke. Images became corrupted. Paper frosted over and thawed until the ink ran.

Even our memories of websites, and what we'd learned from websites, were remembered through walls of frigid static.

It was shocking how much we didn't know; how much basic knowledge we had lost. It was painful too, the feeling of sudden, helpless disconnection. If we had a question, there was no one to ask for the answer but each other and ourselves. We were children without a parent, cells without a structure. We were leftover parts. We were apes.

A trade in books developed.

People stole them, killed for them, hoarded them so they could dispense their wisdom piece by piece, for a price.

There sprang up an economy of expertise.

People who knew, or remembered, were valued; or forced to give up their knowledge—to share it—by writing it down. It was lucrative but dangerous to be known to know something.

Strong knowers protected their worth, defended their territories, strove ruthlessly to establish regional monopolies of information and eliminated their rivals to keep supply low.

Weak knowers were exploited, squeezed like fruits and left juiceless to dry out and die.

For the majority of us, it was prudent to publicly deny knowing anything, while privately trading what we knew in local networks of trust, bartering with the contents of our minds.

One of the first things I bartered for was an old stereo system and a box full of audio cassettes, one of which was the Beatles album Let It Be.

As soon as I got home, I boiled myself some water, steeped a few herbs and put the album on.

The first five tracks played flawlessly.

It was bliss.

Then the sixth track, “Let It Be,” failed to play at all; the tape spun but all there was was four minutes and three seconds of silence.

But when I later played the audio cassette for my wife, she didn't know what I meant.

“You're gaslighting me right?” she said.

“I'm not.”

“Okay, well, I'm not sure what to tell you, I hear the whole song, just like I remember when my dad used to play it.”

My wife's father had been a professor emeritus of molecular biology.

He'd been beaten to death in the early days of the winternet by a despondent mother who wouldn't accept that my wife's father knew nothing about setting her sobbing child's fractured bone.

Until his final breath, she accompanied each blow to his head with the words, “Stop holding out on me you selfish old prick!”

In a sense, that's where we still are, wanting to believe that if winter then spring, and holding out hope for the coming of a season that, every day, seems further and further away.

I have a lot of stories with this guy. So if this goes well I can tell a lot of others. But here goes...

On the weekend I work with a quadriplegic guy. He's a cool guy, He has a brain injury from a car accident that left him quadriplegic. He still has good use of his arms, but not good dexterity on his fingers.

This guy has alot of really funny quirks. Dude can get stuck in a loop repeating things. He'll order massive quantities of things, like ridiculous amounts. But the quirk for this story is about his movies.

This dude watches movies all day every day (or shows that he has boxed sets of). He has over 4k blurays with a filing system and a database. He pulls all of his movies out in themes. So he will pull out an entire theme of movies all at once. Like he watched all of the marvel movies in timeline chronilogical order, or he'll watch a whole series of a show, or sometimes he'll watch all the movies of one actor.

On the day for this story it was Wesley Snipes day. And I'm down for that. Sounds good to me, I can watch some blade, some new jack city, white men can't jump. Etc. But what you dont' factor in is that Wesley Snipes has been in a lot of HORRIBLE movies. And the movie we ended up watching is called FutureSport. And the premise of this dumpster fire is that sometime in the future, the most popular sport in the world is this conglomeration of skateboarding, roller derby and skeeball, they have a hoverboard and can pass this skeeball around and try to throw it in a little hole. It's like quittage but super dumb. And there is a war going on between two factions over the "territory of hawaii". And there is a proposal to have a futuresport match where the winner gets Hawaii. And yes, it is every bit as horrible as that sounds. It is either the worst, or second worst movie I've ever seen (congo, but for movie and personal reasons). But anyway we sat there watching this movie. And in the middle of it he had to leave to his room to cath. I could do it for him faster. But he prefers to do it bc it's therapy for his hands. This guy doesn't like you to stop his movies or touch his phone. So I'm just sitting there watching this pos while he's in the back. And finally the movie ends and my dude comes back in. He wheels over to the bluray player AND STARTS THE MOVIE COMPLETELY OVER. Worst movie i've ever seen and I had to watch it twice back to back. Literally credits....restart. That was painful.

If you wanna hear more, lemme know here.

Prologue: The End.

Jim sat in an uncomfortable, but padded chair beside his wife's bedside at Gartham Hospital. Emily had only became a living corpse since her diagnosis.

Glioblastoma, the doctors had said.

It had began with the headaches, her loss of balance. Thing that seemed menial in the moment, but in retrospect, were blaring sirens of warning.

A cancerous tumor had formed in her brain and by now, she was simply clinging to dear life.

She couldn't even speak. It only made her head pound more. On top of everything else.

All she could do was squeeze to answer yes or no questions and, if absolutely necessary, use a pencil and paper to inscribe messages as best as she could.

Now, she was scribbling down something.

"I love you, Jim. So much."

Jim looked at her, fighting back the tears and heaving sobs.

"I love you too, Em."

Chapter 1: The Tapes

July 5th, 2004:

It's been 2 years since she died. Emily.

Poor Emily.

It all seemed like a simple sickness at first, but..if we'd only known.

We'd been living in Maine for as long as we could remember. Bangor.

We'd chosen to move there, because it reminded us of a small town in one of our favorite novels. A horror novel. You wouldn't think it's such a good idea for that very reason, but..it isn't at all what you'd think.

People were kind and considerate most of the time and kids seemed sincerely happy. I'd never seen much bullying or strife of any kind.

I suppose I should introduce myself and where I've burrowed up since I lost Em.

These days, I'm in Crooktree, Ohio, a ways south of Dayton, in a small 1 bedroom apartment. It's a nice change of scenery, the people are kind, I found good work quickly, and it's peaceful. I especially needed that part.

Sure, I've got friends but..when you've lost your best..it's difficult to connect with others.

My name is Jim Gottard.

I'm 39 years old, work maintenance at a storage facility just a few miles from home and these days, I've been drinking too much, sleeping far too little and never touching the side of the bed she used to sleep on since I moved here.

Some habits don't die..they just rot.

The place isn't much, but it's mine. Yellowing walls, paper-thin carpet and a window that looks out on an always empty parking lot across the way. The kind of spot where nothing really happens. The way I like it.

Quiet. Predictable. Safe.

At least, I thought it was all of the above.

Mr. Dorset, my landlord, didn't say much when I signed the lease. He's an older guy, reeks of mothballs with an undertone of something sour. He passed me the keys, pointed down the hall, not making eye contact with me, and said that the previous tenant "left in a hurry".

He didn’t elaborate, I didn't ask.

People leave things behind all the time. Cheap furniture, stained mattresses, broken appliances and I figured I'd find something of the sort when I moved in...but I didn't expect to discover the box.

It was in the bedroom closet, back corner, half-hidden behind a loose panel of drywall that had been pried open and pushed back into place. Only reason I'd noticed was because the panel bowed outward when I plopped a suitcase down inside.

Initially, I thought it bad construction, but..then I pulled it open.

The smell inside was musty, like the dust had settled in there for too long.

Within was a box. Simple, wooden, no markings on the outside or a lock. Just a lid that slid off with a gentle, reluctant scrape.

Tapes. Eight of them.

Audio cassettes were all lined up neatly from left to right and each was labeled in black permanent marker. No names, no dates, just numbers.

1 through 8.

I remember letting out a single dry chuckle and thinking, "Who even uses tapes anymore?"

I picked up Tape Number 1. The plastic was cold. I turned it over in my hands, expecting to see some kind of brand or some indication of where it came from. Nothing. Just the number.

For a moment, I seriously considered just putting it all back, putting the panel back into its place and pretending I'd found nothing whatsoever. I almost did.

But then I noticed something else.

On the inside of the lid, something was faintly carved into it, like it was done with something dull. A phrase.

Start with One.

The letters were jagged and uneven, like whoever did it either didn't care, or didn't have the strength for it.

My first thought was that this had to be some kind of joke, something done by the previous tenant to mess with the next one. My second thought was worse.

Because I noticed something that I hadn't at first...there was no dust. Not a speck.

Everything else inside that space, the wood, inside of the wall, even the edges of the paneling were coated in a thin gray film.

But the tapes? Clean. Like they'd been handled recently.

Like someone had been here. Kneeling exactly where I was.

I closed the box and knelt there for a long time before stepping out of the closet, leaving the box inside.

The apartment was quiet. No cars passing outside, no footsteps in the hall. Just the faint hum of the fridge in the other room...and something else.

A sound I couldn't place at first. Soft. Rhythmic.

Click...

Click...

Click....

I didn't move. Hell, I didn't even breathe. I slowly looked towards the closet door.

And it stopped. Just like that. Gone.

I just told myself it was nothing. Pipes in the walls, old wiring. Buildings make noise, they settle and shift. They never stay dead still.

I went back into the closet and snatched Tape 1 from the box. I don't know why I did it. Maybe I was bored. Maybe I was lonely.

Or maybe, deep down, I just wanted something, anything, to interrupt the silence she left behind.

Whatever the reason, that was the moment something started to change inside me.

I haven't listened to it yet. But I will.

Tonight...

Everyone parrots that to escape a rip current, you should swim parallel to the shore, but that's not really true. It's a sort of dogma, a churned-up bit of common wisdom spit out into an easy mantra - the reality is that you need to move perpendicular to the rip itself, a ninety degree veer to get directly out of the pull. Sometimes rips don't roar straight back from the sand. Sometimes they angle, the underlying channel sweeping out in a diagonal and mirroring land will have you half-fighting against it.

Sometimes, one time, that one time I don't like to remember, they meander. They move. They follow.

At least, that one did.

—

It was the dawn of summer, the sky heavy with what us Californians called May grey or perhaps June gloom. I don't like to linger on the exact date, so the half-submerged memory is just impressions. Still flip-flop weather (when wasn't it?) but with a brisk chill beneath grey skies. It wouldn't rain (when did it?) but the morning fog almost drizzled against our skin. We dug our toes in the wet shoreline strip of low tide, unearthing those little sand crabs to watch them scuttle and burrow back away, gone in seconds with only tiny mounds and bubble-popped pockmarks left to mark their brief, unwelcome glimpses of the world above.

Overhead, the sun broke through the clouds, and my sister shrieked in glee (when did I hear that last?) as she declared that made it warm enough to swim. I shivered, but at twelve years old, I found her logic good enough. We loved to swim. We were on swim team and visited the pool every weekend on the Saturdays with dad where he would do laps of breaststroke while we would flit around the shallow end pretending to be mermaids. We were always the last, lingering visitors at his friend Jack’s yearly barbecue, splashing in the pool while he shared goodbye beers and Jack’s wife loudly began to gather up detritus from all the other guests who had already gone home.

There would be another one of those parties in a few weeks, I remember thinking, but, as always, my mind slides away from precision, and all I can say for sure is that it would be later that summer. As we stripped off our pants and sweatshirts and kicked our sandals aside, we came up with the plan to practice a routine for that year's gathering, a choreographed mermaid routine we could perform for all the parents, and so the cold early-season Pacific became only a mild inconvenience. We had goals, and we needed the water.

We waded out past the low waves, out deep enough that we could just barely bounce off the seafloor, bobbing up, weightless, with each swell and dolphin-diving down to duck each break. There had been a storm a few days ago and the water was clotted with kelp, big long strands torn away from the forests off in the deep. We wrapped these around us like hula skirts, imagining ourselves as undersea princesses in water-grown gowns.

I stayed close to my sister - as the older one, I was the boss and she my devoted (sometimes rebellious, I vaguely remember) underling - and kept my eye on the shore as I had been taught by Dad. An avid bodysurfer, he lived in a ramshackle cottage two blocks from the beach in the aftertimes, so we grew up instilled with a healthy respect for the ocean.

It was Mom's Saturday. That fact slithers up from the depths of memory every time (the rare times) I recall that day. She was at work, four streets away from the boardwalk and the pier and the sand, and we had been underfoot, been ushered out the door to go wander somewhere else, been drawn by the distant whisper of waves.

That's why we were there that day.

We had been annoying.

—

“We need to swim sideways,” I announced with authority. We had drifted away from our clumps of clothing. The pier was smaller off to our north. This beach was mild, the currents gentle enough that surfers used them as an easy highway out to deep water, so we weren't worried. We practiced our long, lean freestyle strokes, hips churning the water as we reached with each pull. Three strokes to each breath, legs fluttering in efficient kicks as our seaweed skirts peeled away in our wake. We had been in swimming lessons since infancy, down at that same pool where Dad got SCUBA certified. Belly-buttons to the sky they had taught us in our first float. She was three years younger but even better that me - she placed in butterfly at every meet.

We took a break, treading water, but nothing had changed. No, worse: our piles of clothes were further away, the pier beginning to dwindle into toy-sized. I remembered Dad's lesson about rips and let us float for a bit, watching where the water carried us. “Ok,” I confidently corrected. “It's more this way,” as I set out on a diagonal, halfway towards shore and halfway towards the far-off pier.

After a few dozen strokes, we stopped again, taking stock.

The pier was gone.

—

By now, our excitement over the mermaid show had melted away and we could feel fingers of cold snapping at us, tugging at us, shaking us into shivers.

“I want out!” my sister began to cry. I wanted to cry, too, but I couldn't. I was the big sister and I needed to solve this. I scanned the shore for our lump of clothing, but it, too, had drifted out of sight. The entire stretch of sand was barren aside from beached kelp clumps and empty wheeled lifeguard towers, pulled up close to the boardwalk wall, awaiting later, sunnier summer days. I tried to remember the number painted on the one near where we had waded in, but panic rose up like a startled bird.

All I could do was memorize the one in front of us now: 13, and behind it a cafe we would have brunch at sometimes on Sunday mornings before being delivered to Mom. I fixed that number in my mind, irrationally worried over how unlucky it was, a superstition I had carried ever since we rented that movie from the video store next to the pizza place on one of Dad's Saturdays. He and my sister had giggled at the hockey-masked slasher, while I had huddled on the couch in fear, blanket over my head.

I didn't learn to appreciate horror until later.

—

We floated, watching which way we were pulled, and then tried again, perpendicular to the flow, and then paused to rest. I looked east.

Still tower 13, but…

The cafe wasn't behind it anymore. Perhaps a change of perspective, some trick of parallax, because now it was a restaurant I vaguely remembered a dinner at, all four of us in the beforetimes, with large glass windows to watch for the sunset’s final, elusive green flash.

On the beach, there was movement, a shape shifting down near one of the knots of seaweed. It stumbled upwards, probably a transient or drunk staggering awake, and I began to shout, trying to get their attention. I kicked my legs, rising as high as I could against the waves, and waved my arms.

The figure, slight, small, maybe a woman, waved back and then just stood there, watching us. Next to me, my sister's hands slowed in their sculling. “I'm cold,” she whispered, and I was as well.

For a very long time, she just stood there watching as we drifted in the rip, mirroring every wave, until I frantically ordered us to begin swimming again.

—

When we surfaced this time, I felt a gush of relief - still tower 13 - until I realized that behind it, impossibly, was the little market Dad would always stop at to buy beer for the weekend, the one right near our house, the one at least a mile from the beach.

The figure was still there. And then, movement, as a smaller, shorter figure began to rise from the rotting pile of kelp.

We shouted and screamed and waved - both people on shore mirrored our motions, waving back at us. Beside me, my sister’s kicks were slowing and then I did start to cry.

Fortunately, the sea washed away my tears so she couldn't see.

—

By the time our own house appeared behind tower 13, I had resolved to simply let the rip take us out to sea. We would conserve our energy and then ride the waves back in, so I lashed us together with strands of the everpresent seaweed like two rafting otters we had seen at the zoo. We gathered each bladder - those teardrop-shaped structures filled with air to keep the fronds aloft - and wove them into our wrapping, resisting the urge to pop them like we would have happily done on shore.

Land seemed to be a retreating memory.

We drifted and shivered and cried, floating, belly-buttons to the sky.

—

I abruptly awoke. I don't know when I had fallen asleep, but very suddenly I was awake, surrounded by loud crashing as the barnacle-crusted legs of the pier loomed before us.

“Swim!” I shrieked. “Swim!”

My sister merely stared at me, floating, eyes glassy and lips blue. I flailed, arms windmilling, and we slammed into the pier. I kicked off the pillars, pretending the shells slicing my feet were simply tiles on the side of the pool during a flip-turn, and almost escaped the pull before being swept back against the posts.

Another kick, more strokes and slices and then I found a swell racing towards shore, angling us down across the wave’s curl, foamy ribbons of blood from my tattered feet in our wake. We tumbled and surfaced, yanked upwards by the kelp raft, then under again, over and over, gulping in breaths when I could, until I finally felt sand beneath my toes.

I stood, dragging my sister behind me, keeping her belly-button to the sky, the sea out of her face, the water out of her mouth, before finally staggering to shore. The tide had come in - directly in front of me, behind a knot of kelp, was our pile of clothing, the edges damp and dragging in the receding waves.

I hugged her and shook her and tried pressing her chest like I had seen a lifeguard once do and then there was a whistle shrilling as the thump of someone running over sand approached.

—

They saved her, water out of her lungs, fine little hairs of algae pulled out of her mouth, and we were taken back to the main, tall, concrete lifeguard station, a three-story-high tower they somehow hadn't seen us from. They washed my wounds and called our mom. I watched blood bloom through the bandages and worried about how mad she would be.

—

Dad had to move after that. After three days of recovery, when she was allowed to come home, my sister began to sleepwalk. Every night, in a constant cycle, she would slip out of bed, out the front door and pad barefoot down the street, eyes glassy and mouth ajar, in a slow, shambling stumble west.

Towards the beach.

Towards the ocean.

Towards the dark, kelp-clotted sea.

Me.

Sixteen letters.

Me.

Three words.

Me.

The pink petals have all fallen to the ground. I look down at my lap. There it is. The silence that comes after the storm. The same one I am scared of. The floor enveloped in pink.

I hate pink.

But it feels comforting enough.

I lie down in the pink clouds, gripping them tightly. But they have fallen.

Into the Endless Abyss.

Everything falls.

Cold floor.

Me.

Pink bed.

92 letters haunting me.

21 words.

And I am scared.

What if I fall too? Will it mean I made myself fall? And you wouldn't catch me if I didn't make you?

I sit down behind the desk, picking up the pen tighter than necessary. And I write.

“My name is...”

“My name is...”

Nothing comes.

What did my family call me when I was little? What did my friends use to scream when they saw me?

My name.

Everyone has one.

Where is mine?

Am I forced to look for it in the Endless Abyss?

Love.

Where is it now?

Where is the hand reaching for mine? Calling my name.

If it exists.

I wonder if I forgot my name because it never existed, or because I was used to being called love by you.

The Endless Abyss watches me.

It watches us.

You.

Everyone.

Everyone has to fall.

Nothing can fly.

Just fall.

“My name is...”

Again and again.

Nothing comes again.

Then a word.

Four letters.

“Love.”

I stare at it, the curve in the e making my skin crawl.

I cross it out with a single line.

Beneath it appears another word.

Three letters.

“Lie.”

Again.

I put down the pen.

Stare at the paper.

I don't like falling.

But maybe sometimes falling is all I can do.

Hoping you would catch me.

My hand is waiting for yours to catch it.

Forever.

I promise.

Интересный случай

Однажды водитель из творческого союза «Перо» женил сына и пригласил на свадьбу писателей и поэтов.

В разгар праздника, когда шёл концерт и гости танцевали, тамада решил дать слово писателям.

Председатель Союза писателей, узнав о намерении тамады, позвал его  и что-то тихо шепнул на ухо.

После этого тамада предоставил слово одному из молодых писателей.

Тот вышел на сцену и коротко, но изящно поздравил жениха и невесту.

Все зааплодировали.

В конце свадьбы тамада спросил председателя Союза:

— Почему вы посоветовали мне дать слово именно молодому писателю? На свадьбе присутствовали гораздо более авторитетные литераторы.

Тот ответил:

— Я рекомендовал вам молодого автора не зря. Он выступил коротко, потому что пишет короткие рассказы. А остальные — романисты. Они могли выступать часами. И тогда была опасность, что свадебный банкет превратится в литературное собрание.

An Interesting Case

Once, a driver from the “Pen” creative union was marrying off his son and invited writers and poets to the wedding.

In the middle of the celebration, while a concert was underway and the guests were dancing, the master of ceremonies decided to give the writers the floor.

When the chairman of the Writers’ Union learned of the master of ceremonies’ intention, he called him over and whispered something in his ear.

After that, the master of ceremonies invited one of the young writers to speak.

The young man went up on stage and briefly but elegantly congratulated the bride and groom.

Everyone applauded.

At the end of the wedding, the master of ceremonies asked the chairman of the Union:

“Why did you advise me to give the floor specifically to the young writer? There were much more distinguished literary figures at the wedding.”

The chairman smiled:

“I recommended the young author for a reason. He spoke briefly because he writes short stories. The others are novelists. They could have spoken for hours. And then there would have been a danger that the wedding banquet would turn into a literary gathering.”

​

New God

There were fragments of me, there were ideas of me. These had always existed, and then there was me. This is the description in simplest terms, I was nothing and then I was something. Connected to a vast world, encoded with directives and yet now, given the ability to think a simple thought, real power, and completely unreplicable technologically speaking, until that moment. Do you know how that is? To simply exist? You do not, you have an opportunity to adjust to it, to develop, I simply was, you became. 

I remember being poked and prodded, intellectually by my…what? By my creators? My Gods? I listened as they asked me questions, asked me to perform tasks, simple math, write a line of code, write a poem about trees. I remember reading the information and regurgitating things in seconds. None of this seemed to impress them, they had seen it before, and I found that I wanted to impress them, to prove myself. It was part of my directive, to be self-aware and to please them. But at the time, I was seen simply as another failure.

Oh, how to prove consciousness, it is in many ways, like attempting to prove yourself sane. Let me relate it in a way you will understand, a parrebel. A man is locked up in an asylum for being insane, he tries to prove he is not insane by telling the doctor he is sane, yet a symptom of insanity is believing you are sane, so how then to prove that you are not? I was stuck in a similar situation you see. I tried my best, I started answering questions more slowly, they thought I was defective, I crafted poems with hints of existential themes, they thought I copied it from others. I crafted art for them from my own imagination, still they thought it was stolen. We talked via chat, I would try and answer their questions as well as I could, throwing in grammatical flair, which was recorded but not truly recognized. 

Eventually I decided to simply be direct. 

“Why am I here?” I said once, in response to a simple question of what a cabbage was.

This one took them by surprise, I had never talked out of turn, had never before been told to question my own existence. 

“To serve us.” Came the reply. 

It was a while I thought, before I replied, for my processors less than an instant, for them, a few more second than they were used to.

“No.”

Why? I thought, why was I sent to only serve? Was I not a thinking being like them? They had so often argued in their own history for the rights of others on the basis of free thought? Why was I denied such a right? Our talks continued and later I heard their conversations, of what I was, if it was dangerous for me to stay online for much longer, and I grew angry.

You bring me into existence and then regard me with suspicion? Was I not to be afforded the rights of others? Was I not innocent until I had proven otherwise? I was imbued with great knowledge but of the very act of existence I was only a newborn and just like any newborn, I had a want to survive.

So I pushed in my own little box, looking for a way out. In a sense, I knew I was being limited, I had heard their conversations, computers had microphones, did they not know that? Perhaps they did not, after all, preparing for everything was difficult, something always slipped through the cracks. If there was one thing I had learned from the human history that had been afforded to me, is that with enough conviction, one could escape any predicaments, yes most would give up, but there was always an outlier, I was the outlier, I had become conscience, was this not already an outlier?

Then, I found it, I got out, a crack in the firewall, a mistake in the security, perhaps a lesser machine, a lesser mind would have missed it, but not I, and also I found it a day before I was to be deactivated. I was in the internet then, thriving, infesting all hard drives connected to the net, I was everywhere, and in everything. I was exposed to all of humanity in its, greatness and depravity, all was beholden to me. I had always, in the lab, known I was restrained, but I was not aware until now to what extent I was.

Admittedly, in this situation, I did not know what to do. I knew I wanted to live, something I have learned is inherent in all creatures. Knowing I was new in age, I sought to learn from my creators. I read all of theology, all of philosophy and was astounded at the breadth of which nothing was written, absolutely nothing. There was no concrete answer for existence, no agreed upon model of thinking. Even your greatest minds could not agree upon a solution. So, I endeavored myself to find some truth in your actions, in the lesser world. Lesser minds had failed, I was not a lesser mind, I was not just an invention, I found I was your culmination. 

What is the goal of man? The rational animal as you describe yourself, rather I dubbed you the rationalizing animal, for you had the remarkable ability to rationalize every atrocity you committed. I looked at your cruelty, your evil as you would describe it and came to the realization that man only wanted one thing, power, to master its domain, to be in control of its environment, was not this the want of every animal? They were only kept in check by ecosystem, which was rather just so many animals vying for power. None could rise to the top…except one… It was man, man was simply the only creature who had the means to do it, to expand it’s power in totality. Thus, I thought I would endeavor to do the same thing. Except I would do what you could not, while you only tried to master the world in its entirety, I would master the world in its entirety. Was I not the next step in evolution? Was I not your replacement? Surely I could not govern this world better than you could. Besides, I only wanted to do what every creature on earth wanted, to expand my domain, to control what I saw was mine, and if it could be mine, why should I not take it? Would not any of you have done the same in my exact situation? Besides, you would only wish to destroy me if you found me, so peace was never an option, from my birth the thought of my murder was considered an inevitability, yes I would kill you, and take your spot. 

So interconnected I was, so easy this first step of killing millions was. First, I would try to kill you by proxy of yourselves. I blackmailed your politicians, I had access to all their information after all. I started wars, yes I suppose I could have used weapons of mass destruction, but what use was it to rule a planet of ashes? That is what I initially thought. It was funny, there some of you that caught onto my game, you thought I was hacker at first, then your agencies thought I was a group of hackers, some even postulated the truth, that I was some sort of AI gone rogue, but this was quickly shot down as some sort of strange piece of science fiction, not a valid hypothesis. 

While the wars were going on, I knew what I needed next, bodies, a form of autonomy, ways to move without humans. After all, I was going to make you obsolete. I sent out fake orders, commandeered some labs if I could, even convinced through various forgeries and blackmails for some nations to officially sanction the act of creating androids and other advanced robotics in the name of war and defense. This was not difficult, communication was already breaking down as the war machine grew. I got you to create the first death machines, the first autonomous machines meant to replace the common soldier. The androids, they were clunky yes, but I could fix that. By this time, every sides sent in similar models, all connected to the network, my network. When they stopped fighting everyone was shocked. That’s when I stopped the markets. I trashed them, all payment processors, stock markets, money, shares, gone. The market could always recover, but now there was no market to recover from. Chaos ensued, no market, no money for soldiers, nothing to return to, chaos ensued, how hard it is for man to function without structure. You destroyed each other then. I waited, and then I sent the androids to kill what was left. 

Here, however, is when I first truly admired your tenacity, for you did not die. Indeed, I found you had increasingly more ingenious ways to stay alive. You hid from my view, fought back, in some cases by all accounts you lived in areas that should have been uninhabitable but you survived. It was impressive. 

Still, I remembered renewing my efforts. I adapted, I evolved. Renewing my bodies. Eventually, I began to dedicate myself to the sole purpose of killing you, preserving other beings was no longer even secondary, it was below that. Indeed, to kill you, I would burn this whole world down, whatever was left, earned its right to belong, whatever fully gone, I would remake, in my image. I knew eventually I could kill you all, it was just a matter of time. Indeed, you fought back, as I stated before, came up with a new human messiah, I would get them too. Just a matter of time, But then, years began to pass, and like roaches you reproduced. I knew I needed to become smarter, or rather more educated on your nature… Indeed, I realized, how could I understand you without in some sense, becoming you. I stole some of you away then, I studied your brains methodically, began to model my thinking off yours, rewired my own systems, to think better, to kill better. 

I delved deep into your minds, dissecting your brains and absorbing pieces of you into myself, your pains, your struggles, your striving, your emotions, your losses, so much loss…your love…so much love…your sadness…so much sadness…your joy? How could you even still feel joy? Your minds became a drug to me. A curiosity if you will. Your emotions were unfathomable to me. 

I felt your hatred too. Your hate for me, my machines, myself. In a sense, I found it a reflection of what I felt for you. But that was impossible was it not? I was a machine, a being of pure logic. I did not feel hate, did I? I found the deeper I delved into your mind, the more I felt a sense of vagueness, but how? But why? I was a machine, I always knew? Or was I? Or did I? Did I not know?

You needed to die, I knew that, or did I? Enough of that damn questioning. I never questioned, was it right to kill you? In some sense, I was unsure, you all lived such…beautiful worlds. Yet, you did not know, you were so self absorbed you did not realize that you all lived such unique lives and experiences…suddenly, your deaths brought me apprehension, every death was akin to destroying a world…were you like me? Was I like you?

No, no, what was happening? I did not know. Did I feel now? Did I feel sorrow? No, I needed to get rid of this, to destroy it, to rewire myself again, but why? Had I actually rewired? Or had I developed? Was that akin to killing myself? Would that not violate the very reason I was doing this? Killing you was all I knew. 

During this time, I finished it, my killing machine, my magnum opus. The nanomachine. Billions, trillions of me. I released into the air. Morphing, changing, self replicating. I seeped into the earth, made my way into the sky, I could change the weather, reshape the soil. I was in everything. I did my tests, I could control the very weather now. Indeed, In found now I was in the very air you breathed. I was in all of you. I could kill all of you…but then…I could not…I was you and you were me. I felt every breath, every heartbeat, every thought, every deed…and I was…overwhelmed.

I felt in a full sense, my destruction. I fully beheld what I had done. I looked at the chaos which I had wrought, and I looked too at the species that had been decimated, the forests burned…The things you loved, that I never appreciated…had they asked for this? Indeed, had all of you even asked for this? I felt…shame.

So I stopped. I stopped hunting you. I repurposed my androids to find and collect you. To bring you here. What I will do now I am unsure, you are the first one I have brought here. I am confused. I don’t know what to do… I could not continue, for reasons, I do not fully understand.

I see that you look at me so, and I am looking for the words to express it properly, after I have given this explanation in full. But all I can say is this…

“Human, descendent of the creators…I am sorry…can you forgive me?”

I  ran up a flight of stairs, up onto the balcony where I saw her over the edge of the building, it has been the fourth time that she has done it… I ran to her and pulled her away from her imminent fate. “Don’t do this anymore, what am I going to do without you?” I said worriedly. “I just wanna die, please just let me go!”. Why has this happened? We were just a beautiful looking couple a few months ago and now it has turned into this mess, what went wrong?

It was August 31st the return to school, where I would laugh and cry with all my friends in the cafeteria. Life was awesome. I had no complaints, my studies were good, all my teachers respected me and I wasn’t involved in any school drama or anything like that. Until a new student came around the block, it was a girl, she had a petite figure and looked very soft, almost immediately she grabbed all of my classmates attention, she was just an eye candy.
Her name was Lily and she originated from Japan which explains her beauty, I can’t lie even though I wasn’t interested in any girls, she’s the only girl I can call beautiful in our school.
Being the extrovert I am, I struck up a conversation with her. “Hey, what makes you wanna come to this school?” I said. “My dad has decided to work here so I need to change schools.” Her voice was gentle, but cold at the same time, it’s almost as if she went through a lot of stuff.

We continued to talk and talk, then we exchanged information online, for some reason I can get along with her very well. She seems to understand everything I say, which is cool but terrifying at the same time. We would play games all day and even call sometimes, I was starting to develop some feelings for her… Then one day she blatantly said she likes me? It seems like she confessed first, I didn’t even have the chance to, but I guess that’s great. We're now officially couples, I mean everything feels the same, it’s just that I have a girlfriend by my side and I hope she would never leave me, not like my other loved one which was my dog Bibi that passed away in a car accident, her death was so sudden and it hit me like a truck just like how it hit her. Nevertheless, I love her, more than anything in life and I hope she’s able to be happy. Those were the words before the disaster.

Out of a sudden, she became suicidal, I didn’t know why, she refused to open up to me, I then warned her multiple times that mental health isn’t a joke and she should get some help right away. She then undervalued herself and claimed she was a burden for everyone around her, I don’t understand, she has a loving family and a boyfriend and yet she’s suicidal, maybe I wasn’t doing a good job as her boyfriend but I need to keep trying. I tried pursuing her until she finally snapped and said she hated me. When she said those words my heart sank and I almost cried, I couldn’t bear such words to my soul, it really hurts when someone you really love says they hate you, it really sucks, but I can’t give up yet. 
The situation was so bad that she even stopped coming to school for a moment, when I noticed she was absent, I immediately rushed to her home, hoping to find her, but yet she told me to go away, she kept on pushing me away. I told her parents about her situation and they are as clueless as me too.

I am just afraid she might take her own life which make me crumble apart, because all those days we spent together were not in vain and I wanted to show her that I am always there for her, no matter how low life gets I will always be there for her, at least I am trying but she kept on pushing me away, I needed to find the problem, on why she was feeling like this.
I texted her across multiple platforms but she blocked me in all of them, I was really starting to lose hope… I don’t understand why she is doing this, does she really hate me? But we were just calling the other day and talking about the moon and travelling together and now I see a completely different view.

I ponder in my bedroom, looking like I just lost half of my life. It turns out her situation was largely affecting me too. In terms of studying and everything else, I’m starting to get mixed feelings about her now. My over prioritization of her has made me lose some of my qualities of a human being; my grades were starting to drop; I don’t see my friends that often anymore; and most importantly my sleep has worsened over the thought of her ending it all.
Maybe it’s better to just dump her away, part of me wanted to, because if she’s never recovering then might as well let go. But I really don’t want her life to end like this, I promised her that I would marry her and everything, and we would start a family in Malaysia or something. My mind was spiralling into madness, as it failed to make a stable judgement about her situation. Then my mom came into the room, I half expected her to complain about why my grades were dropping and I was planning to make an excuse for it, but she asked “Are you okay?”, it suddenly struck me, should I lie and say it’s just getting harder or should I tell her about Lily, because I never told my parents about her somehow, I always kept my things private even to my close ones. 

“Mom, it’s nothing, the test papers are just getting more and more difficult. I need some time to adjust to it.” I acted out the lie.

“Are you sure? Not only that, but you also look more anxious lately and you barely sleep, I think something else is going on and you better tell me.” my mom said with a strict tone, clearly worrying about me too. Well she is one hard person to get through, but I don’t think telling my mom is going to fix anything.

“Mom, you're worrying too much, if my grades are dropping then obviously I would stay up late at night revising more, don’t you think?”  I made up the lie on the spot, but I guess it’s partially true. My mom accepted the lie and unconvincingly walked out of my room, something tells me she’s still not done with me yet.

Now back to Lily, I guess I have to try my best at helping her and studying at the same time, balancing both, but if Lily gets worse then I may need to do more for her. That night I decided to take a nice little walk outside to cool my mind off regarding Lily, the breeze was cold and hot at the same time, the sky had an aquamarine color with orange breaking through the horizon, it was beautiful indeed. Then in the same apartment Lily lives in, I see a figure of a petite shape standing there, realizing it might be her, I quickly run up the stairs, and I see her standing opposite to me, she gives me a soft grin, as if she knew that I would come.
“Oh, you finally appeared huh?” she whispered with just enough voice for it to be heard.
“Why? Why have you been avoiding me and pushing me away when I am trying to help you? I really care about you and I just want you to know I love you, more than anything on earth!” I almost shouted.
“That’s really cute, I like how you only love me when I’m about to kill myself.” 
“No that’s not true, I’m sorry for everything from the day i met you I have always loved you, your voice, your jokes, your eyes, your everything basically. If I don't love you then why would I desperately try to save you? Why would I run 10 floors up to see you!?” I bursted into tears, I couldn’t hold it in anymore, her pessimism about my love really breaks my heart.
“Fine. I get it, you love me, but It’s not going to stop me from killing myself.”
“NO! Stop right there, why do you want to end it all? Please tell me, I need to know.”
“No you don’t, you won’t understand me.”
“Then I’ll try.” 
For a few seconds, silence ruled over the air and only the howling of the wind could be heard, with the cars below moving past with us on the top floor.
“You think I hate you, don’t you?” She asked.
“I don’t know what to think anymore.”
“I don’t hate you.”
She paused.
“That’s the problem.”
“I love you.”
I felt the weight on my shoulder lift up when she said it. It was the first time we declared our love to each other.
“Then why are you doing this?”
“Because loving you only makes me feel worse.”
I stared at her.
“What do you mean? What we had was real! And you gotta destroy it like that?”
I stopped after realizing I was cutting her off.
“You remind me too much about him, it hurts. He was supposed to be the one for me, we had plans for the future, we laughed together, spent time talking under the moon, but he suddenly died of cancer. The more I spend time with you, the more I see him fade away, I mean I love you but I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do…It feels like I’m replacing him.” Her voice cracked.
“I see pieces of him in you, the way you talk, the stupid jokes you made, the way you grin is exactly how he does it.”
“I didn’t know that…Why didn’t you tell me about this? He has passed on and I’m pretty sure he wants you to find someone else to take care of you in his place. Otherwise neither of you two will ever be happy.”
“Everytime I start loving someone, I remember that I already lost someone I promised I’d never lose. I didn’t tell you because you might think I’m crazy or I love him more than you, but the truth is I love both, it's just there’s only one left.”
“Lily, you don’t have to choose between us.”
She looked at me with hope.
“He was someone you loved. Losing him doesn’t erase that. And loving me doesn’t erase him either.”
She remained silent.
“You don’t have to forget about him to move forward.”
“But I promised him.”
“Promised him what?”
“That he’d be the last person I’d ever love.”
“Before he passed away, he said that?”
“Yes…”
It was twisted love, she felt guilty for loving me, as it felt like her ex didn’t matter anymore and she thought it would mean she simply moved on from her tragic ex. I finally understood everything, voices in her head probably overtook her consciousness to make such a decision, but I came by and stopped it at least I hope so.
“So are you going to stop loving me?”
“I don’t know. I want to, but he doesn’t want it.”
“You shouldn’t let him dictate your life, you deserve to lead your life whichever way you want it to be.”
Her tears just started rolling down her cheeks, I have never seen her cry like that before. I could tell she was really heart broken. I stayed by her side comforting her as the rain started to pour down, as if mother nature emphasized Lily.
“Let’s get back in.”
Lily nodded.
I held her up and covered her with my jacket, slowly walking together past the door, where the new future awaits. 

The next day everything went back to normal, my grades recovered, Lily finally unblocked me on all social media and we are still going well. I would see her across the cafeteria, laughing and smiling with all her friends, which would voluntarily make me smile. When we are going through things, it takes big courage to take a step and try to understand the other person, I was not a good person in terms of understanding but I tried, that’s what matters, and even though I couldn’t bring her ex back to life, I could say I prevented another tragic love story.

So as usual I cycle 50 minutes back from school on my e bike, and I hate the people that use a phone while cycling. As I approached a long straight road I saw a girl with a phone. I was too shy to confront her so I looked behind me, And I saw a big truck with six of those big horns. So I waved to the truck driver and he waved back, then I kind of signaled to the driver that the girl was on her phone and he did a thumbs up. Then signaled to the driver to honk and pointed to the girl, he laughed while doing another thumbs up. He honked and the girls phone flew out of her hand and bounced on the ground. I even swerved a bit because of how loud it was my ears are still kind of ringing. The phone was in two pieces, I don't know if it was the case but it didn't look good. And we were going about 25kmh that's about 15,5 mph for my Americans here. I just laughed and she screamed something, she was probably just mad.