#mindfuck

When I woke up in the morning, I knew something was off. Pretty soon I realized that I was missing a tooth. Upper set, one of the front ones. I'm not a particularly vain person, but losing a tooth upset me a lot. My anxiety flared and my mind exploded with reasons why my tooth could've fallen out. Was it because I only brushed my teeth once a day on the weekends? Or was it something with my gums? I went through the day with my upper lip curled over my teeth and my mind filled with every…

A little girl’s parents went out for a business dinner so they hired a babysitter to watch her. “Can I have some ice cream?” the little girl, Holly asked after supper. “Sure” the babysitter, Beatrice said. “Where’s the freezer?” “In the basement, so are the nuts, cherries and candy and stuff.” When she went down to get the ice cream, she looked out the window to see a little girl standing outside. This didn’t strike her as too suspicious and she simply brushed it off.

The last pale stripes of light were fading quickly behind the city’s expanse that evening. The street, still damp from a recent rain, glimmered thinly. The streetlights had not yet flickered to life, and the street was hanging suspended in that breathless squinting moment between light and dark.

My son and I often play games, he's five years old so our games can range from pirate battles in the middle of the ocean to simple board games like snakes and ladders. Today we decided to play hide and seek. I counted to fifty while he went to hide in one of the three hiding places that he always picks. 'Ready or not, here I come' I called, as I slowly made my way to the sofa. I looked down and there he was two little feet sticking out from behind the sofa, accompanied by muffled laughter.

The parking garage was the epitome of lifeless urbanization—cold, sterile and emotionless. The cement walls were painted a drab grey with yellow horizontal lines along the walls. Fluorescent lights filled the four-story garage with a dull, pale light. The garage shook each time a car drove from floor to floor and the shaking became increasingly more apparent as it neared the ticket booth on the bottom floor. Inside the ticket booth, Trevor waited with a disinterested look on his face. He had…

Moving at the end of my high school career is not what I imagined. My mother and father insisted that we move a few towns a way. Far enough to escape poor memories, yet close enough to the ones we wanted to keep. The town we reside in now has a decent enough track record, and the crime rate seems to be pretty low. My father has become so quiet now, so sallow. I swear, my mother's complexion will never come back.

I find myself staring at the brick wall in front of me again. After another heavy night of drinking I find it abnormal to regain consciousness in the same place several days in a row. I'm outside of the abandoned hospital downtown. An eerie place to find yourself on a foggy morning. It seems no one is around, though you can hear the sounds of the city already busy. I light up a cigarette and proceed to check my phone. It's 7 a.m.

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.”

I stirred from deep within my sleep, unsure of what had woken me, but too tired to put any further thought into it. The mist of an unfinished dream swam around my head, distorted and fading with every second.

A cry woke me in the middle of the night. It's as if a girl was trying hard to muffle her desperate cries of help so as to keep something from hearing her. My heart started to pound with fear as I was reminded of some scenes from horror films involving creepy, crying ghost girls. I badly wanted to wake my room mate who was sleeping across my bed but it is impossible to wake her up for she is such a heavy sleeper.

My name is Harold Granderson, and I've been the director of the Cleveland Opera for 39 years. I'm sure that doesn't sound like much, what with the picture of Cleveland as a post-industrial wasteland deprived of fine culture, but I can assure you we don't harbor talentless hacks. I make sure of that. Admittedly, it's difficult to attract equally discerning ears. We live in the shadow of the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame, where the off-key caterwauling of drunken pseudo-poets is worshiped. Even the…

You awoke in a cold sweat from your dream, looking around the dim room with a fright. You didn’t remember anything that happened in it except for a loud BANG! at the end, but you passed it off as just a nightmare. It had been a recurring nightmare you’ve had for the past few days now. You slowly arose from your bed, preparing your lunch for the day before heading off to work, stopping at a local store to pick up a little something along the way.

No one knows that my affluent aunt bequeathed me her favorite thing in the world, the beach house she bought many years ago on the Florida Panhandle. I’ve been renting it out for years actually, though I haven’t visited it since I was a kid. She knew how much I loved her beach house and how overly giddy and thankful I was every time she took me on one of her vacations. My guess is that’s why she gave it to me; I may have been the only one in the family to love it as much as she did. I think she…

Last night at around 1am, my wife and small child walked to my car after a night at my bro-in-law’s house. He lives in a sketchy suburban neighborhood so we are always conscious of our surroundings. As I was getting ready to sit in the driver’s seat I noticed a young black man staring at me with determined eyes. I stared back and nodded but he just stood there staring back at me.

Hope. It really is the most powerful yet dangerous and cruel of human traits. It forces us to defy logic, sometimes at great cost. Other times it guides us through treacherous waters and back into the arms of our loved ones. We cannot live without being in its presence yet we can die tragically while being draped in it. It is truly a paradox.

When people who died and come back to life say they saw a bright light, they are full of shit. It’s not necessarily their fault though. The mind has a difficult time figuring out things it has never experienced, therefore the mind cannot understand. I’m one of the special, select few who have experienced death and rebirth…often.

I rest for a while. Now is time to get up and try once again to find an exit. Walking and looking for markings on the walls, a stain, a scratch, a spider web I haven't seen yet. Nothing. Perfect walls, untouched. I examine one of them looking for imperfections. Nothing. The maze looks like a work from Nature itself, a little trap created by the forces that rule the universe so they can have fun watching vermin like me struggling for a little bit of sunlight.

Sitting at home alone, you find yourself aimlessly searching the internet from the comfort of your bed. While scrolling through your Tumblr dashboard one of your followers post an interesting link. Looking anywhere for entertainment you blindly click it. Your web browser is whisked away to a plain white screen with nothing but a playful whale trying its heart out to eat your mouse cursor. Finally with some entertainment you find this whale to be a companion when you are alone. After several…

If you have ever been in a near-death experience, you may have seen your life "flash" before your eyes. I've asked several people about this. They said that it was like they went through their whole life in a second. That's not too far fetched. Your brain likes to avoid stress, so that it does not have to deal with facing death. So if your brain was to think you were going to die, it would go to the easiest way to escape: memory. So when it comes close to the end, your brain turns on every…

Ralphie had just received a letter that irrevocably changed his life. A letter intended for him to receive almost ten years ago, though it had only just made it to him now, lost by unforeseeable forces of time. The letter itself wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary, it had been written by a girl who had once loved him and whom- though Ralphie wouldn’t openly admit it- he still loved quite a lot.