#mystery

My cousin told me it happened in a very small village in Mexico, the one our grandfather grew up in. Late one night, a young man was leaving a friend's home. Despite the late hour, he insisted that he could walk home. After all, his own abode was only a mile away. Stepping out into the quiet streets, he started his journey. Breathing in the humid summer air, listening to the buzz of the street lamps mixed with the crickets and his own footsteps on the gravel ground.

Another bullshit Friday night. That was all it was. I was back home from the college dorms at Georgia Southwestern State University and back home in Albany, Georgia for the summer. The June heat was torture. My thirst further increased by the heat and the constant loneliness. At nineteen, I had no money, no girlfriend, no friends for comfort to go clubbing with, and needless to say, I didn’t have a fake I.D. to buy booze for these most lonely nights.

In truth I've always known that the house I live in is haunted. The soft sounds of soft footsteps when you're home alone, the whispers when the house is empty... You know all the signs. All have been told before already after all. We were just lucky that it never got worse than that, yes sometimes small objects would have been placed elsewhere, but we never got the feeling that we were dealing with something that was dangerous or angry. So we just let it be, whatever it was.

“Wanna hear about the weirdest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen in the ocean?” Harvey, the old salt who lived at Neptune’s Net, asked me one night. “Buy me a sip of Cutty Sark, and I’ll tell you something only a handful of people have ever heard, and all of them are dead,” he said, jabbing his finger for emphasis. His gravelly voice gave the ancient mariner a gravitas you wouldn’t expect from a drunk at the end of the bar.

The lily pad rocked like a small, stubborn idea—barely there, stubbornly afloat. I stood on it because standing felt better than sinking, because the pond was quieter than the house and quieter than the questions that had been circling me all week. The city lights blurred into a distant constellation; here, the world reduced itself to water, breath, and the thin green circle beneath my feet.

"I heard birds singing outside. I didn't know birds still came here." "It is a beautiful day to be alive." — Unknown ... I wake to warm light slanting through the curtains. The air smells of toasted bread and coffee, and in the distance, I hear my mother humming a familiar tune, soft, gentle, but off-key. It sounds like she's humming with her mouth closed.

Important Reminder: This Post Has Been Deleted The following content consists of Facebook posts made by the deceased Zhang Yaxin in the past few days. To prevent causing panic, these posts have been deleted. The copies you see now have been processed. Image: A fortune teller's face with one gold and one blue eye, wearing vintage glasses, a prominent nose, slightly curly hair at the ends, looking about 24 years old.

Year 157, Near the end of the fall season. I'm not sure what day it is. I am a regular guy who lives in the peaceful village of "Unut." And today, I am helping the village elder by chopping some logs for him. "But he's not going to pay me shit." I said as I swung my axe. I'm only helping him because he's like a father to me. I was a little child when my family abandoned me. Yet he took me in and raised me to this age. "And I am going to do his chores for the rest of his lifetime."

Pentimento I spent two years working on a single sentence.

Steve was a respected city official who, from time to time, liked to break away from his daily routine and visit his hometown, located about 30 kilometers away. He stood at the station dressed in an elegant suit and hat, carrying a large suitcase. The weather that day was drowsy and rainy; he had forgotten to bring an umbrella. Thus, when the train arrived, he boarded quickly, took a window seat, and began to read a book. The front of the locomotive bore a sign: "Train to Nowhere."

I. The House With No Sound It began with a hum.

“I have good news and bad news,” my boss Chester said. If there is a more butthole clenching phrase said at a struggling company during a sudden all hands meeting, I don’t know what it is. Thing was, Chester didn’t need to say a single syllable. His slouched shoulders, pale(er) face, and hangdog expression told us the entire story. The company was going under.

Xavier Truman drove with one hand resting loosely on the steering wheel, the other drumming against the door in rhythm with the radio. Late afternoon sunlight filtered through the windshield, bathing the quiet neighborhood in a warm, nostalgic haze. The radio crackled softly.

She arrived without warning one day, tall and pale with a pretty face. Dark hair hanging down, tangling with the wind. It was a Sunday, the only day the mines of Gavinvill were closed. With slender hands curled, she rapped her knuckles on the door. And when it opened, she would simply ask: “Need a stitchin’? Need a fix’en?”

Don’t go in there! It’s all a trap." Josh was a 25-year-old hotel receptionist in Black Stone, a town in northern Pennsylvania. He had started the job shortly after graduating from university in Michigan. He was a quiet, down-to-earth kind of guy who always tried to find a rational explanation for everything. But that night, something happened at the hotel that put his sense of reality to the ultimate test.

The Doorman

I still have the book.  And, reluctant as I am to share it with anybody, I can see no other way. Very well, then. This is how it begins: The Knights are lined up all the way down the hall To be blessed by the Queen and the King, With their shields and their sigils and armor and guns And their magical-gagical rings! - They’ve come from afar and they’ve come from a-near To kneel down and mount up and fight, They’re strong and they’re tall and they’re brave one and all –

A beautiful August afternoon, with its gorgeously blazing sun, encouraged them to hit the road and abandon the comfort of their couches and armchairs. Out of the corner of his eye, Garreth admired the lovely surroundings of Woodblacke. • It's so beautiful here! - he said aloud to his travelling companions. Nick nodded in agreement. Susan had just woken up and began her ritual of stretching in the back seat. • We're almost there, just a few hundred metres more and we'll be at our destination…

The GoPro came on the way it always did - a two-second boot tone, a flash of menu, then the wide-angle lens settling on Lance Harmon's garage in Brandon, Mississippi at nine-fourteen on a Saturday morning in September, the light outside already thick and honey-yellow the way Mississippi September light gets when it's warming up for something unpleasant. Lance was doing what Lance always did when he was nervous-excited about a ride - talking.

I still don't know why my father drove away before sunrise. For years, I believed that was the part of the story that would never make sense to me. I was wrong. I was too young to understand it then, and every time I asked my parents about that morning, they either laughed it off or admitted they couldn't remember it at all. Sometimes I wonder if forgetting is easier than remembering.