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“That caint be the number. Just caint,” Wes said, taking off his faded John Deere hat and slapping it against his leg. “I dried the corn before I hauled it over. I know what the moisture level is!” “Wes, I’m just the messenger. The machine checks and gives back a level.” “Well, your gosh-darn machine must be broken!” “It’s just recently been recalibrated. I can run another sample if you want.”

I I wished it with my whole being, which is to say I wished it with something I didn't know yet was a cage. Let me tell you about Delia first. Not because she's the main point—she isn't—but because you need to understand my obsession. Delia is the kind of pretty that makes pretty people feel plain. She wakes up, and her hair is already in order. Her laugh hypnotizes you and puts you in a trance. People lean toward her as plants do toward light, without even knowing it.

As I sat on my couch watching a movie on the television, I found it difficult to concentrate. The noisy neighbors upstairs were at it again. I’m not sure exactly what they were doing, whether they were moving furniture, playing football, or tag. Who knows? All I know is that it was a considerable amount of noise and it needed to stop. My roommate mini came out of her room, frustrated, “Uggh!” she exclaimed, “They’re at it again?”

May 18, 2011. My name is Greg, I just moved into my new house in Pennsylvania. Me and my Girlfriend have had the house for at least four months now and we've managed to mold it into what we've wanted for years. My Girlfriend, Carmen works almost the entire day so I find myself with the entire new house to myself with a lot of time to kill. But lets just cut to the chase...

Here’s your story with proper paragraphing and a few minor grammar fixes: Together, as of today, we would never be apart again. We will always be together…

Perhaps it's just my world, but it might also be yours. Everyone here wears a mask. A real mask, maybe the one given from the beginning or one changed or even stolen. Our masks decide everything for us: our emotions, jobs, school, friends, relationships, chances in life and even crimes. Our whole identity really. Without our masks, we can't live since there isn't really anything underneath it. We all get our first mask just after birth after all.

On the morning of Tuesday the 16th of December 2025, I took a dead woman off the stones below the Old Cross at Ardboe.

“Be one second smarter!” whispered Kippy-Kip to the viewers, leaning in. His face filled the entire screen. After licking the camera lens and leaving it drenched in slobber, Kippy-Kip jumped backward three times, stepping away and leaving the rest of his crew to show off and do their juggling tricks.

A flame burst from the darkness. It was hesitant for a moment, but flashed for an instant, showing the faint glimpse of a lone figure. A second flame was made, but it sizzled low before fading away. The third, like the first, was shy for a moment. However, soon it became full of thorns and nipped at the fingers of its master, but it was held in its place. It would not go its own way, no, it must be sealed in a cage of iron and glass.

The sweltering summer is especially unbearable for me, not to mention the endless rain, which is slowly driving me insane. Savage pains torment my body. Everything inside me swells and bursts, so violently that sometimes I simply pass out. Every step I take feels like a thousand nails being driven into my flesh. My calves explode, oozing meat and fat, and there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop it. But physical suffering can be endured. You can switch yourself off for a while.

I was eleven years old when it happened. It was Halloween night, and my parents had gone out with my aunt to a party across town, planning to stay overnight at a hotel and return the next afternoon. That left me at home with my seventeen-year-old sister, Jessie, and our older cousin, Hannah. I absolutely adored Hannah; she was the fun, cool older cousin who always brought us treats and took us on adventures.

We moved in on a Tuesday, and by Friday I had learned the house repeated me. Not everything. It was selective, like a bad line that only keeps the important words. I would be at the sink and hear, from the landing above, my own voice at low volume, finishing a sentence I had not started. The first time I thought it was a phone, a radio, a neighbour's television bleeding through the wall. We had no neighbours. The house was the last on the road and the woods did the rest.

"Nine-one-one. What's your emergency?" "Someone's in my house." A woman, maybe fifty, steady. "In the hallway. I can hear him breathing." I ask for the address and she gives it, slow and clear, and I type it into the field, and the field does something it has never once done: it stops me. The cursor goes red before I finish. A note unfolds under the line, the way the system writes when it's telling you something is over. PREMISES LOST. FIRE. 2019. NO SURVIVORS.

I slammed the door shut and brushed the snot off my nose and the tears out of my eyes, then kicked my trainers off. They went sprawling over the door mattress and across the hallway floor. All of that for some stupid pills! My life these days revolved around my illness. I had a chronic seasonal allergy which lead to me snorting and sneezing for hours. Two weeks ago it was so bad that I stopped going to work because my condition became intolerable. My sinus thickened and my eyes were constantly…

The laughter didn’t start right away. In the beginning, it was just an odd, harmless hobby. Sarah loved David. She loved his quiet nature, his steady hands, and the calm predictability he brought into her life. So, when David suddenly took an interest in clowning—buying vintage costumes, studying classic mime routines, and practicing face paint in their bathroom mirror—Sarah did her best to be supportive. She even chuckled when he clumsily juggled oranges in the kitchen.

I never really did want to go to that Christmas party, but I have to say it turned out all right in the end. The Christmas party was to be held on the great stage at the Opera House downtown, and it was open to all employees of the law firm Goble & Mundorff and their immediate families.  That last part was a problem for my brother Henry and me, because our mom was a paralegal at G&M, and she’d made it clear that she expected us to put in an appearance.

4/13/2015 ...

I'm going to die here, or maybe I can't. The only thing I have here is a pen that never seems to run out, and this book that has infinite pages and funnily enough is waterproof. I originally woke up in a strange room with yellow wallpaper, fluorescent lights that hummed, smelling the mold and mildew infesting the walls.

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.

What If I Told You the Military Survival School Near Cusic, WA, Was a Cryptid Response Facility? I have a crazy story to tell you, and at the end, you’re probably not going to believe me. However, for those who have lived near or spent time in the Colville National Forest, they will know.