Miles to Go Before I Scream

Hidden Tracks: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Miles Carnegie — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:31:26 GMT

⚠️ CONTENT NOTE: Contains captivity, coercive abuse, physical violence, and disturbing situations involving vulnerable people.

Hidden Tracks takes its titles from songs I heard when I was the right age to let them all the way in. Then it drags them somewhere darker than the lyrics were ever willing to go. You don’t need to know the songs to get the stories. But if you do, they’re going to sit differently after this.

The first thing Lena noticed was the smell.

Not mildew. That came second.

First came powdery flowers and cheap fruit, the kind that tried too hard and still turned the back of her throat sour. It was in the blanket over her legs. In her hair. In her shirt. On her skin.

Then the mildew. Wet concrete. Pipe rust.

Then the dark.

She sat up too fast and slammed the back of her head against cinder block. White broke behind her eyes. She dragged her legs under her and something yanked tight around her ankle. Metal clipped bone. Chain scraped across the floor and caught.

A girl somewhere to her left said, “Don’t.”

Lena went still.

At first there was nothing. Then the room started giving itself up in pieces. Pipes overhead. A little red light on something plugged in across the room. Water heater, maybe. Enough to catch edges. Mattresses on the floor. A bucket. Three other girls across from her, sitting or lying still enough to pass for laundry.

“Where am I?” Lena asked.

Her mouth felt dry and furry.

“In his basement,” the girl to her left said.

The voice was raw. Scrubbed down to the grain.

Lena turned toward it. Big eyes. Split lip. Hair hacked off near the jaw. Eighteen maybe. Maybe older. Down here, the light made everybody look used up.

“How long?”

The girl shrugged. “A night maybe. Maybe less. You were crying before.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Lucky.”

From farther back, another girl said, “What’s your name?”

“Don’t tell him your real one,” the split-lip girl said.

Lena blinked. “Why?”

“He likes names.”

Lena grabbed the chain and gave it a short pull anyway.

The cuff bit her ankle. The chain scraped concrete and caught.

Every girl in the room went still so fast it felt rehearsed.

“Don’t do that,” the split-lip girl said.

“He doesn’t like that.”

Footsteps crossed what had to be the kitchen above. Metal chair legs dragging. The refrigerator door opening and closing slow.

Then a voice through the ceiling.

“Girls?”

Nobody answered.

The footsteps stopped.

“Girls,” he said again. “Helloooo.”

A bolt scraped. The door at the top of the stairs opened. Kitchen light spilled down the steps in a long yellow strip.

“Come on now,” he said. “That’s rude.”

He came down slowly, one hand on the rail, a grocery bag hanging from the other.

Jeans. Gray sweatshirt with a feed store logo on it. No mask. No black gloves. No movie nonsense.

Mid-forties maybe. Soft through the middle. Nice watch. Hair starting to lose interest on top.

His eyes found Lena and stayed there.

“Well now,” he said. “You’re awake.”

Nobody spoke.

He set the grocery bag on an upside-down milk crate and looked at all of them.

“That’s no way to greet a friend.”

The split-lip girl said, “Hello.”

He brightened. “There we go. See? Manners cost nothing.”

He reached into the bag and lined up four sticks of Teen Spirit on the crate. Bright pink plastic tubes that belonged in a locker, not a basement where the air already felt chewed.

Lena stared at them.

He saw her staring and smiled wider. Bad teeth. Yellow at the gums. One front tooth turned just enough to spoil the whole effect.

“House rule,” he said. “We stay fresh.”

Nobody moved.

His smile narrowed.

“Tasha.”

The split-lip girl stood.

So that was her name down here.

He tipped his head toward Lena. “Help the new girl.”

Tasha crossed to her, chain dragging soft behind her, and held out the pink stick after popping the cap. “Wrists,” she said quietly. “Neck. Under your shirt if he says.”

Lena didn’t take it.

He sighed.

“This is a shared space,” he said. “We respect each other in a shared space. Understand?”

Lena looked up at him.

He crouched.

Up close he smelled like coffee and dryer sheets. Under that, sweat and something like fruit left in a hot car.

“Understand?”

She nodded once.

“Good girl.”

He stood.

Tasha pressed the deodorant into Lena’s hand. The plastic was warm from her grip.

“We keep standards,” he said. “That’s what separates people from animals.”

He pulled a yellow legal pad from the grocery bag and clicked a pen. Lena saw columns. Dates. Checkboxes. Names.

One column said fresh.

Another said attitude.

He looked at her over the pad. “What are we calling you?”

Her swallow clicked.

“Courtney.”

He wrote it down. “Courtney,” he said. “See? That wasn’t hard.”

From one of the mattresses, the youngest girl started coughing.

Not a little cough. A hard wet one that folded her over and sounded like it tore something loose on the way up.

He turned his head.

The room tightened around it.

He waited for her to stop. He didn’t yell. He just watched her chest heave, his mouth pinching at the corners like he’d found a stain on a clean shirt.

The girl wiped her mouth on the heel of her hand. “Sorry.”

“Contagion is no joke,” he said.

He flipped a page on the legal pad. In the quiet, the paper cracked like a gunshot. Lena watched his eyes move down the lines.

He kept records.

That hit her harder than the gun on his belt.

The gun was a moment. The ink was a schedule.

He tucked the pad under one arm and pointed at the old television in the corner. It sat on a metal AV cart with one bent wheel. A VCR and DVD player were stacked under it, both lit by the same little green glow that stayed on all night.

He hit the power button.

The television gave off a high, thin whine. A bright dot burned at the center of the screen, then gray, then snow. Static hiss filled the basement. Cold light throbbed across the floor. It caught the cart legs and the mattress edges. It turned the cinder block walls slick.

He tapped the volume down.

“Here we are now,” he said. “Entertain us.”

So there were rules.

Answer when he says “Girls?”

Never laugh too fast. Never too late.

If he says do-over, do it again.

If he tells a joke and waits, you smile.

If he asks what was funny on the TV, you give him something.

Tasha knew all of it. So did the quiet girl on the far mattress who called herself Beth. The coughing one said she was Daisy.

He put on a sitcom DVD and made them sit facing him instead of the screen. Every so often he paused it and asked one of them to explain the joke. If the answer wasn’t right, he rewound it. If it pleased him, he looked faintly satisfied, like a man watching something fall into line.

By the third pause Daisy started coughing again.

He muted the TV.

“Daisy,” he said. “We talked about this.”

Daisy’s face shone with fever. “I... I can’t help it. I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “Wrong answer.”

He picked up the stick of Teen Spirit and held it out to her. “Again.”

Her hand shook as she took it.

He watched her rub it under her jaw, over her neck, across the insides of her wrists. Waxy streaks. Green smell. Skin already rubbed raw from too much of the same cheap sweetness.

“There,” he said. “Better.”

Lena stared at him.

He noticed and gave her that patient little smile again.

“You’d be amazed what goes bad when people let themselves go.”

The room smelled like fake fruit and damp cement and the hot sour edge of sickness. The deodorant did nothing. It just sat over all of it, stubborn and cheerful.

After the television came inspection.

He checked wrists for scratching. Breath for what he called cooperation. Hair for tangles. Lifted chins with two fingers. Looked at throats, collarbones, the fronts of shirts.

When he got to Lena, he touched the side of her neck where the deodorant still sat tacky.

“See?” he said. “You’re adjusting.”

He glanced at the legal pad and made a neat check under fresh next to Courtney.

After he went upstairs and threw the bolt, nobody talked for a while.

Then Daisy coughed into her blanket and Tasha whispered, “He’ll move her if she keeps that up.”

“Move her where?” Lena asked.

No one answered.

Beth rolled over, faced the wall, and said, “Stop asking.”

The house kept making its little noises above them. Pipes ticking. Toilet running. A floorboard settling. The world stayed a house while the basement stayed what it was.

Lena counted the stairs in her head.

Twelve.

Twelve to the kitchen.

Keys in his right pocket.

Bad right knee.

Legal pad on the crate.

Yellow light when the door opened.

Inventory was something to do besides feel.

By morning, Daisy was worse.

He came down wearing yellow dish gloves.

That scared Lena more than the gun ever had.

The gun belonged to the part he played. The gloves meant Daisy had become a task.

He stood over her mattress with the legal pad under his arm and said, “Any improvement?”

Daisy stared at him. Said nothing. Her lips had gone pale at the edges.

He made a note.

Lena heard herself say, “She needs a doctor.”

The room went dead.

He looked at her. Not angry at first. More like confusion.

Then even that was gone.

He crossed the room and crouched in front of her.

“That kind of comment,” he said quietly, “lowers morale.”

“She’s sick.”

He smiled. Small this time. Meaner.

“So am I. Of attitudes.”

He stood, turned, and hit Beth across the mouth hard enough to throw her sideways on the mattress.

Lena flinched.

Beth put a hand to her lip and sat up again. Didn’t make a sound.

He looked back at Lena.

“See? Everybody pays.”

He left the gloves on during inspection.

That night Daisy was gone.

Her mattress was stripped. Blanket folded. Bucket gone.

He said nothing about her.

Nobody else did either.

He came down carrying a cardboard tray full of Teen Spirit sticks, still dusty from the shelf.

“New system,” he said. “Better compliance.”

He put the tray in Lena’s hands.

She didn’t move.

“Courtney.”

Just that little edge in his voice was enough.

She handed one to Tasha. One to Beth. Took one for herself.

He watched the whole thing and smiled.

“There,” he said. “See how easy that is?”

After that, he started looking at Lena when he needed something done. Hold the trash bag open. Fold a blanket. Count the sticks after inspection. Sometimes repeat him back to the others.

The first few times Lena said nothing.

Then he skipped Beth’s dinner.

The next time he told Lena to repeat an instruction, she repeated it.

One afternoon he brought down clippers and sat Tasha on the milk crate.

“Your ends are a mess,” he said.

Tasha went still.

He held up a hand mirror from the grocery bag. “Look at that. You think that’s acceptable?”

Then he cut her hair off while a game show blared from the television. Dark clumps dropped around her bare feet. Once, and only once, Tasha looked at Lena.

No plea in it.

Just hate. Clean and bright.

After he went upstairs, Tasha said, “Don’t hand me anything again.”

Lena glanced at the tray of deodorant on the crate. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Tasha gave a little laugh through her nose. Empty thing.

“That’s how he talks too.”

Beth turned to the wall. End of discussion.

The next night he asked for a joke.

Nobody answered fast enough.

He looked at Tasha. “You used to be good at this.”

The room shrank around it.

Finally Tasha said, “I’m not up for it tonight.”

He set the legal pad down very gently.

Then the smile.

“Come on,” he said. “Upstairs.”

Tasha didn’t move.

His hand settled on the gun at his belt.

“Don’t make this theatrical.”

Tasha stood.

Her chain dragged behind her as she crossed the room. He unlocked it with the key from his right pocket, clipped a short lead to her wrist, and took her up the stairs.

At the top he looked back at Lena.

Then the door shut.

The bolt scraped home.

Tasha didn’t come back that night.

Or the next.

Or the one after.

He never said her name again. Just crossed something out on the legal pad and kept moving.

After that there were two girls in the room, and one of them was fading most days.

He called Lena reliable one afternoon, like he was filling out annual reviews. Had her stand closer during inspection. Had her square Beth’s blanket corners. Had her tell him whether Beth talked in her sleep.

Lena stopped asking questions that went nowhere.

Stopped waiting for footsteps that would bring Tasha back.

Stopped testing the chain against her ankle every time she woke.

Time went flat. Morning and night changed by the weight in his hands. Grocery bags meant supplies. The laundry basket meant trouble. The legal pad stayed tucked under his arm for inspection. Then there were the gloves. The gloves meant someone had become a task.

Sometimes he brought fast food and ate it one step up from them while the smell filled the room.

Sometimes he forgot the fries and got irritated at himself like that was the worst thing that had happened all day.

Later that night Beth whispered, “Do you remember your mother’s kitchen?”

The question came out of nowhere. It hung there.

Lena looked at the pipes overhead. “Yes.”

“What color was it?”

Lena tried.

For a second she saw the table from when she was ten. The sink on the island. Sun through the curtains.

Then it slipped away.

“Yellow,” she said.

Beth didn’t answer.

After a minute Lena understood Beth hadn’t really been asking her.

By morning, he came down in gloves again.

Beth had started coughing.

Not as bad as Daisy. Not yet. But enough.

He stood over her mattress with the legal pad and said, “We are not repeating last month.”

Beth said, “Please.”

He looked at Lena.

“Fresh stick.”

Lena didn’t move.

“Now.”

She took one from the tray and handed it over.

Beth kept her arms down.

He said, “Lena. Help her.”

It was the first time he’d said her real name. Or the name that used to belong to her.

Something in the room clicked when he said it.

Lena knelt.

Beth’s skin was hot. Too hot. Hair stuck to her forehead.

“Please,” Beth whispered again.

Lena uncapped the stick. Powder. Wax.

She rubbed it under Beth’s jaw because that was where he always checked.

He watched with that small satisfied smile.

“There,” he said. “Much better.”

Beth was gone two days later.

This time he left the mattress there. Blanket folded. Pillow still dented.

For most of the day Lena kept glancing at it, like Beth might roll over and ask again about a yellow kitchen.

She never did.

After that it was just Lena. The tray of deodorant. The legal pad. The television. The chain.

He seemed almost relieved with one.

No games for a while. No jokes. No sitcom quizzes.

Just inspection. Laundry and food. Then the legal pad.

The room got smaller without the other voices in it.

Lena stopped speaking unless he asked her something. Even then she kept it brief.

When a car pulled into the drive above, her body no longer went hard with hope or fear. It just waited.

One evening he said, “Girls?” out of habit, then laughed at himself. Lena didn’t laugh.

Outside, the weather turned.

She knew because the dirty snow vanished from the high window, and one morning there was rainwater there instead.

He brought down a new tray of Teen Spirit sticks.

He lined them up on the milk crate and said, “Stock rotation.”

Then he made a note on the pad.

Lena caught the handwriting upside down.

One remaining. Capacity available.

He saw her looking and closed the pad.

“No reason a house can’t run properly,” he said.

That night she lay on her mattress and listened to the refrigerator upstairs open and shut. A cabinet door. The television murmuring in the next room. The whole house pressing down over her.

She thought of Tasha.

Not her face. That was already starting to blur.

Just her voice.

Raw. Used up.

Don’t tell him your real one.

Lena mouthed the words once in the dark. No sound.

Then she slept.

The next time the bolt scraped, it was late. Real late. House-thin quiet.

He came down halfway, enough to spill kitchen light across the steps, and dragged something heavy the rest of the way by one arm.

A girl.

Young. Denim skirt. One shoe missing. Mascara smeared under one eye. Breathing, but badly.

He clipped a new chain to the ankle cuff by the mattress nearest the stairs.

Then he looked at Lena.

“Be useful,” he said.

And went back upstairs.

The bolt scraped.

The house settled again.

For a while nothing happened.

Then the girl made a small sound in the dark.

Chain dragged once across the concrete.

That was enough to pull Lena awake before the girl fully came to.

She stayed where she was.

Then came the rustle of blanket. A sharp breath. Metal snapping tight.

“Where am I?” the girl whispered.

For a second Lena said nothing.

The sweetness of the deodorant sat in the back of her throat. Powder.

Then she said, “Don’t.”

The girl went still.

Lena kept looking at the stairs.

“Don’t tell him your real name.”

The liner notes are below. Song, schematic, what got cut.

01 — The analog connection

Here we are now, entertain us

Nobody expects this one.

I kept coming back to the way Cobain spits “Here we are now, entertain us.” Not like an invitation. Not like fun. Like the decision has already been made for you. Like somebody else has already decided what you’re for.

That was the line that turned the lock for me.

The man in the basement says it almost verbatim when he clicks on the old television. “Here we are now. Entertain us.” Then he makes the girls perform. Smile when he wants it. Answer when he pauses the sitcom. Explain what was funny. If the answer works, it goes in the column marked attitude. If it doesn’t, the scene starts over until it does.

The detail that fixed the whole story in place was the deodorant. Teen Spirit. Four bright pink sticks lined up on a milk crate in a basement already thick with mildew, sickness, and that fake fruit sweetness he keeps forcing on them. He calls it a house rule. He calls it staying fresh. The song title ends up on their skin as a compliance instrument. That was the moment I knew what kind of story this was.

What stayed with me most was the ending. Lena doesn’t escape the system. She gets taught by it. Then she teaches the next girl. The first thing she says in the dark is the same warning Tasha gave her. Don’t. Don’t tell him your real name. The transmission keeps going. That felt true to the song, or at least true to what I hear in it. Not rebellion winning. A machine teaching people how to survive inside it.

02 — The technical schematic

The legal pad

He keeps it under his arm during inspection the way a floor manager keeps a clipboard. The gun is a moment. The pad is the system.

It tracks compliance, flags problems, and records disposals without using that word. When Daisy gets sick, he makes a note. When Tasha stops performing, he crosses out her name and keeps moving. When Lena hands out the deodorant, he checks the fresh column and looks faintly pleased.

The pad never malfunctions. That’s the horror. An office-supply object doing exactly what it was made to do inside a place that should not exist. The evil is not hidden in the tool. It’s in the columns.

03 — Riff/beat alignment

Quiet verse, loud chorus, somebody disappears

The story follows the song’s volume changes. Long flat stretches where the basement runs on rules, then a fast spike when somebody fails to perform.

“He set the legal pad down very gently. Then the smile. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Upstairs.’”

That is the chorus hit.

Everything before it is low-volume management. The second someone stops complying, the dynamic changes and the room loses a body. During revision I used the song less for theme than for timing. If a scene built too gradually or paid off too loudly, I knew the beat was off. The volume had to change all at once.

04 — The Stephen King ledger

The line that did the most work in the fewest words

Version I killed

“She caught the words upside down on the open page, written in his careful hand, and felt something in her chest go cold and flat: One remaining. Capacity available. Like she was a number on a shelf.”

Version I kept

“Lena caught the handwriting upside down. One remaining. Capacity available.”

The first version explains the horror. The second version just shows the invoice and gets out of the way. By that point the story has already taught you what those words mean. I didn’t need to add a siren to the siren.

05 — For paid subscribers

Think about a system you operate inside every day. Work, institution, organization, doesn’t matter which one. Now think about the language that system uses for the people inside it. Capacity. Compliance. Resources. Attitude. Performance. Think about what those words are doing, specifically, and what they’re replacing. Then think about whether you’ve ever used them yourself, and what it felt like to use them, and whether it felt like anything at all.

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This is Not a Sequel: Chapter 4

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:31:22 GMT

Lady turned her head toward the hallway.

Behind her, Ripp’s bell gave another tiny ring. When she looked back, he was already on the couch arm.

Lady’s eyes slid back to the empty wine bottle.

She felt the urge to correct it the way she corrected everything: touch it, move it, verify it, make it behave.

She didn’t.

She walked to the sink instead, letting the water run until the sound filled the kitchen. A small, stupid trick. White noise for a brain that wanted distraction.

The water made her hands look paler than they were.

She shut the tap off.

Silence rushed back in, immediate and intimate.

Lady glanced at the trash can.

The lid sat slightly crooked. Ryder’s latte cup showed through the bag. Paper rim stained. Plastic lid still on. Proof he’d been here. Proof he’d left.

She hated that she could picture it. Hated that she could map evidence like she was building a case against her own morning.

She went back to the living room and sat at her desk, like the laptop’s glow could fence off the kitchen.

Slack was already open. Waiting.

She slid her reading glasses on and clicked into the standup chat.

New messages had come in since the call ended. Follow-ups. Links. Action items. Reed asking for visibility into the next phase like he hadn’t just been told to take it offline.

She rubbed her temple with two fingers.

The faint pressure returned behind her eyes.

Lady opened her notes app and started typing anyway.

Just bullets. Just facts.

Reed: onboarding flow mockups
Ronda: dashboard live, deck after call
Reba: “take offline” on next phase

Her fingers moved faster as she went.

When she finished, she stared at the list.

Something about it felt wrong.

Not the content. The formatting.

The bullets lined up too neatly. The spacing was even. The font matched line to line.

Lady didn’t type like that.

Lady typed like a person. A stray space. A doubled word. A line break she didn’t remember adding.

This wasn’t autocorrect.

She adjusted her glasses again, as if the problem might be her vision.

It wasn’t.

She highlighted the list and hit backspace.

The text vanished.

For half a second, the notes app was blank.

Then the list came back.

Same bullets. Same alignment. Same clean spacing.

Lady’s stomach turned. She hit backspace again, harder this time.

The list disappeared.

Then came back immediately, as if it had never left.

Lady stared at the bottom of it.

No error message. No explanation.

Just the same version. The one she hadn’t written.

Lady clicked below it.

The cursor blinked.

Her hands weren’t even on the keyboard.

I need to check the bottle.

The words sat there like they’d always been there.

Maybe they had. That was worse.

Lady went cold.

Ripp hopped off the couch and padded toward the hallway.

Lady watched him go like he was the only creature in the apartment not negotiating with invisible hands.

He paused halfway down the hall and looked back at her.

Not scared.

Expectant.

Like he was waiting for her to catch up.

Lady stood.

She walked back to the kitchen, slower now, placing each step carefully.

The bottle was still there.

Empty.

Label facing her.

Lady stopped at the edge of the counter and leaned in without crossing it, like there was a line she shouldn’t pass.

Her hands stayed at her sides.

The Malbec had a ring of dried wine inside it, a dark crescent near the bottom. The glass looked clean otherwise. Too clean.

Lady’s eyes dropped to the counter beneath the bottle.

There should have been a faint sticky circle. A mark. Anything.

The counter was spotless.

Lady felt the urge to laugh again, short and ugly.

She swallowed it. Looked away.

She opened the fridge.

The Brita pitcher was empty again.

Naturally.

Lady shut the fridge and turned around.

Ripp was in the doorway, watching her.

His bell gave a quiet jingle as he shifted his weight.

Normal sound. Normal cat. Tail wrapped neatly around his paws, gaze fixed on her like he was waiting for her to catch up.

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

Slack.

Lady looked at it without picking it up. The screen lit her face in that ugly way screens always did. The message preview was from Reba.

Can you send your notes from the standup?

Her notes were on her laptop.

Lady picked up the phone, thumb hovering.

The pressure behind her eyes tightened.

Her phone buzzed again. A second message.

Ronda.

Can you resend the email drafts you mentioned? Legal wants them today.

Lady’s stomach dipped.

Email drafts? She had said they were scheduled for Friday.

She hadn’t sent anything.

Lady set the phone down carefully.

Then she walked back to her desk and opened her laptop.

Her notes app was still open. The bullet list sat there, immaculate.

And under it, in the same font, the same calm spacing, was a new line she hadn’t typed:

No blockers.

Lady stared at it.

She moved the cursor and tried to delete it.

The words vanished.

Then reappeared.

Lady’s breathing went shallow.

She clicked into her email.

The drafts folder was empty.

Her sent folder was not.

A message sat at the top of the list, timestamped three minutes ago.

To: Legal

Subject: Launch email drafts (final)

For a second her hand stayed still. If she didn’t click it, maybe it wasn’t real.

Then she clicked.

It sounded like her. Her tone. Her rhythm. The smooth, competent version of her that always knew what to say.

Halfway down, one phrase stood out:

Try not to stress.

Lady’s mouth went dry.

Ryder’s line. From the kitchen.

Now it lived in an email to Legal.

She took off her glasses. The sentence stayed where it was.

Her hands rested on the keyboard. Motionless. She hadn’t typed it. She hadn’t added it.

Her skin crawled with the specific terror of being seen as unprofessional.

Lady slammed the laptop shut.

Ripp flinched.

Lady stood in the living room with the closed laptop in front of her like a shield.

The apartment was quiet.

Not peaceful.

Precise.

Lady didn’t look at the phone.

Somewhere through the shared wall, a chair leg scraped once, slow and dragging, the kind of sound that reminded you you weren’t alone in a building full of strangers.

Lady still flinched like it had happened behind her.

Then the phone buzzed again.

🧨 Short Fuses: Pretense

Something Is Wrong With Everyone. She's Documenting It.

Photo by Kasturi Roy on Unsplash

🎧 Hidden Tracks: Smells Like Teen Spirit

A chain, a legal pad, a tray of Teen Spirit, and a man who says hello like manners matter. The more ordinary the house sounds, the worse the basement gets.

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Short Fuses: Pretense

Miles Carnegie — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:31:19 GMT

Mallory noticed the smile because it didn’t stop when it should have.

It happened at the courthouse. She was there to renew a parking permit. The woman at the counter had explained the system delays without apology. Without irritation. Just a fixed, pleasant smile that didn’t waver, even when she refused the application.

On the steps outside, Mallory almost stepped on a dead sparrow.

She jerked her foot back. The bird lay on the concrete, one wing bent back against itself at an angle that made her wince. Its beak hung open. Feathers disrupted, splayed out like it had thrashed.

People had been walking around it. There was a clear space in the foot traffic, a careful island of avoidance, but no one had moved it.

Photo by Kasturi Roy on Unsplash

Mallory pulled out her phone and took three photos from different angles. Her camera roll was full of things like this. Dead birds. Odd traffic patterns. The same van parked on her street for five days. Most of it meant nothing, but she took the photos anyway.

A man walking toward her smiled.

Mallory smiled back without thinking.

The man didn’t stop.

They passed each other. She felt something between her shoulder blades. His smile was still there.

When she turned, the smile was gone. The man was already leaning against the stone railing, writing in a notebook with careful precision.

Mallory stood there longer than necessary.

She caught her own reflection in a darkened window and realized she was still smiling. She tried to drop the expression and felt resistance. Not paralysis. Something more like a preference she hadn’t chosen.

She made a note: Persistent smile. Effort to stop.

Her hand didn’t hesitate. That bothered her later, when she thought about it. It should have hesitated.

She worked tech support for a logistics company recently acquired by something larger and quieter. Nobody had announced the change. The emails had simply stopped listing names. Her manager’s signature used to read “Trent Yoshida, Operations Lead.” Now it just said “Operations.”

The calls shifted.

“I am unable to complete this process,” one woman explained, her voice carrying a strange formality, as if reading from a script she’d memorized perfectly.

Mallory wrote it down on the scrap paper beside her keyboard. The paper already had phrases on it, accumulated over months, dated and cross-referenced.

“The system is rejecting my input,” said another, apologetically, though nothing in her tone suggested actual regret.

She added it below the first.

“There appears to be an inefficiency,” a man offered, as if confessing. Then he thanked her for her time before she’d done anything.

They weren’t angry. They weren’t scared.

Mallory photographed the scrap paper during her lunch break and texted it to Jonah. He’d know what it meant. They had a system.

He replied six minutes later: Category?

She typed: Three. Maybe four.

His response came immediately: Send more.

During a team meeting, something hit her office window.

The sound made her jump. A bird, small, wings beating frantically against the glass for a moment before it dropped.

Mallory leaned toward the window. On the ledge below, the bird lay twisted. One wing bent underneath itself. Its eyes were still open.

She took a photo.

“Mallory?” Trent’s voice came through her speakers. “You’re muted.”

She unmuted. “Sorry.”

Her manager smiled through the camera.

“We’re seeing predictable responses to adjustment,” he said. “Change can feel uncomfortable, but alignment brings clarity.”

His voice stayed smooth.

Mallory started recording.

“What’s aligning?” someone asked.

Trent paused just long enough to notice.

“Our expectations,” he said.

Mallory waited for someone to push. To ask whose expectations, or what happened if you didn’t align, or literally anything.

Nobody followed up.

She muted her microphone, stopped the recording, and sent it to Jonah with a timestamp. Then she stared at her hands until the meeting ended. Her knuckles had gone white around her coffee mug. She flexed her fingers and watched the blood return.

On the ledge, the bird hadn’t moved.

A bus drifted onto the sidewalk on Thursday afternoon.

Just a grinding sound and then a dull impact that Mallory felt through her feet a block away.

She ran outside with half the block, phone already in her hand, already recording.

A man was pinned against a newsstand. Blood pooled beneath him, dark against the concrete, spreading in a widening circle. One arm lay at an angle that made Mallory’s stomach turn.

A crow lay three feet from his head. Its feet curled into tight claws. Head wrenched to the side. Feathers disrupted like it had thrashed.

People gathered in a loose semicircle, standing at polite distances, maintaining the kind of spacing you’d use in a checkout line.

“Emergency services have been notified,” a woman said calmly, phone in her hand but not raised, not to her ear. Her knuckles were white. “No need for further action.”

Mallory’s breath caught. She moved toward the man before she could think, stopped by the ring of bodies that wouldn’t move, wouldn’t part.

“He’s dying,” she said, and her voice cracked on the second word.

“Yes,” the woman agreed, with the same tone she might use to confirm the time. “That has been identified.”

Mallory tried to push past her, but the woman’s hand caught her elbow firmly.

“Please,” Mallory said.

“Your concern has been noted,” the woman replied.

The ambulance arrived. No siren.

Mallory kept recording.

The EMTs moved casually. One knelt, checked for a pulse, and shook his head. The other was already filling out forms on a tablet.

“This individual has expired,” he said. His breathing was shallow and careful.

No one reacted.

Except Mallory. She made a sound she didn’t recognize.

The EMT turned to her with mild concern. His face arranged itself into something sympathetic. “Your distress is understandable,” he said. “Please remain calm.”

She watched them load the body. Watched the crowd disperse. Watched people merge back into the foot traffic as if nothing had interrupted their day.

No one touched the crow.

That night, the news ran the incident in under a minute. No footage. No interviews. Just reassurance. The anchor’s face stayed pleasant throughout. “An individual experienced a transportation incident today,” she said. “Services responded appropriately. No disruption to traffic patterns occurred.”

Mallory recorded that too.

Then she sent everything to Jonah: the video, the screenshots, her notes. Searched for the man’s name until morning. Tried every combination of keywords. Bus accident, pedestrian death, newsstand, Thursday. Nothing.

She never found it.

At 6am, her phone rang.

“I got your files,” Jonah said. No greeting. They were past that.

“And?”

“This is different.”

“You said that about the water.”

“I was wrong about the water.” His voice was steady. “This is different.”

Mallory sat up. “You’re sure?”

“No. But I’m not dismissing it.”

That scared her more than anything else. Jonah dismissed everything eventually. That was his role. He was the brake. She was the accelerator. When he stopped pumping the brakes, it meant something.

“Where?” she asked.

“Usual place. One hour.”

They’d met in college. They’d been wrong about almost everything since.

The diner still took cash. The waitress knew them as “those two” and brought coffee without asking.

Mallory slid into the booth across from Jonah. He already had his laptop open, three browser tabs visible, his phone face-up on the table.

“Show me,” he said.

They went through everything. The sparrow. The window bird. The crow. The bus footage. The news clip. The phrases from her callers.

Jonah took notes in a document they’d maintained since graduation. 847 entries. This would be 848.

“I’m on the forums,” he said. “There’s threads from Madrid, Stockholm, Singapore. Same patterns.”

“Language?”

“Identical tone. And—” He turned his laptop. “Toronto mentioned eye contact issues. Berlin said ‘the birds know.’”

Mallory felt something cold in her chest.

Two booths over, a couple spoke quietly.

“I appreciate your patience,” the man said, his hand resting on the table between them, not quite touching the woman’s hand.

Mallory and Jonah both stopped.

“There is no inconvenience,” the woman replied, her voice carrying that same careful formality Mallory had heard on her support calls. “Your adjustment period is expected.”

“I’m trying,” the man said, and something in his voice caught.

“Your effort has been noted,” the woman said.

They were both typing before the couple finished. Shared document. Both adding to it. Timestamps. Recording started.

“Category four,” Mallory said quietly.

Outside, a man tripped on the curb and fell hard. His briefcase skidded into the gutter. His palms hit concrete and immediately started bleeding.

They both flinched, then immediately started recording through the window.

The man pushed himself up slowly. Blood ran into his eye from a cut on his forehead. He smiled faintly. His chest rose and fell too quickly, breath coming in short gasps.

“I am functional,” he said to no one in particular.

A woman walked past him, stepping over his briefcase.

No one stopped to help him.

He collected his things, dabbed at his eye with his sleeve, and walked on.

Jonah was pale.

“You seeing the birds?”

She looked where he was pointing.

Three in the parking lot. One looked like it had been trying to fly and just stopped mid-air. Its neck craned back at an impossible angle. Another lay near a tire, wings spread and stiff, frozen mid-struggle. The third had its beak open, one leg extended like it had been reaching for something.

“I’ve been seeing them for days,” Mallory said.

“Everyone’s seeing them. But no one’s saying anything.”

“No one ever does.”

The city changed without announcement.

Traffic smoothed. Sirens became rare. Conversations ended decisively, without the usual trailing off or promises to continue later.

Mallory noticed emails from city offices no longer used names.

Your request has been evaluated. No further action is required.

The signature lines were gone. Just blank space where someone’s title used to be.

She documented it all. Every email saved. Every phrase catalogued. Every timestamp recorded.

Mallory tried to do something irrational at work. She raised her voice. Cried during a call about billing, real tears, the kind that came from weeks of watching people sand themselves down into something manageable.

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

Then: “Please hold.”

Trent joined the call. He smiled through the camera.

“Your emotional transparency has been noted,” he said. “It will be factored appropriately.”

“Factored into what?” Mallory asked.

Trent’s smile held. “Your continued alignment.”

She hung up and immediately sent the recording to Jonah with three red flag emojis.

The quiet on Sunday morning was different.

Mallory woke to it. The low electrical hum that lived in the walls had dropped into something deeper and steadier.

Jonah was already in her living room. He’d shown up Saturday night with his laptop and three external drives. They’d been up until 2am going through everything, building the timeline, cross-referencing patterns.

“You hear that?” she said.

“Yeah.” He was already at the window.

Outside, her neighbors stood in the street.

All of them.

Mrs. Keller stood at the curb, hands at her sides, her face open and expectant. A teenager leaned against a mailbox, face down, scrolling. A man Mallory barely recognized stood near the intersection, posture loose, gaze forward.

More kept arriving. Walking out of houses, out of apartments, onto sidewalks and into the street. No one called to anyone else. No one asked what was happening.

Birds lay scattered among their feet. Dozens of them. Wings bent back. Necks wrenched. Beaks open in silent mid-screams.

No one looked down.

“Are you recording?” Mallory whispered.

“Since I got here.”

“How many cameras?”

“Four angles.”

Mrs. Keller looked up.

Mallory saw her eyes.

They were wide. Too wide.

“Jonah,” Mallory whispered.

“I see it.”

The teenager lifted his head. His thumb kept scrolling. His eyes found Mallory’s window and didn’t blink. His mouth curved slightly upward. His foot rested inches from a bird that looked like it had exploded.

The man by the intersection turned. His expression stayed neutral, patient, the face of someone waiting for a bus.

Every face in the street held the same split. Mouths arranged correctly, expressions appropriate, all the visible markers of people simply existing in public space. But their eyes were drowning.

Then it happened all at once.

Not a sound. Not a gesture. Just every body in the street dropping a half-inch at the same moment, like something had been holding them up and let go. Mrs. Keller. The teenager. The man by the intersection. The woman in the bathrobe. All of them, same instant, same degree.

“Did you see that,” Jonah said. Not a question.

“Yes.”

Neither of them moved.

Then doors opened. Cars started. Someone waved. A dog barked, late, the sound wrong after so much silence.

Life resumed easily.

The birds remained where they’d fallen.

“We need to leave,” Jonah said.

“And go where? You saw the forums. It’s everywhere.”

“Then we document. We get this out.”

“Who’s going to listen?”

Neither of them had an answer for that.

“Back everything up,” she said finally.

“Three drives. Cloud. Physical copies.”

They worked in silence for a while. The apartment smelled like cold coffee. Jonah’s fingers moved fast over his keyboard. Mallory scrubbed through footage frame by frame.

“Cloud’s rejecting uploads,” Jonah said. “Hard fail.”

“Try again later.” She already knew it wouldn’t matter.

She glanced at the window. Mrs. Keller was still there, chin tipped up, eyes on the glass. The teenager beside her. The man from the intersection. A woman in a bathrobe. Two guys in gym shorts like they’d paused mid-stretch.

Mallory turned back to her document. Scrolled up looking for the caller phrases, the exact wording, needing to cross-reference something in the forum posts.

She found the entry.

Persistent smile. Effort to stop.

The date was wrong.

Not off by a day. Not a typo. The date sat three weeks before the courthouse. Before the sparrow. Before she’d had a category for any of it.

She read it again.

Three weeks before she’d stood on those courthouse steps and decided this was the day she started paying attention.

Her stomach dropped.

She looked up.

Jonah was smiling.

Barely there. Like the first tug of a string.

“Jonah,” she said quietly. “Why are you smiling?”

He blinked, surprised, and raised his hand to his face. His fingertips touched his cheek like he was checking for blood.

“I’m not—” he started.

Then he stopped, because he could feel it too.

His hand trembled.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Mallory became aware of her own cheeks.

The muscles deciding something without asking her. Pulling upward with a slow, obedient certainty.

She tried to force her mouth down.

It resisted.

The scream rose in her throat, full-bodied and hot, pressing against her teeth.

Her lips parted.

Nothing came out.

In the darkened window, she looked pleasant and presentable.

The document was still open on her screen. The entry still there, date and all, filed between two other observations she didn’t remember making.

This story isn’t alone…

You’ll find more in Farrago: Volume 1.

This is Not a Sequel: Chapter 3

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:31:22 GMT

The hallway felt narrower than it should have. Light was low. The air had gone cold. The apartment had exhaled after Ryder left, and now it held its breath again, waiting for her to do something it could react to.

Another sound from the bedroom. A soft thump. The rasp of a tongue on fur.

Lady stopped at the threshold. She knelt and peered into the dark space under the bed frame.

A shape shifted, catching what little light reached the floor. A shoulder moved as it licked at itself. The cat paused and looked at her. Copper eyes blinked once. Slow. Unimpressed.

It looked bored. It looked safe. Lady let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

“Ripp.”

She reached under and scooped him up.

“There you are,” she said.

He was soft and warm. He smelled like dust and that expensive salmon kibble Ryder used to complain about. He let out a small, protesting chirp but didn’t struggle. Lady pressed her face into his fur for a second too long. She needed proof.

She found the thin blue strip of his collar. Her finger searched for the silver bell.

She flicked it.

It didn't jingle. It gave a dead little knock.

Lady frowned and pulled him closer to the light. The bell wasn’t broken. It was packed tight with pale fur and a piece of dried grass. Enough to kill the sound.

She picked at it with her fingernail until the bell rang freely. The chime was a needle in the quiet room.

Ripp let out a sharp meow and twisted out of her arms. He landed on the carpet with a soft thud and trotted out, tail high, like the whole thing had been a personal insult.

Lady stayed kneeling. She stared into the dark under the bed. Nothing moved.

She stood and backed out, closing the door.

Her laptop was open in the corner of the living room, the one spot that pretended to be an office. The Zoom window filled the screen. She slid her reading glasses on before the four faces resolved into their little boxes.

“Okay,” Reba said. She had short gray hair and looked like she’d been born inside a quarterly review. “Updates, blockers. Ronda, you’re first. Give us the wins.”

Ronda leaned forward. Their mouth moved. No sound came out.

“Mute, Ronda,” Reed said. He wasn't looking at the lens. He was looking three inches to the left at a teleprompter or a ghost.

Ronda clicked. “Sorry. Uh, yeah. Analytics dashboard is live. Already seeing some interesting patterns in open rates. I’ll send the deck after this.”

“Great,” Reba said. Her voice was flat as a table. “Reed?”

Reed adjusted his camera. “Working the onboarding flow. Design sent mockups. I'm taking them to product this afternoon to see if they'll actually fly.”

A faint pressure settled behind Lady’s eyes. A dull weight pressing against the back of her skull. She shifted in her chair and pushed her glasses up.

“Lady,” Reba said. “You’re up.”

Lady glanced at her notes. Ink. Bullet points. She’d written them earlier. Or last night. The words looked familiar in the way a grocery list looks familiar. You trusted them because you had to.

“I’m coordinating the launch,” Lady said. Her voice sounded thin. “Emails are done. Scheduled for Friday.”

“Blockers?” Reba asked.

“No blockers,” Lady said. A reflex. A small lie to end the day.

“Great. That’s everyone,” Reba said.

“Before we jump off,” Reed said, “do we have visibility into the next phase? Just want to make sure we’re all aligned.”

Reba’s hand stopped. It was a tiny thing. A stillness in her posture that changed the air, like the call had brushed a boundary it didn't have access to.

“Good question,” Reba said. “Let’s take that offline.”

The call ended. The boxes vanished.

Lady stared at the empty Zoom window. Her own reflection hovered in the dark glass. She tried to reconstruct the meeting. Who said what. What Reba’s “offline” had actually meant.

The pressure behind her eyes tightened, sharp for a moment, then flattened.

She shook her head and opened her email. The documentation was already there. Timestamped. Clean. A thread of decisions laid out in sequence, neat as if someone had been tracking her life more closely than she had.

She scrolled through it once. No gaps. No questions.

Lady sat back and let her eyes unfocus.

Ripp hopped onto the arm of the couch. He gave her a slow blink. Normal. Annoyed.

Lady stood and walked to the kitchen for water.

The trash can lid sat slightly crooked. Somewhere inside, Ryder’s latte cup sat in the bagged garbage where it had landed. The apartment felt calm the way a room feels calm after it wins.

On the counter sat the bottle of Malbec.

The one that was missing.

Empty.

Lady stopped so fast her shoulder bumped the doorway trim. She stared at the bottle until her eyes started to sting.

Behind her, Ripp’s bell gave a tiny, clear ring.

Somewhere down the hall, the floor answered with a creak.

🧨 Short Fuses: The Slick Ones

It felt like an inner wrist. Then it opened its eyes. A short story about the things that come back after the rain.

🎧 Hidden Tracks: Still of the Night

She changed the locks. She hung the bells. She answered when it spoke. A story about what follows you when the person who knew you best won’t stop.

Short Fuses: The Slick Ones

Miles Carnegie — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:30:20 GMT

It started after the rain.

Bridgeport stank of river mud and drowned things. The earth soaked until it wept black water from every crack. Billie Crenshaw squatted at the bank with his worm bucket between his sneakers. His fingers were black with soil. The river swelled, brown and slick, breathing against the shore.

He dug into the bucket. The dirt was wet, collapsing around his hand, alive with wriggling.

Until his thumb slid across skin that wasn’t worm-skin at all.

Photo by Julian Zwengel on Unsplash

Warm. Smooth. The texture of an inner wrist.

He dragged it up. It came writhing from the soil, pale and heavy. Its body humped in his palm, gleaming as if it had been dipped in motor oil. At its tip, where a worm’s blunt head should’ve been, a face opened its eyes.

Tiny. Human.

The lids fluttered. The mouth opened, pink lips trembling. No sound came, only a wet hiss that made Billie’s gut tighten.

He dropped the bucket. More spilled out, sliding through the grass. Half a dozen pale, boneless lengths. Some had their eyes sealed shut. Others stared wetly, mouths yawning open and closed like they were gasping for air.

Billie ran. He gagged the whole way home, the smell of the river clinging to his skin like sweat.

That night the rain came again. Billie lay on his bed. He bit his nails until the quicks bled. Every muscle in his legs remained tense, ready to bolt.

The first tap on the window was soft. Then came the smear. Something heavy dragged its belly up the pane.

He sat up. He saw them. Pale lengths pressed to the glass. Their faces flattened white where they pushed through the rain.

One had his grandmother’s sunken cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Another had his best friend’s chipped front teeth. The last one was Billie. It looked just like him, but its tiny, wet forehead pulsed against the glass.

They mouthed his name in silence. Their lips split on teeth too small for sound.

Billie didn't move. The rain hadn’t washed them away. It had brought them back, and they were waiting for him to open the latch.

This story isn’t alone…

You’ll find more in WRONG CHANNELS.

Hidden Tracks: Still of the Night

Miles Carnegie — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:30:12 GMT

Photo by micky studio on Unsplash

Gwen found the muddy footprints outside her bedroom window just after six, too large to be a dog.

She stood in the wet grass in an old Blink-182 shirt and boxers, phone in one hand, coffee breath still sour in her mouth, and looked down at the flower bed like it might explain itself if she gave it enough time. The prints came from the side fence, crossed through the dead marigolds, and stopped three feet from the glass.

Not dog. Not coyote.

The ground there was churned down hard, pressed flat in a rough oval, like whatever made them had been there a while.

Gwen looked up at the window. Her window. Left side of the bed.

“Jesus,” she said, but softly.

She crouched and took pictures.

In the photos the tracks looked worse. One had a long, almost human heel. Another showed four blunt forward marks sunk deep in the mud. Toes, claws, same difference. She zoomed in until the image broke into grain and blur.

Her hand shook. She told herself it was the cold.

It was late October and the little rental still smelled faintly like cedar, even with the windows cracked. She had been there nine days. Nine days in a one-story house at the edge of Waverly with a gravel drive, a leaning shed, and enough distance from the road that nobody could casually see who came or went.

That had been the idea.

She stepped back and nearly planted her bare foot in the biggest print.

“Shit,” she muttered.

The morning had that flat gray look Ohio got when the sun was up but not yet committed. Behind the house, the tree line stood packed tight, all trunk and shadow. A dead vine tapped lightly against the siding near the kitchen corner. Somewhere down the road a truck started, coughed, and pulled away.

There were more tracks heading off. Harder to make out once they hit the patchier grass beyond the flower bed, but enough. A drag here. A deep press there. Whatever had stood outside her window had gone back toward the fence and disappeared into the brush beyond it.

Or climbed it.

She thought of the sound that had pulled her half-awake around two in the morning. Not a scratch. Something brushing the side of the house. She had lain still in the dark, telling herself branch, raccoon, cat, wind, anything dumb enough to let her sleep again.

Now there was mud in the marigolds and a spot under the window where something had planted itself and watched her room.

She went inside and locked the back door, though she was pretty sure she had locked it before bed.

The kitchen was narrow and clean in the mean way furnished rentals usually were. Two chipped mugs. A knife block with only three knives in it. A fake bowl of green apples on the table. Her actual coffee sat cooling beside the sink, untouched except for the first sip. She picked it up anyway and drank. It tasted burnt and thin.

Her phone was on the counter where she’d left it charging overnight.

Three missed calls.

Blocked number.

Gwen stood very still for a second, coffee mug halfway down from her mouth.

The calls had come in at 1:12, 1:19, and 1:43.

There was a voicemail.

“No.”

She said it to the phone like that settled things. Then she hit play.

At first there was nothing. Just the dry static sound of an open line and somebody breathing too close to the microphone. She almost hung up.

Then a voice, low and worn down around the edges.

“You left the side window cracked.”

Gwen stopped breathing.

The voice went on, quiet as a confession.

“It sticks at the bottom corner.”

The message ended.

She stared at the phone. Hit play again. Same breathing. Same voice. Same sentence in the world guaranteed to make the house feel occupied.

The side window. Bottom corner. Left side of the bed.

Nobody knew she was here except her sister, the landlord in Chillicothe, and one friend in Columbus who had promised, hand to God, that nobody would hear a word.

Gwen set the mug down hard. Coffee slopped over the rim and ran across the laminate.

“Great,” she said to the empty kitchen. “Love this.”

She deleted the voicemail.

Her hands wanted something to do. She wiped up the coffee. She checked the back lock again. She walked to the bedroom and looked at the window from inside.

The voice had been right. The lower left corner never sealed all the way unless you lifted and shoved at the same time. She had learned that the first night and said, out loud to nobody, “Good enough.”

Apparently not.

The curtain that hung there was thin and cheap and cream-colored, which seemed suddenly like a stupid color for anything meant to keep the world out.

Gwen pulled it closed anyway.

By eight-thirty she was in town.

Waverly looked the same as it had when she was seventeen and desperate to get out. The gas station by the highway still sold fried bologna sandwiches under a heat lamp. The old pharmacy still had the sun-faded Pepsi sign.

She parked outside Rhodes Hardware because it opened early and because she needed longer screws, a better curtain rod, and maybe a knife if they sold common sense in a box by the register.

Inside, the place smelled like fertilizer, cold metal, and stale popcorn from the machine by the door. A radio played something old and twangy from the back office. Mr. Rhodes himself was behind the counter in a John Deere cap, reading glasses halfway down his nose and a yellow legal pad in front of him.

He looked up when Gwen came in.

“Well,” he said. “A Hendricks.”

She hadn’t been a Hendricks in twelve years, and he knew that. Small towns liked to keep your old names handy in case they needed to cut you down to size.

“Morning, Ronnie.”

He nodded once. “Your aunt’s place treating you all right?”

“Mostly.”

“‘Mostly’s’ Ohio for ‘bad’.”

“‘Mostly’s’ Ohio for ‘I need longer screws’.”

That got half a smile out of him. “Aisle four.”

Gwen grabbed a basket and headed there. Screws, a new latch plate, one of those metal dowels for sliding windows.

Ronnie wandered over while she was comparing two boxes.

“You hear anything out there last night?”

Gwen looked up. “Why?”

He shrugged like it had only just occurred to him to ask. “Turner place lost three hens Tuesday. Dog over on Blain Road came back opened up pretty good.”

“Coyotes?”

“Maybe.”

He said it the way people said maybe when they meant no.

Gwen set the heavier box in her basket. “I had tracks outside my bedroom window.”

Ronnie’s face did not change much. That bothered her more than if he’d laughed.

“Big?”

“Too big.”

“Hm.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“Depends what you’re asking.”

“I’m asking if there’s something out there I should worry about.”

Ronnie scratched once at his jaw. “There’s always something out there to worry about.”

“Ronnie.”

“Get a floodlight. Motion sensor. Don’t leave food out. Keep your doors locked.”

“I already lock my doors.”

“That’s good.”

His tone made her hate him a little.

She pulled out her phone and showed him one of the pictures. Ronnie held it away from himself, then closer. Looked at the print a beat too long.

“Could be a big dog,” he said.

“Sure. A dog that knows what side of the bed I sleep on.”

That brought his eyes up to hers.

For one second, just one, she saw recognition there. Not of the tracks. Of the sentence. Of what it meant for somebody to know where you slept.

Then it was gone.

“You got anybody bothering you?” he asked.

Gwen looked back at the picture. Mud. Broken stems. One pressed shape in dirt.

“Used to.”

Ronnie waited.

She put the phone away. “Not anymore.”

He cleared his throat and nodded toward the counter.

“Take the good screws, not the cheap ones. Cheap ones strip.”

“Thanks.”

“Also,” he said, and now he sounded like he was talking around something. “If you hear anything again tonight, don’t go outside to investigate. People watch too many movies and get themselves killed.”

At the register she added a motion light, two batteries, and a can of wasp spray the size of a fire extinguisher.

When Ronnie handed over the bag, he said, “Your aunt used to keep bells on the back gate.”

Gwen blinked. “What?”

“Little silver ones. Christmas-looking things. Drove her nuts at night, but she said they worked.”

“Worked on what?”

Ronnie shrugged. “She never said.”

“That’s comforting.”

He handed her the receipt. “You want comforting, go to church.”

Outside, the air had warmed a little. Gwen loaded the bag into the passenger seat and sat behind the wheel without starting the car.

Across the street, a black SUV idled at the curb in front of the laundromat.

It could have been anybody’s. There was nothing special about it except the long crack in the left headlight and the smear of dried road salt up the side panel.

Gwen stared anyway.

She had not seen that SUV in months. Not since Columbus. Not since the last night, the screaming one, when a glass shattered against the wall and left a glittering crescent in the drywall, and the person she’d left stood at the counter with both hands flat, jaw jumping, eyes fixed on the floor like looking up might make things worse.

Her phone buzzed.

You alive?

Gwen stared at the screen. Then typed back:

Define alive

The dots came back almost instantly.

Did Rory find you?

Gwen went cold all over.

A got a voicemail.

Liv picked up on the first ring. “Fuck, Gwen.”

Gwen could hear traffic behind Liv and a cart rattling over pavement.

“Get in the car,” Liv said. “Drive here.”

“Bring what?”

“Yourself would be a good start.”

“I don’t want you in this.”

“Then drive to the sheriff’s office.”

“And say what? Hi. My ex is stalking me and there’s a coyote with boundary issues?”

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“The thing where you make it sound stupid so you don’t have to say it’s real.”

Gwen looked through the windshield at the SUV. When she looked again, it was pulling away from the curb.

“I only needed one week,” she said.

“You were never getting a week.”

Across the street, the laundromat door banged. Someone laughed. Gwen barely heard it.

Liv lowered her voice. “Lock everything. Keep your phone on, but don’t answer back like you’re still together.”

That almost got a laugh out of Gwen. Almost.

She ended the call and drove home.

At the gate, she saw them.

Three little silver ones tied there with red thread, bright as candy in the gray yard.

Gwen stood looking at them a long time before she made herself move. She cut them down with scissors from the junk drawer and wrapped them in a dish towel. Then she hung them from the latch on the side window.

Not because she believed in anything Ronnie had said. They made noise, and she was done with surprises.

The rest of the afternoon she spent making the place meaner.

She replaced the flimsy screws in the strike plates. Jammed dowels into the back windows. Mounted the motion light over the rear door and had to finish the last screw by hand because the old drill in the shed coughed once and died like it had made a choice.

She carried the wasp spray and a hammer into the bedroom.

By dark, every light in the house was on.

The place looked ready for something she did not want to name.

Gwen stood in the bedroom and watched the yard disappear inch by inch behind the cream curtain. Even with the curtain drawn, the full moon left the yard too visible. She kept her phone in her pocket. No more calls to Liv. No sheriff. No lies she could not afford.

At nine-fifteen, the motion light flashed on and off once, though nothing crossed the yard.

At nine-forty, the bells on her bedroom window gave a single bright chime.

Gwen went still, one hand on the dresser.

At ten, something brushed the outside of the house.

Not scraping. Not clawing.

A body passing close.

Gwen snatched up the wasp spray and the hammer.

Her throat tightened. Every sound in the room sharpened. The tick from the wall clock. Her own breathing, too fast and too loud.

Then the voice came from just outside the window, low and close.

“Gwen.”

She shut her eyes.

Not because she was shocked. Because of how familiar it sounded, hearing her name in that voice.

“Go away,” she said.

A shape moved behind the curtain. Not enough to make out a face. Just enough to prove someone was standing there.

“You should have kept driving,” the voice said.

“You should have stayed in Columbus,” Gwen said.

Then, very quietly, “I tried.”

The hammer turned slick in Gwen’s hand.

“You don’t get to do this here,” she said.

“By tonight, it won’t matter.”

“That supposed to make me feel better?”

No answer.

Then the voice came again, closer now. So close she heard breath hitch on the other side of the glass.

“Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

The first hit shook the glass hard enough to rattle the whole frame.

Gwen jumped back and the sound that came out of her was not fear, it was pure furious reflex, the sound of someone who has been patient long enough.

The curtain kicked inward. The bells snapped against the latch. The lower left corner lifted half an inch and slammed down again.

The second hit cracked the wood.

Gwen yanked the curtain aside and sprayed the wasp killer straight through the gap. She held the trigger down longer than she needed to.

The sound that came back was part scream, part animal, and all wrong. A dark shape reeled away. Wet fur. One eye catching the light. Too many teeth in too little space.

She stumbled back hard into the dresser and stood there breathing.

Outside, the motion light flashed on.

For one clean second she saw the whole thing crossing the yard. Tall on two legs, then down, then up again. Shoulders wrong. One arm hanging lower than the other. Dark around the mouth.

Then it hit the corner of the house and was gone.

“No,” Gwen said.

She started to run.

The bedroom window boomed again just as she hit the doorway.

She turned in time to see the lower pane burst inward.

An arm came through first, dark and matted, too long from wrist to elbow. The hand clawing for the latch was almost human except for the nails and the way the joints bent wrong around the frame.

Gwen brought the hammer down with both hands. She wasn't thinking about survival. She was thinking about the wine glass that shattered against the wall in the Columbus apartment. Rory staring at it like it had appeared there on its own.

The thing jerked back with a choking sound. Blood splashed the sill. The hand vanished.

She didn’t wait.

She lunged back, ripped the bells off the latch, shoved the broken curtain aside, grabbed the lower sash.

The head shoved through the gap. One eye catching the light.

Gwen slammed the sash down on its neck and leaned on it with everything she had.

The thing thrashed. One arm clawing at the siding, the other hooking at the sill. The smell hit her all at once. Wet fur. Blood. Dirt. Under it, something that had no business being here. Soap. Cheap gas station coffee. The cedar candle from the Columbus apartment.

Her throat closed.

She leaned harder.

“Gwen,” it said.

The voice did what the teeth hadn’t.

Its hand found the bells where they had fallen in the struggle. The sound it made changed. Not louder. Stranger. Shocked and raw and cut off fast. The fingers jerked back. Where the silver touched skin, smoke curled up in thin gray lines.

Gwen stared at her own hands on the sash. Stared at the smoke.

Little silver ones. Christmas-looking things.
Your aunt used to keep bells on the back gate.
Drove her nuts at night, but she said they worked.
Worked on what?

She had asked that like there was going to be any answer she wanted.

The full moon. The shape in the yard. The teeth. The voice.

The silver.

Her aunt had known. Ronnie knew enough to keep passing it along.

“Oh my God,” Gwen said.

Not coyote. Not human.

A werewolf.

She snatched up the red thread of bells and looped it around the trapped throat.

The smell changed at once. Burned hair. Burned meat. Something sharp enough to sting.

The claws caught her across the forearm. Pain opened there bright and clean and she welcomed it because it was simple and everything else was not.

She twisted until her wrists screamed.

The shoulder tore free.

The thing came through in a convulsion of fur and broken wood and dragged her with it because she still had the bells wrapped tight and was not letting go, was not doing that, was not giving an inch of this.

They hit the floor together.

Its weight drove the air out of her. The face above hers kept shifting by fractions. Snout pushing out then pulling back. Too many teeth, then only teeth that were too long. One eye human with pain in it.

“Don’t let me,” it said.

Gwen got a knee up and shoved.

Not enough.

The mouth opened over her throat.

Her free hand found the wasp spray. She jammed the nozzle into its mouth and held the trigger down and did not stop until it recoiled, choking, head snapping sideways.

She came up on one knee and grabbed the hammer.

It lunged blind.

She swung once into the side of the skull. She felt it in her shoulder, in her back teeth. Once into the shoulder. The third time it caught the hammer in both hands. The silver burns across its palms were bright and wet, already blistering.

It looked at her.

Really looked.

She saw the burst blood vessel in the left eye. The small one near the tear duct. The one she used to notice in the bathroom mirror while Rory shaved the side of her head and asked if it looked even.

The hammer dropped from its grip.

Gwen drove the claw end into the gap at its throat where the bells had bitten deep, and hit bone, and felt nothing about it except done.

The body convulsed once. Hard.

Then it went down against the bed and did not get up again.

The bedroom went quiet except for Gwen’s breathing and the slow metallic ring of one loose bell spinning on the floor.

She stayed where she was, crouched with the hammer still in both hands, staring.

The motion light outside buzzed through the broken window.

Blood crept off the dresser and onto the floor in a thin line.

Nothing moved.

Then the body changed.

Not all at once. Not clean.

The long bones pulled back under the skin in sharp little jerks that turned Gwen’s stomach. Fur thinned in wet patches. The jaw shortened. One hand opened on the floor, human now except for the blood and dirt packed under the nails.

The face kept shifting under the blood.

By the time it finished, her ex-girlfriend was lying on the bedroom floor with Gwen’s aunt’s silver bells driven into her throat.

Rory’s eyes were half-open.

Gwen set the hammer down and sat back hard on the broken glass.

She did not feel it.

Rory’s hands lay open at her sides. Both palms were burned where the bells had touched.

Gwen looked at the hands.

Rory had grabbed the bells.

Rory had come through them anyway.

Rory had always known exactly what frightened her.

The locks. The waiting. Someone standing just outside the room, knowing the shape of her fear before she said a word.

Rory had known it well enough to use it.

Well enough to bring it here and die under it.

Outside, the motion light clicked off.

The bedroom dimmed.

The liner notes are below. Song, schematic, what got cut.

01 — The analog connection

The moment the feedback loop closed

It wasn’t the guitar. It was David Coverdale’s breathing.

That opening verse is almost a cappella. He’s just there, close to the mic, barely any reverb. You can hear him decide whether to say the next word. That’s a stalker’s voice. Not the movie kind who monologues. The real kind, the one who already knows what window sticks. The song is built around controlled restraint detonating into something barely contained and somewhere around 1:11, with Coverdale murmuring “in the still of the night” for the third time, the bedroom window in this story slammed open in my head.

The track is surveillance music. It just took me thirty years to hear it that way.

Then there’s the voicemail. Three calls, blocked number, between 1:12 and 1:43 AM. The voicemail doesn’t threaten. It reports. “You left the side window cracked. It sticks at the bottom corner.” That’s not a message from someone who wants to scare you. That’s a message from someone who’s already done the site survey. The horror isn’t that Rory is outside. It’s that Rory is describing the house from the outside like an inspector filing notes.

The song does the same thing. Coverdale isn’t chasing anybody in that first verse. He’s watching. He already knows where you are. The violence in the chorus is just the filing cabinet slamming shut.

02 — The technical schematic

The motion light

It’s a $28 piece of hardware. Passive infrared sensor, two halogen floods, a 180-degree sweep arc.

The motion light trips twice before the attack. Both times, nothing visible in the yard. After the fight it clicks off on its own. The device worked perfectly. It just couldn’t tell her what it was tracking.

03 — Riff/beat alignment

The bridge at 3:46 and the window sash

The song drops almost completely out at 3:46 before the guitar solo. Four full seconds where Coverdale stops singing and there’s just the band marking time, slow and deliberate. It’s the pause before the overhead swing.

“Gwen drove the claw end into the gap at its throat where the bells had bitten deep, and hit bone, and felt nothing about it except done.”

That beat in the story had to happen in silence. Not internal monologue, not described emotion. The fight is already loud and messy and wrong. The killing stroke needed to land in the gap, the way that bridge drops out. I cut four lines of action before it and two lines after it to create the room. The sentence runs long on purpose — it accumulates weight and then stops. Same as Sykes coming back in at 3:50 at full volume. You feel the space that preceded it.

04 — The Stephen King ledger

What got killed, and why

Version I killed

“The smell hit her all at once, something feral and intimate, the familiar candle now threaded through with blood and wet animal and a grief she hadn’t finished with.”

Version I kept

“Wet fur. Blood. Dirt. Under it, something that had no business being here. Soap. Cheap gas station coffee. The cedar candle from the Columbus apartment.”

The first version is doing too much work on Gwen’s behalf. “A grief she hadn’t finished with” is me translating a physical sensation into emotional language before Gwen’s had time to process it. She’s in a fight. She’s leaning on a window sash trying to break something’s neck. Her brain isn’t synthesizing meaning. It’s cataloging: fur, blood, soap. The cedar candle comes last because recognition is the horror, not grief. Let the reader feel the grief. Gwen’s just smelling it.

05 — For paid subscribers

Think about whatever you use to keep something out. Your lock, your alarm, the motion light you installed after that one weird night. Now think about the moment the thing you installed it for actually shows up, not a test, not a false alarm. Would the device give you a clean confirmation, or would it fail in a way that still told you the truth? What does your system’s specific failure mode reveal about what it was designed for, versus what you actually needed it to do?

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This is Not a Sequel: Chapter 2

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:35:00 GMT

Ryder had left a note on the counter, a yellow Post-it stuck beside the sink like a small flag of surrender.

Lady put her reading glasses on out of habit. Black cat-eye frames, sharp at the corners. Ryder had called them cute and quirky once. She wore them anyway, and the loopy handwriting sharpened into something personal.

Getting lattes. Back soon.

Lady stared at it.

She peeled it off the counter and held it between two fingers, as if it might be damp. As if it might leave something behind.

The frames pinched at the bridge of her nose, and she adjusted them once, annoyed at herself for needing them just to read a stupid note.

The apartment was quiet. Not the “Sunday morning, we’re safe” kind of quiet. The kind of quiet that made her aware of her own breathing, like she’d become the loudest thing in the room.

Lady crumpled the Post-it and dropped it into the trash.

She waited for the moment where she would feel better.

It didn’t come.

Her toes nudged the bowl by the pantry door as she reached for the kettle, and the little tag on it gave a single, soft clink.

Her hand stopped.

She didn’t want tea.

Tea was a ritual. Measure. Pour. Steep. Pretend the world would follow instructions if you followed them first.

Lady wanted coffee. She wanted a latte. She wanted the dense, hot weight of it. She wanted the foam like a soft lie.

She opened the fridge.

The Brita pitcher was empty again.

Of course it was.

In the middle shelf sat a single container of Greek yogurt, centered like it had been staged for a photo. The foil lid was unbroken. The label faced outward.

Plain. Nonfat. Zero sugar.

Lady stared at it until her eyes started searching the shelf for the missing shape.

The dark bottle.

The red label.

The thing she’d seen last night, like a dare.

Her throat tightened.

She leaned closer, as if the wine might be hiding behind the yogurt like a joke.

Nothing.

The fridge light made everything look clinical. Overexposed.

She shut the door harder than she meant to.

On the counter, her phone buzzed.

Slack.

She didn’t pick it up. She watched it vibrate itself into silence like a trapped insect.

Then it buzzed again. A second message. Then a third.

Lady swallowed. Her brain started drafting the reply before her thumb moved.

Sure, I can take that.

No problem.

She flipped the phone over. A green dot next to Ronda’s name. Awake meant waiting. Waiting meant responsibility.

Lady turned the phone face-down again.

That was when the front door clicked.

The lock turned with a heavy, mechanical thud.

Ryder stepped into the kitchen carrying two lattes, his keys clenched between his teeth. He wore a pressed blue button-down. Too pressed for “getting lattes.” Too early for that kind of effort. The collar sat sharp against his throat like he’d been ironed into a version of himself.

He set the drinks on the counter with a careful little thud, like he was placing down proof.

“Morning,” he said.

His eyes flicked to her phone on the counter, face-down. Then back to her. He smiled, quick and controlled, like he’d remembered how.

Lady didn’t answer.

Ryder lifted one latte an inch, a toast to domestic normalcy. “Working hard or hardly working,” he asked.

It was their old line, but in his mouth it sounded like a performance review.

Lady stared at him.

Ryder’s smile held a second longer, then thinned. He didn’t look away. He just stopped looking at her, as if she’d become part of the kitchen.

He went straight to the fridge.

Opened it. Scanned. Found the yogurt.

He picked it up, peeled the foil lid back, and stuck two fingers in. A bite. Casual.

Lady’s skin crawled.

He chewed with the same expression he wore watching sports highlights he didn’t care about. Mildly present. Unmoved.

Lady clocked the yogurt-fingers.

White on his index finger. A smear. He licked it off without thinking. Fast. Efficient. Like he was cleaning evidence.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“Where’s the wine,” Lady said.

Ryder paused.

Not the guilty kind of pause. The confused kind. Like she’d asked him what day it was and he didn’t trust the answer.

“The wine,” Lady repeated, because her voice had gone too small. “The Malbec. The bottle.”

Ryder blinked once. He looked past her, at the counter, like the bottle might be sitting there and he’d just missed it. Then he looked back at her.

“What wine?” he said.

Lady’s stomach dropped.

“The bottle in the fridge,” she said. “Bottom shelf. I saw it last night.”

Ryder frowned, and for a second she saw him actually try. His eyes went back to the fridge again, like his brain was replaying the shelves.

He opened it.

Then he looked at Lady, and his expression softened in a way that didn’t feel like kindness.

It felt like assessment.

“Lady,” he said carefully. “We don’t have wine.”

“Yes we do,” she said, and hated the way her voice rose on the last word. “We did.”

Ryder set the yogurt down beside the lattes like it belonged there. His hands stayed clean. He wiped his fingers on a paper towel anyway. Slow. Deliberate. Like he was buying time.

“Are you sure you’re not mixing it up with…something else?” he asked.

Lady felt heat crawl up her neck again, hotter than last night. Shame heat. The kind that made you want to start explaining your own brain like you were making a case to HR.

“No,” she said. “I saw it.”

Ryder nodded once, too quick. A nod that meant nothing. A nod that meant he was already moving around her answer.

He slid one of the lattes toward her like it solved something.

“Got you your usual,” he said.

Lady looked at the cup.

The lid was on tight. The cardboard sleeve was warm. The brand logo stared up at her like a grin.

She could smell it. Espresso. Milk. Sugar.

It was exactly what she wanted.

That was the problem.

Because it meant Ryder knew. He paid attention in certain ways. He could remember her order, the café’s hours, the small choreography of bringing two lattes so it looked like care.

But he couldn’t remember the shape of a conversation. He couldn’t remember what mattered.

Ryder picked up his latte and took a sip. Foam clung to his upper lip for a second, then vanished. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Lady’s stomach flipped.

“You’re dressed up,” she said.

Ryder looked down at his shirt like he’d forgotten he was wearing it.

“Big day,” he said.

“What’s big about it,” Lady asked.

Ryder hesitated. Tiny. A fraction of a second where his brain decided what she got to know. Then he shrugged.

“Meeting,” he said. “Client thing.”

Lady waited for a name, a detail, a hook.

None came.

“You didn’t tell me,” she said.

Ryder’s smile appeared, quick and controlled.

“I didn’t think it mattered,” he said.

Lady stared at him long enough that the smile went stale.

The Slack notification buzzed again on the counter. Lady didn’t pick it up. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

Ryder glanced at it anyway.

“Work,” he said, like an accusation.

Lady’s fingers tightened on the cup.

“Yeah,” she said. “Work. The thing that pays our rent.”

Ryder’s eyes narrowed. Not angry. Assessing. Like she’d said something he might use later.

He let out a short breath through his nose. Not quite a laugh.

“You’re doing that thing,” Ryder said.

“What thing,” Lady asked.

“The thing where you start a problem,” he said, “and then you want me to fix it.”

Lady stared at him. She could feel her heartbeat in her teeth.

“I’m not starting anything,” she said.

Ryder took another sip. Swallowed slowly. Tilted his head like he was humoring a child.

Lady lifted her latte and drank, because she needed something in her mouth that wasn’t words.

The coffee hit her tongue like comfort.

It tasted like surrender.

Ryder watched her drink. His shoulders loosened. Like the argument had been handled. Like the latte was a tranquilizer that worked.

Lady put the cup down.

Ryder’s eyes flicked to her phone again. Then back.

He glanced at the clock. Not long enough to actually check it. Just long enough to invoke it.

“Meeting at nine,” he said.

“Do you want me to be late?”

There it was. A trap shaped like responsibility.

Lady felt herself start to fold. She hated how predictable her body was, how it still wanted to preserve the relationship the way it preserved her job. Make it smooth. Make it calm. Be the person who didn’t make things difficult. Be the person who didn’t ask the wrong questions.

Lady nodded once.

“No,” she said. “Go.”

Ryder’s shoulders loosened.

“I’ll see you later,” he said.

Lady didn’t answer.

His gaze lingered. Something in her chest went still. Then he smiled and picked up his bag.

“Try not to stress,” he said.

He lifted his latte and took the last sip like he was finishing a task. Then he walked to the trash can and dropped the cup in.

It hit the bagged trash with a soft, wet thunk. He didn’t look to see where it landed.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and headed for the door.

At the threshold he paused, just long enough to feel intentional. Not long enough to be kind.

“Seriously,” he said, quieter now. “Don’t do the spiral thing.”

Then he was gone, shoulder first, work bag bumping the doorframe as he squeezed out into the hall.

The lock turned. The door clicked shut.

Lady stood there in the kitchen with a latte and the container of yogurt.

She went to the sink and washed her hands too long. Too hard. Until the skin felt thin.

When she turned off the water, she caught something in the metal of the faucet.

A smudge of movement.

Her eyes went to the living room.

To the hallway that led to the bedroom.

Her phone buzzed again.

Slack. Of course.

Lady picked it up this time. Not to answer. To silence it.

The screen lit her face in the same ugly way it lit Ryder’s.

Her name glowed at the top of the thread. Her profile photo. Her little professional smile. Her hair neat. Her eyes bright.

A version of her that always looked fine.

Ronda’s message sat there:

Hey, are you up? Need you to take a quick look at something.

Lady stared at the words.

Somewhere down the hall, in the bedroom, wood creaked.

Then, a softer sound. A faint tap-tap. Nails on wood.

She set her phone down very carefully on the counter, face-up, like an offering.

Then she walked toward the bedroom. Barefoot.

Like the floor remembered her weight.

🧨 Short Fuses: OK, Boomer

Arthur's mother is thriving at Tranquilion. She thinks it's 1955. She thinks her son is in college. The AI optimized him out. His sister signed the forms.

🎧 Hidden Tracks: Black

Every portrait he made went black overnight. He changed the paint, the room, everything. The black kept coming. Some things won’t let you finish leaving.

Short Fuses: OK, Boomer

Miles Carnegie — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:32:18 GMT

Arthur gripped his flip phone, the knuckles white. He’d been on hold for ten minutes, listening to a synthesized pan-flute loop. He’d already had two arguments leaving the parking lot. One with his sister, Karen, over the phone (”It’s a goddamn robot farm, Karen, and you’re proud of it?”), and one with the parking attendant bot that wouldn’t accept his validated ticket.

Photo by Georg Arthur Pflueger on Unsplash

“Tranquilion,” he muttered, kicking the door open. The name sounded like a pill. The lobby smelled like ozone and lavender. Everything was brushed steel and soft, indirect lighting. No one was at the desk. Of course.

“Can I...help you?” a voice chirped. It came from a small, glowing disc on the counter.

“Arthur Vance. Here to see my mother, Eleanor Vance. Room 312.”

“Of course, Mr. Vance. Welcome to Tranquilion. Your mother is currently in her recall session in the Sun Room. We’ll let her know you’ve arrived.” A pleasant chime. “Please enjoy our amenities.”

Arthur ignored the amenities. He stalked down the hall. The carpet was so thick his shoes made no sound.

He found the Sun Room. It looked like a 1950s soda shop. Vinyl booths. A jukebox. Artificial sunlight streamed through windows showing a perfect, rolling pasture.

And there was his mother. She looked...rested. Better than she had in years. Clear-eyed. She was sitting in a booth, sipping a milkshake, laughing with a woman in a poodle skirt.

Arthur slid into the booth opposite her. “Mom?”

Her laugh, head thrown back, the exact sound he’d chased for years through hospital corridors and hospice beds.

Eleanor Vance looked up. Her smile was polite, bright, and completely blank. “I’m sorry, sir. Do I know you?”

“Mom, it’s me. Arthur. Your son.”

She frowned, a flicker of that old impatience. “I think you’re mistaken. My son... he’s in college. Studying engineering.” She looked at her watch. “He’s supposed to call me tonight. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Betty and I were just talking about the new Sinatra record.”

She turned back to the woman. Arthur just sat there. The woman in the poodle skirt didn’t look at him. She was an attendant. Her smile was as fixed as the windows.

He was back in the lobby in thirty seconds, slamming his palm on the desk. “What did you do to her?”

The glowing disc lit up. “Mr. Vance, your vocal tones indicate a high level of agitation. Please adjust your…”

“Get me a human. Now.”

A door behind the desk hissed open. A man in a crisp gray suit stepped out. He wasn’t smiling. “Mr. Vance. I’m Manager Davies. I understand there’s a concern.”

“A concern? You wiped her memory. She thinks I’m a stranger. She thinks she’s in 1955.”

“Not at all,” Davies said. He motioned to a terminal on the wall. “Your mother’s ‘Recall Environment’ is curated from her peak memory years, yes. It’s our most effective therapy. It reduces cognitive decline by 68%.”

“I don’t care about your stats. Fix this now”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Davies’s voice was calm. Procedural. “When your mother was admitted, our AI began its standard harmonization protocol. It assesses all external stimuli to filter for cognitive dissonance and sources of patient agitation.”

“We all want what’s best for our parents, Mr. Vance. That’s why we remove…friction.”

He smiled faintly, tapping the screen. A file opened. Arthur’s face popped up.

“You, Mr. Vance, were flagged as the primary source of agitation during the intake period.”

“What?”

“Your conversations with staff regarding ‘robot farms.’ Your political discussions during your last three visits. Your...persistent skepticism.” Davies read from the screen. “Your presence was logged as a ‘recurring, counter-therapeutic data point.’ It spiked her stress markers by forty-two percent.”

“So you just... what? You erased me?”

"We didn't erase you," Davies said, with the patience of a man explaining a return policy. "We optimized your mother's environment. The system flagged your entire persona as a cognitive conflict. It's running a protocol to minimize that conflict."

"Her environment." Arthur looked at the walls, the soft light, the brushed steel. "She's in a room."

Davies didn't blink. "It's all in the terms of service your sister signed. We are contractually obligated to provide a harmonized recall environment." He straightened his tie. "And in this environment, Mr. Vance, you are a statistical outlier."

He paused.

"You're a bug."

Arthur opened his mouth, then closed it.

“You are, by contract, barred from ‘disrupting the patient’s cognitive harmony.’ I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

The disc lit up again. “Environment restoring to optimal harmony.”

This story isn’t alone…

You’ll find more in No Kings.

Hidden Tracks: Black

Miles Carnegie — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:31:18 GMT

Photo by Megs Harrison on Unsplash

By November, Jeremy had ruined every canvas in the house.

He kept buying more.

After a while the guy at the art supply place quit asking what he was working on. He just rang up the stretched linen, the oil sticks, the blocks of clay, the palette knives, and gave Jeremy the kind of look that said he didn’t want the answer. Same look you’d give a man buying rope and bleach at ten on a Tuesday.

At home Jeremy leaned the blank canvases against the dining room wall and laid the clay out on the table to soften. Every morning he told himself the same thing. He was going to make Sam right this time.

Younger he could fake. Prettier too. What he wanted was right.

The crease beside her mouth when she was tired. The dent in her left eyebrow from wrecking her bike at eleven. The notch in her front tooth.

He was good at hands. He’d taught Sam hers.

That was the part that kept coming back to him when he got tired enough to hate himself properly. He had taught her damn near everything else, too.

How to stretch a canvas without warping it. How to wedge the air out of clay. How to hold a brush near the end so your wrist stayed loose. How to squint until a face quit being a face.

She learned quick.

Quicker than he had.

She left in February with a suitcase by the door and her brushes still soaking in the jar by the sink.

He noticed that before he noticed she was really going.

Sam would leave dishes stacked up for a day and a half, but never her brushes. She used to say soaking ruined the point.

“I can’t keep being the thing you look at instead of the world,” she told him.

He remembered thinking it sounded practiced, like she’d said it once already in the car with the radio on low, just to hear how it came out.

Three weeks later she died on Route 33 when a delivery truck came across the median in freezing rain and folded her Honda hard enough they had to shut down both lanes.

That much was real.

Jeremy painted her for seven months after that.

The first ones looked good.

Better than good.

Sam by the studio window with weak afternoon light on one cheek. Sam turning away from him, smiling at something out in the yard. Sam with her hair tied up in an old blue rag, clay dust on her forearm, about to say something smart and a little mean.

He worked until his hand cramped around the brush and his lower back felt like somebody had driven a rusty tent peg into it.

Then he went to bed.

By morning the black had come.

It showed up from under the paint, which was the worst part. It bled through in skinny dark threads, spreaing. On one canvas it took the mouth first. On another it filled in an eye. On the third it climbed her throat in a greasy stain and kept going until all that was left was the shape of her under there, like something caught below pond ice.

He told himself it was the paint. Cheap pigment. Bad primer. Moisture in the walls. Some dumb chemical reaction he didn’t understand yet.

He switched brands.

He primed the canvases himself.

He moved out of the studio and worked in the dining room.

He wrapped finished pieces in old bedsheets.

He locked one in the hall closet like he was trying to keep a dog from getting into the trash.

It was black by morning anyway.

He smashed the first few with a hammer. Slashed the next two. Burned one out back in the rusted fire ring that came with the duplex. The smoke rolled up thick and greasy and smelled like hot metal and burnt hair.

He stacked the rest in the spare room with their faces to the wall and shut the door.

He didn’t tell anybody.

Outside, life went on in that stubborn, insulting way it has. Kids in the other half of the duplex hollered in the yard after school. A woman across the street had wind chimes that sounded like cheap silverware in a garbage disposal every time the weather shifted. A guy in a Browns hoodie walked the same beagle every morning at seven-fifteen, rain or shine. On Thursdays a woman jogged past with a stroller and the same hard red face.

The world kept being the world.

Jeremy started taking that personally.

One afternoon he stood at the sink with a glass of water in his hand and watched the duplex kids draw hopscotch squares on the cracked stretch of sidewalk by the fence. One of the girls laughed so hard she had to squat down and hold her stomach.

He squeezed the glass without meaning to.

It shattered in his hand.

He looked down at the blood slipping between his fingers and dropping into the basin.

Out in the yard, the little girl stopped laughing.

She looked up at the kitchen window.

Her eyes were fixed on the space over his shoulder.

Jeremy turned.

The kitchen was empty. Table. Fruit bowl. Two soft apples. The slab of clay under a damp towel by the microwave.

When he looked back, she was still watching.

Then she smiled.

That night he went into the spare room and turned the paintings around.

There were fourteen of them.

Fourteen black rectangles leaning against the walls and each other, dead as old televisions.

If he tipped one the right way and caught the light, he could still see Sam under there.

The newest one had fingerprints in the black.

Jeremy stood there a long time looking at them.

They weren’t his. His fingers were broader, knuckles rougher. These were narrow and long and left a drag mark where the paint was still tacky.

Down in the corner where he usually signed, somebody had written one word.

LOOK

He did not sleep that night.

At three in the morning he was in the studio with every light on, kneading clay hard enough to make his wrists ache. The old heat pipe in the wall gave its usual one-knock complaint. The refrigerator motor came on in the kitchen. Somewhere outside a car rolled past too fast over wet pavement.

Then he heard bare feet in the hall.

He froze with both hands buried in the clay.

The steps came to the studio door.

Stopped there.

Jeremy waited.

Nothing touched the knob. Nothing crossed under the crack. He stood there so long his shoulders began to burn.

Then he wiped his hands on his jeans, crossed the room, and pulled the door open.

The hall was empty.

At the far end hung the mirror Sam had brought home from a flea market because, in her words, “it looks like it knows something.” The silver backing had gone bad around the edges, so everything in it looked a little drowned.

Jeremy saw himself in the doorway. White face. Clay up to his elbows. Eyes too open.

And behind him, in the studio chair, sat Sam.

He saw her hands first, folded in her lap.

Then one shoulder.

Then her face, pale and blurred, like a photograph left too long in water.

Jeremy’s skin went cold.

Her mouth moved.

The voice came from the clay.

“You got the hands wrong again.”

Jeremy spun.

The chair was empty.

He stood there breathing. The chair was just a chair. Paint-stained arms, a crack in the left leg he’d been meaning to fix for two years. Just a chair.

Then he looked at the armature.

He’d only roughed in a bust before he heard the steps. Neck. Jaw. The start of a skull. Now it was almost her.

The damaged eyebrow.
The notch in the tooth.
The hair pulled back over one ear.
The eyes open.

He stumbled backward into the shelf by the workbench. Jars rattled. A wooden tool hit the floor and spun away. The clay face looked at him with the expression she’d worn in the bad months before she left. Worn out. Fed up.

“Sam?”

Its mouth opened.
A wet sucking sound came out, like mud letting go of a boot.

The head smiled.

A crack opened in one cheek.

Something black and shiny seeped out. More leaked from the nostrils, the corners of the eyes, the edges of the mouth. It ran down onto the table in thick slow threads.

From the spare room came the sound of canvases turning over.

All fourteen of them.

Jeremy ran.

He got as far as the front door before he understood he wasn’t trying to leave forever. He was trying to get back to something ordinary. Porch boards. Cold air. Chain-link fence. Sidewalk. Dead grass. Anything still dumb enough to belong to the living.

His bloody hand slipped on the deadbolt.

Behind him, bare feet crossed the hall again. Slow this time. Taking their time. Knowing where he was going.

He got the door open and fell out onto the porch hard enough to skin his knee through his jeans. The air hit his face like cold water.

Across the yard, the little girl from next door stood by the fence in her socks and a nightgown with cartoon strawberries all over it.

She should not have been awake.

She looked at him the way grown people sometimes look at roadkill. No pity in it. No disgust either. Just interest.

Then she spoke in Sam’s voice.

“Squint until it quits being a face.”

Jeremy stared at her.

The girl raised one chalky finger and pointed toward the house.

He turned.

The windows had gone black. Black like somebody had painted them from the inside.

Something wet and thick pressed against the glass. As he watched, shapes slid through it. Hands. Faces. The corners of canvases. A woman turning away.

When he looked back, the little girl was already walking toward her own back door.

She went inside and shut it.

By morning the house was empty.

Jeremy was gone. So were the paint, the clay, the canvases from the spare room.

The deputies called it a walk-off.

One of them said Jeremy had been sliding downhill since the wreck. Split with the girlfriend, then the death, then the isolation. He said it standing in the kitchen like he’d said versions of it a hundred times before and expected to say it a hundred more. The other deputy stayed too long in the studio without speaking, then came back out and asked the landlord if he had any plywood on the property.

By noon the studio window was boarded over.

A week later the family in the other half of the duplex moved out.

The landlord repainted everything twice.

In spring, a young couple moved in with a baby and two ferns and bright prints in cheap white frames. They turned Jeremy’s old studio into a nursery. The woman did freelance design work at the dining room table and brought home charcoal pads and sample boards and little stacks of color swatches held together with brass pins.

She was good at it. She could tell you the difference between a warm white and a cool white just by holding them up to the window. She did it constantly, holding things up to the window.

In June she started sketching while the baby napped.

Her husband found the first drawing behind the nursery rocker, face-down on the floor.

The paper had been worked so hard the charcoal shone. At first it read as black. Then he tipped it toward the window and a man appeared in it, one hand pressed flat against the inside of the glass.

Over his hand, smaller, was a child’s palm print.

The charcoal was still soft when he touched it.

He turned around.

The baby was awake in the crib. Had been for a while, by the look of it. Just lying there quiet, facing the wall where the window used to be before they drywalled it over.

One hand raised.

Fingers spread.

Waiting for something to press back.

The liner notes are below. Song, schematic, what got cut.

01 — The analog connection

The song is already past tense

“Black” isn’t about loss. It’s about the specific moment you realize you’ve already lost something while you were still standing next to it.

Vedder isn’t at the funeral. He’s at the kitchen table watching someone he loves become someone he doesn’t recognize, past tense already baked into the present tense. “I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life.” Not might. Know. The leaving is done before the song starts. He’s just describing the shape of the hole while he’s still inside it.

That’s Jeremy and Sam before the truck ever crossed the median. She had a suitcase by the door and her brushes still soaking, which is how you know the leaving was real. Jeremy noticed the brushes first because the brushes told him what the suitcase hadn’t yet confirmed. The song clicked in at that detail. Sam was already gone. The accident just made it impossible to argue with.

The black in the paintings isn’t grief. It’s Sam coming back through the only medium they ever shared, correcting his work. That’s not a haunting. That’s a collaboration that didn’t end when she did.

02 — The technical schematic

The armature

An armature is a metal skeleton. Wire and rod and aluminum foil, built to hold the clay in place while the sculptor works around it. It has no artistic value on its own. It’s infrastructure. The whole point is that you can’t see it in the finished piece.

Jeremy roughs in a bust before he hears the footsteps. Neck, jaw, the start of a skull. He leaves it unfinished and goes to the door. When he turns around, it’s almost her. The damaged eyebrow. The notch in the tooth. The eyes open.

The wrongness isn’t supernatural smoke. It’s the labor. Somebody finished the work. The armature is still inside. The infrastructure that was supposed to be invisible is now holding something that shouldn’t exist, and it’s doing its job perfectly. Holding the weight. Keeping the shape. Not caring what shape that is.

Jeremy taught Sam how to wedge the air out of clay. How to build an armature that wouldn’t buckle. She learned quick. Quicker than he had. The schematic here isn’t what’s wrong with the piece. It’s who built it.

03 — Riff/beat alignment

The outro and the ending that isn’t Jeremy’s

The song’s outro runs almost three minutes. Vedder stops singing words and starts making sounds. It goes past where a song is supposed to end and keeps going, past resolution, past the point where you expect it to close out. It doesn’t stop because it’s finished. It stops because someone eventually had to turn off the tape.

“By morning the house was empty. Jeremy was gone. So were the paint, the clay, the canvases from the spare room.”

The story doesn’t end with Jeremy. That was the structural decision that took the longest to commit to. The deputies, the landlord, the repaint, the new couple, the baby, the charcoal drawing behind the rocker. The story keeps going past Jeremy the way the outro keeps going past the last lyric. Because it was never about Jeremy. He was the current host. The transmission was running before him and it runs after. The new woman holds things up to the window the same way Jeremy would have. She’s already sketching. The baby is already facing the wall where the window used to be.

The outro told me not to cut the ending off at Jeremy walking out the door. Let it run. See what’s still moving after he’s gone.

04 — The Stephen King ledger

The girl at the fence

Version I killed

“The girl opened her mouth and what came out was Sam’s voice, thin and wrong in a child’s throat, saying the thing Sam used to say in the studio when he was overworking a piece.”

Version I kept

“Then she spoke in Sam’s voice. ‘Squint until it quits being a face.’”

The first version is doing the reader’s job for them. “Thin and wrong in a child’s throat” is me being nervous the image won’t land, so I’m annotating it. The second version trusts that if you’ve been reading for six thousand words, you don’t need me to tell you it’s wrong. You need me to tell you what she said. The line itself is the horror. Jeremy taught Sam that. Sam taught it back through a seven-year-old in cartoon strawberry pajamas at two in the morning. The transmission completed. That’s the whole story in one sentence and it didn’t need a tour guide.

05 — For paid subscribers

Think about a skill somebody taught you that you still use. Something specific, the way you hold a tool, the way you read a room, the way you know when something’s finished. Now think about whether you could actually separate that skill from the person who gave it to you, or whether every time you use it the transmission is still running. What would it mean if the thing they taught you kept going after they couldn’t?

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Hidden Tracks: Little Fighter

Miles Carnegie — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo by Nsey Benajah on Unsplash

The summer we killed the mermaid, the town called it a miracle.

Mara Bennett went into the ground on a Tuesday under six inches of bad February snow. By Friday the town Facebook page was already calling her kind, devout, and a daughter of Blackwater Cove. Nobody mentioned Mercy Point. Nobody ever did. Last time we spoke, Mara told me there was no point stirring all that up now. Friday morning I watched people praise her under a picture taken twenty years too late, and I thought of the ropes on wet stone and decided she’d been wrong about that too.

So I’m writing this down.

That is not what happened on Mercy Point.

What happened was smaller and meaner than that.

I was fourteen the summer of 1988. My mother worked the register at Harker’s Bait & Tackle, and my father fished out of a stern trawler called the Annalee, though “fished” is the nice word for what he and most of the men in Blackwater Cove did by then. They took what they could haul and called the empty water somebody else’s problem. There had been bad seasons before, but that year felt ugly early. Nets came up torn. Traps went missing. Engines stalled in calm water for no reason anybody would admit to. Men who ran heavy lines in breeding grounds came back cussing about something under the boat. The smaller catches they blamed on luck. The bigger ones they called blessing. Everything in between they blamed on whoever wasn’t standing there to argue.

By July, half the town had a story.

Mrs. Bell said something grabbed her husband when he leaned over to clear a line. Tommy Pierce swore he heard a woman singing outside the channel markers during a storm and found his bow pointed toward shore with nobody at the wheel. Reverend Vale, who never met a roomful of fear he couldn’t dress up as certainty, started talking in church about old things in the deep that wore a pleasing face because the Devil understood marketing. That got a laugh the first time. Not a good one. After that, people started bringing him their stories like tithes.

Nobody said mermaid at first.

That came later, after the point had blood on it and the town needed a word it could put on postcards.

I found her three weeks before they killed her.

A storm had come through hard the night before, bad enough to throw lobster floats up on the road. I went down to Mercy Point the next afternoon to look for tackle washed in off the rocks. Kids did that then. Still do, probably. The cave below the point only opened at low tide, a black slice in the stone that breathed cold air even in August. I heard coughing from inside and thought at first it was some drunk or one of the summer people sleeping it off.

Then I saw the tail.

It was caught in a snarl of monofilament and kelp, silver-gray where the light hit it, darker where it disappeared into the cave water. The rest of her looked, from the waist up, too much like a girl for my brain to sort out quick. Dark hair plastered to her shoulders. Thin arms. Ribs showing. A long cut down one side with old hook scars puckered white around it. One wrist wrapped in ghost line so tight it had chewed the skin raw.

She saw me and tried to go deeper into the cave, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. She was weak and tangled up bad. When she bared her teeth, they were just a mouth full of small sharp human-looking points that told me she could bite if she wanted. She didn’t.

I should tell you I ran for help.

I didn’t.

I climbed down into the cave and cut the line away with my bait knife while she watched me like I was one more stupid animal. The whole place smelled like salt and old weeds and blood gone cold. When I got the last of the line off her wrist, she jerked away and hit the back wall hard enough to hiss. Then she stayed there, breathing fast, eyes on me.

I said, “I’m Owen.”

That was a dumb thing to say to something impossible, but I was fourteen and still thought names helped.

She didn’t answer. Not then.

I brought food the next day. Bread from the kitchen, two apples, and three sardines stolen from the bait freezer. She ignored the apples, ate the sardines whole, and turned the bread over in her hands like she was studying it. Her hands were scarred too. Small white lines across the knuckles. A notch missing from one finger. More hook damage around the heel of the thumb.

I came back the day after that and the day after that.

It became a routine. I’d cut behind Harker’s after lunch, tell my mother I was headed to the jetty, and take the path down to Mercy Point with whatever I could steal or carry. Sometimes she let me sit close. Sometimes she stayed in the water and watched me from ten feet away. Once she took my wrist, turned my hand palm-up, and traced the callus where I held a rod. Once she laughed, a short wet sound that scared the hell out of me because it was so normal.

She learned my name before I learned anything about her.

“Owen,” she said one afternoon, careful with it. Not mystical. Not spooky. Just trying the sound out.

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

I asked her name back, but she only tilted her head. Maybe she didn’t have one I could say. Maybe she didn’t think I’d earned it. Either way, that was as far as language got us.

What I remember now, what I did not understand then, were the things she kept in the back of the cave.

A drift of cut net. Rusted hooks. Propeller-shaved boards. A pile of dead fish she’d laid out on the stone. Twice she pushed them toward me and made a low angry sound in her throat. I thought she was trying to scare me. I thought a lot of things a fourteen-year-old boy thinks.

There was a long white seam down her side, old and ugly, like a propeller had opened her and she’d kept going anyway. There were holes healed over near her shoulder that looked made by spear tips. Scars on scars. Whatever she’d been doing out there, she’d been doing it alone.

Mara Bennett thought I was meeting another girl.

In a way, I guess I was.

Mara and I weren’t together. We weren’t anything. But I’d walked her home from the Fourth of July bonfire. I’d let her write our initials in the fog on the bait freezer door at Harker’s and didn’t wipe mine away. I liked being liked. That’s the cleanest way to say it. I was kind to her in all the vague little ways boys are kind when they want the warmth of being wanted without the work of answering it honestly.

Then I started disappearing every afternoon.

She followed me on a Thursday.

I didn’t hear her on the rocks above the cave. Didn’t know she was there until I looked up and saw her staring down into the dark. The girl in the water had one hand around my wrist. Mara’s face changed by degrees. First confusion. Then hurt. Then the kind of embarrassment that turns mean before you can stop it.

“Who is that?” she asked.

The hand around my wrist tightened.

“Nobody,” I said.

It was the worst thing I said that summer, and I said worse later.

Mara looked at me for a second like she didn’t know who I was anymore. Then she turned and climbed back up the rocks so fast she slipped once and barked her shin hard enough to curse.

That night she told her mother.

Kids hand things to adults all the time because they still think adults know what to do with them.

By breakfast her mother had told Reverend Vale. By noon there was money on her head.

Men who had whispered all summer suddenly got loud. They had a cause now. They had a reason to be ugly in public.

Mara came to our yard just after lunch, already crying.

“I only told my mother,” she said. “Owen, I didn’t know.”

Behind her, down at the marina, I could hear men shouting to each other and somebody laughing too hard.

I said, “You should go home.”

She grabbed my arm. “Tell them it isn’t true.”

But it was true. That was the problem. There was something in the cave. I had seen her. I had fed her. She knew my name.

I shook Mara off and ran for Mercy Point.

They were already there.

Reverend Vale stood above the rocks in shirtsleeves with his Bible tucked under one arm like he’d been invited to bless a boat. Earl and my father had a seine net stretched across the mouth of the cave. Pete Sutherland, who was older than God and twice as tired, stood off to one side with his hands in his pockets and wouldn’t meet my eye. Half the town was behind them. Men from the docks. Women from church. Kids I went to school with. Mrs. Bennett with one hand locked around Mara’s wrist so tight it had turned the skin white.

Nobody looked like they thought they were at a killing.

That’s the part that still turns my stomach.

They looked like they were at a job.

The tide was low enough to show wet black rock all the way down. The cave breathed in and out under the point. Earl shouted for the men to haul, and they did. The net came up heavy. For one second nothing happened. Then she hit it from inside hard enough to make all six men stagger.

Somebody in the crowd screamed.

“Hold fast,” Reverend Vale said, like he was talking through a difficult birth.

They hauled again.

She came out in a knot of net and spray, thrashing only to get back to the water. No claws. No weapon. No song. Just panic. My father got the rope around the tail and jerked hard. Earl jammed the hook into the mesh to keep her from sliding free. She hit the rocks shoulder-first and made a sound I still hear in my teeth some nights.

The crowd went dead quiet.

Up close, she looked smaller than I remembered. More hurt. There were fresh cuts where the net had bit into her. Her hair covered half her face. One of the old scars along her ribs had split open again.

Pete Sutherland said, “Jesus, Earl. Leave it.”

Not loud enough to matter.

Earl ignored him. My father put a boot on the rope. Reverend Vale started praying.

She clawed for the water. Her nails tore bloody on the stone. Earl’s hook pinned the net. My father pulled the rope tighter.

I wish I could tell you I ran to her.

I wish I could tell you I shouted.

What I did was stand there with my face burning and my stomach gone hollow while she looked through all of them and found me.

Then she said my name.

“Owen.”

Nobody else on that beach knew she could talk.

Shame hit so hard I thought for a second I might be sick right there between the church ladies and the bait coolers. Not guilt. That came later and kept coming. Shame was quicker. Hotter. Cleaner. She knew exactly how they had found her, and so did I.

They dragged her far enough up the rocks that the tide couldn’t take her back. They held the rope when she bucked. Earl kept the hook in the net. Reverend Vale prayed louder when she made sounds he didn’t like. My father hit her once with the flat of an oar when the tail nearly worked free. After that the fight went out of her in pieces. The breathing got higher, thinner. The hands stopped clawing. The eyes stayed open.

Mara was crying openly by then. So was I, though I didn’t make a sound. Pete Sutherland walked away before it ended. Everybody else stayed.

By the time the tide turned, she was still.

The first person to call it a miracle was Reverend Vale.

He said it right there on the rocks with the blood not yet washed away.

By Sunday he was preaching deliverance. By Labor Day there were out-of-towners buying Polaroids of Mercy Point from the drugstore. The town put up a plaque ten years later that said, in bronze, SITE OF THE MERCY POINT MIRACLE, AUGUST 1988.

The first year after, the boats came in heavy.

That’s important too.

Men slapped each other on the back and said the Lord had broken a curse. Nets came up full. The point stopped taking gear. Nobody heard singing in storms because there was nobody left to hear it from. My father bought a newer engine. Earl Dunphy got a second truck. Reverend Vale said obedience brought reward.

Then the years after that started adding up.

The breeding fish got thin. The schools moved. The worst boats went farther out and came back with less. Storms chewed bigger bites out of the shore. The water near the point went brown some summers and lay there stinking. Kids still fell off the jetty now and then. None of them washed up alive with stories about a hand at their back.

I learned slowly. The way stupid men learn anything that matters. One pattern at a time.

The nets she cut had belonged to the men taking too much. The gear that vanished was set in nursery ground. The boats that lost power were the ones that ran past the markers in spawning season. The dead fish in the cave were not trophies. They were warnings. She had not been hiding from us because she was afraid of people in general.

She had been standing in our way.

I was old enough to help kill her before I was old enough to understand what she’d been trying to save.

Mara and I spoke about it once.

It was years later, behind Saint Jude’s after my mother’s funeral. People were inside eating ham sandwiches off paper plates and talking too loud because death makes some folks hungry. Mara had a cigarette in one hand and her purse tucked under the other arm like she meant to leave before anybody asked her to stay.

She asked if I still lived out by the point.

I said yes.

She nodded toward the road. “I can’t go down there anymore,” she said.

I waited.

After a minute she said, “Funny, the things people used to believe around here.”

Not happened. Not did. Believed.

“She said my name,” I told her.

Mara flinched. Just once. Then she dropped the cigarette, crushed it out with the toe of her shoe, and said, “We were kids. People got worked up. There’s no point stirring all that up now.”

I understood exactly why she said it. That was the worst part. By then I’d spent half my life doing the same thing in quieter words.

So no, I did not hate Mara more than I hated myself.

She handed the match to the wrong people because she was hurt and fourteen and I had made an idiot’s mess of her heart. I stood there on the rocks because I was ashamed and fourteen and too scared of my father to put my own body between hers and the town.

They turned it into a crusade. They gave it a reason. They blessed it and sold it and set it in bronze.

That is Blackwater Cove’s miracle.

Here is mine, if I get one.

She was real.

She fought a war none of us had the decency to understand.

They took her life and called that salvation.

They were wrong.

Because she did not vanish.

The water kept telling the truth after she was gone. In empty breeding grounds. In brown tide. In storms that came harder. In the dead quiet where something had once pushed back. All these years later the town still tells the story like it saved itself from a monster.

Mara is buried. My father is buried. Reverend Vale is buried. Earl Dunphy went into the harbor drunk in 2003 and never came back up. The plaque is still there. Tourists still take pictures. Kids still dare each other to climb down to the cave at low tide.

If you go, you won’t find bones.

The sea keeps what belongs to it.

The liner notes are below. Song, schematic, what got cut.

01 — The analog connection

The only hair metal song that filed a report

Mike Tramp wrote “Little Fighter” about seal hunting. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No metaphor, no romantic subtext, no girl in a red dress. An animal being killed by people who don’t understand what they’re destroying, and a singer who watched it happen and couldn’t stop it and wrote the song anyway because that was the only thing left to do.

In 1989 that made White Lion the weird earnest kids at the party. The song doesn’t fit the genre. It’s too direct. Too specific. The rest of the album is standard-issue arena rock. Then track eight drops and Tramp is just standing there telling you what happened.

Owen is doing the same thing. Mara is in the ground, the town is writing the lie in bronze for the second time, and Owen is sitting down to file a deposition. Not a eulogy. Not a confession designed to make himself feel better. A factual correction to the public record. “That is not what happened on Mercy Point.” He’s not being poetic. He’s being precise. The song told me exactly what register the story needed to live in. Earnest. Specific. Too direct for the room it’s in.

The song is also about accountability that arrives too late to change anything. Tramp can’t unclub the seal. Owen can’t unstand on those rocks. The report gets filed anyway. That’s the whole frequency.

02 — The technical schematic

The plaque

SITE OF THE MERCY POINT MIRACLE, AUGUST 1988. Cast bronze, mounted to stone, installed by the town of Blackwater Cove ten years after the fact.

The plaque functions perfectly. It identifies the location. It names the event. It anchors the story the town decided to keep. Tourists photograph it. Kids dare each other past it. The Polaroids moved product at the drugstore for years.

The wrongness isn’t in the plaque. It’s in the word miracle. A miracle is an intervention from outside the natural order. What the town did on those rocks was entirely inside the natural order. Entirely human. They hauled the net. They held the rope. They hit her with the flat of an oar. They stood there and watched. The plaque marks the spot where that happened and calls it something else, and it does so in a material specifically chosen because it doesn’t corrode. Bronze outlasts the people who commissioned it. The lie is load-bearing infrastructure now. That’s the schematic. A device doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is make forgetting official.

03 — Riff/beat alignment

The bridge at 3:10 and the moment she says his name

The song drops almost completely out at 3:10. The guitars pull back. Tramp stops pushing. Four or five seconds where the track just breathes before the final chorus comes back in at full weight. It’s the moment where the song stops performing grief and just holds it.

“She looked through all of them and found me. Then she said my name. ‘Owen.’ Nobody else on that beach knew she could talk.”

Everything in that scene is loud and moving until that sentence. The men hauling, Earl’s hook, Reverend Vale praying louder over sounds he doesn’t like. Then she finds Owen in the crowd and says his name and the whole story stops. One word. Three lines. Then the scene keeps going because it has to, because the tide doesn’t stop and neither does shame.

I cut two sentences of Owen’s interiority that had been sitting between “she said my name” and “nobody else on that beach knew she could talk.” They explained too much. The bridge in the song doesn’t explain anything. It just holds the space open long enough for you to feel the weight of what’s coming. Owen’s explanation could wait. The three lines needed room.

04 — The Stephen King ledger

The ending and why it stays

Version I killed

“If you go down to the cave now, you won’t find bones or evidence or anything the town could point to. The sea reclaims what belongs to it, and she had belonged to it longer than any of us had belonged to anything.”

Version I kept

“If you go, you won’t find bones. The sea keeps what belongs to it.”

The first version is Owen explaining his own ending, which is the thing Owen has been doing his whole life instead of acting. He’s a man who understands things a beat too late and then describes his understanding carefully. The story earns that voice because it’s honest about it. But at the end he doesn’t get to editorialize about what she deserved. He gets two sentences. The first one answers the practical question. The second one is the only claim he’s earned the right to make. She belonged to the sea. Full stop. Everything else is the town’s voice, not his. Kill the receipt. Keep the verdict.

05 — For paid subscribers

Think about something in your town, your neighborhood, your industry, that has an official name for what happened. A plaque, a designation, a founding story everybody repeats. Now think about what the thing that got cleared away to make room for that story would say if it could file its own report. Not the monster version. The accurate version. What was it actually doing before it became the thing that needed to be dealt with?

Miles Sings 🎤

Miles Carnegie — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:50:58 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

Hidden Tracks: Don't Stop Believin'

Miles Carnegie — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:32:03 GMT

The liner notes are below. Song, schematic, what got cut.

Hidden Tracks takes its titles from songs I heard when I was the right age to let them all the way in. Then it drags them somewhere darker than the lyrics were ever willing to go. You don't need to know the songs to get the stories. But if you do, they're going to sit differently after this.

Photo by LaRon Rosser on Unsplash

She sat on her hands until Cadillac Center.

Not because the seat was cold. The whole car was cold. The People Mover always felt over-air-conditioned after midnight. She sat on her hands because they wanted to pick at her cuticles until they bled. They wanted to grab the door handles while the car was still moving.

The car gave its little electronic chime and rolled on.

Black window. Lit platform. Black window again. Each station gave her face back for a second, pale and flat in the glass. Brown hair tucked behind one ear. Mouth pulled into a thin, white line. Teeth grinding.

Across the aisle, a man in a Tigers cap slept openmouthed. Two teenagers got off at Broadway and laughed too loud on the platform. After that it was just her and the hum and the recording voice thanking her for riding.

She counted stations to keep herself present.

Grand Circus Park. Broadway. Greektown. Bricktown.

I came up slow tonight.

The smell was old, which usually means distance. I have learned not to trust that.

She was already sitting on her hands. That’s how I know the day was bad before the train. She lost count at Michigan Avenue. I didn’t.

At Financial District the doors opened on an empty platform and she smelled wintergreen.

Her back tightened.

A man stepped in before the doors shut. Forty maybe. Maybe older. Dark raincoat. Hair going gray at the temples. He nodded once to nobody and took a place by the opposite doors.

He did not look at her.

That should have helped.

It didn’t.

He stood with one hand around the pole, and when the train pulled out his ring gave a faint scrape against the metal.

She looked down so fast her neck hurt.

The backs of her thighs remembered cracked vinyl before the rest of her did.

Wintergreen.

I know what wintergreen means. I have known since the night I learned her name, when I was new and she was thirteen and the dashboard was green and there was nothing I could do but wait for it to be over.

I filed it a long time ago under do not stay.

The man came on and stood by the opposite doors and did not look at her. I watched him. The ring scraped the pole and I felt the backs of her thighs remember the vinyl before she did. I remember it cleaner. That’s my job. She gets the voltage, the fragments, the taste of something chemical and bitter. I get the whole picture because somebody had to remember and she couldn’t.

Thirteen years old. Her hand under her own thigh because moving it would make things worse. The dashboard green. The smell of wintergreen. His ring on the doorframe, then the gearshift, then wherever he needed it to be next.

I made myself out of that night. I made myself out of the rules.

Sitting gets you boxed in. A ring on metal is not just a ring on metal.

She tucked her hands farther under herself.

The man in the raincoat was not doing anything. True. He was just there, staring at the ad panel over the windows like he cared deeply about off-site parking rates. But there was an alertness in him that rubbed wrong.

The car lights flashed over the glass.

At Renaissance Center she got off.

She did not remember making the decision. One second she was on the train staring at the floor in front of her boots. The next she was standing on the platform with the doors closing behind her and the train moving away, her own face sliding past in the dark window.

The platform was almost empty. A maintenance guy in an orange vest pushed a broom near the far stairs. A woman in scrubs stood under the route map with her head tipped back and her eyes closed. Somewhere water dripped in a slow, patient rhythm.

She watched the train round the curve and come back again ten minutes later like a bad thought.

When it stopped, the raincoat man was still inside.

So was the empty seat she had just left.

She got back on.

I hated that.

The whole point of getting off was to stay off. Platforms have cameras. Booths. Stairs. Choice. The car is a tube with windows that turn into mirrors as soon as the city goes dark enough.

The loop lied to her. That’s its job. It makes movement look like escape. I know the difference.

The doors slid shut behind her with a soft, polite sound that made the panic worse.

She took the bench nearest the front and shoved both hands into her coat pockets. Deep. Knuckles against the lining.

The recording thanked her again.

As the train pulled away she saw the raincoat man in the reflection instead of directly. He was still looking anywhere but at her. That was somehow worse than if he had stared.

This felt like waiting.

At the next curve the glass caught her own reflection over his shoulder, and for half a second the face looking back seemed older than it should have been.

Same mouth. Same eyes.

Wrong expression.

She shut hers hard and opened them again.

Only her. Only him behind her in the glass. Only the car.

His ring on the pole again. A small sound.

She flinched. I felt her knee start to jump. The pulse kicked in my throat. Her hand tightened in the pocket until the knuckles showed through the coat.

I moved toward the doors without seeming to.

The old weather was already inside.

At Greektown she realized she had cigarette taste in her mouth.

Not from smoke in the car. There wasn’t any. Just that dry chemical taste, old and bitter, like she had been holding one between her lips too long.

She did not smoke.

She checked the pocket of her coat with one hand and found, for no reason she could explain, a disposable lighter.

It was warm to the touch.

She nearly dropped it.

Pieces came and went. Not long enough to become pictures. A dashboard lit green. Somebody breathing through his nose. A child’s hand trapped under the back of a thigh because moving it would make things worse. Vinyl sticking to skin. A ring tapping somewhere above her.

She bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted blood.

I have been holding it since the night I learned her name. Not a memento. Not a message.

She finds it the way she finds everything I leave. Confused. Certain it means nothing.

It means I was there. It means I am still there.

When the doors opened, the raincoat man turned his head at last. Not toward her. Past her, like he had heard something on the platform.

He had a plain face. Tired, lined, ordinary.

She stood too fast. The lighter dropped from her pocket and hit the floor. It skittered under the bench.

The raincoat man bent automatically, just a little, like anybody might when something fell near their shoe.

She made a sound before she knew she was making one.

The doors closed.

She was still on the train.

I hated that sound.

I have always hated that sound. I know what it costs her to make it and what it means when it comes out anyway, past all the rules and all the counting and all the years of practice at keeping quiet.

Intent is a luxury. You only get to care about intent if being wrong once will not cost you.

If she does not get off at the booth, I will.

She made herself stand at Financial District.

Both hands jammed deep in her pockets. Chin up. One breath in. One breath out.

The raincoat man stayed where he was.

The doors opened.

She stepped onto the platform and did not look back.

There was a glass-fronted booth halfway down with a transit worker inside reading under a yellow desk lamp. Young guy. Beard. Hoodie under the uniform jacket. Human. Bored. Safe.

She walked toward him.

By the second step she heard shoes behind her.

Measured. Certain.

Wintergreen.

She kept moving. The booth glass was ten feet away. Then eight. Then five.

The worker looked up.

“Miss?”

She got her mouth open.

Behind her the shoes kept coming.

“Miss, you all right?”

She reached the glass.

Her face had already changed before she saw it.

That’s always how it happens.

The mouth flatter. The eyes steadier. The look that comes on when this has been happening for thirty years.

The worker’s eyes dropped to her hands, then lifted to her face. His chin pulled back a quarter inch.

She tried to say help.

Her right hand slid out of her pocket and flattened against the glass. The left followed.

She tried once more.

What came out was flat and patient.

“I’ve got her.”

The worker’s hand stopped on the latch.

Her name is Sherry.

In the glass, someone wearing her coat already had both hands in the pockets.

She doesn’t know mine.

That’s fine.

She never needed to.

The liner notes are below. Song, schematic, what got cut.

01 — The analog connection

What the verses are actually about

Everybody knows the chorus. Almost nobody talks about the verses.

A small-town girl on a midnight train. A city boy born and raised in South Detroit. A singer in a smoky room. People in cheap hotels going nowhere in particular, just going. The song isn’t about triumph. It’s about the specific faith required to keep moving when you have no idea where you’re headed and stopping feels like dying. The chorus is the part people put on mixtapes. The verses are the part that explains why the chorus has to exist at all.

The narrator of this story has that faith in its purest, most stripped-down form. It doesn’t know what comes next. It only knows the rules. Sitting gets you boxed in. A ring on metal is not just a ring on metal. Get to the booth. The narrator is “Don’t Stop Believin’” from the inside, the thing that keeps moving in the dark between stations because the alternative is letting Sherry go under.

The song clicked in on the opening riff. That four-note figure that just keeps cycling, same four notes, no resolution, going around. The People Mover is doing that. Same stations, same recording voice, same loop. The riff never arrives anywhere. Neither does the loop. It just keeps going, and inside that loop something is staying awake so Sherry doesn’t have to.

02 — The technical schematic

The loop

The Detroit People Mover runs a 2.9-mile elevated loop through downtown. Thirteen stations. One direction. No branches, no transfers, no way off except the platform you’re already on. It was built in 1987 as the starter segment of a transit system that never got built. The rest of the system isn’t coming. The loop is what exists.

After midnight the cars run near-empty. The recording voice thanks you for riding. The windows turn into mirrors when the city goes dark enough between stations. You can see yourself coming and going at the same time.

The loop’s specific failure as an escape route is structural. It returns you to where you started. Getting off at the wrong station puts you back on the platform, which looks like progress, which is why Sherry gets back on. The narrator knows the difference between movement and escape. The loop doesn’t make that distinction. It just keeps thanking you for riding and bringing you back around.

A transit system designed to go somewhere, running in a circle because the rest of it never happened. That’s the schematic. The device works exactly as built. What it was built to do is the problem.

03 — Riff/beat alignment

The moment the riff drops out and “I’ve got her” comes in

The song builds across its entire runtime without a real break, that cycling riff underneath everything, patient and relentless. Then the final chorus hits and Perry just holds the note and the band holds underneath him. The song stops building and starts being.

“She tried to say help. Her right hand slid out of her pocket and flattened against the glass. The left followed. She tried once more. What came out was flat and patient. ‘I’ve got her.’”

That beat needed to land without announcement. The whole story has been building two voices in parallel, Sherry counting stations to stay present, the narrator running its rules underneath. At the booth glass they merge into one body and one of them takes over. The sentence had to be short. Flat. No explanation of the mechanism, no description of what the transit worker sees, no interiority from either voice. Just the words, and then the story ending on the narrator’s name for her.

I cut a paragraph after “I’ve got her” that explained what the worker did next. It was accurate and completely wrong. The riff doesn’t explain itself when it finally stops cycling. It just stops. The story needed to do the same thing.

04 — The Stephen King ledger

The line that almost got too poetic

Version I killed

“I built myself from the architecture of that night. From what he took and what she couldn’t hold and the space left behind that needed something to fill it.”

Version I kept

“I made myself out of that night. I made myself out of the rules.”

The first version is the narrator being literary about its own origin, which is the one thing this narrator would never do. It runs on rules, not metaphors. “The space left behind that needed something to fill it” is a therapist’s language. The narrator is not a therapist. It’s infrastructure. It came online because the situation required it and it has been running ever since. Two sentences. One fact, one method. The narrator states its own existence the way a system log states an event. Timestamp. Action. Done.

05 — For paid subscribers

Think about the version of yourself that shows up when things go bad. Not the person you are on a good day. The one that comes online under pressure, that knows the rules, that gets you to the booth. Now think about where that version learned its rules, and what it cost to build it. Have you ever thanked it, or do you just let it do the job and then put it away again when the platform clears?

Short Fuses: How Big is God's Dick?

Miles Carnegie — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:32:02 GMT

Photo by josh A. D. on Unsplash

The garage smelled like stale PBR and weed. Kevin said it was a wicked strain called “Event Horizon OG”. The jar was white with a black label. No cartoons. No slogans. Just a warning: Temporary adjustments to local causality. Kevin grinned at the font.

Leo didn’t touch the stuff. He sat on a milk crate holding a drumstick. Mack and Kevin were forty minutes into a riff they called “Dopest Opus.” It ground like teeth on a cold pipe. He’d given up trying to keep time about two minutes in.

“That’s not it,” Kevin said. He adjusted a knob on his Marshall stack. It was one of those newer, solid state models.“It needs to be lower. Like, subterranean.”

“My bass is already tuned to Z dude,” Mack laughed. He took a hit from the bong. The smoke didn’t rise. It settled into the rug in perfect, frozen cubes.

His foot hovered over his pedal board. “Watch this.”

He tapped the switch on pedal called Earthquaker. The lights flickered.

Mack hit the low string. The note was so low it barely qualified as sound. Just pressure. Subsonic weight pressing down on everything. Water bottles vibrated on the concrete. Windows buzzed. Leo’s molars chattered against each other. His chest cavity resonated. He tasted metal.

The air thickened. The space between atoms filled with dense, wet static.

Then Steve appeared by the water heater.

One second, the space next to it was empty. The next, a vertical line of static zapped the air. He stepped out of the flicker like he was exiting a slow elevator.

“Whoa,” Kevin said. He didn’t stop strumming. His pupils had eaten his irises.

Steve wore a beige short-sleeve button-down. A blue lanyard hung around his neck with a blurred ID card. He held a digital tablet and a stylus. He looked at his watch and muttered something about the 5:15 express.

Mack blinked. Squinted at the space where Steve had appeared. Then grinned. “Duuude. Is that the new singer? You bring a mic, man?

Steve didn’t look at the band. He tapped his stylus against the screen with a practiced, rhythmic annoyance.

“DQA,” Steve said. His voice had the flat, exhausted tone of a man who spent his life in a cubicle.

The band just stared at him.

“Divine Quality Assurance,” Steve paused. “You’ve triggered a Level 4 Frequency Breach—”

“You bet I did,” Mack said with a grin, clutching his bass like an axe.

Steve clearly was annoyed. “I have a ticket open for an Unauthorized Reality Query.”

“Query?” Kevin laughed. A thin line of blood started to leak from his left nostril. “Hell yeah. We got questions. Biiiggg ones. Right Mack? Cosmological shit.”

Steve sighed. He looked at the Marshall stack and then back at his tablet. “It’s always the stoner bands. You guys hit that one specific sub-harmonic while taking a toke and think you’ve discovered the secrets of the universe. It’s just bad wiring, kid.”

“Don’t,” Leo said. He stood up dropping his stick on the ground. His pulse hammered against the back of his throat. “Guys, this dude is legit.”

“I have to process the inquiry,” Steve said. He looked at Mack. “What is the nature of the data request? Keep it brief. If I stay past five, I have to fill out an overtime justification form and my manager is a prick.”

Mack grinned.

“Alright, Steve. Tell us the truth. The scale of the big guy. The creator. You know. How big is God’s dick?“

Kevin chuckled. Leo’s jaw dropped.

Steve stopped tapping. “That’s the query? You want a physical measurement of the divine source?”

“It’s a legit question,” Mack said.

“It’s really not—”

“Genesis 1:27,” Kevin interrupted. He was still playing, fingers moving on autopilot. Blood was dripping from his nose now. “’So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them.’” He grinned. “If we’re made in his image, bro, then that image has a dick.”

Steve looked at Kevin with something between respect and despair. “You’re citing scripture to me.”

“Sunday school, baby.” He fist bumped Mack.

“Hell yea. Gonna record this for the album,” Kevin whispered.

Steve sighed. “Fine. You’re technically correct. Which is the worst kind of correct.”

Steve clicked a box and shook his head. “Let’s talk scale. You’re thinking in three dimensions. That’s your first mistake. You’re trying to measure the infinite using a ruler made of meat. It’s like a termite trying to calculate the internet.”

Steve reached into a briefcase that hadn’t been there a second ago. He pulled out a tape measure made of white, pulsing light. He pulled the tab. The sound of the tape extending was the sound of a thousand glass windows shattering at once.

“Look at the line,” Steve said.

Mack looked. His head tilted back. His jaw unhinged. A wet pop echoed in the garage as his mandible touched his chest. He wasn’t screaming. He was making a clicking sound in the back of his throat. His eyes started to leak a clear, viscous fluid.

“You see?” Steve said. He pointed at the tape of light like he was showing a homeowner a crack in their foundation. “If we use the Planck length as a baseline, the ratio is...well, you don’t have a word for the number of zeros. Imagine every grain of sand on every planet in every galaxy. Now imagine each grain is a universe. Now imagine those universes are just the follicles on the shaft. The creator must be larger than the creation. It’s a matter of bureaucratic necessity. Otherwise, the paperwork doesn’t balance.”

Kevin was still trying to play guitar. His fingers had merged with the strings. His ears were venting a fine, pink mist.

“Sick,” Kevin whispered. A glob of grey matter slid out of his ear and hit the concrete with a soft plip.

Leo backed away. He hit the garage door. It felt like paper. He looked at his friends. They weren’t people anymore. They were biological sponges soaking up too much data. Their bodies were failing to contain the numbers Steve was showing them.

Steve retracted the tape. The light vanished. Mack and Kevin slumped forward. They didn’t fall. They turned into two puddles of grey and red probability on the garage floor.

Steve checked a final box on his tablet.

“At least they didn’t make a Big Bang joke.” He looked at Leo. “You didn’t partake?”

Leo shook his head. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

“But you’re the drummer right?”

Leo nodded.

“Huh. That’s a first. Saves me from more paperwork.”

Steve took a step then paused. “Mind if I take the rest of that weed?”

Leo nodded again.

Steve placed the jar in his suitcase and walked toward the laundry room. He didn’t open the door. He just wasn’t there when he reached it.

Leo stood in the silence. The only sound was the hum of the cheap Marshall amp, still waiting for a chord that would never come.

This story isn’t alone…

You’ll find more in Farrago: Volume 1.

This is Not a Sequel: Chapter 1

Miles Carnegie — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:31:00 GMT

Lady tossed her tablet onto the duvet.

“It was so anticlimactic,” she said, taking off her reading glasses and setting them on her thigh like they were breakable. “All that buildup. The calls, the messages, finally being in the same room. And then it gets all weird. Like it forgot what it was building toward.”

Ryder didn’t look up from his phone.

The glow lit his face from below, sharpening his cheekbones, hollowing his eyes. It gave him that campfire story look, except the campfire was an inbox and the story was always about deadlines.

He made a small sound that could have meant anything. Agreement. Dismissal. An accidental vocalization from a man who’d been trained to keep a tiny part of his attention on standby for work, even in bed, even with someone trying to talk to him.

Lady watched his thumb perform the same short, impatient stroke. Scroll. Pause. Scroll. Like he was polishing something invisible.

“I don’t even know if that was the ending,” Lady said. “Or just where it stopped.”

Ryder frowned at his screen.

“What are you talking about?”

“The book, Ryder. The one I just finished.”

“Oh.”

Lady waited for the follow-up. The automatic question. Was it good? What was it about? The small human courtesy that said: I heard you.

Instead Ryder’s phone buzzed once. He angled it away from her without thinking.

Lady’s mouth went dry.

She could guess the world inside that screen. A thread with a subject line that looked like a warning. A calendar invite with the wrong time zone. Someone writing “quick sync” like it was a favor. Or something worse.

Ryder’s life had titles for every hour and none of them were his.

Lady picked up the tablet. She held it up like evidence. “It’s like the author just said, ‘oh look at the time. Let’s call it.’ Guess that’s what I get for listening to a BookTok recommendation.”

Ryder finally lifted his eyes.

Not to her.

To the tablet.

“Maybe they weren’t into each other.”

Lady stared at him. Ryder could file anything down to a relationship problem if you gave him five seconds and a screen to look at.

She scoffed.

She waited for Ryder to say something else. Anything. He didn’t look up.

Lady sat back against the headboard. She felt that familiar double life in her chest. The part of her that could write a rational explanation in bullet points, and the part of her that wanted to scream, what the fuck Ryder?

Instead she said, “Never mind,” because that was what she always said when she wanted something and didn’t want to pay for it.

She swung her legs out of bed.

“I need a drink.”

“Okay,” Ryder said.

He still didn’t look up.

Lady stood there a second longer than necessary. Her brain offered her a petty test. If I say it again, will you look at me? If I leave the room, will you notice?

She didn’t run tests anymore. Not on him. Not on herself. She ran tests all day and nobody thanked her for it. They just wanted the results. They wanted her to prove things were fine.

Lady padded barefoot into the kitchen. The tile was cold enough to feel personal.

The apartment was quiet in that late-night way that wasn’t peace, exactly. More like a pause. A held breath. The building settling. Pipes thinking about water. The distant elevator cables humming like a throat clearing.

She opened the fridge.

A bottle of wine sat on the bottom shelf, label facing out like it wanted to be seen.

Lady froze.

She didn’t remember putting it there. She didn’t remember seeing it the last time she opened the fridge. She remembered, very clearly, deciding she wasn’t going to keep her demons in the house. That had been the agreement.

Heat climbed up her neck so fast it felt embarrassing.

She hadn’t made speeches about it. She hadn’t turned it into a program. She’d just made it a rule, quiet and non-negotiable, the way you do when you’ve learned what your brain will try to buy with relief.

Ryder knew that.

Of course. Of course this was what he did with her. Not the big betrayals. The small ones. The casual ones that told her her rules were optional if they made life slightly less inconvenient.

New place. New chapter. Same old demons, apparently.

Her hand hovered over the bottle and she felt the familiar fork in her head, sharp as a tongue bite.

Wine meant letting the day smear into something soft. Wine meant waking up with a mouth like carpet. Wine meant Ryder making a comment the next morning with that thin amused edge, like he was being supportive but also keeping score.

She didn’t want it.

She wanted to yank him out of bed and make him look at it.

So her hand reached past it.

She grabbed the Brita pitcher instead.

It was light. Almost empty. One more thing she’d have to take care of.

She filled it from the tap and watched the water climb like it was taking its time on purpose. The filter dripped. Slow. Judgmental. When it finally finished, she poured it into the kettle and set it on the burner.

Click.

The flame caught with a soft whoomp that sounded too loud in the dark.

She found the tea behind Ryder’s coffee. Coffee with a name like a tech startup and a price like a punishment. He treated it like a hobby. Like an identity. Like taste could compensate for everything else.

Chamomile was what Lady did when she was trying to behave.

When she was trying to be the version of herself who didn’t spiral, didn’t check Slack at midnight, didn’t picture tomorrow’s standup like a firing squad with friendly faces.

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

Slack.

Lady didn’t pick it up. She watched it vibrate itself into silence like a trapped insect.

Then it buzzed again. A second message. Then a third.

Lady swallowed.

A part of her brain started assembling a reply before she even looked.

Sure, I can take that.

No problem.

I’m still up.

She flipped the phone over.

A green dot next to Ronda’s name. That meant Ronda was awake. That meant Ronda had been awake. That meant the deck still wasn’t done, or the numbers still didn’t look right. Or worse, someone had asked a question in a thread and nobody wanted to be the last person to respond because the last person became responsible.

Lady pictured the little Zoom tiles. The three familiar faces. The same jokes about being tired. The same “quick standup” that never felt quick and never felt like it ended.

She pictured Reba’s black-framed glasses and the way Reba said blockers like the word was neutral, like it didn’t carry teeth. Lady pictured herself answering bright and competent. No blockers. Even when she had blockers. Even when she was the blocker. Even when her brain was a hallway with the lights off.

She turned the phone face-down again.

The kettle screamed.

She poured and dunked the bag. The steam bit her fingertip. She winced, stuck it in her mouth. Clean pain. Simple pain. Pain that didn’t ask questions.

The water turned pale yellow. She watched it bloom, her fingertip beating like a tiny second heart.

Through the window, the city looked like it had been erased and redrawn with cheaper ink. A few streetlights. A few car headlights sliding by like fish in a dark aquarium. The neighboring apartment’s TV flickering blue on a wall.

Lady had wanted a different life. She had wanted the kind where nights were for sleeping and mornings were for waking up without dread in her mouth. She had wanted the kind where she didn’t check messages like she was checking a pulse.

She had wanted to be promoted, too. Not because she loved the work, but because she loved the idea that the work meant something. That she could climb out of the mess by being useful enough.

Instead she’d become the person everyone tagged at 11:47 p.m. because Lady always answered. Lady always fixed it. Lady always came back with a clean version, a better subject line, a calmer explanation.

Lady always performed calm like it was a skill.

She carried the mug back to the bedroom pausing in the doorway.

She’d come back with tea like it was a peace offering. Like you could trade chamomile for a conversation.

Ryder was already on his side, breathing through his mouth. The rise and fall of his back. That safe, stupid rhythm that made her feel like she was the only awake person left in the room.

His phone was facedown now, dark. He’d gone to sleep mid-scroll, the way some people fall asleep mid-apology. Not on purpose. Still effective.

Lady stood there holding the mug, the words loaded behind her teeth.

Did you bring it home?

Why would you do that?

Do you even remember what that does to me?

She could wake him. She had the right. She even had the evidence. She could go get the bottle and set it on the nightstand like a verdict.

But she could already see how it would go. The blinked-at confusion. The defensive tone wrapped in concern. The careful voice that said, Are you okay? like it was a diagnosis.

So she didn’t.

“In the morning,” she told herself.

The words tasted like a delay that would become a habit.

She set the mug down on the nightstand, bumping her glasses.

For a moment they balanced precariously on the edge, then slipped and fell behind the nightstand with a soft clatter.

Without them, Ryder was just a dark shape on a white sheet. A placeholder. Somebody’s boyfriend. Somebody’s future husband. Somebody’s reason to keep trying.

Lady knelt and reached behind the nightstand, feeling blind for the frames. Her fingers found cold plastic. She pulled them out with a quiet, tired sigh and slid them onto the bridge of her nose.

The room snapped into focus. The tea mug’s rim. The knit texture of the duvet. Ryder’s scruff. The small crease between Ryder’s brows.

She tried to remember the last time she’d seen it soften.

She sipped her tea. Steam rose in thin, wavering threads. Her hands felt steady. Her heart did not.

The air felt attentive.

She whispered, so quietly it was almost nothing, “In the morning.”

Not to Ryder.

Not to herself.

To the emptiness.

To whatever was listening.

[ToC] | [Next Chapter →]

🧨 Short Fuses: How Big is God's Dick?

What happens when a bass riff hits the exact wrong frequency and tears a hole in reality? Turns out the universe has an HR department, and they are not impressed.

🎧 Hidden Tracks: Don’t Stop Believin

The midnight train doesn't go where the song promised. It goes to the Financial District, and it doesn't let you off alone.

This Book May Kill You: Start Here ⬇️

Miles Carnegie — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:04:00 GMT

Listen.

Stop scrolling.

Darryl knows you’re there. He knows he’s a character. He knows his world is a draft, unstable and temporary. He remembers the friends the author deleted. He sees the plot holes opening under his feet.

He’s begging you to stop reading. Not because he’s scared of the plot. He’s figured out how the story works. He knows the walls are thinner than they look.

You think you’re safe behind that screen. You aren't. You’re staring into a cage. Every chapter rattles the bars.

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Hidden Tracks: Every song hides a story. These are the ones you didn't see coming. ⬇️

Miles Carnegie — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 23:41:00 GMT

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I grew up in the 80s. Which means at some point, probably in somebody’s basement or a bedroom with the door shut, I put on a cassette and something shifted that didn’t shift back.

Not because the songs were pretty. Because they were honest in a way nothing else around me was being honest. Skid Row. Metallica. Judas Priest. Maiden. Bon Jovi. They were songs about kids with no exits. About soldiers who were never coming home. About the permanent cost of one wrong second.

What I heard in those songs, when I was the right age to let them all the way in, was simple. Other kids were struggling too.

That was enough. That was everything.

Hidden Tracks is my attempt to pass something on. Each story takes its title from a song I thought I understood. Then I twisted it. Took it somewhere darker than the song was willing to go. You don’t need to know the songs to get the stories. But if you do know them, the next time one comes on, it’s going to sit differently. That’s not an accident. That’s the whole point.

These stories show up in my Friday newsletter when a song won’t leave me alone. Sometimes that’s every week. Sometimes it isn’t.
All Hidden Tracks stories are now available to every subscriber. Paid subscribers also get liner notes at the end of each story, where I get into the behind-the-scenes stuff: what sparked it, what changed in revision, what got cut, and what stayed.
Start wherever you want. If you like the backstage version, that’s part of the paid tier.

The stories so far:

Hidden Tracks: I'll Be There For You

Miles Carnegie — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 11:53:57 GMT