Paranoia

When my roommate Sutton woke up from a wet dream, she was literally glowing. She claimed it was the most mind-blowing romantic experience of her life—the man’s silhouette, his scent, his body heat felt impossibly real.
Even crazier? When she checked her phone, there was a strange new number saved in her contacts. It belonged to the man from her dream.
While the rest of us shrieked about destiny, o...

"Sophie, come out for dinner."
Mom’s voice seeped through the crack of the door.
I walked over to stand behind the door, when my sister Susan suddenly sent me a message.
"Run away right now. Mom’s lost her mind. She’s going to kill you!"
I stared at those words, my heartbeat racing rapidly.
Moments later, my phone vibrated again in my hand.
The exact same message popped up one after another on the...

In my past life, I kindly took in my girlfriend and brother, only to be pushed into a torrent of acid rain and melted alive. When I opened my eyes again, I was back a month before the apocalypse, only to find that my girlfriend had also been reborn! She was secretly plotting on the balcony to drain my assets to build her and her best male friend's post-apocalyptic love nest? I scoffed, decisively ...

Before the apocalypse hit, my ex-girlfriend called me, laughing like a maniac: "Jack, you pathetic loser—still playing that stupid farming game? Gonna whack zombies with a hoe? Open the door right now, get on your knees, and beg us, and maybe we'll throw you some table scraps."
I listened to the faint scrape of a tactical knife being drawn on the other end of the line, and silently glanced at my c...

Thirty thousand feet in the air, inside the sealed cabin of a commercial airliner, my five-year-old daughter vanished into thin air while I took a thirty-minute nap.
I tore through the lavatories, the galleys, and every overhead bin. The only thing I found was her stuffed bunny, the one she never let out of her sight.
What was even more terrifying was the crew and the passengers. As if perfectly r...

On the second floor of this old Victorian house is a long hallway with a dark red rug. Six doors are evenly spaced along its walls.
We lived here peacefully for ten years.
Until last month, when my seven-year-old sister, Maeve, suddenly refused to set foot in it.
The adults dismissed it as a childish phobia.
Until late one night, hiding under the covers, she pressed her face to my ear and whi...

"You were like a starved beast last night," I complained, spreading jam on my toast.
Gideon's hands froze mid-knot on his tie. He turned to me, his eyes filled with utter bewilderment.
"Nadia, are you out of your mind? I was in the study finishing up that proposal last night. I crashed on the couch at three in the morning. I never even went into the bedroom."
The knife dropped from my hand onto th...

My daughter has been blind since birth. On her eighteenth birthday, she finally received news of a matching cornea donor.
Our whole family was so excited we couldn't sleep that night. My husband and daughter eagerly prepared for the surgery, their hearts filled with hope that she would soon see the light.
But I suddenly slammed my hand on the table and, amidst the family's stunned gazes, proposed ...

He broke down the morgue door, his guttural scream echoing off the cold tiles as he yanked open drawer after drawer.

"Emily!"

Ethan's hands shook violently as he pulled it open. She lay inside, a white sheet draped over her face. With trembling fingers, he peeled back the fabric. Her face was paper-white, lips bloodless, her eyelashes casting faint shadows. So still.

This wasn't the Emily he kn...

Trapped in a lifelong obsession with my flawed face, I found solace only behind beauty filters.
Seraphine, the undisputed beauty of our town, had not only stolen Cillian—the boy I liked—but made a habit of publicly humiliating me.
When I signed up for the Magnolia Queen pageant, I knew I didn't stand a chance. But one foggy morning, while fetching the paper, I found a mysterious silver compact mir...

My roommate acted strangely—an eye peeking through the door crack, a lingering stench, and the shadow of a serial murder closing in. I struggled to find the truth, only to discover her rotting corpse in the wardrobe. It turned out, she was the first to die, and the fear had only just begun.

When the pain started, my mother-in-law called me a monster, then drove off like a madwoman. My doctor slit his own throat in front of me. My husband locked me away "for my safety."
I thought they didn't want my baby. That they were horrified by the child I carried.
But I was wrong.
The thing growing inside me was never my child at all.

Following Aunt Helen’s sudden death and the exhausting funeral arrangements, strange things began happening at home.
A lingering warmth on an empty sofa. Faint footsteps echoing in the hallway late at night.
I couldn't shake the creeping certainty that a third person was hiding in the house with my husband and me.
My husband brushed it off, insisting it was nothing more than grief and severe insom...

"Knock on this door over the noise one more time, and you're dead!"
Calling the cops was useless, and I was too broke to move.
Driven practically insane, I recklessly tore open the black box from the dark web—the seller promised that if I just followed the instructions, it would "eliminate the noise at the source."
Less than half an hour later, the deafening rager upstairs completely stopped.
Thr...

My husband had been traveling a lot lately. Intuition told me he was cheating.
I kept quiet. For his birthday, I gifted him AirPods—secretly linked to my backup Apple ID.
At 10:00 p.m., his "Find My" location wasn't heading to the airport. It had stopped at a decade-abandoned lumber yard.
I floored it, obsessed with catching them in bed.
But when I arrived, I only found a corpse.

My name is Charles Cole, a blind lactation therapist.
Of course, apart from pretending to be blind, all my skills are genuine.
Ophelia sat on the bed and slowly took off her top right in front of me, her beautiful figure revealing its spring allure under the golden warm sunlight.
“Mr. Cole, let's begin!”
I nodded, reaching forward with both hands, yet I didn't dare show the slightest unusu...

My uncle has a hunting cabin in Alaska. Every December, I stay there for a few days.

This year he wasn't there—left me the keys.

When I walked in, I noticed there was a new deer head mount above the fireplace.

Not a whitetail deer. A moose. Very large.

But I noticed its eyes weren't made of glass.

Those two eyeballs looked... too real.

The pupils even contracted in the light.

I texted my un...