When my crew and I were rescued from the deserted island, they found me covered in blood and surrounded by the bones of the rest of my crew. Now that I’m off the island, I’ll need a new excuse to keep eating people.

I called another exterminator to deal with the rats in my basement. This one hasn’t come out either.

I saw the girl stare at me outside. It was the middle of the night.

She went upstairs to check on her sleeping toddler. The window was open and the bed was empty.

She grasps the stone as she trains in her apartment, punching forward as hard as she can. As long as she holds the stone, Time cannot age her.

Her body is twenty-two. Strong, young, but not too young - not like she was days ago, barely able to climb into bed.

She spends the day training, and the next day, and every day for the next month - backflipping off walls, running back and forth, mountains of pushups. She has to be ready. One moment - that’s all it will take for Time to get her. One moment.

As she trains, she reflects on how long she’s been here. Forty long years. Forty horrible, cruel years.

One night she stops, exhausted. In bed, clutching the stone, she sleeps. She dreams, and she remembers. She remembers the first day she lived in this home. She was twenty-three. She remembers trying to leave, and ending up on the ground older than one could imagine, utterly infirm. She lay there for hours until she got the hint and crawled away from the door, reverting back to her twenties as she went. Forty years of this. Waking up as a helpless infant. Waking up as a ninety year-old. Everywhere in between, for forty years.

She does not know why Time does this to her. She has a hunch that it’s toying with her. She hates it more than she can comprehend.

Her dreams are filled with memories of sobbing her eyes out in sheer despair, screaming for her mother a year into her internment. Always trying to grab the knife faster and faster, faster than Time can move so she can cut her own throat open before it gets her. She’s never fast enough.

She wakes up. Today’s the day. She grasps the stone and rushes the door, smashing it open with a leaping kick. Before both of her feet hit the ground, she’s off down the hallway - the first time she’s seen it in forty years. Her heart is pounding in exhilaration - she’s made it! She’s smiling as she nears the turn to the stairwell.

Except…

She feels it. She clutches the stone but she feels it. Her skin wrinkling. Her muscles weakening so fast. She screams in rage and despair. She reaches the turn for the stairwell, but slams into the ground as she does, her body now in the mid-hundreds. She can’t move. Soon she’s sobbing hard. It was all a game. A game. It had control the whole time. Soon, there’s just darkness.

She wakes up in her bed. The door is closed, and she is now thirty-one. She glances at the butcher knife on the nightstand. With a single purpose, she grabs at it, fast. She’s not fast enough. Her arm, now old, twisted and wrinkled, flops weakly and helplessly onto the nightstand. Filling up, she sobs bitterly, and as she does, she can sense - somehow - from somewhere beyond eternity, cruel and proud laughter.

When the firemen arrived my house was already engulfed in flames. My mom, dad, and brother were still trapped inside, but they’d found me rolling around on the front lawn, hands clenched tight against my chest. I’d tried to stop the fire, and when I couldn’t I opened my second floor window and dropped into the bushes below. They thought from my rolling around I’d been trying to douse flames that had been on me, and the state of my clothes had convinced them I’d been caught in the fire.

A kind man had carried me to the back of an ambulance where a man had examined me. My hands and face were blackened with soot, what remained of my clothes singled and almost burned away, but I was unharmed. They told me it was a miracle I’d not been burned myself.

I sat in the back of the ambulance covered in a thin blanket and watched as the firemen tried to control the flames and save my family. Thousands of gallons of water was poured into my home while a brave few broke in the front door to find my parents and brother. Tears filled my eyes as those men came out carrying my family’s limp bodies. The firemen rushed them to another one of the ambulances. The EMTs slow movements told me everything I needed to know.

One of the EMTs came over to give me the news. He tried to soften it, to speak soothingly to me, but I knew what I’d done. I cried as the nice man tried to comfort me. He told me I’d done the right thing by getting out. That it wasn’t my fault. I knew better.

As he continued to speak softly, to try and help me, my hands began to tingle again. My crying stopped as panic washed over me. The EMT noticed the change in my mood and asked what was wrong. I yelled at him, told him he needed to get away, but he didn’t understand. He thought I just wanted to be left alone. I did, but not for the reasons he thought.

The tingle turned into pins and needles, which soon turned into a warm glow. The blanket I so tightly clutched around me began to blacken and smoke as the warm glow began to turn into heat. The EMT noticed this, puzzled at the little tendrils of smoke starting to pour off me.

As he watched the heat spilled out of me. An orange light surrounded me as flames erupted around my body. The worker stumbled backwards, falling in his haste to get away from me. To my horror I caused a second fire that night as the flames spread from me to the ambulance.

She told me it was the scariest thing she'd ever done, but that was just Sarah, and she gets scared by the toaster... Yet she piqued my interest and I wanted to show her how much of a baby she was, so I decided to do it.

I dimmed all the lights in my bathroom - that's the first thing she said I had to do. After all the lights were dimmed, I closed the door to make sure no other rays of light could make it into the bathroom.

The next part was the trickiest for me; I stared at myself in the near-black bathroom, only the faint hum of the orange light bulbs in my ears. To get it to work I had to remain motionless... After a few seconds, something started happening.

Shapes shifting, shadows moving around on my face, and then I saw it. I jumped in terror and it was gone. I was terrified. But not because I saw it.

Because it saw me.

Ever have the feeling that there is someone standing very close to you? Like when you’re at a concert or in a crowded hallway and you can just “sense” the person next to you? Well that’s me right now. Except for the fact that it’s around 2AM and I’m lying in bed. There is something in my bedroom with me. I sleep facedown so all I can tell is that there is something/someone standing next to the bed. My mind is racing; trying to remember if I locked the door to my apartment before I went to bed.

If I just lay here maybe it’ll leave me alone.

You know that feeling when the heat first turns on and you can feel it wafting out of the vents? I just felt that except it was short, like a breath. It’s scent is horrible. It’s not continuous like my heater would be. It’s vaguely human or at the very least, animalistic.

If I just lay here maybe it’ll leave me alone.

Now I’m trying to figure out where my knife is and if I could get to it in time. Or should I grab my phone? Come to think of it things in my room had definitely been moved when I came home. That would also explain the weird thud that I heard when I was making dinner (I live by myself).

If I just lay here maybe it’ll leave me alone.

Every window in my house is covered. At first, it was just to save on heating bills in the winter and AC in the summer. But then, the darkness just became… appealing. Even during the day, it’s pretty dark.

Save for a pinprick of light.

The peephole in the door is the only thing I haven’t bothered with. It’s like a tiny circular window, easy to cover up and subsequently enclose myself in the black. However, it’s not as if I’ve lost interest in the outside world, I just don’t feel motivated to join it. There’s nothing keeping me from leaving but my desire to live in warm, dark comfort. It always burns at first when I raise my right eye up to the tiny hole and peer out, but I quickly adjust.

It really is amazing.

Everyday, many people pass by my house. Couples, stray cats, intrepid young boys too young to realize I’m still here. It’s all very interesting, and the best part about peepholes is that no one sees you from the other side.

It became like an addiction where I’d remain poised at the peephole for hours, staring and observing the lives of others through the fleeting instants where they were in my vantage point. But things change. Even if I never change, the outside world will.

Violence.

How did this happen? Why can’t the peephole tell me why I’m watching people are committing murders in my front yard, or setting things on fire? Why am I the lucky one? Why am I still here? Do they not realize? Why can’t I pull away from the door, the terrifying light?

Who’s knocking?

I barely see the top of her head, but I know it’s the little girl who enjoys walks with her mom. Her mom isn’t with her. Why must she knock on my door? She backs up, waving and screaming. Her right arm is wounded. Why can’t I open the door? Why are people like this? Why was I idiotic enough to want to see? Who is that man headed for the girl?

Panting, I step away from the door and pretend I can’t hear her screaming. In the dark, my fingers fumble for the square packet. I find it in a room within a room, and peel one off the top.

I approach the door, fingers trembling. First, I run a thumb over the two locks, making sure they’re still just- locked. I put the sticky note over the peephole, and retreat into the depths of my house.

Now all the windows in my house are covered.

Steve figures he's a pretty lucky guy.

He's been unemployed for a while, sure, and he got behind on some bills, but his girlfriend has a steady job. She's been pretty much completely supporting the two of them, and doesn't even mind.

But then, Steve is Cate's life. He knows she isn't very sociable. She doesn't have any friends, and doesn't want any. "Just you, " she often coos in his ear, "You're the only one I want in my life...."

It's nice to have someone love you that much, Steve knows.

Although she was the reason Steve lost his job, calling him several times a day, and stopping by to visit maybe a little too often....

But Steve can forgive her. "I just love you so much," Cate says. "I hated not seeing you all day, and hated the way all those other women were always around you...isn't it better this way, with you home all the time?"

Steve always agrees that yes, it's much better. Cate gets all emotional if he suggests that maybe, just maybe, he could look for a job eventually. "But why? Why don't you want to stay home, and just let me take care of you? You have everything you need from me!"

And then, tears and temper and panic, and accusations and finally, Cate will storm out of the house, telling Steve he doesn't know how lucky he is to have her, how lucky he is she keeps him there, but he's going to learn how lucky he is.....

Steve doesn't know where she goes. She doesn't talk to her family anymore, and doesn't have any friends to stay with, but she usually comes back a couple days later, calling cheerily as she unlocks the bedroom door, " I'm ho--ome! Did you miss me?"

And Steve croaks that yes, he did miss her, terribly, and could he maybe, just maybe, have a drink of water, and could she let him up to go to the bathroom? He apologizes for the messy bed, and for upsetting her, and Cate unties the ropes and gently helps him to his feet. He hasn't been up for several days, and is clumsy and staggering, but Cate coos that it's all right, she forgives him, and "Aren't you a lucky guy, that I hate everybody in the whole world, but I just love you, so much?"

And Steve croaks back that yes, he figures he's a pretty lucky guy.