SIMILAR MINDS

Arrive

The Daily Word #11 — arrive — 330 words

Photo by PaaZ PG on Unsplash

I run a small publication.

I am the owner, the editor, and most days, the janitor of it too. In the beginning, it was only a storage room for dark thoughts. I liked strange horror. Not the kind with monsters jumping from a closet; I liked the kind that quietly sits beside a person and waits.

I started posting prompts.

Writers came. They always surprised me. If I gave them a needle, they built a gallows around it. If I showed one drop of blood, they returned an ocean. Every morning, I opened the submission queue with expectation. Reading stories became a pleasant labor. I often felt I was standing at the entrance of a huge underground cave. Each story arrived from somewhere deeper than I could ever reach myself.

One night, I found an old note. It came from before the publication existed. Before the writers. Before everything. On the paper was the prompt that first pushed me toward dark horror: A letter arrives from yourself.

I looked at it for a long time. Then, I published it. At the end of the prompt, I wrote one sentence: If somebody answers this prompt with a full heart, I think that person may be similar to me.

Submissions began to arrive within hours. I felt satisfied.

Near midnight, one final entry appeared. I looked at the author's name. I closed the page. I opened it again. The name stayed. It was my own name.

At first, I suspected a joke. Then, I checked the profile. The biography was mine. The email address was mine. Every detail belonged to me.

I opened the manuscript. Only one line waited at the beginning: You are reading this now.

I continued. The story described my room. My desk. Even a scratch on the chair beneath me. When I reached the final sentence, a notification sound came. It was a new submission. Without thinking, I refreshed the queue.

The author's name was still my own.

[embed]The Daily Word #11 Friday, June 5thmedium.com

Note Originally written in Japanese. Self-translated with well-worn dictionaries and limited AI assistance.