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Sebastian Michaels
Cosmic Horror & Folklore Author
by Soren Wilder
Chapter 2
If she meant to vanish, the world is helping her. Every road I take folds behind me like a book someone is tired of reading. I sleep in ditches and under signs and the night still finds me. It curls close, listening for her name as if it plans to steal it next. I keep seeing places she might have touched. A fencepost that leans the wrong way. A patch of gravel that refuses to scatter. A door in an empty house that swings open only when I look away. Little hints carved into the ordinary by a hand I remember too well. Something keeps pulling my shadow thin. Not hunger. Not grief. Some other pressure. Some other gravity. As if the world wants to stretch me until I slip through whatever crack she used. I talk to the sky more than I should. It answers by rearranging itself, shapes tightening like knots, bright strands tying themselves into patterns I almost understand. Almost. Almost. Never quite. People tell me to stop looking. They tell me the lost stay lost. But the ground under my feet keeps humming soft as breath, reminding me she once walked here and that the earth never forgets the weight of someone it liked. If she is alive, she is walking a road thinner than mine, stitched between silence and nothing, a place only the stubborn reach after they run out of hope. So I will be stubborn. I have nothing else left. If you see dust rise ahead of you even when the air is still, do not follow it. It is only my footsteps, dragging the world open one mile at a time, searching for a door she did not mean to close.