“Under the Overpass”

Every Friday morning, a new tag appeared on the wall beneath the 9th Street overpass. Always the same mark—sharp, angular lines in black paint, no name, no crew, no flair. Just a single, deliberate glyph, like a warning, or a signature from someone who didn’t care to be known.

No one saw who did it. No cameras caught it. The city workers stopped bothering after a while. The graffiti never crossed onto private property, never spread. Just that one wall.

It was Micah who first paid attention. He was seventeen, skater shoes with no grip left, headphones always half-charged, trying to finish high school before it finished him. He passed the mark every day on the walk to his morning shift at the car wash. After a while, he started to notice things.

One week the paint was still wet. The next, it looked like it had been there for years—cracked and faded. Once, it was scratched deep into the concrete, as if carved with something more than human.

Then the people started disappearing.

First was Kenny, the guy who always sat on the milk crate near the liquor store, muttering stories to no one. Then Jasmine—who sold incense out of her backpack. Then Ray, who used to tag up the west wall with neon bubble letters.

Gone. No body. No search. Just… gone.

Micah started keeping a notebook. He mapped the changes in the mark—how sometimes the lines seemed to shift, bend inward, form something like an eye or a mouth. He asked around, but people got cagey when he brought it up.

Finally, one night, he brought a can of white paint and covered the mark himself.

He didn’t make it to work the next morning.

They found his notebook a week later, left in a broken mailbox two blocks from the wall. No name on the cover. Just the glyph, drawn again and again and again.

The paint on the wall had already peeled off.

And beneath it?

The mark was back.