**((Trying something new—story writing isn’t usually my thing, so feel free to share any feedback!))**

It began with the ticking.

Not the clock—no, that had long since been silenced, its hands twisted backward in a gesture of defiance or prayer. This was deeper. This was the sound the world made when it held its breath too long. When it remembered. The ticking lived beneath the floorboards now, in the pulse of the walls, in the spaces between words.

He stood at the center of the room that was no longer a room, but a mausoleum of unfinished thoughts. Notes pinned to shadows, strings that led nowhere. The walls wept ink. His fingers were stained with meanings that refused to stay still.

It should have made sense. It had to. There was a pattern in the madness. The way the cat’s eyes tracked the mirror. The number of footsteps between the door and the window. The scent of lavender that only arrived at dawn, curling like smoke from a fire no one admitted existed.

He hadn’t slept. Not since the whisper first spoke his name backwards.

(You are close.)

He wasn’t close. He was inside it now. The event, the happening, the unspeakable that they all nodded around like a bruise too deep to press. They told him to let it go. But how do you let go of something that’s behind your eyes?

His notebooks flapped like trapped birds. Pages torn, chewed, rewritten in a language he forgot he knew. The mirror no longer showed him — only the outline of a man unraveling.

(You saw too much.)

No. No, he saw exactly enough. Enough to know that truth was a hallway with no doors, only peeling wallpaper and the sound of something breathing just ahead. He chased it anyway.

And there, on the final page—where his pen should have found revelation—was a circle. Over and over, scratched in until it carved the desk beneath. A hole. A mouth. An eye.

He looked in.

And the ticking stopped.