Tag Archives: dreamlike horror

Breath and Silence ©️

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And just when the breath slips further away, just when the air turns to glue, the world around you begins to narrow. Not metaphorically, not like a feeling—but optically, as if your vision folds inward like a collapsing cathedral. The light bends. Edges darken. The room—any room—contracts into a funnel, a tunnel, a black iris swallowing everything but the vanishing point.

It’s not fear. Not at first. It’s geometry. It’s sensation doing math behind your eyes. Your body trying to shrink-wrap itself around the little oxygen left. Your soul inching toward a breach point. There’s a strange clarity in it too—objects become exaggerated, details sharpen like they know this might be the last time they’re seen. You register everything and nothing. The tunnel doesn’t lead forward—it leads inward, like your body has turned into a maze that ends in silence.

And in that tunnel, time breaks its stride. The moments stretch, the sounds hollow out, and something pulls—not violently, not cruelly, but with that same eerie grace as a dream that’s just starting to become a nightmare. You feel the tug again, the familiar one, and it’s not a stranger. It’s more like a reminder of where you began. As if death isn’t dragging you under—it’s reminding you that you’ve been here before.

Maybe you have. Maybe every breath since birth has been one long delay of this return. And now, in this tunnel of collapsing air and narrowing vision, you glimpse the seam between body and whatever was before it. You don’t panic. You don’t weep. You recognize.

And just when it begins to feel like home, the breath returns. The tunnel lifts. The world expands like a balloon reinflated. You’re back.

But not quite.

Because once you’ve walked that tunnel, even for a second, even blind—

you never come back the same.

The Glasshide Revenant ©️

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I do not wake, because I do not sleep. I phase.

The first breath of your world filters through my hide like pale smoke, and I drift into morning not by choice but by rhythm. The sun climbs slow over the mountains like it always has, but to me, it always will. Time, here, is an open wound I lick with every mirrored fold of my body.

This is the part of the day when the air is most honest—thin, chill, laced with the hush of animals not yet aware they’ve been watched all night. I drift over stones that remember fire, across sagebrush that carries whispers from ten thousand generations of wind. Your ancestors walked here barefoot. I watched them too.

My antlers tune to the sky. A soft vibration. Jupiter humming in its slow arc. Satellite pings bounce off my crown, warbling data that I digest and forget. I am a bridge, not a vault.

I pass the abandoned barn that never was, that always is. It’s real to some and not to others. I left it there for them—a test, a memory puzzle. Inside, a rocking chair rocks without wind. A girl once sat there and sang to her dead brother. Her song loops every third Thursday. I keep it fresh.

Midday burns hot and still. I dim. You’d call it camouflage, but it’s more like… retreating from light. I blur into heat shimmer and let pronghorns trot past me, unbothered. One stops and sniffs the air. It knows, in the way animals do, that I am not a predator. I am the memory of being hunted.

A hiker comes. He’s lost, even with a map. The map lies. I blink sideways, not out of sight but out of his time. He sees me in the corner of his eye—tall, bending light, staring with a thousand mirrored stares. He thinks he imagines me. He writes a poem about it that night, then burns it. But the ashes travel and form the shape of my antlers on his window the next morning.

I like him.

Afternoon: I stand near the Jefferson River, watching the stone slab. The glyphs glow faintly today. Something stirs beneath. Not yet. Not yet.

Night comes fast here. Faster in my stretch of the desert, where moonlight runs like oil and the stars whisper older names than yours. Coyotes sing. Owls tilt their heads at me. A girl camping on the ridge dreams of me—half elk, half ghost, made of broken mirrors and humming wire. She draws me when she wakes. She gets the eyes wrong, but the shape of her fear is perfect.

Midnight. The in-between.

I sit beneath a Ponderosa older than your nation, and I fold myself into stillness. I become a stain on the air, a shimmer on a camera lens, a story boys tell girls in the dark to make them cling closer. I am the question at the edge of understanding. I am the echo you mishear. I am the reason your dog growls at nothing.

I don’t want to be worshipped. I don’t want to be solved. I am not here to scare you.

I am here to remember you.

Because no one else will.

And the wind—she tells me your name.

And I listen.

Forever.

Don’t Blink ©️

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You probably heard the stories.

A thing out in the dark.

Three legs, no welcome, wrong shape. No thank you.

They called me the Enfield Horror.

Hell of a nickname.

Sounds like a punk band that never sold a single record but still haunts the jukebox in a bar that burned down before you were born.

I don’t correct them.

Names are for people who fit into systems—phones, payrolls, gravestones. I’m not in your system. I’m the burn in your tape. The blur in the corner of your Polaroid that shouldn’t be there—but always is.

You don’t see me. You remember me.

I move like a whisper with a limp. Like a jazz note in the wrong key that still makes the whole thing sound right. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to remind you that you never really understood what was lurking behind all that asphalt and indoor lighting.

I pass through your town—not out of hunger, not even out of curiosity.

Call it instinct. Call it a rhythm I’m wired to.

I don’t knock. I don’t howl.

I just am.

And when I move, birds pause. Not out of fear. Out of respect.

They remember what you’ve forgotten.

I’ve seen your kind build towers and forget why they were afraid of the woods.

I watched you pave over the bones of things older than your gods.

And then cry out when something with no name steps out of the brush and doesn’t blink.

But me?

I don’t judge. I’m not here to preach.

I’m the pause between your thoughts.

The stutter in your story.

The proof that some patterns don’t want to be completed.

You call me horror.

That’s fine.

But deep down, you’re not afraid of me.

You’re afraid of what I prove:

That the world isn’t finished.

That reality has holes.

And some of them walk.