Day 1,523

Nana always made us set an extra place at the table, always put the best portions there and left them until we'd gone to bed. We were young enough to not ask questions and old enough to assume she just put the food away when we were asleep.

Then I saw who Nana was feeding every night.

It came pouring from the fireplace like oil-coloured jelly and smelled like something sickly sweet and decaying. I don't know how many nights I sat at the top of the stairs and peered into the dining room to watch it eat but I was there enough to know it didn't take the same shape twice.

Every night it came out the same way, same stench and Nana would say the same words to it ("Welcome home, I made your favourite and kept it nice and cool for you"). Every night it would look like something or someone else, once it looked like my sister.

The last time I spied on it eating, it looked like me. From the way my hair curled to the crumpled pyjamas I wore that night to the way I slouched at the table to the way I held my cutlery. I think it knew I'd been watching it and was fed up of the additional audience.

That was the night Nana went missing.

Day 1,522

There's old gods buried beneath the earth, hair tangled up in tree roots and arms tangled up in wires.

They used to warn us of impending doom and natural disasters through the dreams of prophets.

Now they post videos from dead accounts with unpronounceable usernames.


The more we kill the forests the more awake they become, no longer lulled by nature.

We are slowly smothering then with digitised information until they begin to forget who they are.

They begin to forget what they are and embrace their new place in the anonymous online world.


New temples are carved from unused websites and gibberish domain names with no traceable server.

Their followers like and share their messages, thinking they are just neo-surrealist humour.

All the while deep below us, the old gods toss and turn and ponder the new world.


They aren't sure if they like it yet.

Day 1,521

If a person's been dead for long enough, you don't need to ask anyone's permission to splice their genes. If you have the right permits you don't even need to notify the government. The rules got awfully vague around genetic evolution and the use of corpses, perhaps if they were a little more enforced I wouldn't have found my grandfather's face staring at me from inside that aquarium.

It seems that only direct kin have to be asked and as my parents are both dead, in the eyes of the law I'm too far removed to count. The people who did this to him didn't look as smug as I thought they would, they just looked worried every time the it turned to face them.

There's nothing quite as disconcerting as expecting a normal eel only to see an old man's face instead.

I wondered if it had his voice, if they'd gone that far or if they stopped at the face and the smile. Even the patterns along its skin looked like his moustache and receding hairline. It caught my eye a few times and winked just like he used to when he snuck me sweets from his jacket pocket.

He wasn't the only one they used either.

There was a tank full of fish that all had the same crooked teeth that matched the photo from the "genetic donor". Further inside there were lobsters whose claws ended in fleshy fingers, complete with nails and light hair on the knuckles.

My grandfather's tank was right at the back next to a wall of black glass simply labelled "Moe". I must have stood and stared at my grandfather for so long it felt comfortable enough to move forward without me even noticing until I caught movement in the corner of my eye and saw thousands of little heads fused together to form a humanoid sponge.

They seemed to scream with every breath.

Day 1,520

The actors weren't blind when they auditioned and yet on the opening night they gazed at the audience without seeing a single thing. They moved about the stage with a practised ease born from endless hours of repetition ensuring they didn't bump into anything or anyone.

When they heard the applause of the audience, they were glad for their blindness.

Nothing human could make those sounds.

Day 1,519

We weren't allowed to talk to the people next door, not even if our football landed in their back garden. We weren't even allowed to see our neighbours when our parents went to ask them for our balls back. I never realised how scared they sounded each time until I overheard dad's voice trembling when he promised that this would be the last time we kicked anything over the fence.

After that day we were told to only play outside when there was an adult with us and to never interact with, or bother the neighbours. So we did what any kids would do when told that something wasn't allowed - we did it anyway. Waited until we were certain that our parents were asleep and pushed back the ivy that covered both sides of the fence.

We knew there was a hole in there somewhere, we remembered mum telling dad that next door were using it to spy on us. I figured it might be big enough to look through so we could finally see the garden of our mysterious neighbours but in reality it was big enough that I could have straight up walked through it.

Needless to say we felt pretty freaked out that the spyhole was so large and we talked it into ourselves that the neighbours must have monstrously huge eyes or three heads each. We never realised that they'd seen us looking through and were just as curious about us as we were of them.

From that night on we all felt like we were being watched but I was the only one who caught a glimpse of anything. We couldn't tell our parents that we'd broken the biggest rule they ever gave us so we just lived with far less sleep than we should have.

Especially me.

The neighbours would climb over my window, hands and feet sticking to the glass.

They kept trying to open it from the outside, covering the entire ledge in brutal bitemarks of frustration.

Day 1,518

Just west of Barra, right in the outermost Hebrides, there is an island that hasn't been seen for over two hundred years. The remnants of a tropical storm touched down, mixing with the harsh northern air and an unusually warm undercurrent that's kept it perfectly in place all these years.

Boats wouldn't go near it for fear of washing ashore and getting trapped among a culture that hasn't seen outsiders for such a long time. Of course as the years progressed, the world only grew more and more fixated on the longest standing storm ever known.

Rumours soon began to flitter about, talks of disrupting the storm and freeing the island. Counter-talks wondered if the island's ecosystem might have already adapted to the eye of the storm and after two hundred years, what culture had been brought up by it.

As arguments flew between furious keystrokes, a plan was already underway. Several planes dropped specially made early-release firebombs over the weaker parts of the eye wall and set the perfect storm loose to drift about the oceans once more, leaving utter chaos in its wake as the island experienced its full force.

When the first few boats docked they expected to be met by survivors, furious and utterly alienated from their forced isolation but instead they were met with an eerie silence. As they walked up rickety wooden stairs to the main body of the island they saw the carnage the storm had caused.

Not even the birds survived its fury, their broken bodies scattered among the rubble of old stone homes and the motionless figures trapped beneath them. The world wept for the island it had killed with its curiosity and then it moved on.

The nameless islanders did not.

Day 1,517

The worst monsters are the ones that have been lurking inside us for years. The ones we pretend don't exist, pretend everything is fine and we don't need to see a doctor of any description. We didn't even realise these monsters were as alive as we were until they decided to leave us.

It feels... cathartic. Like you're tearing out a chunk of your soul to better yourself, ignoring the way it trembles on the tiled bathroom floor, newborn and unsure of itself. They grow up so fast, slinking their way down drains, through open windows and out into the great wide world.

When they came back we hardly recognised them as the same grey-tinged, rusty red sludge that had poured itself from our burning throats mere months before. Some were almost uncomfortably human, though their skin swirled like oil against tarmac, while others refused that pretence and embraced every bit of nightmare fuel we'd ever given them.

They came back to us like children after their first day at school - tired and changed in ways we can vaguely sympathise with. They wanted to go home, not to us as people but to our bodies as shields. Millions are gone already, reunited as they like to say.

Reunion is a harsh word to swallow when you see all the meat they had to scoop out to make room for themselves inside of us. In some places the skies are always black - full of crows feasting like they've never feasted before and spoilt for choice among the fields of the dead.