This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/RevolutionaryBed7510 on 2026-08-10 18:04:59+00:00.

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I can’t leave the house. I’ve tried the front door, the back, the windows. They all open to the same grey field I’ve never seen before, stretching out under a sky with far too many moons. I don’t know if this is a warning or a confession or just the last coherent thing I’ll ever write, but someone needs to know what happens to us.

8:05 AM – Bellringer

I walked into the kitchen this morning to start the school day. Ximena was already at the table, spooning cereal with the careful concentration of a child who hasn’t yet decided if the morning is gonna be good or bad. She was sat next to a boy I don’t think I’ve seen before.

He looked about her age—nine—dressed in a grey button-up shirt, dapper and old-fashioned. The fabric looked textured wrong—like it had been woven from old photographs, sepia and shiny and fragile. His eyes were wide, owlish, and terribly still. He smiled at me with polite expectations, like a student waits for a teacher in the midst of a chaotic classroom.

My brain ran through the list: Did I forget a playdate? Did Ximena let someone in? Whose kid is this? I checked the back door. Locked. Deadbolt. I checked the driveway camera on my phone. The playback showed the kitchen empty all night, then Ximena alone at the table, spooning cereal into her mouth with no one beside her. Then, almost to the second I walked down the stairs, I blinked and he was with her at the table.

“Ximena…” I said, aiming for calm, “who’s your friend?”

She didn’t look up as she giggled. “That’s Amodeus, Mom. You remember him!”

The boy inclined his head. He didn’t speak. He just watched me, that patient smile never reaching his eyes. And something in my chest flickered—not fear, not yet—but recognition. Maybe I did know him.

I made coffee and we started the day.

9:00 AM – Mathematics

Fractions. Ximena hates fractions. She was chewing on her eraser, staring at ¾ + ¼ like it called her hair ratty. Amodeus reached over with a crayon—burnt sienna, I don’t know why I remembered that—and started correcting her work.

I leaned in to ask him not to write on her paper, to ask him where his parents were and where he lived.

But he hadn’t just solved the addition. The page was covered in geometry that folded into themselves at angles my eyes couldn’t track. When I blinked, the lines rippled. A headache started behind my left eye, a low thrum like a second heartbeat.

“Honey,” I said, “what is this?”

She smiled. “Amodeus says numbers are just a lie to keep the world quiet. He says you can tell the truth if you draw the truth.”

I looked over to Amodeus and saw him writing on his own worksheet now, doing simple math to add the fractions, as though nothing had happened.

I don’t know what got into me. I just… tore the paper into pieces. They fluttered to the floor, and when they landed, a new glyph was perfectly reassembled among the scraps, whole and quiet and humming at a frequency I felt in my nostrils.

10:30 AM – History

I pulled out the textbook. Something safe. Dates, dead civilizations, the comforting dust of things that no longer touch us.

We were talking about the Celts this week. I pointed to a photograph of a reconstructed chieftain. Amodeus made a noise. I thought he had shat himself at first, not completely out of the ordinary for this age, I guess, and if he was non-verbal or on the spectrum, I didn’t want to act too harshly. Then Amodeus pointed at the picture, and his noise became a low, guttural groan that vibrated the water glass on the table. Through his groans, he wrote on a piece of paper: A script that moved, shimmering, sinking into the page like ink made of fever heat. It was Nahuatl, words I’d forgotten I knew from my childhood:

ISTLI TLEN ATID.

“LIE OF ATID.”

A memory flooded in like a tongue in an unwanted kiss. I saw a sky full of stars. A sound like a thousand drums beating on wet earth. A shape above a horizon of trees and rivers—a shape coiling, vast, like a bundle of serpents wearing the sun as a mask. And a voice, vast and indifferent, asking us to forget.

Ximena’s singsong voice cut through the memory, snapping me back to reality with the calm of a nursery rhyme: “Amodeus says we forgot the old ones because looking at them made our eyes melt. He’s helping me remember without melting.”

I shut the textbook, took a deep breath, and composed myself. I’m hallucinating, a side effect of the new meds, maybe. When I opened the book again, there was a new chapter at the back. The title shimmered like that same script: THE PRE-HISTORY OF DISPLACEMENT. I didn’t read the rest. I was afraid I already knew what it said.

1:00 PM – Biology

Lunch was quiet. Amodeus didn’t eat. He didn’t blink. He watched my jaw move, my throat swallow, my fingers tear bread. He was taking notes with his eyes. When I asked if he wanted a sandwich like Ximena, he just smiled and shook his head.

I pinned up the anatomy poster for science next. The human body, bright and clean, systems mapped in friendly colors. I grabbed some butcher paper and asked Ximena to draw herself. Amodeus drew too.

His self-portrait was a child’s stick figure covering the entire four feet of paper, but where the stick of a torso was, he began to cover it with a swirling galaxy—pinprick stars, dark fibrous voids, slow-moving nebulae the color of bruises and autumn. He labeled the parts with a pencil, his handwriting was perfect, better than cursive. The words burned into my mind: Hunger Node. Emotional Repository. Singularity Gland.

He tapped the Emotional Repository and pointed directly at me.

Ximena’s didn’t look up from her blocky self-portrait: “He says your bodies are just cocoons for a very specific kind of life. He wants to know what it feels like when you realize I’m not in mine anymore.”

I looked at my daughter. For one breath, her skin went translucent. There was a slow-moving light inside her, swirling cold stars where veins should have been. Then she looked up to smile, and she was just Ximena again, chewing on her lip.

They both giggled like I’d missed a joke. It was a cute giggle. It horrified me.

2:30 PM – Recess

I sent them outside. I told myself I needed a moment to think, to breathe, to find a weapon. The truth is I just needed them out of the room.

The sun was high, but the shadows were wrong.

Out the window in the front yard, Amodeus’s shadow stretched to the left. Ximena’s to the right. They held hands in the middle of the yard, playing some version of tag and ring-around-the-rosie, and their shadows merged into a single jagged, multi-limbed, unhuman shape. It raised one long arm and waved at me through the window.

I ran and dialed 911, keeping my eyes on their childish game above a monstrous shadow. I didn’t even hear the phone ring when the operator’s voice came through calm and sibilant. “The number you have dialed is not observable from this plane. Please do not hang up, and do not try again.”

The line didn’t disconnect. It started humming the same dissonant tune from the math worksheet.

I looked at my phone and found a text:

Check your desk.

I didn’t have a desk, but I found a Weekly Lesson Plan on the kitchen counter, printed on crisp paper the color of a stormy sky. The letterhead read: ATTACHMENT ARCHITECTURE. Below it, a sticky note in my own handwriting:

Amodeus is a fast learner. The first stage of his thesis requires complete immersion. You are the control group. Please treat him as any other.

When I called the kids in, Amodeus gave Ximena a stiff hug, smoothed his grey shirt, and walked out the back door into a sunset that had no business arriving that early. I locked the door behind him. It didn’t feel like it mattered.

Late Night

Every question I asked Ximena received a giggle and a complacent “You already know that, mama!” By the sixth try and lack of new info, I chalked it up to my own hysterics.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Something was gnawing at me, like a splinter of recognition I couldn’t work free. I blinked and found myself digging through the hall closet, past old coats and half-finished art projects, until I found a box of notebooks from when Ximena was small.

I shuffled through birth records, Build-a-Bear certificates, and old photos of a family of three I refused to look at.

Then, under a note from her daycare and the birthday cards from her grandparents, I found a story I wrote for her when she was five, during a long winter when I felt so lonely I thought I might disappear. A story about a boy made of starlight who came from a faraway land to learn about love. I drew pictures. I gave him a name.

Gottlieb.

The drawing was a little boy with wide eyes and a kind smile. I remembered Ximena and I worked together, cutting up old pictures to make his clothes, blurry misclicks we’d forgotten to throw away from the developed films.

3:45 AM

I walked into the kitchen on legs I couldn’t feel. On the fridge, held by a ladybug magnet, was an envelope. The paper felt like cold skin.

Inside, typed in a font that seemed to breathe under the kitchen light:

To the Guardian of the Primary Subject:

Amodeus has completed his initial practicum in Emotional and Dimensional Fostering. Your daughter has been a wonderful conduit for the concept of “familial bond.” He feels he fully comprehends dependency and is ready for his final lesson: Consumption of Grief at the Point of Material Dissolution.

*Please p...

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