Carl never asked to become famous. He just wanted a little “enhancement,” not a full-blown sidekick with opinions, a Brooklyn accent, and a penchant for fedora shopping on Etsy.

“You don’t treat a national treasure like this!” Arby shouted from inside Carl’s boxer briefs. “This is velvet real estate, pal. You got a wonder of the world down here, and you’re dressing it in Walmart cotton!”

Carl wept quietly in a Walgreens parking lot. Again.

Let the poets write their rhymes about roses and fire. Eleanor Wainscot found her soul mate in a man who lived underwater and smelled faintly of sardines. And sometimes, that’s enough.

Love doesn’t always come neatly wrapped. Sometimes it shows up in a 19th-century diving rig, clanking softly, arms crossed, waiting patiently for someone to see through the helmet.

He woke up in a bunker. No memory of getting there. Just the stale hum of machines, a glowing screen that said WAIT, and the taste of old coffee still on his tongue.

Outside? Nothing but ash, silence, and a sky that watched like it remembered something you didn’t.

And when the screen changed to RUN, it was already too late.

Benny Grimes had always been a bit of a loser. Not the lovable kind you root for in indie films, fumbling toward redemption with a crooked smile and a heart of gold. No, Benny was the kind of loser who built a shrine to failure and lit candles made of maxed-out credit cards. A dyed-in-the-wool, all-in, stone-cold loser.

He stripped his shirt off slow, like it was a ritual. Hands taped. Forearms carved out of scarred wood. No smile. No words. Just movement.

“You want the title,” he said, voice low and steady, “you finish when I finish.”

I don’t remember finishing.
I just remember waking up in the corner, shoes gone, hands torn open, whispering apologies to the rig.

The belt’s still there.
But no one reaches for it.

Not twice.

What if your thoughts weren’t just yours anymore? In Next-Day Delivery, a man’s life unravels when packages start arriving on his doorstep—items he never ordered but definitely thought about. Slippers. Childhood mementos. A tooth. Each box digs deeper into memories he’d rather forget, until it becomes clear: something is inside his head, rewriting reality one delivery at a time. Creepy, surreal, and disturbingly plausible, this horror story peels back the packaging on convenience culture and exposes the cost of always being connected. Because when your past is prime-shipped to your door, what shows up next might just be you.