The Flickering Kitchen Light

February 25, 2026

by Marlon

One evening, my brother Leo, our neighbors Sam and Mia, and I were in the kitchen. Our mom was preparing a snack for us in the next room. We remembered how we used to ask the old ceiling light questions, seeing if it would flicker for yes.

We looked up and asked, “Light, flicker twice if anyone is with us.” Immediately, the bulb dimmed and brightened two times. Leo said he had a thought that the presence might be named Ben or Bella. When he said “Bella,” the light flickered again strongly.

Just then, our mom called us to come get our food. You have to walk through the narrow hallway to reach the dining area, so we all went, assuming our friends would wait for us in the kitchen. Leo finished his snack first and went back to see if they were ready to continue. He came rushing back, his face pale, saying he had heard two people having a quiet, arguing conversation in the empty kitchen.

I finished eating and decided to go see for myself. I walked into the kitchen alone. From near the pantry, I clearly heard two soft voices talking, and for a moment I was sure it was Sam and Mia playing a trick.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

The Last Train to Weldon Hollow

In the autumn of 1994, my father inherited a decommissioned signal box from his great-uncle, a retired railwayman. The box sat at the edge of the village of Weldon Hollow, a place that time seemed to have forgotten, where the only sounds were the whisper of wind through the yew trees and the occasional distant […]

The Hollow Bloom

The day had begun with a brittle, crystal clear sky over the town of Kettlewood, where my mother and I had come to visit my grandfather, a man of few words but many silences, which I now know were filled with stories he never told. We were there to mark the anniversary of my grandmother’s […]

The Trough of the Old Cow Barn

I was twelve when my parents split, and my mother and I left the converted dairy farm we had called home for nearly a decade. My father stayed behind, but the house never felt like ours again after my mother’s key turned in the lock for the last time. We moved into a cramped flat […]

The Sixth Sick Day

My husband, Daniel, and I moved into the old Coldwater place in the autumn of ’88. It was a sprawling, sun-starved house with peeling paint and a porch that sagged like a tired jaw. His boss, Mr. Hargrove, owned it and rented it to us for a pittance, warning us only that it was ‘drafty.’ […]

The Hollow Wall

My mother told me about the year we lived in the old mill house, and what happened to my sister before I was born. We had moved from the city to a sprawling, ramshackle house on the edge of a dying mill town in the Appalachian foothills. The house had once been the mill owner’s […]

The Bell in the Attic

We had lived in the old farmhouse for five years, and the usual quirks had become almost mundane. The creaking floorboards in the hallway, the cold drafts that swept through the kitchen despite the sealed windows, the occasional shadow that slipped past the corner of your eye. It was the kind of place you could […]

The Null Above the Cut

In the late autumn of 1995, I was a night-shift security guard at the Pine Hollow Dam, a massive concrete structure that loomed over the Blackwater River gorge in the Pacific Northwest. The dam was old, its turbines humming a constant drone that had become the soundtrack to my insomnia. The guard shack was a […]

The Cradle of Ash

The Pinehollow Historical Society had been our client before, but this time it felt different. They’d called us about the old Merriwether Farmhouse, a rambling Victorian that had stood empty for a decade after the last occupant, an elderly woman named Esther, had passed under circumstances the county coroner had politely labeled ‘indeterminate.’ The society […]

The Harvest Portrait

The autumn of my sixth year, my grandmother, Nana Rose, held her annual harvest gathering. Our farmhouse, nestled in the amber fields of Nebraska, was the heart of these celebrations. The air smelled of cinnamon and damp earth, and the porch was strung with gnarled gourds and dried corn. My great-grandfather, Pa Anderson, had been […]

The Glass Operator’s Log

Marta Voss had spent the last decade of her life chasing signals. As a radio astronomer at the High Desert Radio Observatory, she lived by data, not by faith. She had debunked more ‘anomalies’ than she could count—cold spots, electronic voices, images of saints in toast. The universe, she told her colleagues, was a beautiful, […]

The Cold Press

I remember that night in late February, the sort of damp chill that settles into old brick and doesn’t let go. I had just finished a double shift at the cannery, my fingers still smelling faintly of brine and metal. The house was one of those narrow, pre-war rowhouses on Hemlock Street, a place I’d […]

The Collector of Lost Hours

The trouble began, I think, with the blackout. Not the one that hit the whole neighborhood—that was just a storm, a tree branch, a transformer. I mean the one that happened inside our house, in the tiny gap between the kitchen and the dining room, on a Tuesday evening when I was carrying a stack […]