This is not safe

February 24, 2025

by Bella

I don’t really know how to begin this, but I’ll try.

A little about my father first—his life was never easy. He grew up in a house filled with anger, sadness, and things no child should have to face. That darkness followed him, always just behind him like a shadow he couldn’t escape. No matter where he went, it was there.

One night, I decided to help him. I didn’t know if I could, but I wanted to try. If nothing else, maybe I could understand what had been holding onto him for so long.

I started my meditation, going deep into it, focusing on him. I pictured him standing there, alone in the dark. I asked for protection, for healing, for whatever light could surround him.

Everything was calm at first. But then, I tried to burn away the things that weren’t good for him. I imagined a fire, a bright flame that would take away the bad energy. Around that, I placed a deep blue light for protection, and a white light for healing.

That’s when it pushed back.

I felt it in my body, in the air around him. The more I tried, the stronger it got. The darkness around him grew heavier, like it didn’t want to leave. I kept going, forcing the fire to burn brighter.

Then, my whole body started to shake. The energy became too strong. It threw me out of my meditation.

I opened my eyes, sitting straight up, my heart pounding. My skin was covered in sweat, and I was breathing like I had been running. It felt like I had been in a fight—but not with something I could see.

In the silence of the room, I heard a voice. Not with my ears, but somewhere deep inside me.

“This is not safe. Never again.”

I whispered a thank you to whatever had been protecting me and promised I wouldn’t try again.

And I haven’t.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

The Lantern of Hollow Creek

The call came at 6:47 AM, wrenching me from a groggy sleep on my cousin’s couch in Sacramento. I remember the disjointed fragments: my aunt’s voice, cracked and raw, saying that my cousin Marcus was gone, that he’d driven his pickup off the old Coldwater Bridge just before dawn. The rest of the family gathered […]

The Inventory of Unread Hours

In my final year at the Armitage Conservatory, I volunteered for the annual library purge—a tradition where students sorted through shelves of forgotten donations. My partner, Emmett, and I drew the short straw: the sub-basement annex, a windowless room where the air tasted of copper and old paper. The task began at dusk, after the […]

The Slate Between Doors

I moved to Playa del Carmen six months after my sister Rosa had settled there, trading the crowded streets of Houston for the humid, salt-tinged air of the Yucatan. My family has always had a peculiar sensitivity—we see things others can’t. In Houston, I’d seen a woman in a white dress at the foot of […]

The Lily on the Landing

The first time I saw her, I was six, standing in the hallway of my grandmother’s farmhouse in the hills of Appalachia, the bathroom door ajar behind me. The house had a smell of damp wood and dried herbs, and the hallway was lit by a single bulb that cast long, wavering shadows. She sat […]

The Porcelain Doll

When I was sixteen, my family lived in an old farmhouse at the end of a long gravel road. The house had been in my mother’s family for generations, and it was full of nooks and crannies that seemed to breathe with history. My bedroom was on the second floor, at the end of a […]

The Room That Swallowed Light

In the autumn of 2004, I moved to a small desert town called Pinyon Ridge, a place where the sun bleached the sky and the mountains stood like silent watchers. I knew no one. On my first day at Pinyon Ridge High, a girl named Rosa introduced herself, and we became inseparable. But that same […]

The Stairwell That Breathed

Mara never believed in ghosts. Not until the night she heard the stairwell breathe. She and her partner, Elias, had moved into the old Harlow house on the edge of the dying town of Crestwood, a sprawling Victorian that had been gutted and renovated into a family home. Their daughter, Lily, had been born three […]

The Loom of the Drowned Orchard

I grew up in the arid folds of Arizona, where the sun bleached the world to bone and the only ghosts were the heat shimmers that danced on the asphalt. As a child, I chalked up my uncanny perceptions to a too-vivid imagination. But now, at thirty-two, stationed at the rust-belt post of Fort Drum […]

The Last Ember of the Lantern

In the village of Ashford, nestled between the crooked pines and the fog-choked river, there was a house that smelled of old wood and colder winters. I lived there with my grandmother, Elara, after my mother passed from the wasting sickness that took her voice before her breath. I was eleven, with eyes that saw […]

The Thirteenth Door

I work the night audit at the Meriwether Title Company, which squats in what was once the scullery wing of the old St. Dymphna’s Hospital for the Indigent Women. The main building, a hulking brick monolith, throws its shadow over our smaller annex, and the whole complex has the feel of a mausoleum that forgot […]

The Lantern of Persistent Motion

Marta and I had just settled into our new apartment above a shuttered cannery in the small coastal town of Dunmore. The place was a relic, with peeling paint and a view that stretched across gray rooftops to the restless Atlantic. That evening, we were washing the last of the dinner dishes, the clatter of […]

The Red Door Game

I was eight when I first saw the boy in the attic. My grandmother had passed, and my parents were clearing out her old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The attic was a dusty, cobwebbed place, smelling of mothballs and old paper. I was supposed to be sorting boxes, but I found a small, […]