01/19/2026
I've been wanting to try my hand at some horror writing for awhile now, I've always been a fan. Tonight was my first experiment with it.
Let me know what you think!
"They wear crowns of flesh."
I’ve been clean for a year now. Things are better, but probably not for the reason you think. I didn’t get clean because I wanted to. I love drugs. Always have. They scratched an itch I didn’t know I had, and then I kept on scratching until everything in my life was a raw, open wound. I would have kept going, too.
I didn’t stop because I was living on a sidewalk. I didn’t stop because I was penniless, begging for change to feed the needle every day. I stopped because, well… now I don’t see them anymore.
I don’t know what they are. Angels? Maybe demons. I’ve watched them do what you might say both would do. I once saw one push a woman into traffic. She was walking down the street with her stroller; as she went past an alley, this thing lunged at her. It shoved her directly in front of a semi‑truck.
The tires screeched. The driver tried to stop. It was too late.
But the thing stopped the stroller.
It didn’t let the kid roll into the street. Why, I don’t know. Did she deserve it? Was it because the baby was innocent? I can’t say. Maybe they’re some kind of cosmic justice delivery system. All I know is that they scared me in a way that made me want more.
I’d describe what they look like, but it’s always different. They might even be the same being in different skin. Humanoid, usually. Mostly opaque, sometimes short, sometimes tall, but they always have some kind of crown. It looks like a fleshy ring floating a few inches above their head. A halo.
When they’re about to act, it flashes. A sharp white pulse on the inner edge of the ring. And then they do som**hing. To someone.
Sometimes they look like a man, or a woman or a kid. Sometimes looking at them makes you feel insane just for seeing them: an undulating mass of geometric shapes, writhing and churning, pieces creaking against each other. I started noticing them about two years into doing he**in, and then speed.
I know. I know what you’re thinking. Psychosis.
I get it. But I know what that feels like. Psychosis is messy. It’s loud. It’s a riot in your own head where the logic dissolves into noise and the shadows start whispering your name. This wasn’t that. This was clinical. It was silent.
The arrival of those things, those floating crowns, brought a sudden, absolute stillness to the air that cut right through the he**in fog. The world would go mute for a split second, like someone hit a kill switch on the worlds audio, and then the flash would come.
That silence is actually what I miss the most.
See, at first drugs gave me that quiet. Like driving under a bridge in a rainstorm. I chased it for a long time. But then I would only feel it when I saw those things. The chemical peace that opiates brought on initially kept the demons at bay. Then it started to bring them, and with them came quiet.
I chased them for a while after that. I started hunting for crowds, high‑risk places where accidents could happen. Intersections. Fairs. Anywhere som**hing terrible could go wrong. I wanted to know what they were, what they wanted.
One day, I saw one show up closer than ever before.
It appeared next to a friend of mine. He had gotten into a bad habit of injecting m**h into his muscles. He couldn’t hit a vein to save his life, but that meant he always did more than he should have. I was watching him trying to hit, and then it appeared.
He couldn’t see it. I could.
It had the body of a teenage boy, halfway transparent, but its hands--its hands looked like an old man’s. Wrinkled and gnarled. It took hold of his wrists and guided that needle right into a vein.
I saw the flash of blood in the barrel. I also saw how much he’d put in the syringe. I knew it was too much. He grinned--a wide, wet rictus of anticipation stretched over the gums where his teeth used to be. "No fu***ng way," he said to himself and pushed the plunger home.
I saw it hit him. He sighed with relief, and then his eyes rolled back in his head. He started seizing, and a few minutes later it was over. There was nothing anyone could do. A heart attack. It was simply too much.
Right as that fleshy ring flashed white, right before he went out, I heard it whisper, “Be not afraid.”
The voice sounded like tires squealing on asphalt.
That was when the fear really set in. Not the usual ju**ie paranoia. Som**hing deeper. I didn’t want that to be me. I stopped hanging around my usual haunt. I only went through to cop what I needed, and I always wore headphones to make sure I didn’t hear that silence if one of them showed up.
The peace they once brought me was gone after that. Whatever they were, I’d had enough. I checked myself into rehab. Called my parents. Asked if I could come home. Somehow, they said yes.
Now that I’ve been sober for a while and my head is back on straight, I can’t stop thinking about them. Wondering if I was just high, or if there was actually som**hing else going on. I keep telling myself it was just the drugs.
The problem is: I don’t believe me.
Even so, I’m happier now. I have things again. My girlfriend talks to me. We do family dinners. I show up to my job at a furniture warehouse from 9 to 5. On paper, it looks like a normal life.
But there’s som**hing missing.
That glimpse into the unknown I chased for so long is gone, and so is the silence.
Being clean means the noise is back. The city is deafening now. Car horns. Shouting. The hum of streetlights. It’s all so constant. But worse than the noise is the blindness.
That’s the trade‑off I made. I gave up the high to get my life back. That’s what I told my caseworker, anyway. The almost‑true version. The real version is that I gave up my sight to get back my sanity.
Getting clean was like gouging my own eyes out.
Some days, I walk past that same intersection where the woman was pushed and the baby was saved. I stand there with my too‑sweet coffee, just watching. I watch the traffic. I watch the people. I wait for that pressure, that static charge that used to prickle the back of my neck right before one of them stepped out of the ether.
Last Tuesday, I felt it.
I was at the corner, waiting for the light. A bike messenger was weaving through the gridlock, going way too fast. Some businessman was stepping off the curb, eyes locked on his phone. The hair on my arms stood up. Static buzzed in my ears. I knew that feeling. It was the precursor.
Then I heard it.
Silence.
My pulse jumped. Cold sweat soaked my shirt. I scanned the crowd, desperate to see the fleshy ring, the undulating geometry, the tall shadow.
Nothing. Just gray pavement and exhaust fumes.
Then the bike messenger swerved.
No, that’s not right. It was like he hit a brick wall in mid‑air. His front tire je**ed violently to the left in a way that ignored the physics of his path. He went down, hard, metal screaming on concrete as he slid across the sidewalk.
A split second later, a bus roared through the space where he would’ve been.
If he hadn’t crashed, he’d be a smear on the asphalt right now.
The businessman dropped his phone. People screamed. The messenger stood up, dazed and bleeding, looking around like the world had just glitched.
I just stood there, freezing cold in the July heat.
I knew what had happened. Som**hing had reached out--maybe a hand, maybe a te****le made of smoke--and stopped that bike dead.
I stared at the air above the empty space he should have died in. I squinted until my eyes watered, begging to see the white flash of the crown. I wanted to see the monster that saved him. The monster only I knew was there.
Nothing. Just the empty, uncaring air.
That’s the horror of being clean. It’s not that the demons are gone. They’re still here, moving the pieces, taking us or pulling us back from the edge. I’m just like everyone else now. I’m walking through a slaughterhouse in the dark, pretending I don’t know the butcher is working.
I just hope whatever system they follow, I didn’t break too many rules. I hope they leave me alone.
And if they don’t, if they decide it’s my turn, at least now, I won’t see it coming...
