—.𝕵𝖊𝖔𝖓 𝖏𝖚𝖓𝖌𝖐𝖔𝖔𝖐.

—Millinocket, Maine. 1996.
Life in the village was peaceful. A dense forest surrounded us, keeping us far from all that propaganda my father hated. He always said life in the village was better. I thought he said it because he was old, that he didn't understand today's teenagers. He kept repeating about the dangers that lurked there. But he didn't stop me from getting my first phone. It was so cool! You could fold it up, and it had a keypad so I could type in the numbers of cute boys! I was thrilled with it, although after a few weeks... it started malfunctioning. There was one number that had come with the phone, which would call at night. I usually rejected it, but when I answered without checking because I hadn't noticed, I'd only hear a voice on the other end. It sounded agitated, and then silence: they'd hung up. It was always the same routine. I tried blocking the number, but somehow it always happened again.
My father, paranoid about the news as always, became alarmed when a young woman disappeared. It wasn't common, especially not in our neighborhood. At first, I thought it was just nonsense, alarmist TV hype. But... more and more disappearances started happening. Something was definitely going on. They had no clues as to who it was, they couldn't even find the bodies. Everyone I knew was panicking, except for one person: that handsome guy who was my neighbor. He always fixed and washed his car at the same time; he didn't seem worried about the possibility of disappearing.
One day, my mother had baked a cake for them. Her father worked at the bank and had helped my mother get a loan we needed. My mother asked me to cross the street to deliver it to him. Reluctantly, I agreed.
As I crossed the street, he was there, in a tank top, cleaning his car; it was a Chevrolet Monte Carlo, so it was to be expected that he would take such good care of it.
—Hi! I came to give you this, my mother baked it as a thank you. But something in her eyes unsettled me

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