Sleep-deprived Monika mindlessly scrolled through Instagram. Reels blurred into each other like static. Suddenly a grainy CCTV clip autoplayed without warning. She almost scrolled past it, but her thumb froze for a second just enough for the video to glitch and restart on its own, as if that tiny pause had triggered something put on pause.
A deserted hallway, with several flickering lights, and an old guard in khaki standing with his back to the camera.
The caption read,
“Unsolved case: The only time the kidnapper was caught on tape.”
As the guard slowly turned, his face became visible and the smallest muscle in Monika’s chest tightened and a shiver ran through her veins. She had seen this face before.
One accidental pause in a doom scroll had cracked open a sealed corner of her mind.
She hid under her bedsheet breathlessly trying to smother the ripple spreading inside her.
She woke up listening to her mother’s melodious humming sound, it was all safe but even the sunlight felt fragile, as though one wrong touch could shatter it.
“You look pale,” her mother said.
“All good,” Monika replied. But there was a lump in her throat and a face struck in her mind.
By evening she restlessly rechecked Instagram out of curiosity, and the video was gone. The account had been deleted!
Her small, restless curiosity had set off another chain
She searched the case online just a quick search, and the moment she typed the keywords, old articles and archived forums resurfaced like they had been waiting for her.
“The guard was the first to take the child. He never made it out alive.”
She zoomed into a still frame. His half-turned face stared back, peeling loose an old memory when she was seven. A dim corridor, cold hands. A warning she didn’t understand then and couldn’t discern now.
That night she woke gasping, the guard appeared and vanished in a blink.
Did her curiosity revive a dead man?
Over the next two days, he flickered before her in reflections and corners appearing clearer and closer, the silhouettes from her memories were reviving because she brought them alive.
The city suffered an abrupt blackout, Monika stepped out for some fresh air and saw him standing there.
His eyes filled with grief tried to warn her.
“Let’s go inside,” Her mother whispered.
In a sudden flash, he appeared closer and her mother’s face froze not out of fear but because of the truth.
And the memories finally echoed; her real family’s cruel history, the guard dying while saving her, and the woman who kidnapped her in desperation but raised her with love.
One glitching reel, One pause, One search,
had turned upside down the life she thought was hers.
Two figures both shaped by that single moment years ago.
Monika stood trembling at the threshold, realising a butterfly’s wingbeat she hadn’t even noticed.
Run, or return to the only home she had ever known.
