12 O'Clock

Death, dismemberment, hunger, cut in little tiny pieces.

The words didn’t echo in my mind so much as settle there, like something had placed them with care. When the landline rang at exactly 12:00PM, the words fluttered, as if startled awake.

I was chopping liver. The knife made a wet, reluctant sound each time it hit the board, as though the meat clung to itself. The pan hissed behind me, spitting oil in sharp, angry bursts. I didn’t turn. I never expect calls. Not on that phone.

Two rings. Silence. Two more. Clipped. Three more. Urgent.

The butterfly inside me stirred—slow, sticky beats of its wings dragging upward. By the time it reached my chest, oil had splashed onto my arm. I swore, but the phone had already fallen silent. I told myself I was fine. I always do. Ritual is a kind of armour.

I live alone. I prefer it. Solitude is predictable. People aren’t.

The landline is a leftover—installed because it cost more not to. I don’t know the number. No one else does. Anyone using it would be… wrong. Someone I wouldn’t want near me.

For years, I dismissed the occasional ring as scams or misdials. But the next day, at exactly 12 o'clock, the pattern returned—two, two, three. Not random. Not accidental. A rhythm. A summon.

The butterfly pressed harder against my ribs.

The day after that, I fled the flat entirely. At 12pm I was at my favourite café, ordering my usual toasted baguette and triple-shot mocha. The butterfly twitched once, then went still, listening.

I tried to read by the river, but the words refused to settle. My thoughts looped:

If I’m not home, the caller can’t reach me. But I never answer anyway. So why does it matter? Why does it feel like it does?

The butterfly scraped at my sternum, irritated.

When I returned home, the hallway air felt stale, as though it had been held too long in someone else’s lungs. The answering machine blinked red.

“You have one new message; received today at 12pm.”

A metallic voice. A click. A faint gurgle, like something shifting in a narrow, wet space.

The butterfly convulsed. I doubled over coughing and spat something onto the floor. A fragment—thin, translucent, veined. A wing, or a breadcrumb. I told myself it was a breadcrumb. I needed it to be a breadcrumb.

The next day, I met a friend for lunch. I spilled my coffee twice. Dropped half my sandwich. My friend laughed, but her voice sounded distant, like it was coming through a padded corridor. I didn’t tell her about the calls. I said “spam.” She accepted it. People always accept the simplest lie.

When I returned home, the fog in my head thickened. The machine blinked again.

“You have one new message. Received today at 12pm.”

A screeching noise, stretched and warped. Beneath it, something shaped like words. I replayed it. Again. Again.

On the fourth listen, a voice emerged—coarse, breathless, close.

“We are coming.”

The butterfly wailed inside my chest. My ribs vibrated. Sweat slid down my spine in cold, deliberate lines. My finger hovered over the delete button.

I pressed it.

The message did not delete.

“You have one new message. Received today at 12pm.”

The butterfly froze. Listening.

I pressed delete again. Harder. The button clicked, but the machine didn’t respond. The red light blinked faster now, syncing with the flutter in my chest.

I stepped back.

The hallway stretched—not physically, but perceptually, as though the air had thickened and the walls leaned in. My vision wavered at the edges, as if the flat were breathing.

I blinked.

The answering machine was closer.

I hadn’t moved.

“You have one new message,” it repeated.

The butterfly thrashed. My throat tightened, as if something inside me wanted to speak but didn’t yet know how.

I pressed play.

Static spilled out—layered, like multiple recordings playing at once. Beneath it, a whispering chorus. Not words. Not yet. More like the shape of words.

Then, faintly:

“We see you.”

The room tilted. The floor felt soft under my feet, as though I were standing on something alive.

I blinked again.

The kitchen was wrong. The counter too long. The window too small. Colours slightly off, like a memory misremembered. The air hummed with a low vibration I felt in my teeth.

The butterfly pressed upward, scraping bone. The air tasted metallic, like the inside of the phone line.

The answering machine clicked.

“You have one new message. Received today at 12pm.”

But the clock read 11:17.

The second hand trembled between ticks.

The butterfly whispered:

It’s not the time that matters. It’s the pattern.

My mobile rang.

Unknown number.

I answered.

Silence.

Then, from inside the speaker:

“You shouldn’t have left.”

The voice wasn’t metallic. It was soft. Close. Intimate. Like someone whispering directly into my ear.

The butterfly convulsed violently. Pain shot through my chest. I dropped the phone. It hit the floor but didn’t stop speaking.

“We were inside the walls. Now we are inside the wires. Next, we will be inside you.”

The lights flickered. The room warped—stretching, contracting, pulsing like a lung. Shadows shifted independently of their objects.

The butterfly’s wings pressed outward, testing the boundaries of my body.

The hallway elongated. The door receded like a mirage. The flat rearranged itself around me, folding and unfolding like origami.

The answering machine clicked again.

“You have one new message. Received today at 12pm.”

The clock still read 11:17.

The butterfly whispered:

Time is only a door. They are already turning the handle.

My chest tightened—not with fear, but with pressure, as though something inside me was expanding, testing the limits of bone and skin. My sternum felt warm. Too warm. As if a small sun had been lit beneath it.

The flat shifted—not visually, not physically, but conceptually. The walls felt aware of themselves. The air felt aware of me. The floor hummed with a resonant frequency that vibrated through my skull.

The butterfly beat its wings once.

The room rippled.

I stumbled toward the kitchen—if it was still the kitchen. The counters stretched and contracted with each breath I took. The fridge door pulsed faintly, like it had a heartbeat.

The butterfly whispered again—behind me.

I turned. Nothing. But the air was shaped like something had just been there. A distortion. A presence. A suggestion of wings.

My chest burned. The butterfly pushed upward, scraping bone.

“Let me see,” it whispered.

“No,” I said, but the word echoed, doubled, as if someone else had spoken it with me.

The butterfly laughed softly.

“You were never the host. You were the doorway.”

The ceiling bowed downward, then upward, like a diaphragm inhaling. Shadows detached from their objects and drifted like smoke underwater.

My vision fractured. For a moment, I saw the flat from above. Then from the hallway. Then from inside the answering machine. Then from somewhere vast, cold, echoing—where distance didn’t behave properly and light bent in ways that made no sense.

I blinked. Back in my body. But my body felt wrong. My fingers too long. My breath too loud. My heartbeat too slow. My skin too thin.

The butterfly beat its wings again.

For a split second, I saw something enormous—an expanse of darkness threaded with luminous veins, pulsing like a cosmic organism. Shapes moved within it, vast and slow. They were not alive in any way I understood, but they were aware.

And they were looking at me.

No—through me.

“They have been calling you for a long time,” the butterfly whispered. “You were simply too small to hear them.”

I staggered. My hand brushed the wall. It rippled under my touch, warm and pliant, like skin stretched over something breathing.

The answering machine clicked.

“You have one new message. Received today at 12pm.”

The clock still read 11:17.

The butterfly pressed upward, aligning itself with something beyond the room, beyond the world.

“Open,” it whispered.

My ribs creaked. The shadows leaned closer. Something vast began to push through.

The pressure in my chest shifted from expansion to alignment, as though something inside me were rotating, clicking into place. My ribs felt like hinges.

“Now we speak,” the butterfly said.

The voice vibrated through my sternum, bending the air. The flat listened.

My breath came out in thin strands that hung in the air, twisting into shapes—letters I didn’t recognise but somehow understood. They dissolved.

My mouth opened. A sound emerged—low, resonant, layered, like multiple voices speaking through a single throat.

“We are through.”

My vision fractured again. I saw myself from across the room. Then from inside the walls. Then from somewhere impossibly distant, where my body was a faint point of light in a vast darkness.

“Being is a boundary,” the butterfly whispered. “Boundaries are temporary.”

My skin shimmered, as though something beneath it was learning the shape of me. My fingertips dissolved into strands of light, then snapped back.

“You are becoming permeable,” the entity whispered.

Shadows circled me, humming softly.

“We are learning you.”

My thoughts tangled with theirs. My memories flickered—childhood, adulthood, moments that hadn’t happened yet. I felt myself stretching, expanding into spaces I had never known existed.

“You are not disappearing,” the butterfly whispered. “You are distributing.”

My name slipped away. My face. My voice. The idea of “I.”

“We are becoming,” the entity said.

The room dissolved into geometry. Geometry into light. Light into thought.

And I dissolved with it.

The flat had been empty for weeks. Not vacant; empty. Vacant is a matter of tenancy. Empty is a matter of presence.

The new tenant arrived on a bright afternoon, carrying two suitcases and a plant. The door opened easily. Too easily.

The flat smelled of dust and stillness. The air felt slightly heavier than it should have, like a room holding its breath.

The landline sat on a small table by the door, its cord coiled like something sleeping.

They laughed. “Who even uses these anymore?”

They didn’t know the number. They didn’t ask.

As evening settled, they wandered the rooms. The walls felt warm beneath their fingertips, though they didn’t notice. The shadows shifted slightly when they weren’t looking.

A faint flutter rose in their chest—soft, tentative, like the first beat of wings.

They blamed hunger.

At 11:59 the next morning, the air thickened. The walls leaned in. The shadows gathered.

At exactly 12:00PM, the landline rang.

Two cries. Silence. Two more. Silence. Three more. Silence.

The tenant froze, knife hovering above the cutting board.

A flutter rose in their chest.

Behind them, the answering machine blinked once, red and patient.

Later, they found a translucent fragment behind the radiator—thin, veined, faintly shimmering. They didn’t know why it felt familiar.

At midnight, the flat shifted—an almost imperceptible tremor, like a breath drawn in the dark.

Somewhere deep inside the flat, a voice whispered:

“We remember you.”

The tenant turned.

Nothing.

Just the flat.

Just the shadows.

Just the quiet.

But the fragment pulsed once, faintly, like a heartbeat.

And in the tenant’s chest, the butterfly— not theirs, not new— beat its wings.

Another cycle had begun.