May 2020 – Glitch Press

A Student Out of Time by Su Yi, Changsha

My classmate shared the following experience with me. It occurred in 2016 when we were in eighth grade, shortly before we took our senior high school entrance examinations. We had just temporarily moved to a room in another building for class because our usual eighth-grade classroom was being used as a test site. Our classrooms served multiple purposes. One of these purposes was as a study area at night. After one such night study session, just as everyone was getting …

The Stain by u/Rivkariver

“I spilt chocolate ice cream on my leg. I wiped it off and there was still a pale brown stain in the shape of the ice cream splotch. I told my mother who said it was a birthmark. I will swear under oath that never before that moment did I have a birthmark there.” Note: This story is collected from an AskReddit lated at: https://www.reddit.com/user/Rivkariver

A Wounded Boar by Marty Weaver

I had horrible insomnia as a kid. It certainly didn’t help that my house is old and makes weird noises at night. I heard a noise one night that I still have no explanation for. There I was, 11 years old, lying wide awake in my dark bedroom for the third straight hour. Suddenly, I heard something. It wasn’t any of the creaks or groans I had become accustomed to in my years of sleeplessness. It was a heavy, pained …

One Day Off by Jared Swansboro

It seemed as if time had decided to move a day back, alluding to my own possible mistakes. The first birthday that I spent with my significant other, I wrote her a poem. September 26th. For three years straight, I read her that poem. She’d laugh, smile, and say how grateful she was. But this past year, that didn’t happen. I was in my dorm, waking up from a long night of essay writing, when I decided to call her …

Ghoul’s Geography by Jared Burkhardt

I went to high school in a lonely, relatively normal town. Often, a few of my friends in the grade below my own would tell some interesting, haunting stories at lunchtime. By my sophomore year, I had heard it all; but I wasn’t ready for a haunting story about a ghost girl in school. My friend Carlos’ geography class was very late in the day. The heat was often blistering as school had just started back up, and this was …

The Ringing of the Western Beast by Ji Yun (1724-1805), The Emperor’s Librarian

About 150 years ago, in the fourteenth year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, a Western nation gave him a mysterious creature called a “lion.” No one in his circle had ever seen such a creature before, and it immediately featured prominently in the poetry and paintings produced by members of the court. It also featured in many tall tales. For example, one story that made the rounds detailed how the lion escaped the palace one morning by snapping its chains in …

The Shotgun by Taddare

“I only vaguely remember the incident, but one night both of my grandparents were woken up by a loud sound. My grandmother swore it was a shotgun. My grandpa said it was a car backfiring since there was no one nearby who would be shooting — we lived pretty far from anyone. They bickered over it for a bit then went back to bed. About 15 minutes or so later, the phone rang. It was my aunt. Her husband had …