Invisible Twists Novels & Stories

After being chosen by a horror game, I took over a food stall in a small town. A ghoul tried to eat me, his huge, bloody mouth a gaping maw, but I quickly shoved a focaccia sandwich into it. He chewed and then said, “Oh, forget it. With food to eat, I’ll kill her tomorrow.” The next day, I made delicious pierogies, then skewers and stews. All the ghouls who stopped by gave up on trying to kill me, focusing on eating instead. The audience watching me was shocked that I could survive all the way to the end with just my cooking.

There are no grown men in our village. When girls turn 18, they participate in a coming-of-age ceremony in the ancestral hall. Dressed in ceremonial clothes, they line up to enter, and when they come out, their faces show a mix of pain and joy. When my eldest sister turned 18, Grandma forbade her from attending. However, one night, she snuck into the hall. When she came out, she was limping, and blood was dripping between her legs.

My wife, Wendy, faked her death and took her younger sister’s identity, and I pretended not to know. I removed her from the position of general manager at the company and went to the police station to cancel her identity registration. In my past life, Wendy’s younger sister, Stacy, died in a car accident. Wendy chose to live as her, only because she could not bear to let Eric, her sister’s husband, become a widower. I confronted Wendy and demanded to know why she was impersonating her sister, but she refused to admit anything. “I understand that losing Wendy hurts, but you cannot treat me as if I’m her just because she is gone.” After that, Wendy spread rumors everywhere, saying I had lost my mind. She claimed that my wife had just died and I was already harboring improper thoughts toward her younger sister. In a short time, I suffered an unprecedented wave of online harassment. In the end, an overzealous netizen stabbed me to death in an alley. When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day Wendy was preparing to take her sister’s identity.

When Callum abandoned me, feverish and shivering on a mountain road, just to watch a meteor shower with the young woman he had raised, I decided to divorce him. His good friend, Emmet, advised him to try winning me back. "Look Cal, sisters are sisters, but a wife takes priority. You’d better not mix up what matters most." Callum, however, dismissed the idea with a confident smile. "She’s bluffing. Does she really think she’ll go through with the divorce?" "All these years, I’ve given her a place to belong. Without me, she wouldn’t even have a home. Leave me? She wouldn’t dare.  "Just wait. Before the cooling-off period ends, she’ll come back crying and begging me to take her in."  But thirty days passed, and I never looked back. While he scoured the world searching for me, I sipped tea in a misty mountain villa, utterly at peace. "James," I remarked to my step-brother, "your place truly feels like home."

One night, as I was making my way to the bathroom around 3 a.m., I saw my dormmate, Yvonne, squatting in front of our door. She was rearranging all our shoes so that their tips were pointed inward. I thought it was funny, so I rearranged them to have their tips pointed outward. The next day, I found that all of them had been positioned inward again. This kept happening for a week, and I continued to scramble things up, hiding the shoes, even, or tying the shoelaces together. But they always ended up being repositioned neatly inward. I started observing my dormmate and found her mumbling to the shoes while squatting at the door. I ranted about it online, only to have my first reply send chills down my spine. [Do you also get the weird feeling that something paranormal is happening around you? You have to move out before it’s too late!]

The dormitory entrance downstairs is completely blocked. After squeezing to the front row, a he-wolf from the physical training camp next door points and whistles at me. "Look, that's the Luminian vixen. She's famous for being a notch-collector and will do it with any Alpha." My bed is strewn with rotten meat and animal entrails. On the wall, the words "Harlot", "Floozy", and "Tart" are scrawled in bright red lipstick. Jessica Cobb, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed cheer captain, holds up her phone. "Girls, I really don't want to expose her, but she's just filthy," she says with a face filled with contempt. "She's worse than a dog in heat. On Monday, it was the little hottie with the six-pack abs in his Ferrari. "Wednesday, it was the mature Alpha who reeks of cigars and has eyes that look like they want to devour you in his Bentley. Yesterday, it was that old gentleman with the monocle who's into domination in his Rolls-Royce." She shoves the photos right in the faces of the surrounding women. "Clearly, she didn't come here to study, but to find a sugar daddy." Despite the crystal-clear pictures showing me in those cars, I can't reveal that the men with me are my obsessively controlling older brother, my hot-tempered uncle, and my great-uncle. Respectively, they are the Alpha King of Lumin, the Chief Justice, and the Chair of the Elders' Council. The surrounding male werewolves burst into laughter, their eyes roaming over my thighs. "Hey, Luminian doll, how much for one night? I'd like a taste of you too." They have no idea that these men they're fantasizing about as my sugar daddies are actually the werewolf elders they can least afford to mess with in this lifetime.

My wife cheated on me—with my cousin. The three of us were headed to sign divorce papers when bam—car crash. Next thing I knew, I was back on the day we got our marriage license. This time, no fights, no drama. We both knew it was over. She ditched me for Jason fast and skipped the country with him. I stayed behind, buried in law books and case files. Five years later, she was famous—thanks to Jason pulling strings. Concerts, cash, fans screaming her name. Me? Still grinding at a law firm, backing folks who needed real legal help. Then came the family reunion. She showed up on Jason's arm, smug and shining, throwing shade like it was sport. But when I mentioned I was settling down with someone else? Her face snapped. "I made one dumb mistake! How DARE you move on?!"

Ever since my husband, Ted Towery, returns from a trip, he seems like a completely different person. He becomes gentle, attentive, and deeply affectionate. But one night, I get up in the middle of the night and see him standing at the kitchen counter. On the cutting board lie his head, his tongue, his eyeballs, and a heart that is still beating. "He" holds a kitchen knife, seeming a little conflicted. "Where should I start fixing?" Suddenly, the tongue on the cutting board lets out a shrill scream, "She sees us!"

My mother despised me because I was the unintended consequence of a one-night stand. She poured all her love and attention into her students, treating them as if they were her own flesh and blood. One day, when her favourite pupil confessed his feelings for me, she flew into a rage. She slapped me hard across the face and called me a whore. Years later, as Alzheimer's clouded her mind, she forgot I even existed, yet still remembered every single one of her precious students. The irony was that not one of them ever came to visit her in the nursing home. They all loathed her just as much as I did.

To celebrate Halloween, our company booked an immersive “rural horror” escape room. My boss said whoever could make it to the end without screaming would get a ten-thousand-dollar reward. As a seasoned horror movie fan, I was instantly tempted. The core character in the escape room was a scarecrow wearing an oversized pumpkin head. I admired how well the props were made, but the chainsaw noise was too loud, so I slipped into a hidden compartment, put on my headphones, and scrolled through reels. The next day, I woke up to a strong metallic stench mixed with the sickly-sweet smell of rotting pumpkin. The police told me our boss had canceled the booking at the last minute, and the actor originally assigned to play the character had gotten food poisoning. That pumpkin-headed figure wasn’t one of their staff.