Neighbors

Maya Hendricks is twenty eight years old, raising her son Eli alone in Chicago, and running out of road. She works three jobs, counts every dollar, and has not asked anyone for help in fourteen months. She is not proud of very much right now. But she is proud of that.
One cold November night she does something embarrassing. She texts the wrong number. A message meant for her sister goes to a compl...

I was frozen for 100 years due to illness.
One hundred years later, the whole world was ravaged by strange phenomena, and humanity was huddled together in a few small places to survive.
I was awakened from my slumber by the investigation team. I thought I would be killed by the monster as soon as I woke up, but I found that the monster here was my good brother from college.
Besides him, the eerie ...

A young couple recently moved in right across the hall from us.
The husband, Richard, works as an auditor at City Hall. His wife, Chloe, is the morning show host for a local TV network.
Chloe is about five-foot-three, with curves in all the right places. Her entire being radiates an unignorable, mature housewife charm—she is absolutely gorgeous.
Richard is a serious whiskey enthusiast and often...

"911, what's your emergency?"
What came through wasn't words—it was raw, desperate sobbing.
In Oak Creek, a well-respected couple called to report their daughter had died. But when officers stepped through the door, what they found made a veteran sheriff drop to his knees and retch—
Their 36-year-old daughter had become part of the couch.
Her body had fused with decomposing foam, waste, and writhi...

In this apocalyptic world of extreme heat, I fight for water in the underground black market, and I risk my life to hoard supplies.
My internet-famous roommate enjoyed my efforts while hiding in the air-conditioned room, panting softly in front of three fill lights: "We need to slow down and reconcile with nature."
Later, she stole my supplies and sold them to drug lords, causing me to be roasted...

"Do you know who runs this wealthy neighborhood? Get the hell out of here, now!"

The HOA committee chairwoman shrieked, pointing her finger right at my nose. Her twelve-year-old chubby son was gleefully smashing my custom furniture worth over a hundred thousand dollars with a baseball bat, his face lit up with excitement.

I looked at the wreckage scattered across the floor, sighed, then reached...

Every night, dragging noises come from the floor above.
The neighbor claims he just can’t sleep, yet he stares at my window and grins in the dead of night.
Later, he dies.
But at two in the morning, I still get a text message from him.
Someone else warns me: Don’t go to the sixth floor.
The police say this building doesn’t even have a sixth floor.
Yet I’ve seen people go up there with my own eyes....

As I sat in the police station with Yvonne Harper, my boyfriend’s childhood sweetheart, waiting for bail arrangements to be made, the decision loomed.
One of us could go home tonight.
My mate, Alpha Jackson, chose to take her.
"Nicole, just wait for me one more night. I’ll come back for you tomorrow," he said.
He was worried about her fragile health, but he didn’t care about my fear of the...

My mother rips my long-hidden Orion star chart to pieces and hurls the scraps straight into my face like garbage.
For seventeen years, I’ve been the praised straight-A good girl, my shirt collars always buttoned all the way up. I’ve lived solely for one goal: an acceptance letter from Yale, my ticket out of this suffocating cage.
But the second she locks my bedroom door from the outside, it hits m...

My husband's body moved over Celeste's, driving into her with brutal force.
She wrapped her legs around his waist, moaning like she did for her three million followers—except this performance was just for him.
I was her assistant. Her best friend, supposedly. Which is how I knew her passcode.
Now I was wedged in the back of her bedroom closet, phone aimed through the gap in the slats, ready to cat...

This was the most miserable Christmas I had ever experienced.
On Christmas Eve night, my husband brought his mistress home and demanded that I, his pregnant wife, leave with nothing.
On this day, I lost my husband and also lost the child in my womb...

At eighteen, I gave my virginity to Hunter in his bed.

I swallowed all the pain and hesitation, naively believing that three years of a pathetic crush had finally earned my way into his heart.

Until the next morning, when I heard his teammates' unabashed mockery:

"Damn, you finally bagged the nerd? How was it?"

Hunter scoffed, his tone dripping with utter contempt.

"Just messin...

That "poor pregnant woman" downstairs is currently waddling around Linden Court with her forty-week baby bump, sobbing to the neighbors. She claims the noise of me screwing men in the middle of the night is so loud it's killing her unborn baby.
In my past life, no one in this building believed me. In the end, she used a pair of rusty pruning shears to pin me, dead, to my own living room floor.
Reb...

I came home early from a business trip and overheard the woman Joseph always called his “poor stepmother” clinging to him in his office, begging for a kiss. Her swollen belly carried his child.
“When do I get to stop pretending to be your stepmother?” Susan whined.
Joseph’s cold laugh stripped away the last of my dignity. “Soon. Once I drain Emma’s company dry, she’ll be useless.”
I used to think ...

On our sixth anniversary, instead of a gift, my husband Liam video-called me while holding his first love, Sophia.
On screen, that woman proudly waved a positive pregnancy test while Liam sneered at me: "Sophia got pregnant on the first try. Proves your body's the problem, not mine!"
Clutching my own newly confirmed pregnancy report, my heart turned to ice. I decided to file for divorce.
But at th...

I was dying in an emergency room when my husband chose his ex-girlfriend over me.

"Stop being dramatic, Olivia," Matthew said over the sound of champagne and laughter. "Rebecca's gallery opening is tonight."

Dramatic? I was hemorrhaging from a miscarriage, signing my own surgical consent because my husband of seven years couldn't be bothered to save my life.

While I flatlined twice on the opera...

"Knock on this door over the noise one more time, and you're dead!"
Calling the cops was useless, and I was too broke to move.
Driven practically insane, I recklessly tore open the black box from the dark web—the seller promised that if I just followed the instructions, it would "eliminate the noise at the source."
Less than half an hour later, the deafening rager upstairs completely stopped.
Thr...

My neighbor Beck Morrow was the best high school point guard this state had seen in years.
The night before the state championship—three college scouts in the stands—he decided to stay home with his girlfriend instead. She wasn't feeling well.
I called his coach.
He played. He got the scholarship. He built a company worth eight figures before he turned thirty, and I spent five years writing every ...

News broke that a classmate had fallen from a building. The forensic assessment said it was homicide. Someone claimed they’d seen the killer: a young girl in a red coat.
The police came to our home. My stepsister shoved me forward. Mom said, “My daughter owns a red coat and she wasn’t at home yesterday.”