13 Feb I Stole My Stories

My name is Andrew Thames, and I am nothing more than a slimy thief.

I used to call myself a writer. I can’t say I ever wrote anything worth it. Despite years and years of work, pouring over my laptop, sending submission after submission, I had almost nothing to show for it. The only money in my pocket came from working the drive-through at a cheap fast food place known for its yellow arches.

I live… well, lived, with a fellow writer. Yasmina Abel. Yasmina is- was, a real writer. She didn’t have to work a shitty minimum wage job where there was always a risk of someone throwing their drink at me because ‘it had too much ice’. She could really make a decent living off her writing. She didn’t even have to ask for jobs sometimes, the people she’d worked for in the past came to her.

It wasn’t fair. She told me it took her years to develop the contacts she did, but it’s not like I wasn’t working hard too! I spent every night working on my new stories. But where I got rejections, she got accepted. When we originally moved in together, we were actually quite good friends. We had been ever since sharing a high school creative writing class. I admired her natural flair for describing colors and how she would set a scene. She said she liked my witty one-liners and how easy it was to relate to my characters. I’m not sure if she really meant it, but it felt nice at the time.

I suppose the reason we stopped being friends was my fault. I mean, she didn’t have to shove her success in my face all the time, but I was jealous. Incredibly so. It felt like she was being favored over me, and maybe she was, by fate, by publishers, by podcasts… we used to have breakfast together almost every morning. By the end of it, I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her.

She was hurt, and I now know she had every right to. But I had a bad workday when I returned to the apartment, and that’s when she cornered me, demanding that we talk. I didn’t want anything to do with her, so I tried to leave. She followed me out into the walkway and told me to stop acting like a child.

It was an accident. I tell myself it was an accident. I never could intentionally hurt someone. But I was tired, I smelled like chicken nuggets and burnt french fries, I’d been screamed at, my job had been threatened, and I just didn’t want anything to do with Yasmina.

So I pushed her. Not hard! I just wanted her to leave me alone. But she tripped and she fell down the stairs. I heard a crack. And then she was still at the bottom of the stairs. She wasn’t moving. Maybe she was still breathing then. I don’t know. I didn’t check.

I just went back into the apartment and went to bed. I didn’t think she was really that hurt.

I especially didn’t expect her to be dead. A few hours later I was woken up by sirens. Cops knocked on my door, told me that it looked like my roommate had tripped and fallen down the steps, broken her neck. Bad luck, they said. Maybe they just couldn’t be bothered to investigate further. That was the first and only stroke of luck I’ve had since Yasmina died.

She didn’t really have much in the way of family. Her funeral was empty of blood relatives, just friends in attendance. I was the one who delivered her eulogy, feeling like it was ashes in my mouth. Every time someone told me how sorry they were, I wanted to barf. I just nodded, people blamed my silence on my grief. They weren’t wrong, just not entirely right either.

I went home after the service. I felt numb. I’d gotten away with murder, accidental or not. I didn’t know what else to do, so I started going through Yasmina’s things. Some things to send to her other friends. Some things to donate. Some things to just pitch into the dumpster.

And then I found her laptop.

At first, I figured I’d just wipe the drive and sell it so I could hopefully afford rent for a few months. I knew the password, like she knew my passwords.

It was there I found her stories. All. Of. Them.

Of course she had more time for writing, she didn’t have to go to work. She could just wake up and be at her keyboard, her fingers flying away as she penned another award-winning short tale. She could write all she wanted.

I told myself that I was just going to read through them. Just to see what she’d been working on before I shoved her down the stairs. Maybe I could even glean some inspiration from her.

Those excuses didn’t last long. She had a dozen stories still unpublished, good ones too, and a trilogy of novels that were all but finished in the editing department. I needed to get something quality out. Otherwise I could kiss my apartment goodbye and go back to living with my overbearing parents. That was the last thing I wanted.

So I copied the stories to a flash drive before I wiped her laptop’s hard drive, removing any existence of the stolen stories. I ended up selling it for two hundred bucks on eBay.

I then copied the stories onto my own google drive, tweaked a few words here and there, and then I began submitting them.

It’s wrong. I knew it was wrong when I did it. I didn’t kill Yasmina for her stories, that I promise you. I didn’t plan to kill her, how could I have chosen to steal her stories before then? But fate seemingly dropped a present in my lap. I couldn’t say no to a chance like this.

And what do you know, it actually worked. It wasn’t a publishing house, it was a podcast, but the guy in charge was real friendly. He told me he loved every word and set me up with a regular writing job, starting with the story I took from Yasmina.

Finally. I was getting paid for writing. It just wasn’t mine to sell. I know that now for sure.

It was a week after I sent the second of Yasmina’s stories off in my name. I treated myself to fast food that night, and was walking up the steps with it when I felt cold. Really cold. I stopped for a second to see if someone came in after me, that all I was feeling was just a cold breeze from the open door. There was nobody there.

I turned forward and at the top of the stairs, I saw Yasmina.

She was wearing the dress she had been when they buried her, but she wasn’t caked in the makeup a corpse is for an open coffin. Her face was pale, nearly gray. Her eyes, filled with anger, stared at me, and her head was tilted and almost sitting on her shoulder, like her black and blue neck unable to support its weight.

She was there only for a few seconds, staring at me, and then when I blinked she was gone. The hallway was the temperature it always was, but I now felt colder than ever.

I didn’t eat dinner that night. I tossed the bag into the trash and hid in my room, convincing myself it was all in my head. I didn’t believe it then, and I certainly don’t believe it now.

Yasmina had an obsession with burning this damn sandalwood incense. Drove me nuts, I hated the smell, but she claimed it helped her anxiety, and if she was anxious she couldn’t write. So I allowed it. We needed to pay rent, after all.

I started smelling it all over the apartment again. Not like how it usually wafted around for a few days after she burnt a whole stick, but like there was a stick actively smoking in the apartment. The first time I tore the place apart, seeing if I missed any of the incense, but nope. I had tossed it all out with the rest of her garbage.

Denial was still my only refuge. I didn’t believe in ghosts. Ghosts weren’t real. And if they were, why would Yasmina be haunting me? It wasn’t MY fault she died. Not really. She fell down the stairs. It wasn’t like I shot her or stabbed her. As for using her stories, well, at least they were still getting out there. She should be happy that they didn’t die with her.

But I was wrong. I was lying to myself. It might have been an accident that Yasmina died. But it wasn’t an accident that I stole her stories.

After I got the third stolen story published, I woke up in the middle of the night. I couldn’t breathe. It was even a struggle to open my eyes.

Yasmina was standing above me, her hands on my throat. She looked so hateful, so enraged, I’d never seen such a horrible expression on her face before. I tried to struggle, I tried to scream, but her fingers just dug into my neck even more.

Then I really woke up. It was almost three AM, and I was alone. My neck hurt like hell, but there was not a sign of Yasmina. I headed to the bathroom and I nearly passed out when I saw my reflection in the mirror. Bruises, clearly from a person’s hands, around my neck. For a second, I thought I saw Yasmina behind me, a dark grin on her face. I spun around and she was gone. She wasn’t there when I looked at my mirror again. But the bruises were there.

I wore a turtleneck when I went out that week. I didn’t want any weird questions. It was really hard to explain why it looked like someone tried to choke me to death. I don’t think she intended on killing me though.

She just wanted to show she could.

Visions of Yasmina followed me everywhere. I nearly wet my pants when I was out with friends getting coffee and I saw Yasmina at another table, staring at me unblinkingly. It was obvious I was freaking the hell out because one of my friends joked about me seeing a ghost. I managed to pass it off as something else, but Yasmina was still there. Still staring. Still wanting to strangle the life out of me.

I had to stop going out after a while, other than going to work. Of course Yasmina followed me out there, but I had to keep paying the bills, and my- well, her writing wasn’t cutting it yet. I think my boss knows I’m seeing things, because the number of times I’d say ‘what would you like to order?’ and then realize it was just Yasmina standing in front of my register again was absurd. No one else ever saw her. Yasmina was only for my eyes. Because I was the one who stole her stories.

I don’t know how I lasted almost three weeks seeing Yasmina wherever I looked. When I went up to get a cup of coffee, Yasmina was there, leaning up against the fridge with a scowl twisting her lips down. When I went to bed, she was in the corner, and I’d hide under the covers like a little kid hoping that the blanket would be a shield to protect me. When I went to pick up groceries, Yasmina was walking by my cart, somehow avoiding running into other customers or shelves but never taking her eyes off of me. Even when I was fucking taking a shower, I’d see her shadow behind the curtain. Thank god she was always gone by the time I’d rip the curtain open.

I’d never have any time alone, if I did, it was just a few blessed moments. Moments where I thought this torture was finally over with. That Yasmina had finally fucked off to heaven or hell and left me alone. But she’d be back, still staring, still seething with barely held back rage.

I finally snapped yesterday. I’d finally gone a whole workday without seeing her. I thought that maybe, finally, I was free from her haunting. Then I got home and I saw her at my computer desk. She stared at my screen, where another of her stolen stories was up. I’d found a magazine that loved the synopsis, so I intended on sending it in that night.

She… wasn’t angry now. She was sad. She looked broken. Then she looked back up at me and her face contorted with rage again.

I was done. I was so tired. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t enjoy a meal in peace. She was always lurking! She was dead, leave me alone!

Somehow my neighbors didn’t react to my absolute meltdown. I threw things at her, I screamed in her face, I begged her to just leave me alone. She didn’t react. The lamps and books I pitched at her just went right through, like she wasn’t even there. She just stared at me. And kept staring.

Finally I collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath. The apartment now looked like a tornado went through it.

I finally asked her what I should’ve asked her days ago.

“What do you want!? Why won’t you leave me alone?!”

I blinked, and suddenly Yasmina was standing above me. She clasped my face in her ice-cold hands. For a second, I thought she might have mercy on me. That she might forgive me.

Then her fingers clawed my cheeks open, ripping through skin and flesh like butter. I fell back to the ground, my face a bloodied mess as Yasmina stared at her bloody hands. She grinned, and for the first time since she started haunting me, she made a sound.

She giggled. She giggled like a fucking maniac.

And then she vanished.

I know she’s behind me. She seems to enjoy being just in the corner of my eye now, so when I whip around and look around I just look crazy. It’s not like she can’t kill me whenever she wants. She’s waiting.

I’m trying to make it right now. I’ve already pulled all of her stories, making up excuses about other promises. I’ve pissed off the one podcast I’ve been working with, but I don’t care. I don’t care if I ever get published ever again. I think it’s safe to say I’ll never be writing ever again.

I’ve done everything I can… but it’s not enough. Yasmina is still there. Waiting.

I hope this confession will be enough to make it right. If it’s not…

if it’s not, I guess she’s just waiting for me to finish making amends before she finishes what she’s started.

I am a thief. And a murderer. I killed Yasmina Abel and I stole her stories. And I’m so, so sorry.