Every Sunday, without fail, my mother sends out the same message in our family group chat: “Dinner at 6. Bring tupperware.” It’s a tradition as reliable as the sun rising in the east. She’s never missed a single week, not even when she had the flu last year and could barely stand. It’s **her way of keeping us all connected**, a weekly ritual of family, food, and familiar faces. So, when I opened my phone that fateful Sunday morning and saw a message from her at 10 a.m. saying, [“PLEASE DON’T COME TODAY,”] I immediately thought it was some kind of bizarre joke. There was no emoji, no explanation, just those four unsettling words hanging there in the digital ether. My first instinct was to assume she was playing around, maybe trying out some new form of passive-aggressive humor. But something felt off. The lack of any clarifying context, the unusual time of the message – it all added up to a feeling of unease that quickly morphed into genuine concern. I immediately asked if everything was okay, if she was feeling alright. She left me on read. A single, silent confirmation that she had seen my message, but chose not to respond. That’s when the real panic started to set in.
…………………………………………..
👇 [ CONTINUE READING ] 👇
…………………………………………..
Five minutes later, my brother texted me, his message mirroring my own growing anxiety: “I called Mom, but she’s not picking up. Have you talked to her?” I hadn’t. The fact that she was ignoring both of us was incredibly out of character. We became increasingly worried, our minds racing with potential scenarios, each more terrifying than the last. We decided to rush to Mom’s house, hoping to find a perfectly reasonable explanation for her strange behavior, but fearing the worst.
I arrived first, my heart pounding in my chest like a trapped bird. I knocked on the door, my knuckles rapping against the solid wood, the sound echoing in the unnerving silence. No one answered. I knocked again, harder this time, calling out her name. Still nothing. I knew she was home; her car was in the driveway. I had a spare key hidden under a flowerpot near the front porch, a relic from the days when I would constantly lock myself out of the house as a teenager. With trembling hands, I retrieved the key, inserted it into the lock, and turned.
The door creaked open, revealing the familiar interior of my mother’s cozy living room. But something was different, something was terribly, horribly wrong. An unsettling stillness hung in the air, a silence so profound it felt like a physical weight pressing down on me. I took a tentative step inside, calling out my mother’s name again, my voice barely a whisper. And then, I saw it. Or rather, I saw *her*. And I **SCREAMED**. A primal, involuntary scream that ripped through the silence and echoed in my ears.
Because the woman sitting in my mother’s favorite armchair, the woman who turned to face me with a slow, deliberate movement, was not my mother. It was a stranger, a woman with cold, calculating eyes and a chillingly familiar smile. She was wearing my mother’s clothes, sitting in her spot, and the room reeked of a sickeningly sweet perfume my mother would never wear. The scene was like something out of a horror movie, a twisted parody of my mother’s comfortable Sunday dinners.
My mind struggled to process what I was seeing, to reconcile the familiar surroundings with the utterly alien presence that had invaded my mother’s home. Who was this woman? Where was my mother? And what in God’s name was happening? The woman simply smiled, a slow, deliberate curve of her lips that sent shivers down my spine. She opened her mouth to speak, and the words that came out were even more terrifying than her presence. She said, [“Welcome home, dear. Dinner will be ready soon.”]
