Jzt Stories

I  knew I shouldn’t have been driving that night. The bar had been nothing special just cheap beer, stale smoke, a jukebox playing songs from twenty years ago. But I had stayed too long, stayed past the point where the world felt solid under my feet. The bartender had given me that look as I asked for my last round, the one that said  you sure ?  I wasn’t sure, but I nodded anyway. By the time I got in my car, the night air slapped me, but not hard enough. My head was light, my eyes burned, and the warmth that pooled behind them made the road swim like heat rising from asphalt. Still, I convinced myself it was fine. I wasn’t stumbling. I wasn’t slurring. I just had to make it across town, through the stretch of highway that cut beneath the overpass, and then home. Fifteen minutes. That was the lie I told myself. The first few miles were quiet. Too quiet. No cars, no trucks, no late-night stragglers. Just me, my headlights, and the hum of tires against blacktop. I rolled t...

Snow White wasn’t her real name. Her classmates gave her that nickname in high school half-joking, half-afraid because she was unnervingly pale, the kind of pale no amount of summer could burn. Her hair was ink-black, her lips a natural red that needed no makeup. People noticed her, but not the way you’d want to be noticed. She looked less alive, more like porcelain someone had left in a coffin too long. Her stepmother hated it. Not because Snow was prettier though she was, in that unsettling dead-girl way, but because of the attention. Every photo, every whispered comparison, every glance that skipped the older woman and lingered on the girl. The stepmother was obsessed with her own beauty; her Instagram was full of filters, her bathroom full of mirrors. But mirrors had a way of telling truths. One night, drunk on wine and envy, she whispered to her bathroom mirror. “Who’s the most beautiful? Me, right?” And maybe it was the drugs, or maybe it was something older in the glass, but the...

I haven’t slept in seventy-two hours. Seventy-two hours of raw consciousness, stretched thin over the edge of sanity. At first, I thought it was nothing—just one of those bad patches people get. Too much caffeine from late nights at the office, too many deadlines stacked on top of each other like bricks pressing down on my skull. I told myself I’d crash eventually, that sleep was inevitable. But by the third night, inevitability felt like a cruel joke. My thoughts no longer moved in straight lines. They spiraled and tangled in looping knots. My skin prickled constantly, as though ants were crawling just beneath the surface. Every sound felt amplified: the hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the clock, the faint rattle of the pipes in the walls. And my heart—my heart never slowed. It hammered inside my ribs like it was trying to break free, sometimes so fast I thought I’d faint, only I never did. I knew I was breaking down. I saw it in the mirror. Hollow eyes ringed with dark bruise...

Everyone in the village knew the rhyme. Children sang it while skipping rope, mothers hummed it to restless infants, and even the elders muttered it under their breath as if repeating the words kept them safe. “Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, And Jill came tumbling after.” But like most rhymes, the truth had been twisted into song. The villagers forgot or pretended to forget what Jack and Jill were really known for. They were not innocent children. They were cunning thieves. Jack was bold, with quick eyes that never seemed to stop moving. He had a grin that made even the sternest adults soften. Jill was quieter, her hair tied back with ribbons, her little feet always bare, her hands always folded politely behind her back. Together they looked harmless, almost angelic. They lived in a crooked cottage with their grandmother, a frail woman half-blind with cataracts. She sent them up the hill each morning with their pail, telling...