Memories of Ink and Loss

He drew things. Not for a living. For eyeballs. For views. For upvotes and karma.

For dopamine.

Sometimes for money, but only when asked.

He was bought from, he never sold to.

It started as a joke. A sketch for a friend. Then a forum. Then a following. Then money.

The comments told him who he was.

“More like this.”
“Hot.”
“Wrong, but right.”
“Your brain must be a terrifying place. I love it.”

Tentacles, mostly. Glossy, anatomically improbable things. Commissioned by lonely weirdos with PayPal accounts and a fixation on things that slither and penetrate.

He told himself it was fiction. Just pixels. Just fantasy. A safe kind of wrong. Nothing like the real kind.

He’d always said he didn’t believe in anything—not love, not fate, not the soul. Least of all beauty. Certainly not monsters.

The drawings changed. His drawing changed too, the pen on his tablet like a chant, the rhythm that of a prayer or a hymn.

He started adding expressions. Not ahegao, no, nothing like that. Real ones. Ones that people felt in their souls. They noticed. “That last piece hit different,” someone DMed. Another said, “I saw myself in her.”

He grew a following around his name. People started talking about him like he was famous. Still, he wanted more. Wanted reach and influence. He didn’t know what he was reaching for.

Something reached back.

Someone messaged him, not with a kink, not with a commission—but with a memory.

“You drew this. But I dreamed it. Before you posted, I dreamed her face. I remember the smell of brine, the burn of it in my nose, before the dark came. I thought I’d forgotten. But she remembers me too, doesn’t she?”

He slept less. Drew more. Built a website, and watched his hit-counter tick in the corner of his fourth screen—the more hits, the faster he drew, the less he slept.

He stopped replying to messages. He wanted to, but there were too many. Answering them meant getting more messages, and he wasn’t really a word sort of person anyway—time was better spent drawing.

The comments got strange. Not angry, never angry, just needy. Hungry.

“Do you take custom dreams now?”
“I didn’t ask for her to touch me. She did anyway.”

“Please draw the one with the mouth. The first mouth. The mouth like sin and loneliness. Please. I’m so alone.”

The website earned. More than enough. No use for so much money.

He stopped taking commissions. Turned off DMs.

They still found him. His snapchat, the one he kept for new girls and old friends. A gmail address he’d forgotten about. One started mailing hand-written letters—no return address, just tentacle sketches on the envelopes, all in the same pale purple ink he used in a throwaway piece months ago. Ink he’d mixed himself. Ink he’d bled for, once. He remembered tearing a hangnail, and the taste of ink mixed with his blood.

He thought nothing of it at the time.

He changed his email. They still found him.

One girl showed up at his door. She didn’t knock. Just stood there, rain-soaked, staring. She mouthed, “She’s real,” and pressed her forehead to the peephole. He never opened it, just listened to her humming, the same chant or prayer or hymn that his pen made against his tablet. Eventually, she left something at the threshold: a folded drawing. One of his own, altered, shaded in new ways, as if she’d seen it from another angle.

When he picked it up, it was still cold and it burned.

⸻

His audience started to lose themselves. Slowly at first—quieter profiles, vague accounts deleting themselves after strange, too-sincere comments like, “Thank you for showing me where I belong.”

Then faster.

They began drawing too. Poor imitations. Scribbles. Each post accompanied by strings of text he couldn’t read, but understood.
“Her memory grows in us. You are the herald.”
“Why have you forsaken us?”
“Come back to where you belong.”
“You are needed.”
“I thought… I thought I was a moth; she was my flame, my pyre.”

He wanted to quit.

He couldn’t.

He’d wake in the morning and new pieces would be posted under his name. Signed with his handle. In his style. Except… not quite. The lines were sharper. More sinuous.They had layers he couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t unlock. Still, the master files were in his folders. The exports: uploaded from his IP.

The worst part?

They were better than his work had ever been.

They made people worship.

They began to call themselves The Taken. A subreddit formed. A Discord, buzzing with manic devotion. Some tattooed his linework on their bodies. Some removed things from their lives, made space, prepared themselves with rituals.

A few streamed their preparations.

He didn’t watch.

He heard about it though.

Then it happened.

It happened, and he heard about it. We all did; it made the news, there were memes about it.

⸻

The last post he made was an apology.

“I didn’t mean for you to believe me. It was supposed to be fake. It’s not. I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was real. I didn’t know you’d all be so easy.”

The drawings, one by one, fell from the net. Replaced with some random grotesquerie or attempt at erotica.

All traces of his once famous username: long since purged.

He’s still alive. He walks by the sea now, somewhere unlisted. He doesn’t draw. Doesn’t even own a pen. Sometimes, he sketches, with his toe, in the sand, but only when there’s no-one near—only where the sea will take it before anyone can see.

He’s quiet now. Not broken—he was never broken—but hollowed. Like a shell that’s been carefully, reverently cleaned out by something with patience and too many limbs.

He doesn’t speak often. When he does, it’s always kind. Like someone who remembers what it felt like to be seen too much.

People who meet him—tourists, mostly—they say he seems nice. Gentle. A little sad. Older than he looks.

Those who ask for it don’t recognise his name.

Sometimes—rarely—someone says something. A phrase. A word that shouldn’t mean anything but does, to that part of him that he’ll never forget.

He smiles, small, and says, “Not anymore.”

He walks away.

The sea eats his footprints behind him.

She never told anyone.

Of course she didn’t. That’s the point. That’s the cost.

A girl in a small town, a girl who swallowed the words for what was done to her. Still, the town knew and too many eyes watched her, mouths whispering, talking about her. So she kept her mouth closed and attempted no truths. Bit her tongue. Swallowed silence until it curdled her soul.

She whispered it once—not in words, but in a sob, drawn out of her by a clawed prayer to nothing.

She was wrong.

Something was already listening.

It heard her under the floorboards. In the crawlspace where water pooled, where the mildew wrote its own history. It tasted her grief in the coppery rust on the old pipes, in the fungus behind the drywall. It swelled with it.

She forgot her whisper, her one moment of weakness and truth.

It did not.

⸻

He never thought about her again. Of course he didn’t. That’s the point. That’s the pattern. One and done, and onto the next.

He left town. Found new places. New placements. New lives and souls to sully.

Years later, when the basement in his city flat began to flood—he blamed pipes, weather, someone’s negligence, global warming.

Not memory.

Not consequence.

The water rose. Only in his building. Only when he was home alone and not watching.

The walls grew soft.

The floors began to give.

The first tentacle came through the sink, slick and silent. It didn’t grab. It touched.

Identity confirmed. Verified. Action authorised.

The second did not ask.

⸻

He did not die quickly. This was no gentle passing. That was the point.

His screams didn’t echo. They gurgled. They were taken from him and rendered futile, just as her objections and refusals had been.

When they were done—when he had been taken by the thing that remembered her…

There was nothing left.

No trace. No body. No complaint or complainant.

Just a damp ring on the floorboards and a smell no bleach could lift.

⸻

She never knew.

She didn’t need to.

It wasn’t about her—it never was.

Yet: years later, when she passed through that town, she glanced toward the water and thought she saw movement beneath the reeds.

For the first time in her life, she felt safe. Vaguely, but still: comforting.

Not because the world was kind, no she knew better than that. She had learned his lessons well. She had learned: somewhere in the world’s wet, dark places, where most people never look…

Records are kept. Filed.

When the time is right, they are actioned.

He found the pen in a warped cigar box of forgotten things, the box itself buried behind glossy coffee-table books on fashion and art, all spine-out like sentinels. Beneath them: paperbacks, their pages foxed and swollen with humidity, their covers the kind of lurid that could only be described as necrocilious—a sin of printing best repented for in blood.

“Orric___ __llow __brary __st&fo__d” on the outside of the box.

Inside the box: a rotted hymnal, its pages fused at the corners as though ashamed to open. A moth-eaten bookmark stitched in crude thread, wavering but legible: “Trust in the Lurd.” The U was no doubt a child’s mistake. Or perhaps a truth deeper than the one intended.

And beneath all that, the pen.

Mother-of-pearl. Delicate as bone, but with a weight that suggested burden more than craftsmanship. It gleamed faintly, even in the shade—like it remembered light. Like it waited.

He touched it, and the hairs on his arms lifted like they were trying to pray.

It hummed in a way that only he could hear.

He didn’t think much of it at first. Just took it. Slipped it into his bag like its ownership was already fact.

He was sixteen, or at least that was what he told people. In truth, he wasn’t sure. Dates had a way of feeling hazy. Years had dissolved in sermons and silence. The preacher—his father—had a way of talking that bent time, made it feel as if all moments led back to fire.

He lived quiet. Kept to himself. Said “yes sir” and “no ma’am”. Buttoned his collar even when it chafed. Washed the sin off his hands every Sunday even though he hadn’t done anything to earn it.

The pen changed things.

It started with a name that wasn’t his yet. That was all for the first night. Written on an old gas bill envelope in his bedroom while cicadas rasped outside and the fan turned slow above his head. The ink was too dark. Too thick. It bled through the paper but didn’t spread.

He tried to wipe it off.

It wouldn’t wipe away.

He wrote again the next night. Not because he had anything to say. Just because the pen wanted to be written with.

Soon, it wasn’t just thoughts. It was memories; some of them weren’t his. Confessions, admission of sins he’d never even thought of committing… until now. Truthful things that he hadn’t admitted to himself, and shameful wants, the kind that grew like moss in the corners of the body.

“Her name was Hannah. I didn’t want her. I wanted her voice. Her bones. Her shape. I wanted to be seen the way they saw her. I was inside her and it was nice, but I wanted to inhabit her very being, her life, her entirety.”

He’d never known a Hannah, but he remembered her nevertheless. Remembered wanting to become her.

He didn’t sleep much.

He didn’t pray at all. Prayer seemed strangely surplus now.

The ink marked more than paper. It lingered on his fingers, soaked into the skin. Stained his cuticles. Turned his tongue black one night when he bit his nails.

That was the first night he dreamed of them.

Tentacles, but not monstrous and violent—no rape, no forced restraint, not like those in the strange asian comics the boys showed off on their phones, giggling in a way they thought was worldly. No, these were not horrific things. Soft, slow, exploratory and gently curious. They writhed through the slats of his bedroom walls, through the floorboards. They brushed the fan blades, coiled around the ceiling. Never touched him. Not at first.

He met people differently now.

There was a woman in town, too old to be called Miss, too strange to be called Ma’am. Her eyes flickered pale like fishbellies. She sold jars of honey, thick and glistening dark like deep sea oil.

“That pen,” she said once, when he came to her table, “weren’t neva meant for no boy t’ be usin’. Leastways, not for too long…”

He didn’t correct her. She already knew anyway.

She looked at him for a long time. “But maybe it was meant for you.”

A boy came to him later, younger than him by a year or so. Grey-eyed. Freckled and bruised. Too kind. The kind who blushed when their hands brushed.

They kissed behind the old church, where no-one could see.

Nothing burned. No lightning struck. Just the taste of something sweet that wasn’t sugar.

That night, the pen wrote: “I don’t want to be forgiven. I want to be changed.”

His hand trembled at the truth, the pen’s shadow bobbing on the peeling wallpaper.

Or was it nodding?

He met others. Some older. One who had once worn a collar like his father’s. Another who claimed to remember a time when the sea whispered instead of roared. One who didn’t speak at all, but sang into his palm, and left him shaking for a week.

They all had the marks of ink from their own pens, deep in the whorls of their fingertips.

He wasn’t alone.

The pen never ran dry.

He started to see glyphs in water stains, messages in mildew. When he walked barefoot through the bayou, the grass parted, the moss gave way as if greeting him.

The townsfolk began to look past him. Not ignore. Their eyes slid off him, couldn’t stay on him for more than a moment, as if he were already fading out of their lives.

He wrote more and more. Hid the pages in forgotten clothes, beneath the floorboards of the attic. In hollow trees. Beneath loose bricks. Were they hidden, or were they offerings?

He didn’t know.

His father tried to summon him, once. From the pulpit. “You are not what God made. The unmaking of Gods work is Sin.”

The words found him, through the ears and lips of others, but he didn’t answer.

Not in words. In a look over the breakfast neither of them was bold or angry or sad enough to stop having.

He scrapes the blackened crusts against the edge of the plate, and the sound is awful—ceramic teeth grinding on rusted tin.

His father eats slowly, methodically, like it’s penance ritual. The still-a-son eats faster, like he’s trying to get it over with before the weight of their shared quiet chokes him.

The can sits on the table still open, syrup pooling at the edge. The knife they used to dig the lid free rests beside it, sticky and indifferent.

No one speaks. Not because there’s nothing to say. But because what there is to say won’t survive being spoken.

They both gave praise when the meal ended. Not the same way, but still…

He wrote that night until the pen bled from both ends.

When he woke, the bed was slick with ink. Words written on his skin. Names he did not know. A language that hurt to remember.

He walked into the river that morning.

Not to die.

To meet them.

They waited below, soft and old and knowing. Tentacles beckoning, welcoming.

The ink washed from his skin. But not from her soul.

She writes still.

Some nights, if the air is thick and the cicadas loud, you can find a note at the foot of a cypress tree. Damp but legible. The words unfurl like vines, intricate and archaic.

“I am not healed. But I am whole.”