The story
The absence of his father still hung in the air like a heavy morning fog. That fateful Sunday when the old man passed away, the news reached him late, tearing through his soul with a pain so deep it seemed impossible to heal. The days following the funeral blurred together in a haze of silence and held-back tears inside the walls of his home, where every corner seemed to hold the echo of a voice that would never be heard again.
That morning, looking for a glimmer of comfort among his memories, he sat in the living room to go through the photographs stored on his cell phone. The pale daylight drifted in through the window, barely lighting up the touchscreen as he scrolled over and over through pictures of happy times. Suddenly, as he swiped over to a hidden gallery, his heart seemed to stop in his chest.
There, filling the phone's display, was a deeply disturbing image. Two dark hands, with blurry outlines and absolute blackness, were emerging from the deepest shadows of the screen, stretching their fingers out desperately as if trying to grab onto someone, or drag him down into the digital abyss.
A freezing chill ran down his spine. With trembling hands and ragged breath, he called out to his wife, who was in the kitchen. She came right away and, leaning in to look at the device, instantly turned pale at the sight of those menacing shadows that seemed to take on a life of their own.
Trying to figure out where this visual nightmare came from, he started checking the file's metadata. That was when he realized it wasn't just some downloaded photo, but a screenshot. Intrigued and terrified at the same time, he checked the exact time it was recorded: the screenshot showed precisely nine-forty-five in the morning on Sunday, June twenty-third.
A thick silence took over the room as they made the connection. That exact moment matched the exact time when his niece, desperate to break the news of the death, had tried to reach him by phone—a call that changed his life forever and that, apparently, had left a vague and eerie trace in the digital world.
