Draft Zero

The mold above Rae's bed looked like Texas. It had been growing since February, a slow spread of shadow that didn’t flinch at bleach or begging. She stared at it most nights while the building groaned around her, listening to the baseboards creak and the radiator sigh like an old man too tired to argue.

Her laptop balanced on her knees, humming its tired fan-whine. The Word doc was blank except for the blinking cursor, like a pulse that never stopped waiting. She hadn’t written anything real in months. Just invoices. Outlines. One commissioned scene about a rancher who fingered his fiancée behind the hay bales. ("Make it emotional," the client had said. "But like, hot.")

Rae didn’t write that kind of thing for herself anymore. She barely wrote anything at all.

But that night, after eight hours manning the print station at a strip-mall copy shop—photocopying Dungeons & Dragons manuals, binding zines for local punks, and labeling obscure archive folders in calligraphy for a conspiracy theorist—Rae opened a document called draft_zero.docx on her laptop and typed without thinking.

In this version, her landlord choked on a mouthful of ice. Not because she wanted him dead—well, maybe a little—but because it had been hot for five days straight and the building's A/C was broken. Again. He’d promised to fix it. Again. In her version, he collapsed halfway through a voicemail threatening to raise her rent. Ice caught in his throat, and he fell onto the tile, wheezing like a dying accordion.

She gave him a full page. Then she deleted it. She didn’t save it. It felt indulgent, like picking a scab.

She didn’t think much of that. It was a reflex by now—she never kept the petty ones. Not because she feared what she wrote, but because she didn’t think it counted. These weren't real stories. Just scraps she cut loose, like old skin.

But the next morning, he was dead.

Heart failure. Officially.

"Collapsed in the kitchen," the girl downstairs told her. "Didn’t even drop his phone."

Rae blinked. Laughed, maybe. Said something like, "Terrible," and went back upstairs. She didn’t think about the story again until two nights later when she wrote about a publisher who’d ghosted her in 2016—the one who’d raved about her manuscript, kept her on the hook for six months, then published a strikingly similar novel under a more marketable name.

She hadn’t even written anything cruel. Just a scene where he panicked on stage. Fumbled his words. Admitted, unprompted, that he’d stolen it. She’d deleted that one too. Half out of shame. Half because she thought maybe it meant she could finally stop wanting it to be true.

But the next morning, he was trending on Twitter.

He’d been exposed for lifting entire chapters—whole arcs and metaphors—from a dozen unpublished authors whose work he'd reviewed, archived, and buried. A quiet fraud, dragged into light. His apology was shaky, scripted, and far too late.

It didn’t feel like power. Not yet. It felt like coincidence. Ugly little threads of chance. But she kept writing.

A week later, she tested it.

There was a girl in her undergrad workshop who used to "joke" that Rae's work read like trauma fanfic. She'd gone on to become a poet-slash-influencer who wrote about self-love and sponsored face serums. Rae wrote her into a scene with a paper cut that turned septic. She watched the news the next morning with her coffee, pretending not to flinch when the headline scrolled past: "Popular TikTok Creator Hospitalized With Rare Blood Infection."

She told one person—Nina, her coworker at the copy shop—and Nina just laughed.

"You're telling me you wrote someone into the ICU and then hit delete?"

"Not on purpose."

"You know that sounds insane."

"I know. It feels insane."

Nina slid a ream of printer paper into the tray with a thud. "You okay?"

Rae hesitated. Then, honestly: "I don't know. I want to stop. But I can't seem to. It’s like something’s waiting for me to write. Like if I stop, I disappear. And when I do write—it’s the only time I feel like what I am saying matters."

"Sounds like quite an addiction."

"Or a possession..."

That night, she didn’t open draft_zero.docx. She stacked books over her laptop, like that might keep something inside. She paced the apartment like a caged animal, her breath shallow, heart thudding with a tremor that felt cosmic—like the echo of a language not meant for her throat. Two glasses of wine didn’t touch it. Sleep wouldn't come. The need to write clawed at her, hot and humming and ancient. She told herself it was just her loneliness, her boredom. But it felt more like a hunger, a desperation. A summoning.

Finally, with shaking hands, she cracked her knuckles. Moved the books. Opened the laptop. Typed:

In this version, her ex-husband forgets how to lie.

She gave him a camera crew. A live interview. A microphone he couldn’t escape. His mouth moved before his mind could catch up. Secrets poured out: the affairs, the stolen edits, the cruel little rewrites he’d slipped into her manuscript to make her smaller. The name he gave his heroine. The real one he'd stolen it from.

Then she backspaced the whole thing, line by line, until the screen was clean. Her finger hovered over the key for a long time, heart skipping.

In the following days, he was trending too.

It wasn't criminal, but it was catastrophic. He unraveled on his live—confused timelines, admitted to edits he denied for years, casually confessed to "borrowing inspiration" from an unnamed source. Then he called his new wife by Rae’s name.

The internet pounced. Someone clipped the moment into a viral super cut titled: Plagiarist Unplugged. Some said it felt staged by the universe. Like a public exorcism.

Rae didn’t laugh this time. She shut the laptop gently, like it might bite.

She thought it might be about catharsis at first. Some strange psychosomatic release. Maybe the words were just dredging something up—old rage, old memories—and her brain was filling in the blanks with coincidence. That made sense. Almost.

That’s what scared her the most. Not that she could do it—

But that she wanted to.

It was getting harder to pretend. And harder still to understand the rules.

She started leaving the endings unfinished. She thought maybe if she didn’t delete them, nothing would happen. That seemed to be the pattern. But those stories just sat there—dead on the screen. No accidents. No news. The world stayed silent.

It wasn’t about whether the story was finished.

It was about whether she let it go.

This curse, or the force—whatever it was—only woke up when she pressed delete. Like it needed her shame. Her refusal. Like it couldn’t use what she still claimed.

That was the catch—at least, the part she understood.

Whatever listened—it only stirred when she surrendered her claim. Not when she wrote, but when she let it go, truly, like a truth too painful to keep.

She tried to write something beautiful once. A scene about her mother, long gone. Rae wrote her alive again, sitting at the kitchen table, humming Cher and buttering toast with cinnamon. The words made her cry. She hit delete anyway, just to see.

Nothing happened.

That was how she knew. It wasn’t love that made things real. It was rage—or her grief—or something older and crueler that fed on the worst of her.

She stopped writing for three days. But she couldn’t stop thinking. Not just about what might happen next—but about where it all began. The power hadn’t followed her all her life. It hadn’t appeared with her first publication. It began with draft_zero.docx—a file she’d opened in a moment of bitterness, not to write a story, but to dig something out of herself.

The file had always been blank. But the hunger she felt after—the strange pressure behind her eyes, the hum in her spine—felt like something waking up. Not in the world, but in her. Not a possession. More like a second voice, just behind her own.

She unplugged the laptop and shoved it to the back of the closet. Told herself she didn’t need the rush. The ritual. The strange intimacy of it. Told herself she could be normal again.

But she didn’t believe it.

On the fourth night, the air felt different. Still, but wrong. The hairs on her arms stood up like a static charge had passed through the room. She checked the closet. The laptop was on. Plugged in.

The screen glowed through the crack in the door.

When she opened it, there was a new file waiting.

One line:

What happens when you write about yourself?

Rae's hand paused above the keyboard a moment before she closed the lid. Her breath came slow. The air felt heavy, like the calm before a storm.

Then, like surrender, she turned out the light and lay down. And this time, she slept.

She dreamed of a tunnel made from language—an infinite corridor spun from starlit script and echoing thought. The walls shimmered with lines of words that rearranged themselves as she passed, murmuring possibilities in voices she half-remembered. Each sentence shimmered like a constellation, grammar bending like gravity, punctuation suspended like orbs of frozen time.

Every fork in the tunnel branched toward another self: Rae, the award winner; Rae, the recluse; Rae, the forgotten. Each life folded into the next like pages in a book never bound. The deeper she wandered, the more insubstantial she became—not erased, but translated. Her breath turned to metaphors, her skin to vellum, her pulse to rhythm. She became text, pure and rewritten.

Ahead, a portal glowed—shaped like an open bracket, thrumming with potential. She did not pause. Rae stepped through.

And the tunnel folded closed behind her like a sentence ending.

Somewhere in the dark, she felt it—the second voice that had lived just behind her own, finally unspooling. Not silenced. Not erased. But fulfilled. The hunger that had haunted her from draft_zero.docx didn’t follow. It had stayed in the file, in that world. Here, it had no purpose.

She woke—not in her moldy apartment, but in a little house by the sea, windows open, gulls crying overhead. A cat she’d never met curled beside her. On the desk: a typewriter, a page propped, ready to be written. In the mirror: a woman she recognized only slightly, but who looked softer, unburdened.

There was no laptop. No drafts. No mold creeping across the ceiling like memory.

Just morning—clear, gold, and quiet. She let herself breathe it in.

For the first time, Rae felt like she had arrived somewhere meant for her.

And that, finally, was enough.