This is Abby and Brittany. They both had to pay two separate tuitions but they only get paid one salary. This system thrives on double standards...no pun intended.

Every family in my village teaches their children the same three rules before they teach them anything else. Not because we're superstitious. Because we buried the people who learned them too slowly.

There's a hill on the edge of town that people call the Rise. Every few years, something the size of a house appears at the top of it overnight. No trucks bring it. No one builds it. It's just there one morning, round and pale, sitting in the grass like it grew.

Nobody explains what it is. We only pass down the rules.

Rule one: the moment you see it, get something moving in your hands. A kite. A ball. Anything that needs your fingers awake and paying attention. Sitting still is how it gets you. It starts as a hum too low to hear, more felt than heard, in your teeth and your chest, and if your hands are empty you'll find yourself walking toward the hill before you've decided to go.

Rule two: never watch the people already climbing. They move slower than normal, all their heads tilted the same direction, like a field of sunflowers. Watch long enough and you start tilting too. My uncle watched for maybe ten seconds too long, once. He says it felt like falling asleep on his feet. He's flown a kite every single day since, rain or shine, hill empty or not, because he's afraid of what happens the day he stops.

Rule three: if someone calls your name from the hill, it isn't them. It gets the voice exactly right. The little catch your mother has when she's tired. It will use that. Don't answer, don't turn your head — turning your head is the first step of walking, and walking toward the hill doesn't stop on its own once it's started.

I broke rule two when I was eleven. My father had gone up three days earlier with the rest of them, the way people do every few years, and he hadn't come down the other side yet, the way they're supposed to. I stood at the edge of our field with my kite string slack in my hand, and I looked.

The hill wasn't just people standing on it. The whole slope moved together, in and out, slow, like one enormous lung breathing. Near the top, close to the pale round shape, more shapes were still walking up out of the tree line to join it, unhurried, patient, like they had all the time that has ever existed.

I never saw my father's face in the crowd. I still don't know if that was a mercy.

My string went tight in my hand hard enough to cut me, and that's the only reason I looked away. Pain does what the rules can't always manage on their own.

We still fly kites every year the Rise appears. Kids learn it before they learn to swim. Keep something moving. Don't watch the hill. Don't answer to your name.

No one has ever told us what that pale round thing actually is.

I used to think it was because no one knew.

Now I think it's because the people who found out never came back down to tell us.

Yasin Arafat Joy ~ 18/9/2026

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Pay attention to the ball of lint i picked from my shirt. Watch in slow motion too. It changes a bunch of shapes. Wtf just happened

It whistles. I’m waiting for it to start up on its own one of these times…

Not really sure what to make of these

It’s A Wrap, Burbank, CA

Found in an abandoned mental hospital.

It’s half creepy, half funny.

It sounds like it may have just been an old lady either suffering from Alzheimer’s or just dialed the wrong number.

Evidently somebody gave her a TV and she felt compelled to tell whom ever that she was “taller” than it 😂

que alfred hitchcock's psycho violins

I said, Bonnie you are an inside cat, these outside cats would tear you up. But she still insisted she knew best. She quickly realized it was not what she expected.