The Phantom Pulse #1 | May 2026
Amanda Cecelia Lang
CW: car accident
My window blinds have a missing slat.
Through it, I see things I don’t want to see.
The missing slat opens a horizontal wound in the dusty wooden blinds, an inside peek at the outside world. A spyhole to escape this sickly studio apartment. I moved in last Friday, a few weeks before fall semester. The guy at the college leasing office promised me a quiet building.
He lied.
Rotting on the edge of campus, everything in this place grinds and gurgles. And hello insomnia, my new best friend. Sharper now in this loud alien space, sharper since my best friend died, leaving behind our dream university and an emptiness that clings. Childhood soulmates, college roommates, we were supposed to become old ladies together, doing Jello-shots in our rocking chairs. Instead of keg parties and study dates and a lifetime of thirsty memories, I got open wounds all my own. Vast cuts begging to be filled.
I stand at my only window.
Through that long narrow gap, my new life shows me a brick alleyway instead of the sprawling campus we enjoyed from our freshman dorm. Sodium light bleeds inward, painting a corpse-sallow stripe across the opposite wall.
Staring out, all I see is an old lady watering dead window-box geraniums at 2:17 a.m. She stands barefoot amid broken liquor bottles, wears a stained yellow nightgown. Her eyes don’t blink, neither do mine.
That’s what Kelsey might’ve become one day if drunk driving hadn’t stolen her from me. It’s an odd, wistful thought. This haggard woman looks nothing like my friend. Doesn’t look like anyone’s friend.
She turns suddenly, faces my window, going impossibly still in the alley light. Just standing. Facing my missing slat. Her expression doesn’t strike of anger or sadness. She wears a calm, decaying vacancy, like a mannequin in an abandoned window.
I start to draw back.
With a jerk, she staggers toward me. Except, her naked feet tangle. She collapses in a peculiar shattered-glass drift, limbs bent at canted angles like bones snapped in a collision.
“Holy hell!” I yank the blinds open. “Are you okay?”
The alleyway stands empty.
I blink, tell myself insomnia makes patterns from nothing, then force myself into bed.
Next night, before bedtime, I slam three shots of licorice vodka. Cheap stuff, Kelsey’s party-poison of choice. Tastes like nail polish and black ice. I’m almost spiraling into dreams of her when the alleyway grinds itself to life, the guttural rev of an engine just outside my blinds. Blue-bright headlights slice through my missing window slat.
Something tells me I shouldn’t look.
I always look.
Outside, summer is dead. Mounds of grubby snow choke the moonlit alley. A vintage van juts from a snowbank, tires spinning out, fishtailing helplessly. Oily unreality smears across my mind. Snow? It’s August. I cranked the window earlier, felt the last gasps of summer’s rancid heat. But this—this is Kelsey’s kind of cold. Spring semester cold. Hospital corridor cold.
Ice crystals fog my breath.
The van’s engine snarls, going nowhere as fast as me. My heart hammers like emergency lights flashing, like the clink-clink-clinking of bottles rolling back and forth. Too loud. Too clear. A shadow swells, a pressure in my chest. Something barreling down this narrow space, coming recklessly, unseen.
The van’s windows are tomb-dark, impossible to glimpse the people inside. The tires lock, stop spitting snow. The driver’s door cracks open.
Spying. Caught. Panic floods my mouth like too much grief and vodka, too much being gut-sick about an old lady’s crumpled mannequin. Don’t know whether these mirages are inside me or outside, but I lunge, fingers scrabbling, yanking the blinds up.
Daylight glares in at me, drunken late-summer heat exhaling against my gooseflesh.
The van is gone.
So is the snow.
Another night of sleepless echoes. Drunk again, my apartment spinning around black-ice tires. Not three shots this time—five. Maybe six. Hard to count when the hazy silence beyond my broken blinds whispers so loud.
I shouldn’t look.
I always look.
My wounds gasp. My eyes sting. Our freshman dorm fills the alleyway, soft-lit with Kelsey’s rainbow fairy lights and my lava lamp. I see our old window, that perfect campus view. We sit cross-legged on my bed, knees touching, fingers linked, lipstick kissed away.
Impossible, everything about this view. Still, our not-so-ancient voices echo through me. Because they always do.
“…too much lately,” Kelsey worries. “I can’t keep up. College wasn’t supposed to be chaos and endless parties.”
“I’m just having fun.” The old-me pulls away. “We’re having adventures.”
“Are we?” Kelsey squeezes my hand—and standing in my shitty new apartment, I swear I feel her warmth tugging me closer. She tries to smile. “Adventures don’t end with you forgetting who you are. Remember what we promised? Back home, when it was just us?”
No! Don’t say it, don’t see this!
I need to scream. Or puke.
I wrench the blinds up, let the chilly summer sunlight slide back in.
Next night. No shots before bedtime. Okay, maybe one—but one is practically zero.
I’ve duct-taped the wound shut with cardboard. Maybe it helps because I pass out cold. Only realize I’m drifting when voices outside reality shatter my black-out.
Shouts. Slurred laughter.
I sit up. An echoing procession ripples past the alley, past my distended window slat. Takes several blurry heartbeats for my brain to clear.
Something tore my cardboard down.
I shouldn’t look.
I always look.
It’s the view from our old dorm-room window. Frost obscures the sprawling quad. Benches, snow-capped cherry trees. Freshmen never get this lucky with scenery. We couldn’t wait until the spring melt when everything would blossom.
Tonight, bruised by moonlight, a student parade staggers through the snowfall. An afterparty of ripped hoodies and sloppy glitter, hair matted with sweat and beer, lipstick smeared like open cuts. Frat boys, rowdy and swaying, hoist something overhead. I stare through hazy tears.
An open casket.
A forever-young mannequin, sightless eyes gathering snowflakes. It wears a yellow sweater and a yarn-knit cap. Kelsey’s outfit. I’m too frozen inside to back away.
Even when the crowd pivots to face my window, raising bloody shot glasses.
Toasting the horrible things I’ve done.
The wound exhales frost against my cheek.
Don’t remember sleepwalking to the window, tripping over empty bottles. Here I am though, fingers curled inside the gap, tears frozen on my lashes. Outside, the night rushes past, snow-grit wind, endless miles over the speed limit.
Too fast to get out of the way.
I blink, and my guts flip. Blink again, and reality fishtails, turning me inside out, crushing, squeezing, until my knees buckle and her seatbelt swings loosely against my thigh.
Instead of wooden blinds, my hands grip a steering wheel. Snow batters the windshield, streaking past my headlights. Tires spinning, the world spinning. The sickly taste of liquor and someone else’s kisses still smears the lipstick across my face.
Kelsey sits beside me in the passenger seat.
I miss her so deeply, it knocks the breath from me. This isn’t mannequin-Kelsey. Not phantom-memory-Kelsey. She’s real, flesh-and-blood, wearing that yellow sweater and cap. And just like the last time I saw her alive, she’s shouting.
“We promised to love each other!”
“I’m sorry. So terribly sorry!” Don’t remember saying this, but I’m saying it now. Still too late. Pressure building, my foot dead-heavy on the gas. “You’re the only one who sees me. The only person I wanna share a view with—”
“Liar! You kissed that frat boy! Partied yourself into a million blackouts with a million strangers! Why?”
Thirst, cheap thrills. I have zero decent excuses, that’s the agony. “What if I lose you?”
“You already did,” she gasps. Headlights bloom inside the roaring white-out.
Ahead, a vintage van parts the blizzard, fishtailing atop black ice.
I jerk my leaden foot off the gas, slam the brakes. But my haunted past doesn’t slow, irrevocable decisions hurtling us forward. Headlights flare across oncoming faces, the driver’s door cracking open, desperate to dodge away.
Kelsey’s scream drowns everything.
The clashing steel, my exploding windshield. The steering wheel cracks my forehead, but for the first time in weeks, I don’t blackout. The night fills with hideous metallic grinding, a gurgling, a crushed voice trying to form words. The sound echoes from the passenger seat.
I shouldn’t look.
I always look.
My head twists with the wheels of fate, winding my whiplash spine. I squeeze my eyes closed. Don’t look, don’t see! The steering wheel becomes the edge of my window blind. I let go, scrabbling for the chord, and yank.
The blinds fly up, sunlight rushes in, streaking my vision. Brick alleyway, broken bottles.
And Kelsey.
Her forehead slumps against my shattered apartment window, snowflakes gathering atop her yarn-knit cap. The sparkle seeps from her eyes even as she gapes into the murky windows of my own. She gurgles, and blood freezes around her final words.
“We were gonna grow old together…”
About the Author
Amanda Cecelia Lang is a horror author and aspiring monster-slayer from Colorado. As a diehard scary movie nerd, she craves meta-slashers, ‘80s nostalgia, and the rise of a fierce final girl. Her stories haunt many dark corners of the world, including The Deadlands, Ghoulish Tales, Uncharted, Cast of Wonders, Gamut, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthologyThis Way Lies Madness. Her collection Saturday Fright at the Movies: 13 Tales from the Multiplex (Dark Matter INK) is available everywhere nightmares are sold. You can stalk her work at amandacecelialang.com—just don’t be surprised if she leaps out at you from the shadows.