Creepypasta stories

The baby jar

(I never read this one )

She awoke abruptly to a spinning world of darkness.

With all the grace and poise installed into her at a young age by a fretful mother, she leaned over the arm of her threadbare couch and divulged the entirety of her stomach contents upon a long-suffering carpet. The pungent scent caused her stomach to roil, but there was nothing further to bring up. Slowly, her head pounding with the righteous cacophony of a high school marching band, the woman swept her muddy eyes across the train wreck of her apartment and attempted to take stock of the damage.

The slightly crumpled hulls of five...no, six beer cans meet her gaze, silently mocking her condition. Blue Ribbon; cheap shit, tasted like rat piss and pond water, but it got the job done. With a low groan of discomfort, she rolled herself onto her back and stared up at a yellowed ceiling fan that, to her knowledge, had not been in functional order since the days of Reagan. She became vaguely aware of the fact that she reeked of old sweat and worse. Well, who gave a shit? No reason to leave the apartment, except to pick up more booze at the corner store, and she sure as hell wasn't the type to...how did the high class fucks put it? "Entertain guests?". The building's pipes were shit anyway, producing a liquid that was more rust than water and invariably colder than the Arctic sea. It was hell on her leg.

Ah yes, her leg. One grimy hand instinctively dropped down to the wounded appendage and began to rub the twisted flesh hidden beneath her threadbare jeans. It was a gift from one driver who couldn't keep the bottle out of his mouth for five minutes. When running the morning commute the last thing most people worry about is a drunk weaving across the center divider and ramming into the side of their sensible commuter car like a rogue elephant. But that was that great bitch of Life for you, always throwing out delightful little surprises when you least expect them. She was put on disability after that and the rest was, as they say, history.

The irony that she herself become a drunk after the incident was not lost on her. But she was nothing like the asshole who had taken out her limb and livelihood, dammit. She needed the alcohol for the pain in her leg; the pills her cheapskate insurance provided were nowhere near powerful enough to cover the almost constant dull throb that spiked with every movement the injured joints attempted. And once she took that first sip of Blue Ribbon or Miller or whoever else was kind enough to ease her in a hazy half world that particular day, the car keys were off limits.

Except that one time. But it was an emergency, really.

Resigned to the fact that no further sleep would come that night, the woman carefully shifted herself into a sitting position and prepared to fetch a pinch of the dog that bit her from the fridge. She found it was the only thing that really quieted the monster in her head once it started roaring.

It was then that she noticed the TV was on.

The set in question, a pathetic old thing that was pathetic even in these squalid conditions, had given out about a month ago during a particularity juicy episode of Jerry Springer. Too lazy to drag it down two flights of stairs to the trash and too cheap to get it fixed, the woman had allowed the device to sit there silently collecting dust and beer cans, destined to waste away to quiet oblivion beneath an ever encroaching pile of trash.

Until now.

"The 'ell?" She half muttered, half slurred. The world still wobbled and rocked beneath her, like a ship docked upon gentle wave, and thus she did not trust herself to brave the few inches of carpet between the couch and TV. The screen displayed nothing more than slowly flickering lines of static, but the last time she'd had it on it refused to show even that. Hell, hadn't she even pulled the plug out of the wall in case it somehow continued to leech off her electricity? The memory was hazy, but she had grown used to peering through the thick lenses of alcohol over the years and discerning fact from fiction with a reasonable degree of accuracy.