Counttoten Stories

Six strangers. One boarding house. A caretaker with rules he swears will keep them safe. They should have asked why the rules existed before they agreed to follow them. The house on the edge of the city is too large for what it costs and too quiet for what it contains. The caretaker delivers his rules at the door and disappears into the dark at the end of the hall, and by morning the rules are less comfort than they seemed, and the door at the end of the corridor is breathing, and the miniature sitting in the forbidden room has figures with faces pressed into their clay that no one should have been close enough to make. Cora has been drifting for long enough that she has stopped noticing the drift. She notices the house. She notices the bruise on her sternum that has pulsed since she crossed the threshold, shaped like a keyhole, warm in ways she cannot account for. She notices the miniature's tiny figure with her own face pressed into it with the intimacy of a mold made before she arrived. The house has forty seven names in its ledger. Eleven of them escaped. Inside these walls, nothing taken can be returned. Nothing placed inside a person comes out the way it went in. And the thing the house wants most is the one thing Cora does not yet know she has been carrying her entire life. This is not a story that flinches. It stays in the room. Count carefully. Do not open your eyes until you mean it. ©️ Relle H

In the fifth grade, people didn't know Sophia Anderson's name. She was known as the-girl-who-chewed-on-her-hair. In eighth grade, people knew Sophia Anderson as the girl who was dating Steve Rodrigues; he was tall and already had a mustache. In high school, however, people knew Sophia Anderson because of her brother. Not because he owned a cool car and was head of the football team, but because he owned a gun and knew how to pull the trigger.

What made Eloise Willian's story so unlike many others is hidden behind memories not even Eloise can reach. With dead parents from such a young age, there's not much to reach for. No photos, no sign of them ever existing. She wanted to be reminded of their existence. She was tired of making them up in her mind. Although there was not much else to do as a young child in an orphanage trapped within grey walls under an even greyer sky. Her adoption led to her attending Hogwarts, as well as what they now call the Golden Quartet. While searching for answers surrounding her parents she finds love.