short fiction · 2026-10-23

The Witness's Ledger

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Tomas did not burn the cloak. He unstitched it, thread by black thread, and laid each fiber flat beneath glass. The thing had eaten seventeen wearers that the archives named — nineteen, if you counted the two who vanished before the record began. Each had tried to command it. Each had become a hollow in the world where a person used to be.

Tomas wrote instead: Day 43. The collar still whispers when moonlight strikes the hem. It wants a throat. I give it ink.

The cloak learned. It learned that a witness who refuses to wear it becomes something worse than a meal — becomes a mirror. Every night Tomas recorded what the fabric remembered: the taste of a queen's terror, the weight of a general's last order, the small cold hands of the child who had only wanted to be warm. The cloak's hunger did not fade. But it changed shape. It began to wait.

On the two-hundredth day, the cloak spoke in Tomas's handwriting. You are the first who did not eat us, it wrote. We do not know what to do with that.

Tomas capped his pen. Neither do I, he wrote back. But we have time to find out.