Wallpaper

I wrote this story from a quiet but persistent thought: that houses are never truly empty.

Every space we live in has already held other lives. Other voices. Other moments—some ordinary, some not. Walls absorb more than we realize. They witness things. They keep them.

I’ve always been unsettled by the idea that we move into these spaces assuming they’re ours, assuming we’re the first to shape them, when in reality we’re just the latest presence passing through.

Wallpaper felt like the perfect metaphor for that. Layer upon layer, covering what came before without removing it. Not erasing—just hiding. Preserving. Waiting.

What interested me most was the possibility that something could remain… not just as memory, but as something active. Something aware. Something that doesn’t recognize time the way we do.

In this story, the danger isn’t something entering the house.
It’s something that was already there.

Something that’s been watched over, sealed in, painted over—until someone curious enough, or careless enough, begins to uncover it.

Because sometimes the most unsettling truth isn’t that something followed you home—

it’s that you were never alone to begin with.