u/DarkQuarters

I call it "the universe is the decaying corpse of a god who willed his own nonexistence"

Read it here. Feedback very much appreciated!!

When I was 13, something that looked exactly like my father waved at me from my window while my actual dad stood beside me on the sidewalk. It didn't smile, it held a flashlight that blinked in a pattern, and that flashlight disappeared that same night. Here's the full account of what I saw and the years I've spent trying to place it.

https://biblicallyaccuratealiens.substack.com/p/how-i-realized-im-an-alien-antenna

When I was 13, during a blackout, I watched my dad wave at me from my bedroom window while he was also standing five feet away from me on the sidewalk. For a week afterward I had the same recurring dream, and it stopped on the exact morning of 9/11 — the day my uncle died in the North Tower. I finally wrote the whole thing down and tried to make sense of what I saw.

how i realized i'm an alien antenna

new essay working at the sod layer of a few connected texts: the defective spelling of nefilim in bereishit 6:4, the missing nun of ashrei and what brachot 4b is really hiding, the chash/mal split (chagigah's silence-and-speech reading of ezekiel's chashmal), and the ophanim -- the wheel-angels whose entire bodies are covered in eyes that never close.

the frame is playful -- it's structured as a field guide to spotting "dead angels" passing as human, with bob dylan's "sad-eyed lady of the lowlands" treated as a modern mystical text alongside the traditional sources -- but the textual work underneath is sincere. the central claim: the fallen ones didn't drop into a void. they dropped into the next line. ours.

interested in this sub's take on the chashmal-as-transmission reading especially.

how to spot dead angels

i spent way too long with this song and wrote up a deep-dive that takes dylan's "thin wild mercury sound" quote seriously, maybe too seriously. the argument: the sound he was chasing is the same phenomenon ezekiel calls chashmal (the word that became modern hebrew for "electricity"), and "sad-eyed lady" isn't a lady with sad eyes. it's an eyed lady. who is sad.

along the way: why the track got the entire fourth side to itself, the "dead angels" verse the farmers and businessmen keep under lock, what "sheets like metal" and "deck of cards missing the jack and the ace" are actually describing, and a footnote about sara lownds i could not confirm and will not apologize for ( /s).

half torah scholarship, half unhinged close reading, fully sincere about the song. curious what this sub makes of the fourth-verse reading in particular.

how to spot dead angels among us

new installment of my serial THE 36 is live today. it's Jewish folk horror about my mother — the one person i know who actually met one of the thirty-six hidden holy ones who hold up the world, at eighteen, and has spent the rest of her life dealing with the fallout. notebooks, birds, candlesticks, gematria, and a darker number she won't say out loud. every other thursday. start at chapter one 👉 here

Genre: Jewish folk horror / occult memoir
Update schedule: new installment every other Thursday

according to jewish mysticism there are thirty-six hidden righteous people quietly holding up the world — the lamed vov, the 36. most of us get one shot to cross paths with one, at eighteen, and 99.9% of us miss it. my mom is the 0.1%.

this serial is me finally telling her whole story: the notebook that showed up with my mom's name already in it, the hand that caught her off a mountain, the candlesticks i still can't account for, the hungarian she somehow understood, and the number she taught me to avoid. gematria, near-death rescues, and a mother who's spent forty-eight years refusing to explain any of it.

--

my mom returned to brooklyn in the summer of 1976 on a tailwind of excitement. most of it was backward facing, an energy taken from the incredible six weeks she had just spent overseas with her friends. it was her first real taste of independence, and she discovered that freedom was a flavor she liked, but her excitement also faced forward, pointing at college, which she started in a few days.

i happen to be extremely introverted and sobbed in panic every night for a week before beginning college, but my mom was (and is) very different and she looked forward to it the way i look forward to never going back to school.

that semester, my mom enrolled in brooklyn college for four classes, all during the day. she also enrolled in a single class at the fashion institute of technology at night. this class met once a week on the fit campus on west 26th street in manhattan.

my mom around the time of this story, pictured with her uncle, my great uncle chaim (which is also my middle name)

to hear her tell it, the excitement of starting college all but drove the notebook and her near-death experience from my mom’s mind. i find this a little hard to believe, but okay. a few days after she got back, her young brother, my uncle shmeel, asked about her trip. she started talking about how beautiful israel was, all the cities they visited, the hikes they went on… and then suddenly stopped.

“you okay, till?” fifteen-year-old shmeel asked.

my mom excused herself and sprinted to her bedroom, anxious about the notebook. but it was still there, stuffed under an old skirt at the very back of her closet, exactly where she stashed it three days earlier.

it was a relief. for some reason, my mom was convinced it was gone, that the whole thing had been a strange dream, but nope, there it was. as purple and scrawled on and real as in the picture below.

my mom opened it, flipped past the pages so covered in scribbles and cross-outs they were unreadable, and found the one with her name on it.

it was still so uncanny to see her in someone’s accounting like that.

she looked at the next name in the notebook.

leah freilich [yom shlishi] 9-7 818 18 ave, 12-43

there was also a weird diagram at the end she couldn’t make sense of.

it looked a little like this: 𒄆𓁹𒀱𓁹𒄆

but the rest of the note was straightforward. at least the dates, time, and location: on september 7, which was later that week, at 818 18th avenue, at 12:43… something would happen. what, exactly? another person, this leah freilich, would be in some kind of danger? like my mom on the hike? what the hell was all this?

my mom had no idea, but she wasn’t going to miss the date and time.

818 18th avenue was just a few blocks from my grandparents’ house, and so on september 7, which was a thursday, my mom cut the first college class of her short career. she actually cut two classes. she had intro to economics from 11:50 am to 12:30 pm in boylan hall and french 2 from 1 to 1:40 pm across the campus in roosevelt. to be at 818 18th avenue at 12:43 pm, she had to miss both.

my mom was at the location ten minutes early, which might be one of the most shocking parts of this story. anyone who has ever known tilly lichtschein at any point in her life knows that she’s a remarkable woman, very much deserving of a written treatment of her time and experiences, but one thing she is not is punctual. i cannot stress this enough. my family has so many bits about how my dad acts when he’s ready to leave for an event at the time agreed upon but my mom is running late for one of a million reasons and he’s just sitting there, by the entrance, arms crossed in annoyance.

but regardless, on that day, she was there early. with the 36, i’ve found, my mom is uncharacteristically punctual.

818 18th ave is a small house with a brick facade, a few steps, and a stoop.

the building is still there. i’ve been writing this part of the story in boro park to better catch the inspiration, and i just took a break from working on this to walk over and take a picture. here it is in july 2026.

walking down the street, nearing the address, i can almost feel my mom, fifty years earlier, approaching the same destination, although to her it probably looked neater and less run-down.

my mom stood behind a large tree on the sidewalk verge and waited, eyes alternating between the front door of the house and the watch in her hand. she was staring at the time when the minute changed from 12:42 to 12:43. at that exact moment, the front door of 818 18th ave opened and a woman stepped out.

my mom stared. the woman appeared ordinary. she was a little younger than my grandparents, in her early forties, and wore a tan skirt and a heavy canvas shirt. on her head was a large-brimmed sunhat and her hand held a purple watering can. my mom noticed several green shoots at the end of the stoop. the woman walked over to these and started watering the tall plants encroaching her front porch.

my mom stood up, curious and unsure of herself. what was she supposed to do? save this woman somehow? she certainly didn’t look in danger, and my mom wasn’t even sure she was leah freilich. and just as my mom was getting ready to make her presence known, the woman stopped watering and turned around, looking at my mom for the first time.

There's a concept in Jewish mysticism called lema'alah min hateva (למעלה מן הטבע), literally "above nature," and once you see the number logic it's hard to unsee. 7 is the number of the natural world — seven days of creation, seven days in a week, seven visible planets to the ancients, seven notes, seven colors. Nature is a system that counts to seven. 8 is what's on the other side of that: not more nature, but what exceeds the system entirely. And it's load-bearing, not decorative. Circumcision on the eighth day. Chanukah is eight nights, and the whole miracle is oil doing what oil cannot do. Shemini Atzeret, "the eighth day assembly," hangs off the end of a seven-day festival like an extra step where the staircase should have ended. When the tradition wants to mark a rupture in natural law, it counts to eight. What gets me is that this is a pre-modern framework for the anomalous as a category — not a specific monster or miracle, but a slot in the structure of reality reserved for the thing that doesn't fit. A named place for high strangeness, four centuries before anyone called it that. The numeral is doing something too: 7 is an open figure, a line that stops, while 8 is a closed circuit that crosses itself, ∞ stood upright, a number that returns. I don't think the Maharal was writing about anything in the sky. But we've spent a century groping for words for what people report — non-human, non-local, not obeying the physics we've got, arriving on cycles we can't predict — and here's a tradition that already had a slot for it and just called it above nature.

(Full disclosure so nobody feels tricked: I went so far down this hole I wrote a novel out of it, about beings that pass through Earth every eight years. It never sold. But I'd have posted this either way.)

Anyone know of parallels in other traditions? I keep half-remembering that 8 does something similar in Chinese numerology and in some Gnostic material — the Ogdoad sits above the seven planetary spheres, which is almost too on the nose — but I don't know that material well enough to say anything responsible about it.

L8ER SK8ER, a history

https://biblicallyaccuratealiens.substack.com/p/jewish-mystics-who-died-before-forty

the woman sat by the window and watched the sky fail her again.

the darkness stretched over the fields in a single unbroken sheet. there were no green lights, no vroom of a descending craft, and none of the impossible geometries sliding between the stars, rewarding her and her patience. just the familiar constellations and the distant blink of a radio tower beyond the trees.

she rested her forehead against the cool glass. forty years she’d been waiting.

some people wait for god or the messiah. others wait for the return of their youth or a love that eclipsed them. others still wait for death. the woman in the bedroom waited for visitors.

every night she imagined how it would happen. it would be exactly like it was in the old church basement. the man of god who had exploited her body had the decency to at least do it by the window, so she could have something to focus on while she lost her ownership over herself. and one night, a few weeks into their private worship, as she stared unblinking at the sky, the dark clouds peeled apart. it was layered like a dream but very much real. the horizon turned emerald, and she saw the beings. they looked vaguely human, but completely their own.

she was able to leave her grandmother’s house shortly after that (a kind neighbor and a few precise questions), and her life seemed okay. she even joined the class suit when it came around five years later. the night after her rapist was sentenced to ten years in prison for the sexual abuse of seven girls, she started watching the sky. it quickly became routine. every night she would sit by the window, around midnight, waiting and watching. she knew what she was looking for. it would arrive, eventually, and when it did, she would rush into her yard in welcome while everyone else cowered inside. like her in her body, at least the way it used to be.

but the sky was a trickster and rarely played along. this night was no different. why would it be?

“tomorrow,” she said softly. it was the same promise she’d made yesterday and the day before that. and a thousand days before those.

with a sigh, she rose from the chair, ignoring her complaining knees. fifty-eight years old and still waiting for sky visitors. she tightened the sash of her robe and shuffled toward the kitchen to start the ordinary rituals that filled the space between one disappointment and the next.

the woman stopped.

the faucet was running.

water poured steadily into the sink. it wasn’t dripping or leaking. it was running.

for several seconds she simply stared.

she lived alone. she hadn’t turned it on. at least she didn’t remember turning it on? anything was possible.

she crossed the room and twisted the handle. the stream vanished and silence settled heavily around her.

“getting forgetful.” talking to herself, she found, was one of the kookier things she started doing in her fifties. she continued down the hall.

the bathroom light was on. the faucet there was running too.

the woman felt a chill attack her spine. this one she knew she hadn’t touched.

she approached the faucet slowly, looking at the mirror instead of the sink itself. her reflection was pale and uncertain. behind her stood the open door and the dark hallway beyond.

it was empty. of course it was.

the woman shut off the water.

again the house became silent. only now it felt too silent. like something had stopped breathing and was carefully holding its breath.

for a long moment, the woman remained perfectly still. just listening.

nothing moved or creaked. the old farmhouse seemed to hold itself together by sheer concentration.

finally she shook her head.

there were explanations. maybe she didn’t know what they were, but there were always explanations.

she brushed her teeth, washed her face, and applied the lavender lotion she hated but kept buying anyway because it was cheaper than the lilac one.

by the time she returned to her bedroom, she’d convinced herself she was being ridiculous. if the visitors came, it would be from the sky, not out of the faucets.

moonlight spilled through the window and striped her carpet silver.

the woman loosened her robe. and then stopped.

a man stood in the corner of her bedroom.

her heart detonated as the robe slipped through her fingers.

he was tall and broad-shouldered. he was smiling. in his hand was a knife.

the expression on his face was not confusion or fright or embarrassment. it was purpose. the expression of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and why he was there.

the woman understood immediately.

her lungs locked. every nerve screamed at her to run, but she didn’t move.

the man took a step forward, his smile growing wider. and then the woman noticed his skin. it looked green. just a faint tint in the moonlight through the window. a color that didn’t belong, and yet absolutely did.

she blinked. the greenish pallor remained. her eyes traveled upward.

the man’s head seemed longer than it should have been. unfamiliar and yet beautiful.

the terror loosened its grip on her as a thought bloomed in her mind. finally.

emotion flooded her chest so suddenly that she almost laughed. she had been right. everyone had mocked her, including her sister, her coworkers, even the cashier by the tabloids who humored her stories.

they had all laughed. and now she was right.

the visitor watched her carefully. his smile faltered and he stopped moving.

the woman took a step toward him. the knife lifted slightly, but she barely noticed.

another step. she was close enough now to see his eyes. they looked dark, vast, ancient. surely no human eyes could look like that.

the woman felt tears gathering. “i knew it,” she whispered.

the visitor didn’t answer. could be that his language was different, or maybe speech was beneath him. “i was waiting,” she said. “but i didn’t see you arrive.”

the visitor said nothing. he didn’t need to. the woman opened her arms and crossed the final distance between them.

the knife gleamed. she was close enough that she could smell his body odor. it smelled human. for the briefest moment, some forgotten survival instinct tried to claw its way back to her surface.

then she saw the green again. and the shape of his skull. she felt forty years of hope outweigh one moment of fear.

she wrapped her arms around the stranger in her bedroom. she felt the knife press into her but it felt like a handshake. like father in the early days.

“welcome,” she said. “i knew you’d come for me.”

outside the bedroom window, the stars stayed where they’ve always been. the sky was empty, but the woman never once looked back to check.

Hi all. I'm a horror writer and Olivia fan and a lit mag put out a call for single-sentence stories under 500 words last week, and somewhere between that prompt and having "you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love" stuck in my head on a loop, I ended up writing a piece set in the orbit of an unnamed pop star, threaded through with my favorite lines from the album.

Fair warning before anyone clicks: it's horror, and it's narrated by an unreliable, delusional stalker character — think the Eminem "Stan" / Lennon–Chapman lineage. It is not flattering to the narrator and it is not really "about" Olivia so much as about a parasocial obsession curdling into something dangerous. CW for obsession, violence, and references to abuse self-harm.

ヾ(๑╹◡╹)ﾉ🔪 i know everybody changes but i hope that we don't

If it's your thing, I'd love to hear what you think. If it's not your thing, totally fair — scroll on. 🔪