You sit on your bed in the darkness, the only light coming from the glow of your phone screen. You’re scrolling through old photos—happy snapshots of family vacations, birthday celebrations, and seemingly ordinary days that now feel steeped in nostalgia. Everything is warm and familiar… until you notice something odd.

There, in the background of every single picture, is a man. A stranger with a gaunt, unsettling smile, lurking silently in the corners of your memories. At first, you chalk it up to a trick of the light or perhaps a recurring photobomber—an odd coincidence. But as you scroll further back in time, the images grow older, grainier, and the figure becomes more defined. He’s always there, watching, his eyes dark and unblinking.

Your hands begin to shake as your heartbeat quickens, pounding in your ears like an insistent warning. With each new photo, dread seeps deeper into your skin. You can almost feel his presence, as if the space between pixels and reality is thinning.

Unable to contain the terror, you rush to the kitchen where your mother is preparing late dinner. “Mom… do you know this man?” you ask in a trembling voice, holding the phone out for her to see. Expecting her comforting smile, you’re met with silence. Her hands freeze mid-stir, and the hum of the kitchen falls eerily quiet.

Slowly, she turns toward you, but the face that meets your gaze is not the one you remember. Her eyes, once soft with maternal warmth, now carry an otherworldly stillness. And then, as if something in her shifts, the features morph—line by line, detail by detail—into that same disturbing stranger from your photos.

He’s smiling.

Your blood runs cold as you stare at the face that was once your mother, now contorted into an unsettling mimicry. It was him, the same brown hair, eyes. The room feels suffocating, the shadows stretching. You’re trapped in a nightmare where the familiar has become horrifyingly foreign, and you can’t tell if you’re still awake or trapped in a waking dream.