This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/imfunerals on 2026-07-09 04:40:56+00:00.
I have hundreds of drawings in a cardboard box beside my desk. I started numbering them after the first month. I thought it might help me find a pattern. And, well, I didn’t.
All of the drawings are in crayon.
Every single one of them is dated the day before whatever they’re showing happens.
My son has never drawn yesterday.
Two months ago, I thought I’d finally started putting our lives back together.
Toby had made a friend named Eli. And if you happened to read a post I made here a while back, you’ll know I nearly destroyed the best thing that happened to him. Ever since my wife, Renee, died, I’d become so convinced something terrible was happening that I never stopped to consider how much damage I was doing in the name of protecting him.
I apologized, and Eli’s parents forgave me, and Toby did too, eventually.
Then Toby started drawing.
He’d always doodled here and there, even before Renee died, but after everything with Eli, drawing became an obsession. Every afternoon after school, he’d disappear into his room with a box of crayons and emerge an hour later with another picture.
At first, I thought it was just another way he was grieving. But weeks passed, and he never stopped drawing.
The first picture wasn’t strange by any means.
It was just a golden retriever wearing one of those white plastic cones from the vet.
Toby left it on the kitchen table before school.
I smiled, stuck it to the refrigerator with a magnet, and went to work.
That next afternoon, the drawing of the dog with the cone made sense.
I was pulling the truck up into the driveway when I saw my neighbor, Mrs. Cabrera, walking her golden retriever. The dog was wearing a fresh cone
“Rough day?” I called out, nodding to the dog.
“He got into some briars at the park yesterday,” she sighed. “Vets put the cone on this morning to keep him from licking the stitches.”
I watched them walk away.
Toby had drawn that.
He’d drawn Mrs. Cabrera’s dog, even the little patch over its left eye.
I went inside, and Toby was sitting at the kitchen table with a blue crayon, moving in circles.
“Hey, Tobes,” I said. “I guess Mrs. Cabrera’s dog is wearing a cone now."
“Yeah.”
Blue crayon.
Circle.
Circle.
Circle.
“That’s why I drew him yesterday.”
I laughed, a little stunned. “What do you mean, bub?”
Toby finally looked up from his drawing. He frowned, as if I’d just asked him why the sky was blue.
“He was wearing it.”
“When?”
“On the paper.”
I didn’t push him on it. But I started keeping his drawings in a cardboard box, numbering them as they came.
Drawing #8: The Garage.
It showed me sitting on the floor of our garage, head in my hands, crying. That next morning, my father passed away in his sleep. I spent two hours sitting on my garage floor because I couldn’t contain myself.
Drawing #17: The Yellow Bus.
Toby drew a sideways bus and a slate-colored sky with thick slanted lines for rain.
The next morning, the school bus hydroplaned on the bypass. No one was hurt, but the kids were stuck in the rain for over three hours while they waited for a tow.
Drawing #34: The Sling.
It was a simple stick figure of his teacher, Mr. Sellers, with a white triangle over her arm. The next day, she tripped on a trapper-keeper in the hallway and broke her collarbone. She was doctor-ordered to wear a sling for six weeks.
I’m a practical man. If a car is totaled, the passenger is usually hurt—cause and effect. But Toby was giving me the effect before the cause.
The escalation was slow, and honestly, almost manageable.
Until it stopped.
The next week, I came home and found Toby sitting at the kitchen table. His backpack was propped up by the couch, and his box of sixty-four crayons was open, but his sketchbook was blank. He was staring at the white page, hands gripped together in his lap.
“You don’t want to draw today, bub?” I asked.
“I can’t,” he whispered.
“Why not? No ideas?”
Toby looked at me, with tears starting to form in his eyes.
“I don’t want tomorrow to come,” he said.
For the next twenty-four hours, I barely sat down. I even called out from my shift. I checked the gas lines and locked every window in the house. I spent the entire day for something extreme, a shooting, a tornado, or some localized collapse.
But nothing happened.
The sun set, and the sun rose. The day was normal.
I figured the “gift,” or the curse, or whatever the fuck it was, had finally burned itself out.
But that night, as I was tucking him in, Toby looked at me from under his blankets and asked a question that made the hair on my arms stand up.
“Daddy? Can tomorrow be today instead?”
“Go to sleep, Tobes,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
I woke at 3:00 AM to a familiar sound, but it was different this time. It was a frantic skritch-skritch-skritch.
I walked into his room. The floor was covered in drawings. There must have been hundreds of them. Toby was on his knees in the center of the room, surrounded by a sea of rainbow wax shavings. He was coloring so hard that the crayons were snapping in his fingers, but he didn’t stop. He just grabbed another piece and kept going.
“Hey, bub. What are you doing?” I asked.
He didn’t look up. His hands were stained a dozen different colors, his fingernails caked with wax.
“I’m trying to make it different,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I carried him back to bed.
But I found the one he’d hidden the next afternoon.
I was cleaning Renee’s side of the room when I noticed a piece of paper tucked under the leg of her nightstand.
I pulled it out.
It was dated for tomorrow.
It showed our kitchen in the morning light. There was one chair at the table. A single coffee mug sat on the counter, and the front door stood wide open.
Outside, a man who looked like me was running.
I tore the paper into pieces, and I took them to the sink, running the garbage disposal until the sound of grinding paper stopped. I went to the fireplace and burned the scraps of his sketchbook. I threw the box of crayons in the trash bin.
I thought if I could destroy it, I could change it.
The next morning, I woke up to a quiet house.
I walked into Toby’s room.
The bed was made.
His phone was still plugged in.
His shoes were by the door.
Toby was gone.
I ran downstairs as fast as I could and… when I got to the kitchen, it looked the same. One chair. One coffee cup. The door was wide open.
I ran out.
The police did a survey of the neighborhood. They checked the Quarry. They checked the woods. They interviewed Eli and his parents, who swore Toby never came over. There were no signs of a struggle or forced entry—just a twelve-year-old boy who had seemingly walked out of existence.
Weeks passed.
I kept Toby’s room exactly the way it was when he disappeared. I went back to work because the sound of sirens was the only thing loud enough to drown out the sounds of silence.
I was cleaning out the office today when I saw the cardboard box.
The drawings.
I sat on the floor and opened the lid. I started flipping through them all, looking for number one.
I reached the bottom of the stack, and what I pulled out made me freeze.
There was one more drawing.
The drawing showed a tired old man sitting on a hardwood floor beside a cardboard box. He was holding a piece of paper. He looked exactly as I did.
I turned the page over.
The drawing was labeled. But it was a word this time, not a date. Written in my son’s handwriting:
Today.