This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/MikeJesus on 2026-07-08 16:52:50+00:00.
“Hey,” he says, leaning in the doorway. “Welcome back home.”
I recognize the hoodie before I recognize him. Ragged and stained by the decades, the lettering is still legible — Class of ’09.
“Hi,” I say, sitting up in bed.
Fear rumbles in the nether regions of my mind, but it never truly connects.
“It’s been a while,” he says, taking a step towards me. The building is old, but the floor doesn’t creak. “What brings you back to Poprad? Visiting the family?”
“A funeral.”
“Oh.” Another soundless step. The air in the room turns frigid. “Who died?”
I open my mouth, but no words come out. Dazed with sleep and stress, my mind struggles to make sense of things. Stefan bursts out laughing.
“I’m messing with you, cousin. Appreciate you coming. Wish the circumstances were different.”
Another silent step. The moonlight catches his face. Sunken eyes and crooked nose and pallid skin. The years have made their mark.
“Airbnb, huh?” He produces a crumpled pack of Startky out of his sweatpants. “Is there a no smoking policy?”
“Does it matter?” I ask.
Stefan grins. Some of the teeth are missing. None of them are healthy.
He lights up and offers me one.
“I quit,” I say. “About five years back.”
“Good on you. I tried a couple times, but could never last more than a day or two.” The puff of smoke is thicker than it should be. It almost obscures his crooked smile. “Y’know, addictive personality and all.”
“How…” the words still struggle in my throat. “How are you?”
“Dead.” For a moment, the smile disappears. For a moment, Stefan’s pale face looks as it should. Then, his usual smile returns. “But heaven’s nice. Real tranquil. Real bright. There’s little cherubs with harps and shit.”
“Oh,” I say, noticing puffs of steam coming from my mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Went off on a high note. A really high note.” With another chuckle, Stefan strides past me to the window. He reeks of old sweat and burnt plastic. Stefan smokes and watches the street outside and then, as if it was of no consequence at all, he asks:
“Is Anna coming?”
“Yeah,” I say, pulling up the covers to escape the cold. “Her flight gets in tomorrow.”
“She married?”
“I don’t think so.”
He says nothing. He just ashes his cigarette on the windowsill.
“And you?” Stefan finally asks, getting bored of the window. He makes his way across the room, picks up my discarded pants and fishes out my wallet. “Wife? Kids? Sorry, haven’t had a chance to catch up. Been real busy.”
“No wife. No kids. There was a girl I was seeing for a couple of years but… No wife. No kids.”
Stefan doesn’t listen. His focus is solely on my wallet.
“Organ donor,” he says. “Neat.”
I let him rifle through my loyalty cards and health insurance. The sleep fully leaves my eyes and I realize he can do no harm anymore.
“Hey,” he says. “Could I borrow twenty euros?”
“For what?”
His brow furrows. The single gesture ages him well beyond his years.
“Heaven is nice. Real nice. Little babies with harps and all. I could just use some cash.”
“For what?”
“Does it matter?”
“I guess it doesn’t.”
He plucks the blue note out of my wallet and then deposits it back in my pants.
“Thanks Sam,” he says, making his way back to the door. “I’ll see you soon.”
Before I have a chance to respond, I wake to an overcast morning. The cold and the smell of burnt plastic is gone, but I find myself craving a cigarette.
I meet Anna at the airport. When we first embrace in the arrivals lounge, things seem casual. Happy, even. The fact that we’re both in town for a funeral isn’t lost to us, but it is obscured. There’s a sort of giddiness that comes from seeing a familiar face aged. As we make our way to the taxi stand, however, Stefan’s death bubbles up.
By the time we’re outside, conversation dies down. As we get in the car, Anna goes silent. I can see the tears gathering at the edge of her eyes. The sobs come out dark and heavy.
“I dreamt about him on the plane,” she says. “I haven’t slept a wink since his mother called me. Moment I close my eyes on the flight though — he’s there. Smoking.”
I think of telling her about my midnight encounter with Stefan and how my wallet feels lighter, but I don’t. Instead, I reach as far as the safety belt will allow me and run my hand across her back. The more she cries, the louder the radio gets.
The family invites us for lunch, but we don’t go. Anna says she needs the fresh air and I have my own reasons for limiting familial sit downs. After she drops off her bags at the Airbnb we go over to the train station park where we used to hang out after school.
The vagrants which fill the park are an uneasy sight, but they are nothing new. As we stroll, we catch each other up on the minutia of the past decade. We’ve both aged, but she’s aged more gracefully. Her nose still scrunches up when she smiles. Her laugh hasn’t changed one bit.
We sit on a bench in the park and talk about prom. About how we got too drunk. About how we broke into the water park and how Anna’s neighbor almost fell asleep there. About how we’d die if we drank half as much as we did now.
“Do you remember this bench?” she asks, after a long moment.
“I don’t think so.”
“First cigarette.”
Summer of sixth grade. The three of us. Blue L&Ms. That nicotine rush.
“Oh man,” I say. And for a moment, I am a head shorter and it’s a sunny afternoon.
She breaks me out of my trance with a pack of cigarettes.
“You smoke again?” I ask.
“Quit when I went to the UK. Picked it up again on Saturday.”
The packaging is unfamiliar, but it reads L&M. I consider telling her that I quit too, but I just take one. I take it as pouring whiskey on Stefan’s as yet unoccupied grave.
The packaging is different. As is the actual cigarette. Yet it all feels the same.
“Sam,” she says, after a quiet moment. “I don’t want to see her tomorrow.”
“Aunt Viera?”
She blows out the smoke hard and nods. “She kept calling me after I moved. ‘Oh, Stefan misses you, when are you coming back home?’ I told her we were broken up. So many times. She’d still call me at least once a year.”
“She’s a lot,” I say, because she is.
When I go visit Stefan’s mother, the house is already crawling with family. Fortunately, the clan is drunk enough to be tolerable. Aunt Viera meets me in the hall reeking of wine and cheap perfume. She pinches my face and tells me how I’ve grown and how I don’t spend enough time with family anymore.
The apartment feels smaller than when I was a child, cramped even. Aunt Viera hasn’t changed the least bit. Her hands are still covered in gaudy rings, her voice as nasally as ever and age has not leeched on her manic energy. The years have hit my hairline hard, but they have completely spared her.
Aunt Viera asks me about Anna. When I tell her she’s sleeping at the Airbnb after her flight, she says something about the Brits stealing away her manners. She then, with suddenly shuddering voice, proclaims that maybe Stefan would still be alive if she hadn’t left.
I consider telling her that’s an unfair thing to say, but I don’t. Her eyes are already glazed and I know there’s nothing I can say to the woman to change her. Instead, I give her a hug and let her pour me a glass of wine.
When I get back to the apartment, I am drunk. Anna is fast asleep on the bed. Aside from the couch, there’s nowhere else for me to lay. In the suddenness of the trip, we never discussed sleeping arrangements. For a moment I consider crawling under the covers with her, but I trust neither myself nor the situation. I gently pull away one of the blankets and take a pillow to the couch.
Before sleep fully embraces me, I sense a shiver in my arms. The room’s temperature drops.
“How was she?” I hear his feet prop up on the table.
“Your mom?”
“Yeah.”
I take a deep breath and immediately regret it. The room smells rancid.
“All things considered, she’s holding up,” I finally say.
“Drunk?”
“A bit,” I say, sitting up on the couch and opening my eyes. “But everyone was.”
He looks worse than he looked the night before. The skin is sallow. His voice is strained. When our eyes meet, I notice a familiar twitch in his. When Stefan notices me noticing, he gets up.
“It’d be ironic if they had a sober one for me, eh?” he says, before turning his attention to the bookshelf. His movements are jerky and unbalanced. Stefan grabs something off the shelf and begins studying it. “Think this is worth any cash?”
A statuette of a Goral sheep herder. Possibly bronze, but most likely of cheaper stuff. Stefan trails the edges of the herder’s long brimmed hat with his hands. I can see them shaking from across the room.
“No idea,” I say, watching him busy himself with the statuette. “How’s heaven?”
Stefan taps his finger on the sheep herder’s upraised ax. He seems to be testing whether the metal will break the skin. Then, finally, noncommittally he says: “It’s nice. Real peaceful. It’s just… expensive.”
“Expensive?” I ask, “What are you paying for?”
He places the statuette back on the bookshelf, slowly, keeping the tremors at bay. Then he lights up a cigarette. Stefan keeps his back towards me. “Food,” he finally says.
“Food? What kind of food?”
“Heaven food,” he says, breathing out a gust of steam and smoke. “Why aren’t you sleeping in the bedroom?”
“Anna’s there.”
“So?”
He smiles wide. There’s genuine camaraderie in his eyes, but I can only focus on his teeth. There’s less of them. They look even sicker.
“We broke up a while ago, cousin,” Stefan…
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