A Little DABS Will Do Ya!
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A Little DABS Will Do Ya!
Hollow Creek - When the Creek Calls Your Name
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
They said no!
No to the role. No to the rule. No to being chosen.
But Hollow Creek doesn’t ask.
It writes.
When your name appears in ink you didn’t spill…
When the story starts speaking in your voice…
When the line between witness and sacrifice begins to blur—
You don’t get to walk away.
You get rewritten.
And this time…
the creek isn’t asking for a guardian.
It’s taking one.
Previously, on retreat at Hollow Creek, they carried their own law to the overlook and made the date itself their witness. They read the balance clause aloud so the creek would have to listen in a language older than water. It accepted a return by inches. Jonas' breath was given back to him and demanded again what it always demands. Choose guardian. They refused a single signature and answered with a word, it cannot count. We. Back at the lodge, the house gathered the page, the locket, and the dock photograph like props for a trial. A locket showed the overlook from below. A small hand finished the letters T C in the photograph's corner. The floor learned how to carry water. Myra said, I am not your stamp. And still the pencil pencil moved. They wrestled it to a stop, took the argument back outside at noon, and watched the photograph try to schedule their future. Two sets of four at the lodge door arrived double like a loop that refuses to end. On the stone, their witness line reshaped itself to a single word. We. The creek laughed like it had found a new path. The lodge door in the pitcher and in the trees opened all the way. The first thing the house does is pretend not to be a house. The front room forgets how to keep corners. The ceiling lures half an inch, then remembers itself and rises. On the table, their balance clause warms, as if it has a fever that will speak or become a rule. Outside the noonlight tilts to afternoon without asking permission. From the porch, the sound of footsteps, four, then four again, arrives in the careful rhythm of people who have rehearsed, not falling. It's a photograph performing as prophecy. It's not truth, it's pressure.
SPEAKER_01Elias raises a hand to his throat, then points to the page, then the door, then makes the smallest circle in the air.
SPEAKER_00Loop. Yes, loop. If we let the second set of us reach the porch while we're standing here in the same clothes, the creek can't argue that the house requires a guardian to educate the duplication. It will make the word guardian mean owner. Then we narrate the loop as a story, not a law. Stories can be finished, laws linger.
SPEAKER_02We buy time. We walk slow. We make noon last.
SPEAKER_00They angled the table toward the door so the page faces the threshold. The dark photograph sits in a circle of light like a child who has agreed to behave if someone reads. The locket lies open and blank, as if it intends to be a mirror until someone deserves an image. If they are us and we do not accept that without condition, what do we need to hear ourselves say? That we are not currency, that we aren't here to host the river's ledger, that Guardian is a dead now.
SPEAKER_02And if this is a loop, this is the last one. The last time we let a rifle feel like fate.
SPEAKER_01Elias taps the page gently, then points at the door. Read to them.
SPEAKER_00To whoever stands on our porch wearing our shadows, listen, whether you are us or scarecrows good at posture, we have a clause that saves bodies and gives us pages. We will not trade breath for watchers' arithmetic. If you are us, step back from the door and say, We, if you are a photograph pretending to be a future, be warned. Paper burns slower than you think, and we brought patience. The steps outside hesitate. Wood knows wood. The porch boards test their weight and register the pause like a question left unread. A draft moves across the floor with a clean line, then stops at the table, as if a hallway of air has agreed to hear terms. Listen to that door. It wants to decide it's a courtroom.
SPEAKER_02Declare yourself furniture, not judge.
SPEAKER_00The lat twitches and then behaves, which is the door's way of admitting it has no gravel. The footsteps withdraw a pace. The second set advances a pace to keep balance. And for three long breaths, it sounds like a waltz talk to two different bands. The creek thinks we will blink. Don't blink, y'all. I'll read the names the way I will read them on a stone I've been asked to love. Lena Ward, Tams and Cole, Peter Gardner, Noah Vale, Jonas Vale, present by refusal, witnessed by we. No, not memory. That's witness. We can give endings. We can give the endings restore back to the people they belong to.
SPEAKER_01Elias nods her. His finger traces a line on the page. Add it.
SPEAKER_00Adding endings return to origin, no more borrowed conclusions. The ink settles with the quiet of an idea finding the right shelf. The house leans away from the door the way a person leans away from a suggestion. Outside, AJ laughs and then apologizes in a softer key.
SPEAKER_02I need to know what Howard Creek is beyond clever water. I need an origin, or I'll keep fighting style instead of substance.
SPEAKER_00Well, we read backward. We read the guest book from the last blank to the first name. We look for the moment the creek stopped being a creek and learn to keep accounts. I'll get it. She returns with the book that has practiced bad habits for decades. The leather smells like a desk that kept too many secrets. She opens it at the back and moves towards the beginning, page by page. Her finger swiftly moves the page. Her mouth reading softly so the words feel less alone. Okay, here, three summers ago, the semester we didn't come. A note in a different pen. Witness withdrawn. A year before that, Guardian accepted, followed by a name scratched out so hard the paper puckers. Earlier, collected, stamped, not written, besides a checkout line that isn't a checkout. And here, listen, this entry is older than the ink around it. The pen changed. The grammar didn't know about commas yet. If a person is lost, water holds them until a guardian signs. Before that, first summer, first retreat, ledger tested, stories to be judged. Ah, it says ledger, not creek.
SPEAKER_02Hollow court. Say it. This wasn't always a body of water. It was a body of law. Some clever ancestors of ours, or of this lodge, turned agenication into a thing you could pour. And when law learned to move, it learned appetite. It started asking for guardians because that's how law binds people and other people.
SPEAKER_00And when the storytellers came, it found a bang. We kept bringing language that could be stamped.
SPEAKER_01Elias taps the claws and then his chest. Fix it here.
SPEAKER_00We declare Hollow Creek is not port. It is a bad habit made of liquid. It can hold none of us. It can keep no one. It can record what we witness and nothing else. Okay, write, write it, write that. Myra writes in the careful block of someone who wants to be read by fussy ghosts. The page absorbs each letter like it's been waiting to be named correctly. The locket closes itself halfway, then opens again as if nodding. The guest book turns a page by itself, the one they were not yet reading, and awakens a pressed fern between two summers. The fern drops to the whole floor, green as the day it was trapped, then darkens, then becomes a strip of paper as if being told a story changed its body.
SPEAKER_02Read it.
SPEAKER_01Elias lift both hands. Now, finish it.
SPEAKER_00They stand as if a verdict could be granted by posture. Outside, the second set of footsteps chooses patience over drama. The door remains a close. The creek waits, the way a habit waits when it sense in distinction. How creek? Hear this and keep it. Guardian is a word we will not use. Witness is the word you will accept, and we is the shape it has to take. Return the names you have catalogued as numbers. Return the breath you kept in barrels. Return the endings you stole to stay alive, please. Return what you took from Evelyn Ward. Return what you took from Lena.
SPEAKER_02Return what you nearly took from me at the waterline. The inch between almost and present. Return Noah as a name that doesn't have to be past tense to be safe.
SPEAKER_01Elias closes his eyes, draws breath, and lets silence be a sentence. Return.
SPEAKER_00The air cools by a single degree that feels like a page turning. The floor dries in a line from the door inward, as if an invisible mop were deciding to be kind. The locket shows the creep for the length of a blink and then refuses to indulge scenery. The docket photograph clears and shows the children on the dock paying attention to something the camera cannot see, which is in this house respect. It's listening.
SPEAKER_02And now it will punish. It always does before it accepts.
SPEAKER_00Then we narrate the punishment before it can name it penalty. They wait under their own words. The punishment arrives like weather that knows your calendar, polite and inconvenient. The house begins to remember water, not flood, memory. Floorboards are bowed one summer, bow again. The smell of iron climbs the baseboards. The guest book opens to a page they have never owned and showed four names written in careful hand. Carla Wynne, Myra Cole, Elias Hall, Jonas Vale, Beneath in the ledgers blue. Guardian blank witness blank. Don't look away. It will write what we want if we give it the privacy of our backs. Write witness we in our book, not theirs. Done. I'll watch. The guest book waits. The blue line, hungry and unhelped, begins to fill itself. Not with a hand, with the weight of expectation the creek has taught paper to carry. A letter appears in the guardian blank. The letter M. No. No. Wait a minute. Let me say this louder. No.
SPEAKER_01Elias slaps his palm over the word. When he lifts it, the letter smears to a bruise and stops.
SPEAKER_02It knows your name is the hinge. It wants you to be the stamp you refuse to be.
SPEAKER_00Then we change the hinge.
SPEAKER_03How?
SPEAKER_00We offer a better word to carry the weight. It keeps putting on Guardian. Let me see. How about Caretaker? Caretaker is a human holding a truth until it can stand. Caretaker is temporary. Caretaker hands it back.
SPEAKER_02Wait a minute. Caretaker is not currency. Caretaker is a bridge.
SPEAKER_01Elias points at the clause. Add it now.
SPEAKER_00Adding caretaker, not guardian, holds in daylight only, returns at nightfall. Witness remains plural. The guest book refuses to write guardian again. It tries caretaker and leaves the line empty, the way a mouth leaves a difficult word alone. The house raises its shoulders in a shrug the size of a room. The creek, if a creek can frown, frowns, which looks like water deciding not to be pretty. Then tell it what Hollow Creek is, because that's the truth that hasn't been had its turn.
SPEAKER_02Hollow Creek is where judgment became a game. Because it was tired of courtrooms. It thought it guarded it, made it holy. It was wrong. It is a habit we will end with the sentence. Say it with me. Holly is a court.
SPEAKER_00How is it? We ended up with we Elias lays his hand on the page and keeps it there.
SPEAKER_01Period.
SPEAKER_00The second set of footsteps chooses that moment to change temple. Outside on the porch, someone knocks. Three measured taps. The rhythm that started this retreat, and too many stories like it. Listen, guys, we don't answer. We answer with narration.
SPEAKER_02You are closed because we said so. Knock. You are sound, not summons. Porch. You are a stage without an audience.
SPEAKER_00The knock comes once more, less certain, and then stops. The creek runs. The air holds. The photograph shifts. No future rectangle now. Only the dot, the children, and the light. I need to ask for it. Not the inch, the rest. Evelyn, if your name still has a room in this place, hear me, please. You told whoever would listen, I am not ready to sign. We are ready to sign for you, not as guardian, but as witness. We will carry your letter to a place where it can rest. We will return Lena to a tenth that doesn't need perfect or past.
SPEAKER_02And Noah. Say it. Noah Vale is not a cop. He is a person who either stood up and left a doc or didn't. Either way, he gets to be named without a price.
SPEAKER_01Elias breathes out the word the creek hates most from him. Home. Without sound, but the shake is there.
SPEAKER_00The house hears. The floor dries. The guest book, well, for the first time since they arrived, looks ashamed. The creek, unamused by shame, tries the last of its old mechanisms. From the lockets blank, a child's voice that is not a child whispers into the room so gently that for a second it sounds like mercy. Bring the witness. We are the witness. Bring the witness. You aren't taking any of us. Bring the witness.
SPEAKER_02Oh my god, we're already here.
SPEAKER_00The voice changes strategy. It becomes Myra's voice, her exact cadence, her laugh lifted and empty. Her breath between syllables pressed flat. If you don't choose a guardian, I will. You won't. Under it, up to the others. Don't argue. Define. Guardian is obsolete. Caretaker returns at nightfall. Witness is we.
SPEAKER_01We, we, we. Elias brings his fist down once on the table. A punctuation mark that does not need a word.
SPEAKER_00Silence returned like someone who forgot their keys and decided to let themselves in anyway. And then the thing the Creek has been holding breaks. Not water, story. Between the floorboards in the scene where the house keeps its oldest dust, a thin line of ink wells up and writes itself across the plank in scripts so small it has to be humble to read. Hollow Court Session one. A second line follows. Older, more careful. Ledger tested. Witness refused. Guardian accepted. Session one. The origin.
SPEAKER_02They refused witness and accepted guardian. That's the C.
SPEAKER_01Elias points to the page. Answer it.
SPEAKER_00Session last. Ledger broken. Witness accepted. Guardian refused. The ink on the floor dries in a heartbeat, flakes, and blows away on a draft that wasn't there until those words were. A hand no larger than a child's finish a name with elegant cruelty. The name is not TC. It is Myra Cole. I didn't.
SPEAKER_02It's lying.
SPEAKER_00No, look at the hand. They do. The hand that writes is precise. School talk. Careful. It's not Myra's, but its angle is Myra's angle when she copies a line to teach manners. The creek has learned to counterfeit not just a signature, but a posture.
SPEAKER_01Elias rips the photograph from the table.
SPEAKER_00Before he can tear it, the paper hardens in his hands the way a river hardens into winter. The image won't rip. It wants to be a record too badly to admit it's a trick. The guest book flips itself open as if to receive a citation. The Guardian, lying on their page, a page they own, pulls like dough toward a letter they never wrote. Please don't let it name me. Oh no, we won't.
SPEAKER_02Good. Now it can't print there. It can't hold the ink.
SPEAKER_00The guest book bleeds coffee, brown, through the puncture and gives up a looking official. The photograph softens by a shade. The locket, which has been pretending modesty, lets an image bloom behind the oval glass. Not the creek, not the overlook, a room none of them have seen and all of them have recognized. A courthouse emptied to walls, benches replaced by water, a judge's chair kneeling to level of the river. The plait beneath the seal reads, Hollow Court. And beneath that, in smaller print, someone has scratched Creek with a key. We have our truth. And it will keep doing that until we make it accept witness permanently.
SPEAKER_02One more session. Session last. We write it here and we make the water read.
SPEAKER_01Elias takes their pages, lays it flat, and with a finger writes on air above it as if the sentence can be printed without ink.
SPEAKER_00He writes nothing the eyes can see. The page warms anyway. The locket fogs and clears. The creek pushes at the door and stops when the door decides it has a spine. Okay, we end it tomorrow. We go at dawn, we carry nothing the river can spend. We bring the page, the locket, the photograph, because they already know who they are. We bring we and don't let the habit find a single name to hold. And if it tries to make a new session, we refuse to sit.
SPEAKER_02And if it calls for Gardian, refuse.
SPEAKER_00They let the plan sit in the air so the air can memorize it. The lodge recloses around them, and the way a kind hand closes around a cold one. For an hour, long enough to make faith a practice, they do not get punished for thinking ahead. When punishment comes, it comes sideways. The guestbook does not move, the photograph does not twitch, the locket behaves, the house helps for once by remaining a house. It is the balance clause, their page, their signature of we that makes the choice. The paper lifts a corner as if testing wind, then slides across the table toward the door without any helping. It reaches the edge and does not fall. It presses against air as if a plan of grass were there. It is lifted, not by fingers, not by water, by something that believes it has the right to carry paper like a verdict. No, no, hitch it. The latch flips up. The door opens to the careful width of a person who thinks they've lived here. Outside, the path is empty except for the noon that has finished being noon and turned into a thin, exact light. The page floats across the threshold like a patient bird and disappears down the hall toward the back of the lodge. They run, not in a panic, in a carefree way, their bodies wrote yesterday. The back hall waits with the table that pretends it never moves. The page is there, laid neatly beside the dock photograph. The guest book opens itself to a blanket margins wider than good sense. The locket clicks once like a throat clearing. On the blank and perfect careful hand, the heading writes itself, hollow court, session last. No, this is ours the name. That creek is trying to finish our sentence.
SPEAKER_02Read it before it does.
SPEAKER_00The heading glows, then dims, then changes a single word. Court becomes creek. And then with the malice of a school teacher correcting a child, becomes court again. Under it, lines for guardian, witness, collected, released, appear like forms already filled in a dream. The guardian line stays blank for a full heartbeat, kindness, or theater, then links a letter with contentment that feels like theft. The letter M. Just stop. They do everything at once. Hands, breath, voice, refusal, enough noise to make a river shadow. It should be enough, but it isn't. The letter finishes itself like a door closing softly so it won't wake the house. And spells M A R A C O L E Myra Cole. The room does not move, the floor does not tilt, the water does not rise. The punishment is smaller and meaner than that. The word looks beautiful. It looks official. It looks exactly like Myra's hand when she is trying not to shake. That isn't. It is not mine.
SPEAKER_01We can cross it out. Elias shakes his head. No. Crossing is acknowledgement. He raises both palms. Witness it. Say what it is.
SPEAKER_00It's a forgery. It's forgery. You do not get to brag about beautiful life in my handwriting. The letters do not fade. The book does not blush. The claws on the table warms to a point of discomfort and cools, as if deciding whether to live or become kindling. From under the floor in a small unseen where this house keeps its mischief, water starts the slow, satisfied journey of someone arriving on time. It's Myra, and I'm here. And we're here with you.
SPEAKER_01Elias places his palm flat over the forged name. The page warms under his skin and does not burn him.
SPEAKER_00He leaves his hand there long enough for the room to understand who it belongs to. When he lifts it, the name shines brighter as if grateful for attention. It will not be shame. The locket, which has been waiting for this moment since someone invented hinges, opens to show the overlook at dawn, the stone, the page, the pebbles that think it's a paperweight. A small hand finishes a second name where there should be no second line.
SPEAKER_01Elias Hill.
SPEAKER_00Oh no. It is teaching us how much it can write without us.
SPEAKER_01Elias mouths a word with no voice. Run.
SPEAKER_00No, we don't run. We name. Forgery, forgery, forgery. And witness we not collected. The words hang where words hang when they're outnumbered and insist on being true anyway. The book does not erase. The photograph does not relent. The floor carries the sound of water choosing a room. On the guest book, next blank, a third line etches itself, smaller as if to be kind about the speed, collected, and leaves the space ready to receive what it hopes to take. The house breathes in to make itself taller and manages only to be the size it already is. Outside, the second set of footsteps on the porch resumes, slower as if they have all day to arrive. The creek laughs once. A soft thing, like a cup set down in a quiet kitchen. Next, on Hollow Creek, it all comes to an end. The truth steps out of the shadows, and every secret demands its price. Nothing stays buried. No one walks away unchanged.