This was lying on my bedsheet when I woke up.
Small. Pale. Wrong.
For a few frozen seconds, I was sure it had come from my own body. I picked it up with shaking hands, convinced I was holding a piece of sk.i or… something worse. Thirty minutes of panic, Google searches, and wild theories later, one tiny clue finally explod… Continues…
I couldn’t shake the dread as I turned the strange lump over in the tissue, replaying the night before. Had I scratched myself in my sleep? Was it a parasite, a piece of nail, some kind of medical emergency I was too scared to name? Every possibility made my chest tighten a little more.
I kept inspecting my skin, my clothes, the sheets, searching for an answer that refused to appear.
Then a faint sticky patch on the bedsheet caught my eye, and with it, a memory: my child, giggling on the bed last night, clutching a handful of gummy candies. In an instant, terror collapsed into ridiculous relief. The horrifying “mystery object” was nothing more than a melted gummy, reshaped by body heat and time. I had spent half an hour spiraling over candy. The fear was real—but so was the laugh that finally broke through.
