‘One may notice, on occasion, the presence of phone recycling booths in the corners of malls and department stores. Sometimes they offer the user cash for old phones. Sometimes they suggest the phones will be forwarded to some vague charity. Maybe those things happen, but they are not the core purpose of these machines. The purpose of the machines is to disincentivize the act of throwing old phones into ‘The Calling Pit.’ 

‘The Calling Pit’ is an outwardly mundane hole between two small hills near the border in Southern California. ‘The Pit’ is sizable, around 20’ in diameter, and it is naturally occurring, though guard rails now line its rim. ‘The Pit’ is deep and winding- the bottom, if it has one, cannot be seen from the surface. 

In 2004, a visitor to ‘The Pit,’ which was even less remarkable then than it is now, accidentally dropped their new and fully charged iPhone inside. Over the course of the next day, the visitor’s contacts received strange calls and messages, including pictures of shadowed rock walls and dim sunlight, filtering in as though from a distance. Those calls and message that could be described as coherent were pleasantries (‘hello,’ ‘how are you,’ ‘what is your name’) and questions (‘how warm is it where you are,’ ‘where are you exactly,’ ‘how long will this last’). Contact ceased roughly around the time one might suspect the iPhone lost power.

Whether or not this had happened previously, the iPhone case became popular enough that others began to experiment by sinking means of contact into ‘The Calling Pit’ and waiting for contact from the entity inside. Nothing works but cellular phones and contact is only ever between the entity and contacts on an active phone- it does not seem capable of or interested in revisiting old numbers from previous devices. 

Visitors to ‘The Calling Pit’ have found that, for every three questions they answer, the entity will reluctantly answer a question put to it, though it is unwilling to offer any description of what or where exactly it is. The entity only ever offers advice, and the advice tends to be targeted and insightful beyond what one might expect of something that has never felt the sun on its form. The advice is good. 

Studies suggest that roughly 30% of people who engage meaningfully with ‘The Calling Pit’ are dead within a year, though no clear line of causation has been found. It may well be that only desperate people ask a hole for advice.’

I buy a burner for the occasion, spending extra for a better battery and a case. I watch on the peripheries while others drop their phones down into the dark. I do what they did- I slide the phone along the closest thing to a slope, hoping to minimize impact. It’s a violent fall, regardless.

There are rumors people have died trying to enter. 

I’m the only contact on the phone. The first messages come in an hour later. Garbled.

Then a call.

A voice like a young man asks where I’m going. I check the guide and tell him I’m going to a museum where they retire the costumes of sports mascots. Before I can wonder if I need to explain what a ‘mascot’ or a ‘sport’ is, the caller hangs up. 

The same voice calls back 45 minutes later and asks how I’m doing. I tell it I’m nervous, but well. The voice asks what I’m nervous about and I tell it that I don’t know who I’m talking to. Or what. I refrain from wasting a question asking.

The line remains active. I tap on the dashboard and nod to myself in the rearview mirror. 

“How much longer do I have to keep doing this?”

The phone crackles and the answer comes.

-traveler

Traveling so regularly between states, it’s sometimes difficult to remember which have legalized marijuana, medical or otherwise, since I took this adventure up nearly a decade ago. I don’t smoke, myself, or I haven’t in a long time. I try not to engage in any form of substance abuse now (my self-abuse takes other forms), mostly because I don’t want to but partially because I don’t want to be stopped on the wrong side of a border with gummies I had forgotten were spiked. This means that when I arrive at ‘The Back Door,’ which is literally the back door to a pizza shop in the worst part of Denver, and a scrawny picked-skin man opens the door asks me what I want, I hesitate, for a moment, glancing at the pistol tucked loosely in his waistband and then say:

“Drugs?”

‘Buying drugs used to be fun and dangerous before capitalism was given full access to dispensaries, transforming the process into the same sterile drag that is purchasing one of a handful of the current generation’s smartphones in a mall. The modern dispensary is so far removed from the head shop- from the dealer’s shitty apartment living room- that one can hardly find any familiarity in the process at all and the sheer variety of strains and mediums encourages the middle-aged and polo-ed employees to depart on a lecture about the various pros and cons of each product, at the end of which a customer is left wondering whether such differences can actually exist between specimens or whether it’s all much of the same, branded and rebranded to create a false sense of worth. It used to there was ‘good stuff’ and ‘the stuff you bought when funds were tight.’ Now it is like a wine-tasting, all flavor and no buzz.

‘The Back Door,’ half storefront and half dinner theater, allows a glimpse into the old days. 

Run out of the back of a legitimate pizza parlor, ‘The Back Door’ makes it difficult to actually purchase any of their products, encouraging their employees to act erratically- sometimes even dangerously- in order to extract the maximum amount of cash from customers (or to scare them off in the process). Visitors report varying levels of complexity after engaging in the experience. Some describe angry tweakers wielding make-shift weapons at any attempt to negotiate a better price. Other report being ‘arrested’ and ‘held in a separate facility’ for ‘several days of questioning’ before being released onto the street with no record of arrest or of the officers that interrogated them. 

Some suggest that ‘The Back Door’ is a front itself, disguised in camouflage so gaudy and intense that local law enforcement is forced to assume everything is above board. Others suggest it’s only another level to the game, though repeat customers are rare or absent from the conversation entirely.’

“Drugs, huh?” The man wavers on the stoop. He looks back inside and makes meaningful eye contact with someone I can’t see. “What makes you think we’ve got drugs here?”

I reach back to pull my copy of the guide from my back pocket and the man levels his pistol at me. “What you got there?”

My mouth is dry. “A… book?”

The man spits messily to his right and wipes his mouth on skin of his shoulder, bare where his t-shirt is ripped and stained from saliva. “The autumn one?”

I nod. 

“How high you want to get? We’ve got a real mellow sativa-”

“No, No!” A chubby man in a button-up appears from inside and the dealer’s posture slips from unwell and on-edge to scolded puppy. “How many times do I have to tell you, your character wouldn’t know the names.” The man turns to me and pulls a little card out of his pocket. “Sorry- we’re training this guy. This should get you 15% off a pizza in the front. Come back tomorrow if you want to try again.”

The dealer and his boss pull back into the building and ‘The Back Door’ closes. I look up reviews for the pizza place and shrug.

Better than nothing. 

-traveler

‘Hidden like a bunker in the low hills of west Arkansas ‘The Place Where They Keep the MSN Chats.’ They’ll tell you this isn’t the case, but it is. Much of what is said about the facility is speculation. For instance, it has been suggested that the hill masks a massive faraday cage, enclosing the hidden servers and protecting them from access and attack. It’s been said that a small army of private contractors guards ‘The Place,’ and it’s been said that only one man, very skilled and discreet, has access. Maybe both rumors are true, for it has also been said that ‘The Place’ is needlessly layered and it’s been said that the low hills of Arkansas don’t actually conceal ‘The Place Where They Keep the MSN Chats’ at all, but a complicated decoy. 

What has to be true, assuming such a place exists at all, is that the MSN chats are intact and that they are carefully archived, tied, as though with tacks and yarn, to those frivolous handles millennials donned in order to spill their secrets/desires/fears to each other and to men much older than them just before it felt like the world was going to end at 2000 and just after, when it didn’t. Why else would such a ‘Place’ exist if there weren’t important secrets, there? 

There is a scrap of footage taken from inside ‘The Place Where They Keep the MSN Chats.’ It sometimes makes the rounds and then disappears, as though by some silent but concerted effort. The footage shows a room of humming servers. It swings around to a human-sized statue of the MSN chat logo as it existed in 2001. The statue seems to pulse with internal light. A door slides open with a chime like an incoming message and then the footage ends, hardly 10 seconds in a darkened room. It is frustrating short and poorly filmed, but these aspects seem to lend it some credence. 

The closest a traveler might get to ‘The Place Where They Keep the MSN Chats’ is the foot of the hill. With an ear pressed to the dirt, one can hear the chiming of those doors, opening and closing as the army or the man patrols the secret hallways below. The sound of it leaves a listener wanting and hopeful, but the existence of ‘The Place’ is a danger to us all.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

“Hello, my name is Midrigar and I will be your server today. What can I get you?”

The man standing next to the table is young. ‘Midrigar’ is an approximation of his name, which was more a sound, really. A sound like a boulder rolling down a hill. I try to check his name tag but the symbols on it hurt my eyes. 

Midrigar sees me squinting and covers the tag with his hand. “Sorry about that. If it’s easier, you can call me Mike.”

With my eyes released from the quivering letters on the man’s chest, I see that one of his eyes has rolled back up in his head. The iris reemerges from the bottom after a complete spin. An ocular sunrise that makes me want to vomit. “It seems important to call you by your real name… Midri…” My tongue becomes sluggish in my mouth. Blood pours up from my throat and I spit it into my coffee while I pretend to take a sip. 

In the booth ahead of me, a mother snatches a child’s menu away from her son. He had been connecting dots and the result is a multi-pointed star that glows black. A man facing the corner of the restaurant and standing still as a statue disappears as she crumples it. The boy begins to cry. 

“Midrig…” A car alarm goes off outside. Something small and reptilian briefly surfaces in my coffee. “Midriga…”

Midrigar sniffs and waves his pen at me. “Just order.”

‘There are things out there that are not human. Spirits. Demons. Monsters. Some, among these entities, see their inhumanness as an affront and seek to change to change it. They take what they want. They possess.

Then they find out what it is to be human and those that don’t seek out a violent end usually make their way to ‘Cal’s Place.’ 

‘Cal’s Place’ is a café that employees possessed humans that, due to personality quirks or the physical modifications to their host’s body that occurred as part of the possession, are unable to find work elsewhere. This demographic serves as the main draw of ‘Cal’s Place,’ which is otherwise known for mid-ranged food and less-than-ideal customer service. Customers arrive at the café well aware that their hosts and servers will occasionally skitter across the floor on limbs that bend backwards or utter words that shake the tables and cause those with sensitive minds to briefly black out.

The employees put up with the indignation of being photographed and recorded for social media because there are few other solutions available and, unlike their previous vague and immortal forms, their human bodies need to eat to survive.

As of 2025, possession remains unrecognized as a qualifier for any sort of government aid, though host bodies are sometimes stripped of their assets in situations where courts have ruled their identity has technically ‘changed.’ Advocates for human hosts tread lightly, aware that legal recognition of possession may just as likely result in prosecution as protection. The system is always looking for more prisoners.’ 

– traveler

‘Undulating’ is the word that best describes the floor of ‘The Dance Factory,’ a venue for young and inspiring influencers to produce content in an environment designed explicitly for that purpose. The influencers, who I assume pay through the nose to be on the floor (the actual pricing is discussed during in-person meetings only), move below the area meant for visitors, like me, who pay slightly less, but still quite a bit, to witness the whole thing in action.

We are not allowed to record, for obvious reasons. This would be like snatching wieners from the water vat at the hot dog factory. The sausage doesn’t belong to us. We might get hurt trying to take it. The meat isn’t even finished. It might make us sick. 

So we watch, from out bird’s eye view as people perform careful dances or stunning displays of parkour in rooms meant to look like other places entirely. A man reclines in the first class seat of a common airplane. Another brings his phone close to a dinner he’s eating in the capsule-style sleeping room of a cross-country train. 

The group I’m touring with is random and diverse, but among them is a teenage pair- brother and sister, I think, or boyfriend and girlfriend. Not my business. What is sort of my business is the context they bring to the visit. Our guide only speaks about the facilities, which, I suppose, is why I’m here. They talk non-stop about the people below us, minor celebrities and frenemies with beef. Twice, the tour guide has to ask them to refrain from calling out to people they recognize. The teens want so badly to be on the floor that I want it for them. Passion is healthy, right?

When I catch a glimpse of myself in the glass, I remember I’m not the image of respectability. That my life has gone off the rails for something that may have been passion, once, but is now an entrenched duty with no purpose or end. The rails seem fairly distant now. I’m not sure my wheels would even sync to the tracks. 

‘There are numerous instances of stupid people digging where they shouldn’t and being rewarded with oil or buried treasure or labyrinthine tunnels with historical value. With much of the earth churned already, those happy accidents occur with a bit more subtlety, and ‘The Dance Factory’ has all the tells.

The name, for instance, was clearly chosen by somebody of a generation that is far removed from the zeitgeist. It is neither edge, nor wholesome, nor even ironically ‘cringe’ enough to be a business associated with Gen Z or younger, and this checks out. The owners are boomers, already rich from being born at the right time and with the right skin color. In the few interviews they’ve agreed to, Michelle and Leon Tach express the good sense that the further they are away from the operational side of ‘The Dance Factory,’ the better. They would ruin the ‘vibe,’ Leon is quoted as saying, and the word ‘vibe’ exits his mouth with the same polite distaste of a man who has only recently tried sushi and found he prefers his fish cooked. 

The Tachs are quite comfortable in acknowledging that some of the content produced at ‘The Dance Factory’ is questionable. They justify the output by indicating that the far-left and the far-right political banter made, there, is equivalent in volume and that it’s all largely drowned out by the fluffy dance stuff and the ASMR that sometimes borders on erotic. 

Leon shivers at this. “Can’t stand the whispering stuff,” he says, “Give me the dance over the whispers any day.”’ 

In the basement of ‘The Dance Factory’ there is a room with the exact dimensions of the one above, the one with the facades. This is a quieter room, a place with cubicles and ample charging stations and some nice looking computers that go largely ignored. Here is where the influencers go to cut and edit the content that, in its final form, appears effortless. 

“Still think you want to go into this line of work?” The father of the teens is frowning through the window. He strikes me as the sort of man that works in an office like this. 

The teens nod and the tour ends at a mandatory gift shop.

-traveler