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| Something about the man across the street didn’t look right. |
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It was my birthday, so technically I was allowed to stay up until two. My parents made a whole thing of announcing it before they went to bed, like they were granting us some kind of royal decree. Owen and Carter and Lucas just nodded along with straight faces, and the second my parents' door clicked shut, Carter started laughing and said, "Two? You're fourteen."
"They do this every year," I said.
"It's so wholesome it physically hurts me," Carter said.
Lucas threw a piece of crust at him.
We'd been at it for maybe two hours by then—pizza boxes open on the floor, controllers getting passed around, everyone talking over each other about nothing. I'd grabbed a two-liter of Coke from the back of the fridge before my parents went to bed—one of those bottles that had been there long enough that nobody could remember buying it—and we drank it anyway. Lucas was losing badly at everything and making excuses for each one. Bad controller. Sun in his eyes. Lag. Carter told him there was no sun at ten-thirty at night and Lucas said that wasn't the point.
That's how the night started. It was the kind of normal that you don't notice until it's already gone.
Nico showed up around ten-thirty.
He does this thing where he doesn't knock, just opens a door like he owns whatever room is on the other side. I'd told him about it a hundred times. He genuinely didn't see the problem. He wandered in wearing his dinosaur pajamas—the ones with the faded T-rex on the front that he'd had since he was six and still refused to throw away—looked at us for a second like he was sizing up the situation, then drifted toward the window.
"Why is that man standing like that?" he said.
"Nico." I didn't even look up from the screen. "Go back to your room."
"He's just standing there."
"He's the neighbor. People stand. Go."
He lingered for another few seconds in that annoying way little kids do when they want you to know they're leaving on their terms. Then he was gone.
Owen glanced at the window. I caught him doing it out of the corner of my eye.
"Don't encourage him," I said.
"I'm not." But he looked anyway.
Carter paused the game to get more pizza and ended up standing near the window while he ate. He didn't say anything for a second. Then: "Okay, that guy's posture is a little weird."
"What guy?" Lucas asked.
"Neighbor. Across the street."
Lucas went to look. I stayed on the couch. I wasn't going to give Nico the satisfaction.
"He's just standing in his yard," Lucas said.
"Yeah but like... his head's tilted kind of far."
"People tilt their heads."
"Not like that."
I finally got up because I was curious, not because I thought anything was actually wrong. The man was standing in the middle of his lawn, maybe forty feet from the curb. Porch light was on. He was just... there. Still. Head dropped a little to the left.
"He probably just moved in," I said. "You know how adults get weird about their lawn at night. My dad does it."
"Your dad walks around," Carter said. "That guy's not moving."
"Give him a second."
We watched. Carter checked his phone and slid it back in his pocket. Lucas grabbed another slice and came to stand beside us. The man didn't shift his weight. Didn't look up at the sky the way people do when they're just standing outside, thinking. Didn't scratch his arm. The porch light threw a long shadow behind him across the grass and none of it moved.
"How long have we been standing here?" Owen asked.
"Like two minutes," Carter said.
"He hasn't moved at all."
"He's just chilling," Lucas said, though he didn't sound totally sure.
We went back to the game.
My mom appeared in the doorway around eleven, the way she did when she wanted to check on us without making it obvious she was checking on us. She had her water bottle, which meant she'd already been up for a while. She glanced around the room—pizza boxes, controllers, the usual—then her eyes drifted to the window.
"Oh, that's just the new neighbor," she said. "He moved in last week, I think. Nice enough."
"Does he just... stand outside a lot?" Owen asked.
She shrugged. "Some people like the night air." She pulled the door mostly shut and went back to bed.
That was it. Just the night air.
Nico came back at eleven-fifteen. I heard his feet on the stairs before he opened the door.
"Still out there," he said.
"Nico, I swear—"
"He was closer before."
I turned around. "What?"
"He was farther back before. Now he's closer to the street."
"You're not supposed to be up."
"I know." He said it like it was obvious, like the rules were a minor inconvenience he'd already factored in. "He was farther back before," he said again. Then he left.
Owen looked at me.
"Don't," I said.
"I'm not saying anything."
"Good."
I waited a full minute. Maybe longer. I picked up the controller and set it back down. Then I went to the window.
The man was closer to the curb. Not at the curb—maybe ten feet from it now—but noticeably closer than before. His porch was all the way back behind him.
"Did he move?" Lucas asked. He'd followed me over without me noticing.
"He must have," Carter said. "We just didn't see it."
"When, though? We've been looking."
"We weren't looking every single second," I said. "We were playing. He probably just walked up and we missed it."
"We were looking at him like five minutes ago," Owen said.
"So he moved in the last five minutes. It takes two seconds to walk across a yard."
"And none of us caught it."
"People move fast," I said. It sounded thinner out loud than it had in my head.
"His front door didn't open," Owen said quietly. "I would've seen the light."
Nobody answered that. We stood there for another few seconds, none of us saying what we were actually thinking, and then Carter said "whatever" and went back to the couch. I stayed at the window a little longer. The man didn't move. I kept waiting for him to scratch his nose or shift his weight or do anything at all that people do when they're just standing somewhere, but he didn't.
I went back to the couch.
The game got quiet after that. Not silent—we were still talking, still playing—but the energy had shifted in a way that nobody named. Carter kept glancing back at the window. Lucas started losing on purpose so he could take a break and go look. Owen had pulled his chair so he could see the street without turning around.
"He's angled different," Lucas said from the window.
"What do you mean angled?" I asked.
"Like before he was facing the house, kind of. Now he's more sideways. Toward the corner."
"What direction sideways?"
"I don't know. Just—like he turned but we didn't see it."
Carter walked over to look. Stood there for a second. "He looks the same to me. He's facing the house."
"He's not facing the house. His shoulder's pointing at us."
"His shoulders are square-on. I'm looking right at him."
They were standing at the same window, six inches apart, looking at the same man under the same porch light, and describing two different things. Not in a dramatic way. Not like one of them was making it up. More like when two people try to describe a color and both answers are almost right but don't match.
"You're looking at the same guy?" I said.
"Obviously," Carter said.
Lucas just shook his head slowly.
Owen hadn't moved from his chair. "How close is he now?" he asked.
Nobody wanted to say.
He was at the edge of the yard. Maybe five feet from the sidewalk.
Nico appeared in the doorway again around midnight. I didn't even tell him to go back to bed. He walked straight to the window, looked out, and said, matter-of-factly: "Why is he all bendy like that?"
We all went to the window.
The man's posture was wrong. Not dramatically, not cartoonishly—just wrong in the way that makes your brain stutter, the way something looks off in a picture before you can figure out what it is. His shoulders weren't even. One arm hung lower than it should. The angle of his neck put his head somewhere that heads don't usually go.
"Bendy," Owen said quietly.
"He's like a bendy man," Nico said.
"Go to bed, Nico," I said, but my voice came out flat. Not annoyed. Just flat.
He stayed at the window for another second. "He doesn't move when you look at him," he said. Then he went back upstairs.
The room was very quiet.
"Okay," Carter said finally. "That's a real weird thing to say."
"He's eight," Lucas said.
"Still."
I didn't say anything. I was watching the man on the street. I'd been watching him the whole time Nico was talking. He hadn't moved. He was perfectly, completely still.
I kept watching. The porch light across the street buzzed faintly—or maybe I was imagining it. Nothing else moved. No cars. No wind in the trees. Just him, standing there with that wrong shape, and the four of us crowded at a window like we'd forgotten how to look away.
I made myself turn around. Looked at the pizza box, counted the grease stains on the cardboard, looked at the dark TV screen. Gave it five full seconds. Told myself he was going to be in the exact same spot when I turned back. That this was just a weird neighbor on a weird night and we'd built it into something it wasn't.
I looked back.
He was on the sidewalk now.
"He's on the sidewalk," I said.
Everyone came to the window.
"He wasn't there before," Owen said.
"He was in the yard."
"When did he move?"
None of us had seen it. We'd been looking at him—or I thought we had—and he'd covered thirty feet without any of us catching it.
His shape was more obvious now, up close. The wrongness of him. Like everything was in the wrong place—just a little. Too much bend in the joints. Not enough in others. He was facing our house, I thought. Or maybe angled slightly. I couldn't tell. My eyes kept sliding off him. Every time I tried to focus, something about him wouldn't stay still long enough to look at properly.
Carter laughed suddenly—short and sharp, the kind of laugh that doesn't mean anything is funny. "Okay. Okay, you know what? We've been staring at this guy for an hour and a half. We're just creeping ourselves out." He stepped back from the window. Sat down on the couch. His voice had gone completely calm. "He's just a weird dude who likes standing outside. Some people do that."
None of us moved.
"Seriously," Carter said. "He looks totally normal. I don't know why we got so worked up." He leaned back, relaxed in a way he hadn't been for the past hour. "Probably just takes walks at night and stopped for a second. Nothing weird about it."
Owen turned to look at him. "You were the one who said his posture was off."
"I was tired. It looks fine now." Carter shrugged. "I don't know what we were all so freaked out about."
Something in his voice was different. Not scared anymore. Not anything, really. Just even and flat, the way you sound when you've already decided something and stopped thinking about it.
Owen looked at him. Something in his face shifted.
I heard Nico's voice from the stairs—he hadn't gone back to sleep, just retreated to the hallway. He was looking at Carter when he said it.
"Now you look like him."
© 2026 Karen Cody. All rights reserved. This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog. Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission. This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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