SCROLL EATER

Lena’s thumb drifted over her phone, her face lit by the blue flicker of Instagram stories, Twitter threads about the world falling apart, TikTok strangers dancing in kitchens she’d never step into, Facebook updates from people she barely remembered. She looked over at the clock on her nightstand, which said 1:47 AM.

She was a doomscroller, and she knew it.

She did it anyway.

Not to relax—God knows it never did—but because silence made her skin crawl.

Noise felt better.

Other people’s chaos, other people’s crises, other people’s fear. She wore it like a warm weighted blanket—comforting enough to hide under, heavy enough to sink her deeper.

A reminder notification hovered on her lock screen: Call Mom back.

She swiped past it without even seeing it.

Her phone buzzed.

Talia: You see the news??

She hadn’t. She didn’t look at real news, just the slow poison that kept her scrolling until her mind blurred at the edges.

She typed back:

Lena: No? What happened?

Talia: They found another one out by Widow’s Tongue Creek. Eyes gone.

A dull ache behind her eye. Not pain. More like a string plucked, quick and gone.

A ripple of unease. Then, as quick as it came, it was gone.

No big deal, just the usual stress

Swipe.

Emergency lights. Smoke. Bodies moving like frantic shadows. Her pulse picked up. That quiet thrill of watching someone else’s disaster from far away.

Swipe.

A shaky flashlight skimmed over charred bark. The camera caught something wet, marble-smooth, tucked near a root. The light jerked away. Lena’s stomach lurched. Saliva filled her mouth, too fast, too hot.

Another twinge behind her eyes. Sharper.

She tried to remember what she’d been searching for. A message? A headline? Something—

Gone again.

Swipe.

The images blurred, evaporating from memory as fast as she could consume them.

Her pulse tightened.

Her fingertips tingled.

Swipe.

She tried to text someone—Talia? Mom?—but the name melted the second she reached for it. A sudden white blankness opened in her mind.

She gasped.

Then forgot she had gasped.

What’s happening to me?

Her heart jittered, then ran. Cold sweat crawled down her spine. A metallic taste spread across her tongue. Battery acid and something older. Her breath was thin. Heavy.

Swipe.

Her thoughts melt at the edges, softening, losing shape. Images slurred. Words bounced around her skull, looking for meaning.

“Get it together,” she murmured. Her voice dragged, rough. Like pulling words through wet sand.

Swipe.

Language failed her.

“I need to—” she gasped, unable to get the words out.

“What’s happ—” fizzled into static.

Her thoughts came in glitchy bursts, a failing radio transmission.

Drool slid from her chin.

She didn’t feel it, though. Her mind was collapsing inward like a cheap paper lantern.

Swipe.

Her name wavered like a dying bulb. Memories fragmented. Her sense of self diluted to a trembling filament.

A warm wetness ran from her eyes. Thin scarlet trails sank into her sheets.

Her jaw hung slack. Her body sagged.

Still, her thumb moved.

Slow.

Mechanical.

Purposeful.

Swipe.

Swipe.

Swipe.

Her chest hitched with a spastic jerk, like something inside her was trying to escape—but then it stilled.

Something slipped out of her.

Not upward.

Not outward.

Just… gone.

Her soul left the way a breath leaves a dying fire: quietly, with no ceremony at all.

She didn’t notice.

She couldn’t.

Her body sat upright, held by fading reflex. The screen lit her in cold blue. She didn’t know what it meant anymore.

Swipe.

Swipe.

Swipe.

---

Lena Forrester wasn’t in her bed when the sun came up. And there was no sign she’d walked out the front door.

At dawn, two anglers found her on the muddy bank of Widow’s Tongue Creek. Mist smothered the water, thick and slow, as if the hollow itself was breathing in.

She had been… placed there.

Her knees bent neatly.

Hands folded awkwardly around her ruined phone.

Her eyes were gone.

Not taken out.

Not gouged.

Just… absent.

Her phone was dead.

Cold.

Black-screened.

But her thumb still moved.

Swipe.

Pause.

Swipe.

A mindless, automatic gesture—one that had outlived the mind that once made it.

The medical examiner later described Lena’s brain as “thinned.”

Not damaged.

Not diseased.

Just smoothed in places, like a stone worn down by water.

He did not file that description.

What he filed was this:

Her fingerprints had been worn nearly flat by repetitive friction.

As if she had been swiping long, long after her heart stopped beating.

---

Back at Widow’s Tongue Creek, mist clung to the water like an ethereal web.

The reeds along the bank all bent toward the tree line—as if something had passed through the night before, searching for something.

And along the mud, just at the edge of the water, were footprints.

Not Lena’s.

They were too large.

Too deep.

And pressed perfectly into the mud…until, halfway down the bank, they stopped entirely.

From there on, they disappeared up the creek and into the dark mouth of the holler.

Hunting.

Hungry.

---

Authors note:

Scroll-Eater is fiction. The danger it points to isn’t.

We live in a world built to keep our eyes open and our minds overstimulated. Doomscrolling, iDisorders, screen addiction—whatever label you want to use—are modern predators we willingly invite into bed with us. The constant drip of fear, outrage, and catastrophe does something to the brain. Not overnight. Not obviously. But slowly. Quietly. A little piece at a time.

Most of us won’t end up like Lena. But most of us will feel a shade of what she felt.

If this story rattled you, good. It means something in you is still paying attention.

This isn’t a call to toss your phone into a river.

It’s a reminder that your attention is worth something—and the world, digital or otherwise, is more than happy to take every last drop of it if you’re not careful.

Use your screen. Don’t let it use you.