my r/nosleep favorites | volume one

I picked up something weird off the road last night.

I picked up something weird off the road last night.
by flippingphones

So I tend to lurk nosleep a lot, it's a great way to kill time, y'know? Normally I wouldn't post on a horror-oriented subreddit for something like this, but I've seen users do a lot of really sensible problem-solving, and this is pretty fucking creepy, and I don't want to look at it, think about it if I don't have to, so what the hell.

So I have this really terrible tendency to pick random shit off the ground. I usually throw it out eventually, but my first instinct when I see something at least relatively clean and not trash is to pick it up and pocket it. I have a small hoard of jewellery, some intact DVDs I haven't gotten around to resurfacing, and so on.

I work graveyard shift, and bike to work. It's about a ten, fifteen minute commute, one that passes by a huge stretch of marshlands, and a road between my job and a Tim Horton's that is completely black, and I usually have to navigate that part by the faded glow of the lights on either side of it. Usually, puddles are my only visual indicator.

Last night, though, I saw something very compact reflecting light. I stopped to pick it up, because that's what I do, pick random shit off the ground. It turned out to be a flip phone. Fairly new model.

I looked up to start biking again, and saw someone hobbling away. Into the marshlands. I figured it was a drunk, from the way they were wavering back and forth. I've had to deal with drunks pretty often here, they usually linger around the entrance because they thought the store would be open and they don't want to trek back to the main road to get somewhere that's actually open. Some of them pretend they're having a heart attack so they can get a lift and a warm bed. Normal shit.

I was running late and I'm kind of an asshole, so I decided that if whoever it is wandering into the marsh at night in pitch blackness didn't show up in the morning, I'd just bring it home with me.

As it turns out, no drunks emerged from the marsh, and no one was loitering anywhere around the parking lot or road past the marshlands, so free phone! I'm a douchebag and I probably deserved what I found on that thing.

When I got home, I collapsed on the couch and opened the device. It still had juice, and wasn't damaged. Definitely a new model. Dirty, scratched. There was something odd about the sides, I noticed now in the light; brown-and-yellow scars along the silver body, looking almost like fingerprints. I rotated the phone and realized it was fingerprints. Fingerprints that looked like they melted the frame.

While trying to figure out how the hell that might have happened, I started poking through the phone. Very few icons; just 'messaging', 'contacts', 'call', 'calendar', 'internet', and 'files'.

I checked the contacts first, just in case there was someone I could ask about giving it back; blank. Phone was still mine, clearly. Next I checked the files. There were two photos, one of a grilled cheese sandwich, one of a pretty skyline, one of a hand holding a cup of coffee with the blurry backdrop of some indistinct figure using a vending machine. Obvious remnants of someone posting about their day.

The next file was a video. And, well, I don't want to actually type out the contents, but I figure you could probably get some more out of what the hell happened in it if I actually told you everything, so here it goes. Apologies for flubbing the wording or writing stiffly from this point on. It's embarrassing, alright?

It was a gay sex tape.

I'm asexual, and I tend to associate my libido more with the ebbing and flowing tides of my hormones than actual sex acts, or any sex appeal at all, so it was just awkward. Based on the angle, the fact it was on a phone, and the messiness of it, my first assumption was a pair of lovers recording their session on the phone for home or something.