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Maybe I misunderstood,
maybe I looked too far outside,
searching for who hurt me
while ignoring what I hide.

I've been quick to name the damage,
quick to point out who was wrong,
quick to explain what happened
and why I've had to be so strong.

I've carried grief, I've carried fear,
old wounds I didn't choose,
learned to expect the worst sometimes
because I had too much to lose.

But lately I've been asking
a question harder than blame:

What part of all this is mine?
What patterns have I named?

Because I'm big on accountability.
I believe it should be due.
I've just realized I've spent so long
expecting it from others
I forgot to ask it of me too.

Not everything was my fault.
Some pain was never mine to cause.
Some people made their choices,
and some losses simply came at a cost.

But maybe fear became my compass.
Maybe hurt became my guide.
Maybe I built walls for protection
then wondered why I felt alone inside.

Maybe yesterday's rejection
still follows me today.
Maybe I've mistaken self-protection
for pushing good things away.

And that's a harder truth to swallow,
but maybe truth is where I start:
I can't control what happened,
but I can control my part.

I can heal without excusing.
I can forgive without forgetting.
I can face what I've done wrong
without drowning in regretting.

I don't need to call myself broken
for admitting where I've strayed.
I just need enough honesty
to face the choices I've made.

Because I can't rewrite
the chapters that came before.
But I can stop repeating
what I don't want anymore.

So I'll own what is mine.
I'll release what isn't.
I'll stop blaming every circumstance
for the choices that I've given.

I didn't cause every wound.
I didn't choose every scar.
But if I want a different life,
I have to change what I can.

Not with shame.
Not with blame.
But with courage, truth, and grace.

Because maybe accountability
isn't punishment after all.

Maybe it's finally looking in the mirror
when the reflection gets hard to face,
when the truth feels heavy as shit
and I'd rather turn away.

But this time, I won't.

I'll stand there with the damage.
I'll stand there with the pain.
I'll own the things I wish I'd done differently
without disguising them as blame.

I'll face the ways I hurt,
the ways I ran,
the walls I built,
the things I didn't understand.

I'll stop rewriting every failure
as something someone else began.
I'll stop using what happened to me
to excuse what I still can.

Because some things were done to me.
Some things were beyond my control.
But some things came from choices
I made while trying to survive it all.

And that's a heavy truth to carry.
It's uncomfortable.
It's raw.

But I'd rather face an ugly truth
than keep protecting every flaw.

So let the mirror show me everything.
The fear.
The scars.
The shame.

I'll look at every broken piece
and finally call it by its name.

Not to punish.
Not to hate.
Not to drown in yesterday.

But to finally understand
what I can change today.

Because accountability
isn't punishment after all.

It's having the courage to look in the mirror
when the truth is hard to see...

And refusing to look away
just because the hardest thing to face
is me.

Charlie woke screaming. His body jerked violently against the padded floor. He looked down and noticed that he was no longer in the straitjacket. Although this recent change was welcome, he now had to overcome whatever was moving underneath his skin. A sudden pain tore through his stomach. He lifted his shirt to notice, to his surprise, that he was bleeding heavily from his belly button.
Confusion set in. As negative thoughts beset his mind, he began to wonder: What had these doctors given him? He ran his index finger across his navel. It appeared to be a deep gash, not that dissimilar to how a bald vagina might look to a virgin. The hatch on the door came down. A pair of authoritative eyes were staring at him. "Something is wrong with me. Can you get the doctor? I'm in a great deal of pain." As quickly as the words came from his mouth, the hatch closed back up.
Everything was happening too quickly for Charlie to comprehend. He needed medical assistance, but no one cared. Then came the sounds of crawling from the walls. It wasn't just one, but thousands of creatures scurrying amidst the plaster. Nothing was making sense. Was this a dream, he thought?
Charlie reached inside his belly button. Maybe if he could identify the source of the bleeding, it might reassure him that this was actually happening. As soon as he stuck his finger inside, something bit him. He winced in pain and equal parts bewilderment. A charcoal black, bony but furry leg pierced the belly button. One of the male nurses banged on the door, screaming for him to pipe down as it was two in the morning.
He was unable to keep quiet, especially as the remaining seven legs all did more long-lasting damage to his abdomen. The pain became overwhelming. He had never felt pain quite like it before in his twenty-five years on this planet. As agony tore through him, something clicked in his mind, a hard, humbling realisation. He had always dismissed other people's suffering, especially his sister's, telling himself he was the one who had it rough. But now, as every nerve burned and his body convulsed, Charlie realised the truth—real suffering was silent, isolating, the kind that carved you up from the inside.
He suddenly saw why Abi, and his mother before her, could endure so much and still keep going. The strength needed simply to survive pain, to bear wounds that never heal, belonged to them, not him. Maybe that's why women became mothers—taking on hurt, carrying it, and turning it into something that protected others. Grief washed over him as he remembered his mother, lost only days ago. Now he knew a faint echo of what they had carried all along.
He soon started violently convulsing on the floor as the thing inside him tore its way free. He looked down, and that's when he saw it. It was his sister, but not as he remembered her. Her angelic face was there, somehow, impossibly attached to the body of a golden orb-weaver spider.
"I'm not useless anymore, am I, brother?" Charlie stared into her eyes. "Abi.." The creature watched him with glee as he died a painful death. "What was it you used to call me? Ahh, that's right - spastic." He started to fade in and out of consciousness. "I remember all the times you had your mates round, purposely hiding your lips while speaking so you could mock me".
Charlie's eyes began flicking. His vision started to blur. His mind started to flip between seeing his sister's head on a spider and how she appeared before she was violently murdered. "I was just a kid. I didn't mean to take it out on you. I was just angry at the world for not having what everyone else had".
"Spare me your sorrows. Justice will be served on all men like you, who openly hurt those who are vulnerable or different." Charlie attempts to crawl across to his sister one last time. The pain, however, is too much. He can barely move an inch without winching in shock. Another flurry of knocks echoes across the room. "I already told you, Binks, one more time and you're going back in the straitjacket". The nurse's patience was growing thin with the commotion, as was Abi's with his gaslighting.
"Abi, you don't understand. I wasn't really exposed to anyone who is blind/deaf/an amputee/paralyzed or any other physical... Disability?" Abi hurries over to Charlie. Her eight legs sounded like a tap dancer dancing on a glass table. She extends two of her skeletal extremities. Charlie thinks for a brief moment he has managed to get through to her. To his shock and horror, Abi uses her fangs and bites down on his tongue. The venom penetrates so quickly that he is no longer able to speak.
"Now for the rest of your pitiful existence, maybe you can try and understand what it must have been like being me for a day". The door to the padded room opens out. The guards and nurses are dumbfounded by what they are seeing. A spider with a female face is killing their patient. Charlie soon died staring at his sister's face.
Abi is then startled as one guard tries to crush her beneath his shoe. Abi hurries off too quickly, shooting venom out towards his knee. The guard drops down, screaming in agony like a newborn baby fresh out of the womb. The nurse screams out as Abi scurries beneath the door. She later vanished in the darkness of the hospital ward. Some say a shimmer of gold and silent footsteps haunt the corridors at night, and patients whisper of strange patterns spun across the ceilings. Somewhere out there, Abi watches and waits, seeking those who once turned away from pain, hungry to turn her vengeance into a legend all its own.
In Charlie's dying moments, as he gazed down at his own blood and gore that was spilt out on the sterile floor, he understood life had lost all coherence. The world twisted between nightmare and fever, shadows swimming along the padded walls, the crawling beneath his skin blurring into echoes of his own tormented thoughts. He no longer knew whether the monstrous vision before him was real, perhaps a supernatural vengeance wrought by Abi, or just a punishment conjured by his unravelling mind. He could not separate memory from madness, nor certainty from fear. Was this his sister, reborn and transformed, or simply the crowning horror of guilt and grief tearing him apart from within?
These questions remained unanswered, but one truth was inescapable: Charlie would spend whatever remained of himself haunted by what he had done and failed to do. Whether Abi had truly returned or Charlie was experiencing the final creation of his splintered psyche, the result was the same. For him, the world had slipped beyond sense or salvation and now only opened into the endless darkness of death, heavy with the burden of his past. The line between reality and nightmare had been erased, and that erasure itself was the only certainty left to him.

THE END

I’m Phatti MacHine, an independent writer and creator working somewhere between illustrated fiction, satire, strange archives and interactive storytelling.
I’m new to Written and looking forward to seeing what kind of community is developing here. I’ve spent the last 40 years building stories that don’t always stay politely inside the covers of a book, so a platform experimenting with different ways for readers and writers to connect caught my attention.
I currently have two published works I’ll be bringing into the conversation.
ClearCAM
An illustrated story about Maya, a smart, skeptical kid who discovers ClearCAM, a tool that helps expose the tricks hidden inside advertising, influencer pressure, fake urgency, manipulative packaging and aggressively cheerful mascots. It’s funny, colorful and built around a simple idea: learning how someone is trying to influence you doesn’t mean you have to stop enjoying the joke.
the Diminuto Archives
A much stranger project. Part archive, part story, part artifact collection and part evidence locker for things that probably should not have been catalogued in the first place. It wanders through odd documents, questionable technology, unexplained incidents, cats, conspiracy and the general human tendency to file the impossible under miscellaneous.
Both projects are part of my broader interest in stories that reward curiosity. Books with artifacts, hidden connections, fictional products, websites, games, documents and other bits of narrative debris readers can explore beyond the main text.
I’ll be sharing more artwork, background material, experiments and new work here as I figure out the platform.
Thanks for having me.
Think clearly. Choose wisely. Stay curious.
— Phatti MacHine

Discovering deeper meaning in Scripture can transform the way you view your faith journey. My first book release, From Shadow to Substance reveals how engaging with both Old and New Testament patterns provides a richer understanding of biblical truths.
Explore the connections between temple washing covenant and New Testament baptism to experience the unity and depth of God's redemptive design.
1. Trace biblical connections for new insights
2. Apply ancient truths to modern faith

I'm a creator and I'm creating a brand. I write poetry and create cinematic poetry videos. I've wrote a book (posted in image) through Amazon, but it didn't do so well. I don't understand marketing very well. I'm trying Written to see how things go. I'm a creative mind, a little dark, poetic freestyle, original rhyme schemes. More coming soon