The Offering
- S.S. Fitzgerald
- Jul 5, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 13
You can call this a trigger warning.
The below short is tied to an upcoming novel, Sinner's Pass. The novel, and by extension its universe, include dark topics, to include abuse and drug use. I do not list or describe any of it explicitly here, but I feel I need to be up front with you as my audience.
Update 2/13/2026
Sinner's Pass received a re-release on 2/13/2026. Scenes were tailored to be more precise for the "realms" within Sinner's Pass. The hardcover (special edition) also now has the 3 short stories associated with the Sinner's Pass universe. With this, the short stories have all been rewritten for their debut print publication.
The more normal I want to feel, the more alien I feel, Mia thought.
The harder Mia tries to feel normal, the more wrong everything becomes.
Mia walks to school. She sits in class. She answers when called on. Mia performs the motions correctly, the way she thinks a girl her age is supposed to. But beneath it all there is pressure—slow, relentless—expanding inside her body. A biological certainty she refuses to name.
She stops going to school. Officially, it’s because she’s sick. Unofficially, it’s because she cannot sit still anymore. Especially not in science class.
The last unit had been on plant growth. Seeds pressed into Styrofoam cups, dirt tamped down with careful fingers. Mia had watched green shoots break the surface day by day, unstoppable. The teacher called it development. Mia had thought of something else entirely and shoved the thought away before it could finish forming.
She hates the word her mother uses. Infliction. As if it is an illness. As if it simply happened.
Television calls it a miracle. A blessing. Mia once believed that. Now the word tastes wrong in her mouth, like a lie she is forced to swallow.
She walks the long road back to the apartments, a plastic grocery bag swinging from her hand. The sun is low. Owls call from somewhere in the trees, sharp and insistent. The sound crawls along her spine. She looks for them and finds nothing.
Invisible things have become common.
She tells herself she has time to think now. No school. No structure. Just the long walk and the noise in her head.
Her mother moved them here years ago. Mia is too young to remember the details, only fragments: boxes, a different sky, her mother saying her father was out of jail. That they needed a fresh start. The apartments were new. Clean. Affordable. Safe, her mother said.
Safe is not a word Mia trusts anymore.
There had been a neighbor back then. Mr. Flemming. Loud. Always awake. Always sweating. Sometimes yelling. Sometimes leaving in the middle of the night. Her mother told her to ignore him. Men like that disappear eventually.
Mia doesn’t know why she thinks of him now. She decides it must be nothing. Not the beginning. Not the cause.
Things change when her mother starts spending time in town. Church events. Bake sales. Friendly people with careful smiles. A place where food is always offered. Where questions are answered before they are asked.
There is a man who stands out. Mr. Belfort. He wears white suits that never seem to wrinkle. His mustache curls upward like it has been trained. He looks at Mia for too long. Not openly. Precisely.
Her mother begins staying out late. Mia likes being alone at first. Then she doesn’t.
One night her mother comes home after dark.
“Mia, baby,” she says from the doorway. “Are you awake?”
Mia turns on the lamp. Her mother’s face looks hollow, as if something has been scooped out and not replaced.
“I need your help,” her mother says.
That sentence lodges in Mia’s memory like a splinter.
Her mother talks about the church. About fear. About things she’s seen. She says they need something. Not money. Something else.
Mr. Belfort is already there.
The living room feels smaller than it should. Mr. Belfort looks Mia over the way people inspect fruit. He asks how old she is.
“Old enough,” her mother says too quickly.
Mia remembers feeling cold. That is what sticks. Not words. Not faces. Cold.
They leave. She doesn’t change clothes. Pajamas are apparently sufficient. They go next door.
Mr. Flemming opens the door a crack.
After that, the memory breaks.
Just static. Noise without image. Her mind folds inward, sealing off the details with mechanical precision. What remains is sensation without context. Pressure. Weight. A sense of something being taken that cannot be returned.
That is all.
Mia stops walking. The grocery bag slips from her fingers and hits the road. Her head throbs. She presses her palms to her temples, as if pressure from the outside might force the inside back into order.
She knows only this: afterward, she starts seeing them.
The church has explanations. Names. Rules. Some monsters belong to certain people. Some wear human faces. Some don’t. All of them are real, the church says. All of them are consequences.
Sometimes life is normal. Long stretches where she can pretend none of it happened. Then the world shifts. Colors rot. Angles sharpen. People die.
She breathes in cold air. The trees above her are bare. Fog creeps in low and fast.
Fog is never good.
Her body moves differently now. She walks carefully, deliberately. Balance matters. Pain matters.
“Pssst.”
She turns. Nothing.
Then the voice is everywhere.
“You’ll join us.”
Her skull fills with noise—scratching, crawling, relentless. She collapses to her knees, hands over her ears, but it’s inside her. It always is.
“Stop,” she whispers. Then louder. “Stop.”
The noise cuts out as suddenly as it began. The fog thins. The road is empty again.
Mia doesn’t wait for it to return.
She grabs the bag and runs, as fast as her changed body allows, away from the road, away from memory, away from whatever is still coming for her.
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