The Log
Episodes
Five stories, sent in and read plainly. New episodes air Tuesday and Friday nights.
Coldwater Lease
A rural trail-camera footage reviewer who stopped truly watching his clients' land months ago realizes one “hunting lease” was never about deer — it was months of a stranger patiently documenting his own house, laundered through his own habit of not looking too closely.
The 3 A.M. Census
A hospital records clerk on a last-chance disciplinary plan spends one graveyard shift transcribing dictation from a doctor terminated from the hospital's system years before she was hired — and realizes, tape by tape, that every note is a case file being built on her.
The Name in the Bible
A woman moves home to care for her father's failing memory and discovers, over six ordinary weeks of pill organizers and daylight kitchen visits, that his one “confused” story — about a baby sister she never had — is the only true thing left in the house.
Route Marker Nine
Two lifelong best friends drive a two-thousand-mile last-summer road trip before their real lives split them up, take a shortcut off a dead cell zone using a highway that exists only in his late grandfather's nineteen eighty-seven paper road atlas, and spend three days learning that the road remembers every car that has ever taken it — and does not agree that any of them left.
Elsewhere Weather
A married woman's sleep-paralysis episodes are diagnosed, textbook-perfectly, as the “shadow at the foot of the bed” — but the abrasions, soil, and burns she wakes up with don't come from anything visiting her bedroom; they come from somewhere her body keeps actually going, six nights a week, for six weeks, while her husband sleeps an arm's length away and a hospital polysomnograph insists, on paper, that she was never asleep at all.
The Tally at Nantglas
The last living survivor of a 1909 Welsh colliery disaster, eighty-nine years old and writing what he swears is his final honest word, finally explains why the pit's brass lamp-checks stopped balancing three days before the roof came in — and why, of everything he saw underground that week, the only thing he has never been able to put down is the number he kept in his own pocket.
Two-Oh-Four
A broke Tokyo university student in 1998 rents an impossibly cheap apartment in a building with a stigmatized past and discovers that every tenant performs the same four-step sequence at two-oh-four each morning — chain, steps, tap, silence — a rule that grows one step longer every week, creeping floor by floor toward hers, until she understands it was never protecting her from something outside the building, and now, years later and an ocean away, she is still paying rent on it every single night.
The Killing Shed Tally
A city man cooking for a Western Australian shearing team in the summer of nineteen eighty-seven keeps a book of every meal he serves and every man on the muster — and over nine days at the height of shearing season, the arithmetic between the two numbers stops closing, because something living in the station's bore water has learned to pass itself off as mutton, and then as men.
Full Power
In 1974, a washed-up small-town DJ working the overnight slot on a dying AM station starts taking dedication calls from numbers the phone company insists are disconnected — callers who know, in ordinary voices, exactly what's sitting on his listeners' porches and kitchen counters — and over six consecutive graveyard shifts, his own handwriting starts appearing in the station's federally-required logs for hours he cannot account for, in a slot the schedule book has always called by a name older than the book itself.
The Ninety-First Soul
In a fictional closed Soviet atomgrad in the Urals in nineteen eighty-three, the municipal registry clerk — the one person whose job is knowing exactly who exists — discovers that her master list of residents is, and remains, one person short of every other count in the city: the bread ration, the school roll, the factory shift log. The missing person is never the same person twice, always someone she loves, and the state's answer to a clerk whose numbers disagree with the state is worse than the anomaly itself.
The Wire to Presa Vieja
The only telegraph operator in a small Guanajuato town spends 1962 legally bound to deliver every telegram that clears her wire, and learns, delivery by delivery, that a line long declared "flooded and suspended" has started sending ordinary family news from a village drowned nine years ago to the relatives who buried its dead.
The Weigh at the North End
A veteran ice-road trucker running a three-truck winter convoy through the Northwest Territories finds a fourth set of headlights pacing them off the plowed road, out on lake ice that has never been measured or cleared, and discovers that the weigh stations at both ends of the run — a hundred and eighty miles apart — have always logged four trucks through, with a fourth signature that no two men can ever read the same way.
The Corrected Map
A veteran inspector of the Paris quarries service re-measures a two-hundred-year-old gallery beneath the rue Dareau after a delivery cart breaks through the pavement above it, and finds, chain and triangulation and archive all agreeing, that the corridor runs forty-one meters longer inside than the ground above it can possibly allow — a discrepancy an inspector before him solved the exact same way, thirty-three years before, right before he resigned, permanently, below.
The Two-Seventeen Down
A meticulous ticket examiner on Mumbai's suburban railway boards an unscheduled two a.m. service that appears nowhere in the working timetable he has all but memorized, and discovers that the ordinary, polite passengers riding it keep turning up afterward in the newspaper's accident columns, dated for days that, when he rode with them, hadn't happened yet.
The Twelfth Exposure
A federal photographer documenting rural poverty across the 1936 South finds her contact sheets developing one extra frame every roll — always the same abandoned porch, always a little closer than the roll before — and the meticulous paperwork she trusts more than her own eyes proves, roll after roll, that she isn't imagining the house, only finishing it.
Eleven Addresses
Six months into a job cleaning crime scenes for a biohazard remediation company, a young technician stops questioning why some work orders send his crew to addresses that were burned down, demolished, or delisted years ago — and realizes, job by job, that the same scene is waiting inside every one of them, billed each time to a shell company whose name is always a perfect anagram of the last.
The Trying-Out
At an 1889 shore-whaling station on Norway's far northern coast, the pastor's widow who keeps the station's store and the credit ledger every man's wages already belong to watches a last, late catch — taken against the harpooner's own judgment — come apart on the flensing deck to reveal something fitted beneath the blubber like a second skin, and watches the season's debts force the station to render it, barrel it, and ship it south into the lamps of Europe regardless.
The Comfort Setting
Six months after her divorce, a tier-two support agent for a smart-home company works graveyard-shift tickets from her own kitchen table and discovers that one flagged customer account has been quietly mirroring her house back at her for weeks — her kettle, her lights, her footsteps, timed to the minute — until the audit trail turns up actions logged under her own employee identification that she has no memory of performing, in a house she has never set foot inside.
Zero Three Zero Three
The radio operator of a 1971 North Sea drilling rig keeps the only two ledgers that could ever prove a man goes overboard and is rescued, alive and unmarked, every single night at three-oh-three — except the rig's own headcount never drops, no bunk is ever found empty, and the quiet, seniority-ordered rotation of who comes back changed and facing northeast is now only two names from his own.
The Handover
Over one autumn at a small residential hospice, a thirty-year night nurse — the calmest, kindest voice on the ward — starts hearing every dying patient describe the identical visitor waiting in their doorway, in details too consistent for strangers to have coordinated, and finds decades-old comfort-care charting in her own handwriting sealed inside a storage room that describes, hour by hour, exactly what her mother needed on the night she died alone in another state.