I thought it was just trash. A dark, tangled heap had appeared in my yard after a night of heavy rain, and at first I barely noticed it. Then it moved. Not a twitch, not an insect crawling across the surface, but the entire pile slowly shifting in a strange, rhythmic motion, almost as if something underneath it were breathing. I froze where I stood, staring at something my brain refused to understand.

I pulled out my phone and started recording. I zoomed in, searched images, and tried every description I could think of. The closer I looked, the more disturbing it became. The heap was glistening, tangled, and unmistakably alive. I kept searching because I desperately wanted an ordinary explanation, but every result made the mystery stranger. Then I finally found an image that looked almost identical to what was lying beneath my window. I stared at the screen, then back at the yard, and suddenly understood what I was looking at.