I found a Fire And Fluff hoodie in my closet. I don't remember buying it

I swear to God, I didn’t have that thing this morning. I woke up, and there it was folded on top of my laundry basket — a stupid, oversized bunny-hug with the band’s logo stitched on the chest: a tiny flame curled around a tuft of fluff. The tag inside read only MASTER OF FLUFF in shaky handwriting. No receipt, no note, nothing.

I put it on because it was cold. It fit like it was made for me: sleeves too long, hood huge enough to disappear into. The fabric smelled faintly of smoke and lavender, like a bonfire someone had sprinkled soap into. I shrugged it off as weirdness and headed out.

That’s when the corner-of-the-eye stuff started. At first it was nothing — a twitch of movement at the edge of my vision, something darker than the theater of shadows my brain invents when it’s tired. I'd turn my head and there’d be nothing. The world snapped back to normal like someone rewound a film.

It got worse. On the bus, a woman across the aisle froze mid-blink, and for a second the pupils in her eyes were vertical slits. At work, the reflection in the microwave showed me two small, fox-like ears peeking from the hood I was wearing — but when I glanced down in real life, my head was bare. When I laughed at a joke, my voice in the mirror was half my voice and half something much larger, a rumbling purr that made the windows vibrate.

I tried taking the hoodie off. It wouldn’t come all the way. The zipper stuck halfway like a reluctant mouth. I tugged and felt heat under the fabric, like embers shifting. In a storefront reflection I watched my hands move — but the fingers were too long, tipped with soft black nails, and when I flexed them the sleeve fur bristled. I slammed the hoodie in the closet and left the door open, thinking cold rational thoughts: maybe sleep deprivation, maybe anxiety, maybe a prank.

That night, I dreamed of the Master of Fluff. Not the band member’s human caricature, but a towering fox-woman made of smoke and cotton batting, headphones around her neck, leaning over me with a smile that could be a bowl or a maw. She whispered lyrics I could not remember in the morning, but they echoed under my skin. When I woke, the hoodie was warm against my chest and the tag inside read a new line in the same shaky script: YOU LOOKED GOOD IN THE HOOD.

I started seeing patterns in the hoodie’s knit — tiny sigils stitched into the hem, paw-prints stitched into the cuffs. When sunlight hit them at the right angle they moved, like minnows under glass. People I passed in the street didn’t look away; they looked through me, like I was a window that hadn’t been fully washed. Once, an old woman sitting on a stoop tapped her cane and said, flat as a slab, “Be careful. Don’t let her inside.” Her eyes were black as the inside of a lantern.

I tried burning it. The flame licked harmlessly at the sleeve and died like a candle with no wick. The smell that rose wasn’t burned cloth but church incense and wet leaves. I threw it out of my apartment window into the alley and watched a fox — real, small, filthy — snatch it up and vanish into the night. In the morning the hoodie was back on my chair, folded perfectly, like whoever had taken it was thoughtful enough to return it wiped clean.

Now, I catch glimpses of other things in the corners: a row of tiny paw-prints leading down my hallway, music under the hum of my refrigerator, a crowd chanting words that are almost lyrics. When I watch videos of Fire And Fluff, they skip in the same places my memory does. I can hum the chorus to a song and then forget the last line mid-note, as if my brain refuses to commit it to the ledger.

Someone asked me if I liked the band. I told them I did, because what else do you say when you’re wearing the thing on your chest and have a tag that knows your name?

I’m putting this here because if you find a Fire And Fluff hoodie you didn’t buy, don’t shrug it on — don’t be polite like I was. Don’t let the seams warm against your skin. Don’t let the hood fall over your eyes. Don’t let them stitch you into their set.

Right now the hoodie is folded at the foot of my bed. I can hear a faint rhythm from it — not through the speakers, but under the floorboards, like someone marching in slippers. When I pass the mirror it looks like a little movement in the fabric, the hood twitching as if on a breeze. I’m typing this with one hand because the other hand keeps stroking the cuff, the fur there softer than it should be.

If I don’t post again, tell my friends I had good taste in merch. Tell them I looked pretty good in the hood. But please — if a garment appears out of nowhere in your closet with a band’s emblem and a ghost’s handwriting, burn it, bury it, whatever you have to do. Don’t let it find you at the edge of the light.