TABLE OF CONTENTS
Morning found her mother already in motion, gliding through the kitchen with that nervous brightness she wore like armor. She hummed under her breath, set the plates with precision, and said, “You should eat,” while sliding a plate of fried eggs across the table without asking what Kat wanted.
The radio filled the room with its usual chatter: a traffic accident three neighborhoods away, a sale on carpeting, the bright hum of people pretending their mornings meant something. Her father turned the page of the newspaper with a snap that was sharp enough to cut through the awkward silence.
“I’m heading out around noon,” he said. “Should be back for dinner.”
“Where are you going?” asked Kat.
“Into town.”
“For what?”
He smiled, the kind of smile that made her uneasy, as if he knew a private joke that no one else could hear. “To see some people,” he said, folding the newspaper carefully and aligning its edges before setting it down. He left without saying goodbye.
Kat looked to her mother for an answer, but her mother’s hands were already busy with the dishes, rinsing what was already clean. They were a family allergic to questions. The house didn’t like questions either. She thought of the man in the mirror, the patient tilt of his head, the quiet certainty that someone had watched her sleep.
Sunlight crawled across the table and made her breakfast shine. She ate because it was easier than enduring the talk about strength and good habits and depression. Eating was a kind of surrender. Kat said nothing about the man in the mirror or the rocking chair or the low sound that sometimes crept through the walls at night.
After a mostly silent breakfast, she opened cupboards instead as she cleaned and put away dishes, searching for proof that the world was still arranged in some sensible way. Under the sink, a smell rose up that made her eyes water: wet wood, rust, an old rag that had learned how to keep secrets. She shut the door and pressed her palms to the counter. It was sticky in one spot no matter how many times her mother scrubbed it. Kat cleaned it again and watched the sponge come away spotless, as if the stain had moved somewhere else. I wish I could move somewhere else, Kat thought sadly.
But after she did some work, she planned to do just that: to find more listings for apartments that were cheap enough to rent or roommates looking for another problem to have. Kat spent the late morning on her laptop uploading data profiles for a job she didn’t care about, drinking too much coffee, and checking her phone every few minutes for messages that never came. Jessica, who she had thought was her best friend, hadn’t called in days. No one had. Divorce, she decided, was a subtraction problem. You think you lose one person, but half your life goes with them. She hadn’t been married to Derek, but ten years felt like a marriage, and if this was true enough for her, then how much worse would it be for someone who was married?
By the time she was ready to go apartment hunting, the air had thickened into something she could taste, mildew masked with the perfume of potpourri. The house always smelled slightly off. She imagined inheriting it one day and knew she’d probably want to burn it down.
The library was about an hour’s walk away, and people still left handwritten or typed roommate notices on a corkboard there. She stepped outside and felt the first hint of late Spring warmth. The air was alive with expectation, and she felt a short burst of excitement as she walked down the pathway through the gate and onto the sidewalk.
Then she saw the girl next door again.
Abbey was tracing a new hopscotch grid in chalk right in front of her cement steps. The squares leaned to one side, and the number eight had been pressed so hard that the chalk had splintered. Her braids were looser today, a hairpin sliding toward her ear. She was crouched on the ground, trying to draw another number.
“Hey,” Kat said, attempting to find a voice that was friendly instead of intrusive. “How’s it going?”
The girl turned her head to look at her. She frowned, as if deciding whether to answer. “My mom’s working late. And it’s boring inside.”
“Boring isn’t the worst thing,” Kat said, putting her hand on the fence post beside their gate. She smiled in an attempt to push them both into neighborly conversation. “Your name’s Abbey, right?”
The girl thought about that and smiled, polite and distant. “Your mom gave me cookies once,” she said. “I helped her clean the silverware. She said I have little fingers.”
Kat’s throat went dry. “She shouldn’t make you do that.”
“It’s okay,” she replied, turning her whole body towards her but staying crouched down. “I like to help. She said I can come back if I want.”
“Does your mom know when you go?”
“She knows I go places,” Abbey said, which wasn’t an answer. Her gaze wandered toward Kat’s house, as though it might invite her back in. “It smells like sugar when she bakes.”
“Everyone likes that smell,” Kat said, and instantly wished she hadn’t. A strange impulse rose in her, the urge to ask if the girl had ever been told to wait by a door with her shoes in a perfect row, to be good and quiet. The question dissolved before she could form it.
The girl stood up suddenly, glancing down the street as if someone had called her name. “I have to go,” she said. Her voice changed, lighter and sadder all at once. “I’m trying to forgive you, you know. I thought you were my friend.”
Kat blinked as Abbey turned away toward the front door. “Abbey,” she said. “What are you talking about? What do you mean?”
“Excuse me.”
The voice startled her, and Kat turned around quickly. A black SUV was stopped in the middle of the street. The driver’s window was rolled down to show a woman of about sixty, her brown hair streaked with gray and gathered into a loose bun. Her eyes looked buried under exhaustion, with bags set under each of them.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked, sounding tired.
Kat stood frozen, confused. “I’m sorry?”
“I live here,” the woman said. “You’re staring at my house. I thought maybe you needed something.”
Kat exhaled and forced a small smile. “Oh. No, I’m fine. I’m actually staying next door. I was just talking to your daughter, Abbey. She seems very nice.”
The woman’s expression froze. Her eyes widened, then hardened into narrow slits. “I don’t know who you are,” she said slowly, through gritted teeth, “but you need to get the Hell away. Do you understand me? Get out of here before I call the police.”
The words struck like open hands. Kat took a step back, raising her palms in instinctive defense. Before she could respond, the window slid up and the SUV pulled away, the engine humming low as it disappeared down the street and around the corner. Why the woman didn’t turn into her own driveway, she couldn’t know.
Kat stood on the sidewalk staring at nothing, waiting for her pulse to steady. The silence pressed in again, heavy and unhelpful. “What the Hell is going on?” she muttered. “It’s like the Twilight Zone around here.” When she turned back around, the house was empty, and its windows had all their curtains drawn. What she couldn’t understand was the missing hopscotch drawing that had been on the stone pathway to the front door only moments ago.
She walked towards the grocery store lost in thought, and by the time she got there and picked out her milk, a few toiletries, and paper towels, she still couldn’t figure any of it out. She had forgotten about the library altogether. The wind was picking up on her walk home, sweeping brittle leaves and dirt along the curb. When she passed the neighbor’s house again, this time on her left, the girl with the red bracelet was watching from the first-floor window. Kat waved, but the girl only stared, her face pinched and cold.
“Nice to see you, too,” Kat murmured. “Creep.” The word came out sharper than she intended. She felt ridiculous a moment later, hating on a lonely child like that. Maybe she was just getting old and cranky, too eager to seem kind but too easily stung when kindness failed.
She Said I Have Little Fingers
Her own house waited ahead, square and silent, as if listening for her footsteps before deciding to open its mouth and swallow her back inside. As she walked towards the kitchen, she argued with herself about whether to bring Abbey up.
An arrangement of silverware on top of a towel caught her off guard when she stepped into the cold light. Forks and spoons gleamed in shallow rows, shining like a display of delicate bones. Her resolve to ask her mother about the girl quickly melted away. Abbey’s voice played again in her head. She said I have little fingers.
“I hope you are going to drink that milk soon,” her mother said without turning. “It spoils fast.”
“I’m putting it in the fridge,” Kat replied. “It’ll last.”
“Not in this house.”
Kat slid the carton into the refrigerator, wondering how everything she could do, even down to buying herself some milk, was just not good enough. She turned around and stared at the silverware beside her mother, who was washing dishes. Each spoon bore thin scratches that caught the light like lines in a palm. There were some tarnished spots, but mostly they shined with the reflection of a mix of sunset and the kitchen’s fluorescent lighting. Kat imagined Abbey’s little hands polishing them, wrists aching while her mother’s praise fell warm and syrupy. The image made her throat tighten. Praise, she thought, can be a trap when it’s given for the wrong kind of labor.
By the time dinner came around, her father had returned. He talked a bit about the news, how inflation was going up, and how the stocks he’d invested in weren’t doing so well. Most of the meal was eaten in silence other than the radio. Her father’s quiet usually had weight to it, a steady sort of silence that seemed to flatten the air. After they finished, and Kat helped with the dishes and cleaned up, she climbed to her room and lay in the small boat of her bed, letting the darkness move around her. She was protected by the lamplight.
Sometime after midnight she woke. The lamp was still on. It was the rocking noise that had begun again that made her wake up. The sound reached her through the floorboards, slow and patient, but though it had startled her awake from her unexpected nap, she wasn’t afraid of the noise this time. It was more like an inevitability. The sound of the rocking chair belonged to the house as much as the chair itself.
And part of her wanted to see it, to prove there was nothing really there, that the noise was a product of a weary house burdened with too many years and shifting with time. Kat closed her eyes instead and pictured the kitchen below: a faint halo of light from the stove, dishes drying beside the sink, a shadow moving in the chair just outside the light. A man was waiting there, rocking with the calm patience of someone who had all the time in the world. He didn’t speak; he didn’t have to. His eyes would have said everything. He wanted her to come to him.
She almost laughed aloud. Every story like this ended badly for the curious woman who went looking for the serial killer or every child who went looking for a demon in her closet. Let him rock, she thought, whoever he is. Kat stayed in bed, waiting for sleep despite the ghostly noise, and when it finally came, it felt more like surrender than rest.
When morning arrived, and she peeked out the window, the outdoors seemed pale and indifferent. It looked like a pencil sketch out there, dull and muted. Kat felt a thin film of resolve spread across her thoughts: today she’d find an apartment. Something small, cheap, and quiet. There was no way she could wait any longer, much less another month before the market picked up at the start of Summer.
Downstairs her mother was already humming, that tune she used when she wanted the world to believe all was well. The fried eggs were already cooling on a plate. The radio filled the air with talk of rain and the rising price of lettuce, then slipped into a silence that should have held music but didn’t.
“Sleep any better?” her mother asked.
“A little.”
Her father had gone out long beforehand. On the table, a ring of coffee marked his place, and the spoon on the saucer pointed neatly to the right. His absence had a shape, a slight hollow in the air. Kat nudged the spoon a fraction of an inch, a small act of rebellion she couldn’t explain even to herself.
By midmorning, though she had planned to walk to the library again and bring her laptop with her in order to search online for places to live, she found herself standing in the hallway with a rag and a bottle of cleaner. She hadn’t meant to clean, but there she was. Cinderella, eat your heart out, she thought. You’re not the only one who can’t go to the ball.
But she was choosing this, wasn’t she? No one was making her clean. At least, she didn’t think so.
But the baseboards gathered dust the way a hive gathers bees. There was some work to be done. She wiped until her wrist ached, following the line of the wall all the way into the living room. When she stopped, she couldn’t really see any difference, but she felt much better about her day. It was worth the time spent.
Kat stood by the front door, hands on her hips and looking around the living room, trying to decide what to tackle next. She really was turning into her mother, she thought grimly. Something to put away in her memory banks for when she got that therapist she’d been thinking about.
The light outside had shifted, and the glass in the living room window caught the sun unevenly. That’s when she first saw it: five small ovals and the faint trace of a palm print. The window had fogged slightly from the cool air outside, and it was clear. There was no doubting that it was, in fact, a hand print. For a moment Kat told herself it was hers from the day before, distorted by a crack that ran through the window pane. She thought about the cracked bathroom mirror upstairs.
Kat pressed her hand beside the palm print. Her fingers were longer, and the old print was lower than hers would have been. Child height. She backed away a step, her pulse starting to rise. The house seemed to tilt, almost imperceptibly, as though it were shifting its weight beneath her.
She tried wiping the print away with the sleeve of her sweater. When she lowered her arm, a faint smear remained, stubborn and luminous, as if the hand’s oils had seeped into the glass instead of resting on it. She pressed the fabric against it again and rubbed until the pane gave a short, high squeak.
The house replied with a soft sound from the vent near the floor. A whisper of air, followed by a murmur that almost shaped itself into words. It had the rhythm of speech but no language, two or three syllables that rose and fell, like a child rehearsing a forgotten line in a play.
Kat crouched beside the vent, holding her breath. The paint around the grate had been sloppily brushed, sealing parts of it shut. Something small glinted inside. She pried it loose with a fingernail and found a red bead, smooth and round as the marble she found in the corner of the kitchen. She tilted it in the light, then slipped it into her pocket. Strange, she thought. The heating ducts probably hadn’t been cleaned in decades. Kat leaned close, peering into the dark slit, but saw nothing else and heard no further whispers.
Now the Stairs are Soft
By the late afternoon, she had forgotten about the window, the vent, and her plan to find an apartment that day. The evening folded into something resembling peace as she joined her mother in the kitchen to bake bread. It was always easier between them when there was a task to share. They had cooked together like this when she was a child, both absorbed in the rhythm of measuring and stirring. Sitting face-to-face had never worked; silence became unbearable when it had nowhere to go.
Kat mixed cinnamon, sugar, and flour, adding water until the dough came together under her hands. The oven door squealed as she opened it, a high, bright note that cut the kitchen in two.
“It is not hot enough,” her mother said, continuing to work on her own loaf. “It will not cook properly.”
“Three hundred and fifty is fine,” Kat said. “You’re not trying to make toast, are you?”
Her mother’s voice sharpened, but she never looked at her daughter. “Do not get smart with me. It needs to be hotter. Four hundred. And do not make that face. You always made that face when you were little. Like you knew better than everyone.”
“I don’t think I know better,” Kat said quietly, as she stood by the open oven, feeling the heat rise from it and the blood rise to her face.
Her mother’s eyes stayed on the dough. “You think you know everything. Well, the rest of us simply know how to live, and how to not ask so many questions.”
Kat didn’t say anything else despite her growing anger. It had turned into a nice evening. There was a chance she could salvage it, if she just didn’t respond. She turned the dial to four hundred, and as she put her bread tray in the doorbell rang.
Her mother paused, wiped her hands on her apron, and went to answer it. A man’s voice spoke from the hall, low and amiable. Kat couldn’t make out the words. Her mother’s tone followed, too playful for it to have been a stranger, then soft, like a whisper. When the door shut, the air seemed to stretch, as though making room for someone who had walked through without being seen.
Kat walked over to the hall and leaned against the kitchen doorway. Her mother stood with her back to the front door, motionless.
“Who was that?” Kat asked.
“A neighbor,” her mother said, voice thin. “I am going to go sit and listen to the radio. I am feeling tired. Do you mind finishing the bread? Mine is ready to go in as well. Just remember to set the timer.”
Kat heard the radio shift from an advertisement to static without passing through a song. The sound thickened and thinned, finding a voice somewhere inside it. The voice spoke a single syllable that might have been her name, then vanished. The announcer came back suddenly, too cheerful, listing sports scores as if restoring order after a brief embarrassment. Then her mother found the music.
Kat finished up the bread, put on the timer, and went upstairs to work. If she did that, she wouldn’t have to think about her parents and this house and the reality that she might never get out of it.
When nighttime came, the house felt watchful. Streetlamps glowed weakly outside, with their yellow halos in the rain. Somewhere a car idled, then rolled away. A person was on their phone, running through the rain and having a heated conversation. The sounds reassured her. It meant there were still other lives out there, carrying on without her.
She closed her laptop and went back downstairs. In the kitchen, the two loaves were cooling beside the stove top. In the living room, her mother was asleep again in the old wing-back chair, mouth slightly open, breathing shallow but steady. The television had a woman with sculpted hair moving across a black-and-white set that pretended to be a kitchen. Laughter erupted from an unseen audience, loud and mechanical. Kat turned the volume down until the woman’s mouth moved in silence. She stood for a long time bathed in a wash of gray, watching that wordless performance. Then she clicked the power off and plunged herself into darkness.
It was there, in the dark, that the memory surfaced. Not a scene, not a story, only a pattern of sense and sound. The smell of bleach in the bathroom that no one had cleaned. A pair of small shoes arranged neatly by the back door, toes touching the threshold, waiting for permission to come in. Her mother humming in the kitchen, too loud. Her father’s low voice speaking to no one she could see. The urge to ask what was happening, and the stronger urge not to. She had gone outside instead, sitting on the broken step, counting ants as they crossed her shoe.
The memory dissolved as quickly as it came, leaving her chest hollow. She glanced at her mother lit only by the street light reaching in through the window. The older woman’s face had softened in her sleep, but the expression was still the same one she had always worn: guarded and unreadable.
Kat picked up the towel her mother had left on the armrest, folded it neatly, and set it on the coffee table. She stood there listening again. The refrigerator hummed faintly. The house creaked as the night air cooled the siding. Beyond that was the steady rhythm of her mother’s breathing, and beneath it, the quieter pulse of the place itself.
A sound came from the kitchen. It was the scrape of a chair pulling out from the table. The movement was deliberate, patient, almost thoughtful. Kat didn’t move. She recognized the sound, its arrangement in the space of the room; a chair pulled out, a cup waiting to be handled, a watcher seated. She imagined the spoon resting neatly on the saucer, handle to the right. But her father wasn’t home. She knew that.
It was worse to stay frozen, to not know, so she moved quickly into the kitchen. It was unchanged except for one of the chairs by the kitchen table. It sat slightly askew, as if someone had just risen from it. Kat walked to the table and touched the back of the chair. The wood felt ever so slightly warmer than the air. She drew her hand away and waited, listening. A faint current stirred at her ankles, moving along the floor toward the hall. It slipped between her feet, subtle as a thought, and she followed it before she really decided whether it was worth doing.
Even when she stood in front of the basement door, she couldn’t guarantee that the draft that led her there had been real. The door itself was unremarkable, plain and familiar, but something in it carried a quiet wrongness. It had been years since she had gone down those stairs, since she was twelve, small enough to still believe that ghosts lived where the air was dark and cold. She had outgrown the belief in spirits, but not the fear. It had calcified inside her, the way plaster holds the shape of a nail long after the nail is gone. She still hated dark places.
Kat rested her fingers on the door knob.
“Katherine.”
Her mother’s voice came from behind her, soft and half-dreaming. The sound startled her hand away. When she turned, her mother was standing in the darkness near the chair she had been asleep on, a small figure folded into shadow. The kitchen light stopped just short of her face.
“Your father never fixed the stairs,” her mother said. “They are soft in places. Someone could fall through.”
“I thought it was the floor that was soft,” Kat said. “Now it’s the stairs, too?”
“Both.”
“I was only checking the lock.” Her own voice surprised her with its steadiness. “I thought I heard something.”
“Leave it,” her mother said. The words carried no anger; they were simply final.
Kat stepped back, letting go of the knob. She had no reason to go down there anyway. The silence that followed settled thickly between them. The refrigerator hummed. The clock ticked. Her mother said nothing else but continued to watch, her outline still and sure.
“Well, I’m going to bed,” Kat said. “Good night.”
It was the first time in more than twenty years that she was afraid of her mother.
Upstairs, Kat left the hallway light on. A strip of light beneath a door could make a person feel safe, though she knew it was only an illusion. Anxiety rose in her chest like a tide. Something in the house had shifted. Her parents were the same people they had always been, yet not quite the same, as if someone else had drawn their faces from memory, leaving the features almost right but not entirely true to form. Had they changed that much since she left so long ago? A lot can happen in ten years, she thought. Her parents had always been strange, but she never felt what she could hardly get herself to admit: revulsion.
Kat sat on the edge of the bed for a long time before finally lying down. She didn’t bother to brush her teeth or wash her face. The air in the room felt heavy, thick with expectation. The quiet pressed harder than sound would have. She could feel herself dividing into two versions: the one who would leave this place and find another life somewhere else, maybe stay away another ten years, and the one who would stay to either find out what was going on or go insane. She was going to be the one who would ask questions, or the one who would keep pretending. The crack in her bathroom mirror had split her face into two, each half waiting for the other to move first.
At last Kat slid under the blanket. The ceiling caught the faint light from the hall and returned it in ripples, as if water were passing overhead. She watched it shimmer until her eyes burned.
After some time, from the living room below, the rocking chair began to move again. Its rhythm was deliberate. The sound traveled through the walls and into her chest, and she listened until she could no longer tell where the noise ended and her breathing began. She pulled up her covers and placed her hands beneath her chin the way she had when she was little and afraid. And the thought that came before sleep was the most terrifying of all: I should have done something. I should have, but I did nothing…Nothing.
We're getting somewhere here with Kat's mysteries... Love it. I accidentally started this one again, when you had a link at the top of a new one. I thought that was for the substack audio, and I heard your voice and the familiar story and realised... but I wasn't sure I'd finished it, so I did it again.
Excellent, I love the details in this, very engaging.
'They were a family allergic to questions. ' - fantastic line! This stood out as growing up, there was a part of my family who appeared like this whereas the others were encouraging curiosity! Keep up the great work!