It’s so quiet.
It’s always quiet around this time of day. The golden afternoon glow blankets the living room with a melancholy luminance. James sits silently on his favorite couch. The brown one with the floral pattern. His bare feet sink into the green carpet as he regains his strength. He must have dozed off while the kids were watching TV. The volume is low but he can faintly hear the melody of “Conjunction, conjunction, what’s your function” streaming out of the wood colored speakers on the television set. Strange, James thinks to himself, this show is usually on in the morning.
James begins to rise. He pushes all of his energy into his calves when he is struck by how heavy he feels. Must still be groggy. At 46, his age must be catching up with him. A lifetime of living healthy apparently matters little with the reaper just down the street. He relaxes back into the couch. It’s silent again. The flowers in the vase on the wooden coffee table have about a day left before they’re ready to be tossed. The summer breeze rattles the orange and white curtains in the kitchen. Molly picked that curtain. He hated the design but after 22 years of marriage, he’d learned to let certain fights go. There would be other, more important battles to pick. That’s the one piece of good advice he’d gotten about marriage from pops. A car drives past in the distance.
It is quiet this time of day, sure… But it’s a little too quiet today. Where are the kids, anyway? Where’s Molly? The kids usually leave the TV on but Molly would have turned it off. She’s the one that keeps track of the electricity bill. James begins to rise again. Why does it still feel so heavy? Why is he still groggy? He’s been sitting at the couch, awake, for at least 10 minutes.
James uses all of his strength to bring himself to his feet. His entire body feels weak. Anxiety starts to build in the pit of his stomach like a slow burning fire coming to life with a tiny, accidental spark. He feels vulnerable, afraid. He normally feels strong but today, right now, even that punk kid, Billy, from across the street could knock him out with a single blow.
It’s not as hot as it should be. It’s usually really hot this time of summer. His nylon slacks usually cling to his body with sweat and he leaves his shirt unbuttoned when laying around the house. All buttons are closed today. The breeze arrives at the living room. He’s sure he feels it. Something feels wrong. Everything feels wrong.
James makes his way through the den, past the stairs and to the kitchen. There are pots and pans in the sink. There is food cooking on the gas stove. Beans and beef boil and bubble to the surface. It must smell like chili. Molly’s favorite set of knives lay spread out on the cutting table. She wasn’t done with the potatoes. She makes the best steak fries he’s ever had. Better than his mother’s and that is a bold statement. Where’s Molly.
James turns back towards the den and starts to walk. The pain of a thousand sharp daggers suddenly stab into right side of his brain as he stumbles and catches himself on the table next to the door. Just as quickly as it came it is gone. James holds the table and pushes himself up, using all the strength he has left in his arms and takes a step back. What the hell was that? Had he had a heart attack? He reaches with his right hand and feels his chest before grabbing his left bicep and feeling his belly. Everything feels fine. It feels normal. Doesn’t it? Wait a minute, where did this table come from?
James takes another step back from the table the broke his fall. It has a dark metallic color. It has tall legs and a black surface. And it’s a big table; fills the space between the corner of the room and the kitchen doorway perfectly. James has never seen this table before. Could Molly have gone out, purchased a table and had it delivered without telling him? Impossible. Besides, it doesn’t even match anything. Wait a second… He remembers this table. He saw it… It’s gone. There was something there but it’s gone as quickly as that strange headache.
There is nothing on the strange table but a bowl. “Fer Christ’s sakes,” James actually blurts out. It’s filled with peanuts. The kids know damn well about Molly’s peanut allergy. Who the fuck brought peanuts into this house? No one would dare, not with James’s temper. For an instant, James is angry. For an instant, the strangeness of everything else since he opened his eyes is replaced by an old, familiar feeling: rage. The anger actually calmed him a bit. It was normal. It was an acceptable reaction to the discovery that some inconsiderate asshole brought peanuts into their home. But it was only an instant.
James’s eyes rise from the peanuts and refocus on the den, just past the doorway. It is filled with boxes. Large ones. Small ones. Medium sized ones. White ones. Brown ones. Clumsily taped ones. There is just enough moonlight to see that there is marker writing on almost all of them. One says kitchen while another says bedroom. There is another stack of boxes labeled wedding gifts. It’s not Molly’s handwriting. James is frozen. He had just walked through that very same den to get to the kitchen. There were no boxes there when he walked through. Were there? No! No there could not have been any fucking boxes in the god damn den. You know why? Because there are so many of them that James would have had to step over them in order to get to the kitchen, that’s why! Wait a second- what time is it again? How did it get so dark so fast?
James’s heart is now pounding. He can actually hear it bouncing off the walls of chest. His breathing is fast and short. The flame of anxiety is now a burning city of fear. Iit feels like he wants to throw up but doesn’t need to. He wants to look away from the den, from the boxes through the doorway. James has always been tough. No one dared pick a fight with him. Whether he was at the local bar or in the jungle with his platoon, the one thing everyone knew is that ‘Jimmy’ didn’t go down fighting because ‘Jimmy’ doesn’t go down, period. But this paralyzing fear… Jimmy couldn’t fight it. He couldn’t hit it or get it in a headlock or event shoot it. This intangible thing had absolute control over him. So much so that he couldn’t bring himself to turn his head away from the den.
James takes another step back. The sound of his rubber soles pressing against the tile floor seem as if they’re being broadcast over a loudspeaker. Encased in this deafening silence, they sound so incredibly loud that James actually hesitates taking another step. It feels like swallowing a cantaloupe but he sucks it up and turns his head to his right anyway. The kitchen is all different. The chili is not on the stove. In fact, there is a different stove where his General Electric gas one used to be. It’s dark. The kitchen is only illuminated by moonlight cutting through the curtainless window. In the darkest corner of the kitchen, where the moonlight ends, someone stands silently and watches him.
The sudden stabbing pain again. It only lasts a second or two and thank god for that; no human could fathom the possibility of any more than that. James opens his eyes. The kitchen looks normal again. Someone’s in James’s house. There it is again: That familiar, comfortable feeling:. Anger. “Hey,” James yells, “you better get your ass back out here and I might go easy on you!” He storms around the kitchen, opening cabinets and slamming them, looking for the person he saw standing in the corner a few seconds ago. “You better hide you fucking coward,” he growls as he moves his way around the kitchen, searching every nook and crany. But there is no one here.
James stands at the doorway again. The anger makes him feel powerful. It seems to overtake that weak, vulnerable feeling he had. He breathes heavily. It’s the only sound in the room.
Okay. Let’s take a step back for a second. “Let’s think about this logically,” James whispers to no one. It’s not possible for it to go from afternoon to night and to afternoon again. The boxes in the den are gone. Who was looking at him from the corner of the room. What did she look like? James doesn’t know how he know that it was a ‘she’ but he knows. It’s not like he could see what she looked like in the darkness. She looked like she had long hair. What else, what else… Her clothing looked like a sack made of burlap. Her hair looked long, dark and filthy. How could he have seen all of this? Had he seen her before? She had something in her right hand. She gripped it tight. It was a knife. Blood dripped from its tip and onto the hardwood kitchen floor.
James quickly looks down at his feet. The floor in the kitchen is tile. It’s always been tile.
Determination. That’s what he feels now. He’s gonna get to the bottom of this bullshit. He clenches his fists and stomps into the den. No need to step over any boxes because there are none there. When he arrives in the living room, the TV is still playing Schoolhouse Rock. He steps towards it and reaches for the knob when the shrieking pain pummels his head again. He slips and falls to his knees, banging his head on the rubber wheel of a bicycle. If it had been the television set, he might have sustained a serious injury. That things is huge but thankfully the TV was gone. The feeling of being thankful lasted only a second as the fear set in. Where did this bicycle come from? James brings himself to his feet. It’s dark again. There is a light in the far corner of the room away from the window where the bookcase should be. It’s not organic. When you spend enough time in the jungle in the dead of night, and your eyes are starving for clarity, you learn to tell the difference between moonlight and a dim watchtower spotlight real quick.
James takes a look around the room. It’s hard to tell what and where anything and everything is. There’s just that manufactured square light in the corner of the room. James steps towards it slowly. It looks like a tiny television. No, it was one of those personal computers James had been seeing on TV. A much smaller one, almost like a hardcover book. This is definitely not his. Molly definitely did not go out and buy a computer and a bicycle without his consent. These objects definitely did not belong to him.
The colors on the screen are vivid. The only computers James had heard of only had black screens with green text. This thing was way more advanced than anything any of his buddies had ever heard of. There was even a video playing on the screen in full color of a boy in a Halloween costume being interviewed by a reporter. The feelings of amazement and fascination wage a war with fear and anxiety inside of his body. The video ends and the screen goes to black for an instant. James sees his moonlit reflection, his combed hair, his well groomed beard, his blue eyes… And behind him stands the girl in the burlap sack.
James swings around with force, yelling with rage. There is no one there. There is a rustling upstairs. Is it Molly? The kids? James runs towards the den and trips over a box, falling on his face into the hardwood floors as boxes hit the floor behind him. He quickly turns his body around and pushes back with his legs, resting his back against the wall. He checks to see if he’s chipped a tooth.
There are whispers coming from the second floor. There are others in the house. James forces himself to stand up while reaching to the corner of the room where he normally keeps his Louisville slugger. He looks over his shoulder and locks eyes with the girl with the dark, dirty hair. Her eyes look soulless and there are cuts on her cheeks. Her eyes are sunken in. She thrusts the knife towards James’s gut. The pain of a dagger being thrust into him brings him to his knees again. But it’s not his midsection, it’s his brain again. The den is illuminated by afternoon light again. The girl is gone. James checks his body. That he is not injured is of no relief to him. The adrenaline is pumping at too fast a rate to calm down now.
Molly screams. She is upstairs.
“Molly!”
James runs up the stairs as Molly screams again. His body feels like putty but rage and fear push him up what seems like a never ending flight of stairs. There are only 23 steps (he knows that because he counted them when he laid out the new green carpet) but it feels like 1000. When he reaches the top floor, he hears Molly’s scream again. She’s in the master bedroom, down the hall. James runs as fast as he can. It doesn’t matter who’s in there, it doesn’t matter what kinds of weapons they have. James will not hesitate to die for Molly and the kids and whomever the fuck is in that room, if they’ve laid a hand on James’s family, they are going to wish they were dead.
The door is open. James bursts into the room. Everything is blurry. It didn’t become blurry, it just suddenly is. It’s like that one time he was watching a movie at the drive-in and a few frames were missing from the real; like time jumped forward for just a second.
As his vision comes into focus, James notices that beautiful golden light. The silence. The summer breeze. The bed where he and Molly gave their virginity to each other, where he saw her womanhood for the first time, is now covered in blood. Molly’s lifeless body lays on top of it. That girl… The fucking dirty, ugly, terrifying whore with the dark hair and the sack for a dress stands over her holding the knife, dripping with blood. Molly’s favorite cutting knife. She turns her head and looks at James with those soulless eyes. James screams as loud as he can. He has discovered a new emotion. It’s a combination of rage, fear, sadness and hopelessness. This is what death must feel like.
The girl in the sack runs towards him. James reaches for the nightstand just in time to grab his 45 colt as she inserts the blade into his abdomen. As he points the gun towards her forehead. With the last ounce of his strength he pulls the trigger, a mess of blood and brain matter filling his vision before everything goes blurry again.
He is on the floor. His face is against the wall. His vision is filled only with the floral pattern of the wallpaper. It doesn’t hurt. James knows he’s dying. Seven men have died in his arms in Vietnam. They described not feeling anything when they went. Come to think of it, he’d been not feeling anything since he woke up on the couch. He’d been here before. This has happened before, this whole thing. The crazy little bitch that broke into their house. She lived in a nearby neighborhood and went missing a few weeks ago. Everyone knew she had “problems” but pretended not to notice. They brushed her under the rug. She was an inconvenience. No one wanted to deal with her. James heard the whole story from the countless conversations the detectives had with his kids about the events of that day. He stood over them and listened, knowing that no one could hear or see him.
He weeps now. He always weeps when he realizes what’s been happening. Over his shoulder, he hears the young couple that live there now argue.
“I don’t give a shit, you call that god damn realtor and tell her we’re not staying!”
“What am I gonna tell her? The house is haunted can you find us another one?”
“I don’t care what you tell her! I don’t care what you tell her!”
“Let’s just give it another week. I’m sure you’re stressed from the move and-”
“The cabinets keep opening on their own!! This is the third time it’s happened! And how do you explain the whispers? And now the boxes fall over on their own?”
“Look, you need to just relax for a second…”
It hurts so much. That light comes back again. It always comes when he’s here, on the floor. It pours out of the top corner of the room like a waterfall. It’s beautiful, peaceful. It makes no sound but still sounds like singing. It has no shape but the sight makes him want to smile. Want to smile, not gonna. It calls to him without saying anything. It would be so easy to just… Go…
“Fuck you,” he whispers, “I’m not going anywhere without Molly.”
James lays there for what seems like hours. The light starts to fade away. It becomes dark. The floral pattern of the wallpaper disappears. What remains is a flat, empty, boring wall with a lame color James doesn’t care for. He makes no attempt to rise. He hears the young couple argue over his shoulder. He’s so tired. It would feel so nice to just nap for a bit. They can’t see him anyway so fuck it. He closes his eyes.
It’s so quiet.
It’s always quiet around this time of day. The golden afternoon glow blankets the living room with a melancholy luminance. James sits silently on his favorite couch…
It’s always quiet around this time of day. The golden afternoon glow blankets the living room with a melancholy luminance. James sits silently on his favorite couch. The brown one with the floral pattern. His bare feet sink into the green carpet as he regains his strength. He must have dozed off while the kids were watching TV. The volume is low but he can faintly hear the melody of “Conjunction, conjunction, what’s your function” streaming out of the wood colored speakers on the television set. Strange, James thinks to himself, this show is usually on in the morning.
James begins to rise. He pushes all of his energy into his calves when he is struck by how heavy he feels. Must still be groggy. At 46, his age must be catching up with him. A lifetime of living healthy apparently matters little with the reaper just down the street. He relaxes back into the couch. It’s silent again. The flowers in the vase on the wooden coffee table have about a day left before they’re ready to be tossed. The summer breeze rattles the orange and white curtains in the kitchen. Molly picked that curtain. He hated the design but after 22 years of marriage, he’d learned to let certain fights go. There would be other, more important battles to pick. That’s the one piece of good advice he’d gotten about marriage from pops. A car drives past in the distance.
It is quiet this time of day, sure… But it’s a little too quiet today. Where are the kids, anyway? Where’s Molly? The kids usually leave the TV on but Molly would have turned it off. She’s the one that keeps track of the electricity bill. James begins to rise again. Why does it still feel so heavy? Why is he still groggy? He’s been sitting at the couch, awake, for at least 10 minutes.
James uses all of his strength to bring himself to his feet. His entire body feels weak. Anxiety starts to build in the pit of his stomach like a slow burning fire coming to life with a tiny, accidental spark. He feels vulnerable, afraid. He normally feels strong but today, right now, even that punk kid, Billy, from across the street could knock him out with a single blow.
It’s not as hot as it should be. It’s usually really hot this time of summer. His nylon slacks usually cling to his body with sweat and he leaves his shirt unbuttoned when laying around the house. All buttons are closed today. The breeze arrives at the living room. He’s sure he feels it. Something feels wrong. Everything feels wrong.
James makes his way through the den, past the stairs and to the kitchen. There are pots and pans in the sink. There is food cooking on the gas stove. Beans and beef boil and bubble to the surface. It must smell like chili. Molly’s favorite set of knives lay spread out on the cutting table. She wasn’t done with the potatoes. She makes the best steak fries he’s ever had. Better than his mother’s and that is a bold statement. Where’s Molly.
James turns back towards the den and starts to walk. The pain of a thousand sharp daggers suddenly stab into right side of his brain as he stumbles and catches himself on the table next to the door. Just as quickly as it came it is gone. James holds the table and pushes himself up, using all the strength he has left in his arms and takes a step back. What the hell was that? Had he had a heart attack? He reaches with his right hand and feels his chest before grabbing his left bicep and feeling his belly. Everything feels fine. It feels normal. Doesn’t it? Wait a minute, where did this table come from?
James takes another step back from the table the broke his fall. It has a dark metallic color. It has tall legs and a black surface. And it’s a big table; fills the space between the corner of the room and the kitchen doorway perfectly. James has never seen this table before. Could Molly have gone out, purchased a table and had it delivered without telling him? Impossible. Besides, it doesn’t even match anything. Wait a second… He remembers this table. He saw it… It’s gone. There was something there but it’s gone as quickly as that strange headache.
There is nothing on the strange table but a bowl. “Fer Christ’s sakes,” James actually blurts out. It’s filled with peanuts. The kids know damn well about Molly’s peanut allergy. Who the fuck brought peanuts into this house? No one would dare, not with James’s temper. For an instant, James is angry. For an instant, the strangeness of everything else since he opened his eyes is replaced by an old, familiar feeling: rage. The anger actually calmed him a bit. It was normal. It was an acceptable reaction to the discovery that some inconsiderate asshole brought peanuts into their home. But it was only an instant.
James’s eyes rise from the peanuts and refocus on the den, just past the doorway. It is filled with boxes. Large ones. Small ones. Medium sized ones. White ones. Brown ones. Clumsily taped ones. There is just enough moonlight to see that there is marker writing on almost all of them. One says kitchen while another says bedroom. There is another stack of boxes labeled wedding gifts. It’s not Molly’s handwriting. James is frozen. He had just walked through that very same den to get to the kitchen. There were no boxes there when he walked through. Were there? No! No there could not have been any fucking boxes in the god damn den. You know why? Because there are so many of them that James would have had to step over them in order to get to the kitchen, that’s why! Wait a second- what time is it again? How did it get so dark so fast?
James’s heart is now pounding. He can actually hear it bouncing off the walls of chest. His breathing is fast and short. The flame of anxiety is now a burning city of fear. Iit feels like he wants to throw up but doesn’t need to. He wants to look away from the den, from the boxes through the doorway. James has always been tough. No one dared pick a fight with him. Whether he was at the local bar or in the jungle with his platoon, the one thing everyone knew is that ‘Jimmy’ didn’t go down fighting because ‘Jimmy’ doesn’t go down, period. But this paralyzing fear… Jimmy couldn’t fight it. He couldn’t hit it or get it in a headlock or event shoot it. This intangible thing had absolute control over him. So much so that he couldn’t bring himself to turn his head away from the den.
James takes another step back. The sound of his rubber soles pressing against the tile floor seem as if they’re being broadcast over a loudspeaker. Encased in this deafening silence, they sound so incredibly loud that James actually hesitates taking another step. It feels like swallowing a cantaloupe but he sucks it up and turns his head to his right anyway. The kitchen is all different. The chili is not on the stove. In fact, there is a different stove where his General Electric gas one used to be. It’s dark. The kitchen is only illuminated by moonlight cutting through the curtainless window. In the darkest corner of the kitchen, where the moonlight ends, someone stands silently and watches him.
The sudden stabbing pain again. It only lasts a second or two and thank god for that; no human could fathom the possibility of any more than that. James opens his eyes. The kitchen looks normal again. Someone’s in James’s house. There it is again: That familiar, comfortable feeling:. Anger. “Hey,” James yells, “you better get your ass back out here and I might go easy on you!” He storms around the kitchen, opening cabinets and slamming them, looking for the person he saw standing in the corner a few seconds ago. “You better hide you fucking coward,” he growls as he moves his way around the kitchen, searching every nook and crany. But there is no one here.
James stands at the doorway again. The anger makes him feel powerful. It seems to overtake that weak, vulnerable feeling he had. He breathes heavily. It’s the only sound in the room.
Okay. Let’s take a step back for a second. “Let’s think about this logically,” James whispers to no one. It’s not possible for it to go from afternoon to night and to afternoon again. The boxes in the den are gone. Who was looking at him from the corner of the room. What did she look like? James doesn’t know how he know that it was a ‘she’ but he knows. It’s not like he could see what she looked like in the darkness. She looked like she had long hair. What else, what else… Her clothing looked like a sack made of burlap. Her hair looked long, dark and filthy. How could he have seen all of this? Had he seen her before? She had something in her right hand. She gripped it tight. It was a knife. Blood dripped from its tip and onto the hardwood kitchen floor.
James quickly looks down at his feet. The floor in the kitchen is tile. It’s always been tile.
Determination. That’s what he feels now. He’s gonna get to the bottom of this bullshit. He clenches his fists and stomps into the den. No need to step over any boxes because there are none there. When he arrives in the living room, the TV is still playing Schoolhouse Rock. He steps towards it and reaches for the knob when the shrieking pain pummels his head again. He slips and falls to his knees, banging his head on the rubber wheel of a bicycle. If it had been the television set, he might have sustained a serious injury. That things is huge but thankfully the TV was gone. The feeling of being thankful lasted only a second as the fear set in. Where did this bicycle come from? James brings himself to his feet. It’s dark again. There is a light in the far corner of the room away from the window where the bookcase should be. It’s not organic. When you spend enough time in the jungle in the dead of night, and your eyes are starving for clarity, you learn to tell the difference between moonlight and a dim watchtower spotlight real quick.
James takes a look around the room. It’s hard to tell what and where anything and everything is. There’s just that manufactured square light in the corner of the room. James steps towards it slowly. It looks like a tiny television. No, it was one of those personal computers James had been seeing on TV. A much smaller one, almost like a hardcover book. This is definitely not his. Molly definitely did not go out and buy a computer and a bicycle without his consent. These objects definitely did not belong to him.
The colors on the screen are vivid. The only computers James had heard of only had black screens with green text. This thing was way more advanced than anything any of his buddies had ever heard of. There was even a video playing on the screen in full color of a boy in a Halloween costume being interviewed by a reporter. The feelings of amazement and fascination wage a war with fear and anxiety inside of his body. The video ends and the screen goes to black for an instant. James sees his moonlit reflection, his combed hair, his well groomed beard, his blue eyes… And behind him stands the girl in the burlap sack.
James swings around with force, yelling with rage. There is no one there. There is a rustling upstairs. Is it Molly? The kids? James runs towards the den and trips over a box, falling on his face into the hardwood floors as boxes hit the floor behind him. He quickly turns his body around and pushes back with his legs, resting his back against the wall. He checks to see if he’s chipped a tooth.
There are whispers coming from the second floor. There are others in the house. James forces himself to stand up while reaching to the corner of the room where he normally keeps his Louisville slugger. He looks over his shoulder and locks eyes with the girl with the dark, dirty hair. Her eyes look soulless and there are cuts on her cheeks. Her eyes are sunken in. She thrusts the knife towards James’s gut. The pain of a dagger being thrust into him brings him to his knees again. But it’s not his midsection, it’s his brain again. The den is illuminated by afternoon light again. The girl is gone. James checks his body. That he is not injured is of no relief to him. The adrenaline is pumping at too fast a rate to calm down now.
Molly screams. She is upstairs.
“Molly!”
James runs up the stairs as Molly screams again. His body feels like putty but rage and fear push him up what seems like a never ending flight of stairs. There are only 23 steps (he knows that because he counted them when he laid out the new green carpet) but it feels like 1000. When he reaches the top floor, he hears Molly’s scream again. She’s in the master bedroom, down the hall. James runs as fast as he can. It doesn’t matter who’s in there, it doesn’t matter what kinds of weapons they have. James will not hesitate to die for Molly and the kids and whomever the fuck is in that room, if they’ve laid a hand on James’s family, they are going to wish they were dead.
The door is open. James bursts into the room. Everything is blurry. It didn’t become blurry, it just suddenly is. It’s like that one time he was watching a movie at the drive-in and a few frames were missing from the real; like time jumped forward for just a second.
As his vision comes into focus, James notices that beautiful golden light. The silence. The summer breeze. The bed where he and Molly gave their virginity to each other, where he saw her womanhood for the first time, is now covered in blood. Molly’s lifeless body lays on top of it. That girl… The fucking dirty, ugly, terrifying whore with the dark hair and the sack for a dress stands over her holding the knife, dripping with blood. Molly’s favorite cutting knife. She turns her head and looks at James with those soulless eyes. James screams as loud as he can. He has discovered a new emotion. It’s a combination of rage, fear, sadness and hopelessness. This is what death must feel like.
The girl in the sack runs towards him. James reaches for the nightstand just in time to grab his 45 colt as she inserts the blade into his abdomen. As he points the gun towards her forehead. With the last ounce of his strength he pulls the trigger, a mess of blood and brain matter filling his vision before everything goes blurry again.
He is on the floor. His face is against the wall. His vision is filled only with the floral pattern of the wallpaper. It doesn’t hurt. James knows he’s dying. Seven men have died in his arms in Vietnam. They described not feeling anything when they went. Come to think of it, he’d been not feeling anything since he woke up on the couch. He’d been here before. This has happened before, this whole thing. The crazy little bitch that broke into their house. She lived in a nearby neighborhood and went missing a few weeks ago. Everyone knew she had “problems” but pretended not to notice. They brushed her under the rug. She was an inconvenience. No one wanted to deal with her. James heard the whole story from the countless conversations the detectives had with his kids about the events of that day. He stood over them and listened, knowing that no one could hear or see him.
He weeps now. He always weeps when he realizes what’s been happening. Over his shoulder, he hears the young couple that live there now argue.
“I don’t give a shit, you call that god damn realtor and tell her we’re not staying!”
“What am I gonna tell her? The house is haunted can you find us another one?”
“I don’t care what you tell her! I don’t care what you tell her!”
“Let’s just give it another week. I’m sure you’re stressed from the move and-”
“The cabinets keep opening on their own!! This is the third time it’s happened! And how do you explain the whispers? And now the boxes fall over on their own?”
“Look, you need to just relax for a second…”
It hurts so much. That light comes back again. It always comes when he’s here, on the floor. It pours out of the top corner of the room like a waterfall. It’s beautiful, peaceful. It makes no sound but still sounds like singing. It has no shape but the sight makes him want to smile. Want to smile, not gonna. It calls to him without saying anything. It would be so easy to just… Go…
“Fuck you,” he whispers, “I’m not going anywhere without Molly.”
James lays there for what seems like hours. The light starts to fade away. It becomes dark. The floral pattern of the wallpaper disappears. What remains is a flat, empty, boring wall with a lame color James doesn’t care for. He makes no attempt to rise. He hears the young couple argue over his shoulder. He’s so tired. It would feel so nice to just nap for a bit. They can’t see him anyway so fuck it. He closes his eyes.
It’s so quiet.
It’s always quiet around this time of day. The golden afternoon glow blankets the living room with a melancholy luminance. James sits silently on his favorite couch…
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