Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman

Author:Josh Malerman [Malerman, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

29

We’re sleeping in the car. In the parking lot of a gas station between Chaps and East Kent. Daddo says we’ve been to this gas station a bunch but it all looks different to me if we have.

Everybody else in the car is asleep.

Daddo is in the driver’s seat with his hands hanging over the wheel. Grandma Ruth is in the passenger seat with her arms crossed. Mommy is in the backseat with me.

It’s bright here because the gas station has a lot of lights and there’s some people walking around and a lot of them look at us in the car.

Do they know something bad is happening to us?

It feels like they do. It feels like people don’t want to come near us. Like how Amanda and Dan were glad we left their house. I bet that man Frank wishes he didn’t come near us.

Grandma was breathing hard on the drive here and I asked if she was okay and she said she is a sixty-one-year-old woman who has never experienced anything like this in her life and she’s trying to “process.” She also told me I am brave if I sat and talked with “that thing” in my bedroom before.

Mommy said I was wrong when I called her a woman. Said it’d also be wrong to call her a man.

But…

I still see her as Other Mommy. The woman whose eyes were a little less dark than the rest of the inside of the closet, the first time she ever spoke to me.

Hello there, and who are you?

She’d come like that, most nights. I’d sit in bed after Mommy and Daddo tucked me in and I’d look to the closet doors and they would open, just a little bit. I’d see her eyes in there like she was smiling. Sometimes I thought I saw her teeth, too, but when car headlights came through the window, I’d see she wasn’t smiling. Sometimes it felt like she was checking to see if I was there. Like she was looking to see if I was asleep or not. One night I sat on the edge of the foot of my bed and waited for the doors to open but then I got too scared and I crawled back to my pillow and I heard the closet creak open behind me. I hurried up and got under the blankets, all of me, and pulled the blankets over my head. I heard her walking in my bedroom that night. The floor creaked and then it didn’t and then it did again and then I smelled her next to my bed. That night she said,

Peekaboo.

Like Mommy used to say. Back when I was littler. Back when Mommy was happier I think and her and Daddo made jokes that made each other laugh all the time.

Peekaboo, you.

I didn’t come out from under the blankets when she was beside the bed. Then she must’ve walked back to the closet because she said,

Do you like me better in

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