hic vigilans somniat
Crowded afternoon at the store, lots of activity and customers. A guy gets my attention, excited to be buying the massive brass singing bowl we got from Tibet. I am excited for him as well, since it’s several thousand dollars. Not a bad way to end the day. I get cornered behind the counter by a difficult customer, raising hell over… Continue reading the end
My daughter is almost nine but we still use a monitor so that we can hear her if she wakes up in the middle of the night. My wife has gone to bed and I am up late, doing some work I brought home from the office. The monitor crackles and my daughter calls for me. When I head upstairs, she is… Continue reading “She won’t rest.”
Sitting at the dinner table, my daughter suddenly turns and looks over her shoulder. “What’s wrong?” She turns back around. “That was weird,” she says. “I heard someone say ‘Yeah’ behind me.” We go on with our dinner and I make a mental note to talk with my wife. We’re starting to see more activity around the house. There’s a little… Continue reading hereditary
This evening as I was taking my daughter upstairs to bed, she froze outside her open bedroom door. “What’s wrong?” Staring into her room, she said “I just saw a cat or a dog or something on my bed. It looked up at me and then slid under the covers.” I turned the lights on and we went in. Of… Continue reading not a cat, not a dog
Talking with my wife today about recent events, particularly those involving our daughter. Making plans for when the exorcism should be performed, discussing when she might be able take our daughter out of the house for an hour or two. So I can work. She remarks that we should time it with the next full moon phase. Personally, I don’t necessarily… Continue reading nemesis
“She says she saw something in the back stairwell,” my wife tells me. Our daughter is eight years old and not prone to flights of fancy or making things up. Also, we have been very careful to not let her overhear any of our conversations about what is going on here at home. When I talk to my daughter, this is what… Continue reading not a bat
My seven-year-old daughter has been sick for a couple of days. High fever, probably the flu. She woke up tonight, sometime around 9 o’clock, frantic and consume dwith a fear that she could not (or would not) articulate. Glassy eyed, staring… Looking from my face to the face of her mother… She would not answer our questions. What’s wrong? Are you… Continue reading sick girl
A kitchen, a house in the country — dry and dusty, very little greenery. A little boy with dark hair and a baby face sits at the kitchen table playing with an old wooden birdhouse. I see a yellowjacket crawl sluggishly over the back of the birdhouse. Inside I see the telltale paper comb covered with more yellowjackets. I shout… Continue reading danger
“What’s a haunted house?” My daughter is four years old and, a few days before Halloween, she’s decided to start asking questions. I wring out the washcloth, buying time. We don’t talk about these kinds of things around her. She has a couple of picture books, but… “What honey?” “What’s a haunted house?” “Well . . . that’s a house… Continue reading in the bathtub
When I get home after work, my youngest daughter meets me at the door. I’m late and phoned ahead to say they should start dinner without me. A plate of half-eaten food waits at my wife’s place at the same able. But she is nowhere to be seen. “Mama went upstairs,” our daughter tells me. After a few minutes, my wife comes… Continue reading a fall
Conversation with my four-year-old daughter... “Time to sleep, sleep and dream.” “I don’t always remember my dreams.” “That’s okay. They remember you.” I think this might be the best thing I have ever said or ever will say.
In the upstairs bathroom, I stand and wait for my youngest daughter to finish. My back is to the door. Given my history, that’s uncommon. As I help her down off the toilet, I catch a glimpse of someone passing behind me — walking through the hallway just beyond the door. I assume it’s my teenage daughter coming out of… Continue reading passing by
That smell again. A warm, yellow smell of rotting fish. My youngest daughter and I are in the back hallway when it drifts past. It almost seems to stop and turn back, encircling us for a moment. I look down and see that my daughter has wrinkled her nose. After a moment, the stench dissipates. I can find nothing that might’ve… Continue reading stench again
“Will you check the tub in a minute?” My wife comes into the room, a little cross. We are getting our daughter ready for bed. “What’s wrong?” “There was almost no water in the tub and it was cold.” “Really?” She repeats this again. Unspoken is the rebuke — or, perhaps, the fear — that something odd has happened. It was full,… Continue reading bath time
Three or four times now, while I’ve been walking in the neighborhood with my youngest daughter, I’ve seen a man wearing a long black overcoat and a fedora. Three times now. Three different men. One of them is quite young, perhaps in his early twenties, with scraggly facial hair and glasses. Another is older, around my age. And another was… Continue reading the walking men
For some reason, I am holding a bottle of olive oil in my hand while my daughter and I take a walk around the block. (We are not at home, this is not the neighborhood where we live in the waking world. This is someplace else. I do not recognize it from either my dreams or the waking world.) Midway through… Continue reading kitchen door
Reported by my wife: A few days ago she and our daughter were in the back stairwell, getting ready to go for a walk. Once she got our daughter into her shoes, my wife sat down to put her own on. While she was doing this, our daughter went down the three steps to the back door. My wife could hear her… Continue reading little girls
...and while my daughter plays in the tub, there’s a sudden wave of men’s cologne — acrid and sour — that passes over me. My throat closes, I am overcome with a coughing fit. Inexplicable. My wife does not wear perfume. I do not wear cologne. It lingers for a number of minutes there in the bathroom before slowly dissipating.
Woken by my daughter early this morning, unable to get back to sleep so I head downstairs to sit in the predawn dark, looking up from my book from time to time as little beads of shadow stream across the floor like dark mercury. An hour or so later, I hear footfalls overhead. They move through the laundry room to… Continue reading early morning
Later... Sitting in the living room, talking with my wife while our daughter plays . . . I see someone peek around the corner of the entry leading into the dining room, a brief flash like someone pokes their head out for a quick look and then ducked back behind the wall when I looked in their direction. Still cheating… Continue reading peeking
Changing the sheet on my daughter’s crib tonight, strange flashes of faces in her room — white and black, bold stripes and contrast, large teeth and bulging eyes framed by wild hair . . . almost like the stark, menacing glee of Japanese oni masks. These flashes, somewhere between a mental image and a visualization — not quite registered by the… Continue reading masks and shadows
...and I have no breath to scream as my daughter falls twenty feet to the hard concrete floor, a gasp pressing out of my as I run to pick up her tiny, limp body. “Oh god, her eyes...” I turn away hiding her face from my wife so she cannot see how our daughter’s right eye has become detached and is floating… Continue reading the floating eye
Somehow, I have become two people. There is the adult version of me, as I am now. And there is the teenaged version of me. Together, we are plotting to rescue my youngest daughter from her daycare. The details of why she needs rescuing aren’t explained but, armed to the teeth and sick with worry, we make our plans. (Even in my… Continue reading daycare rescue
...for some unknown reason, our family has been relocated to what can only be charitably described as “the bad part of of town.” The neighborhood is a congregation of cheap, prefab homes and trailers jumbled together with only the thinnest of spaces between them. The houses stand (barely) on two hillsides with the street running between them. Each house is a… Continue reading just another white trash weekend
I said to my daughter “Get behind me.” “What’s wrong?” “I’m not sure. Something weird’s going on.” “I can handle weird, dad.” I looked at her. “My kind of weird.” She got behind me. [I’m guessing at the date on this one, based on something I posted to Pinterest seven months ago. Apparently this dream involved skeletons and a doctor’s waiting room.]
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated January 6th, 1997] I stand in the front window and watch as the car makes its second pass, making myself as visible as possible to the men inside . . . letting them know that there are people home and they’ll have to find someone else to rob. On… Continue reading home invasion
