The house at the end of your street

Pressed into the morning frost on a low pane of glass was the shape of a small mouth, a tiny nose, and two little eyes – as if a girl had climbed onto the porch in the middle of the night and put her face against the window to see inside. By 10 am it had melted away. A cold snap returned a few days later, and it reappeared on the other side of the house – on a glass door, just three feet high, as if the owner were barely old enough to walk.

The old tenant hunted in the garden and examined the front steps, but he could find no footprints. He drove slowly through the suburban streets at twilight, but no one looked like his evening visitor. The weather stayed warm for the next few weeks, and the face did not come back. But then he found a delicate hand print in the ash of his fireplace. He opened the flue and looked inside feeling foolish. He rubbed it away with a brush. It made him nervous. He told his grown children, and they decided it was time for him to move.

On his last day in the house, with the walls bare and the floors swept clean the old tenant took one last walk from room to room, his steps echoing back at him. He peeked into cabinets and closets; he removed a panel leading to a crawlspace and put his whole head inside. Satisfied the house was empty, he locked it up and left it behind.

Within 10 years he was lying on a hospital cot barely able to remember his own name. Before he died he gripped an orderly’s hand and whispered something to her. But he slurred his words, and she understood little English.

By then a couple had moved into his house. And when they brought their newborn son from the hospital, they woke up again and again to check on him. They did this all through that first night, and for many nights after. They felt his chest and listened carefully to his breathing, and they positioned and repositioned him in his crib. The couple left a monitor on, and they would lie awake to hear to their baby’s low sounds emerging from the device’s static like a shape coming out of a heavy snow. And once in the early morning hours the young father started awake, certain a man’s voice had come over the speaker.

“She could be anywhere,” the voice said. “She could be anyone.”

But he realized he'd probably dreamed it. And anyway, the monitor often crossed frequencies with other traffic in the area. There were many couples with many young children. Scores of monitors crackled softly out there in dark suburban nurseries, their red LEDs dim as failing stars. Mothers and fathers slept lightly. A whole world waited full of bad things that could happen. No one could stop them all.

As he drifted off the father barely noticed the sound of the young girl, singing his son to sleep.

Scary Puppet Time!

At 1:12 you realize you're going to have nightmares that will never go away. But by then it's too late.

The Light

This is a "Photographic illustration of a near-death-experience" by someone named Jesse Krauß. I found it here on Wikimedia.

Help is Not Coming

The icy rain spots the sill, where a single upper window sits open in the station. A sparrow flies in out of the night. Startled by the warmth and light, he flies to the other side, lined with other windows, all of them closed.
Travelers below come from their trains. They don’t hear the desperate wet thing, sick with cold, scratching at the glass. By morning it’s dead, and B.D. the janitor climbs his ladder and collects it in a pan.
He idly spots the single vertical crack in the window. Facing the center of the pane, he can see how it lines up almost exactly with the tree across the street, the gas station two blocks further, and a brick tower far away.
He wipes the glass clean, and he doesn’t have reason to go back. Three weeks after, following another storm, he doesn’t see the spot where the lightning burned the tree down to a stump. He doesn’t think of the story in the paper later that year about how the gas station has been razed after the terrible accident. And as the first year passes he barely notices the dim roar one morning. A controlled implosion brings down that abandoned apartment where someone shouldn’t have played in the stairwell.
No one sees the crack, which now marks a clear line to the bay -- the gray water beneath the empty sky.

Twelve Things About Me

1. I love the smell of old houses.

2. I hate the smell of wet earth.

3. I like driving at night with the radio turned all the way up.

4. When I was barely two I took a fall and still have the scar beneath my hairline.

5. I lost a coat long ago – blue cloth – and I still miss it.

6. When I was six my bicycle hit a rock, and I tumbled over the handlebars. I keep a chip of the
cast in the crawlspace behind my old closet.

7. People tell me I should leave for a new home, but I can’t.

8. The accident I had when I was 18 was quite severe, and there was a notice in the paper.

9. The driver of the other car survived.

10. I spent the night in the hospital’s coldest room.

11. I used to be afraid of the dark.

12. I stand in a corner watching you read my words.

The Haunted Wood

Testimonial

My doctor put me on Psypil, and within weeks I was a new man. Before I’d suffered extreme anxiety in any social situation. At the beginning of a party I’d spend half an hour in the bathroom gripping the sink and staring into the mirror, trying to stop shaking. The thought of getting up on a stage hit me with waves of nausea and powerful stomach cramps. Even understanding people – knowing when they were really happy with me, for instance, or they were just being sarcastic – was impossible. It’s hard to describe how debilitating it was, and as a result I never had close friends. Coworkers took advantage of me, and I was often the last to be promoted.
Psypil regulates the neurotransmitters in the social centers of your brain. You don’t feel drugged at all. You're in control of your emotions… instead of the other way around. I can actually look at someone who would normally make me mad or afraid, and I can just turn those feelings off.
And with that control comes a wonderful clarity. You can read people better than you ever thought possible. Two days after I started my treatment I watched a couple from across a crowded restaurant, and I knew she was going to break up with her boyfriend before he did! A week later I knew the best time to confront my supervisor about how he lied on my review was on his way home. That would have been out of the question before Psypil. I would be too scared of “making a scene.” But I watched his body language as he fumbled with his keys in the dark outside his apartment, and I just knew he lived alone. I knew no one would miss him.
Getting his job was the best thing I ever did. Well… the second best. But what’s really important is for the first time in my life I feel good about myself.