Did You See That?

Chilling accounts of odd occurrences of the supernatural sort

So here's the first short story of this page, I hope you enjoy! If you do, feel free to  +1 this story and subscribe by email on the home page!

ALSO

Don't forget to listen to the music for this page, it adds to the mood!

Home for Dinner

It was raining. 

That was no surprise. 

Her husband was late. 

That was no surprise, either.

It seemed like the two occurrences were becoming more and more commonplace as of late. She had thought she’d seen the end of his workaholic attitude when he moved them into this new house, but it had only taken a month for his new, familial behavior to wear off. Now he was back to spending late nights behind his desk like he used to.

If it weren't for the fact that she could see the fruits of his extended labor in the lavish new home of theirs, she might have suspected him of nurturing some sort of affair.

“Tch,” She scoffed to herself, “the only action he’s probably getting is when his fingers stroke the keys on his laptop.”

“What you said, Mama?”

The woman, who’d had more than four and a half decades to hone her senses, immediately picked up on the babyish voice from across the kitchen. She glanced up from her work of slicing vegetables and stared at the little child who’d spoken.

“What?” She frowned.

Yes, she’d heard the boy, but as for catching whatever it was he’d said; well, no. She was too busy and too frustrated for that.

The curly-haired boy stated, “I wanna know what you had said.”

She sighed and said, “Don’t worry about it, baby.”

And so he didn’t. This boy was four years old and could only be concerned with things like that for so long, after all. He left his mother to her cooking and began to roam the house.

It was more of an estate, really. All grand and spacious and filled in every corner with precious items that didn't belong to them; her husband moved them into a home partially furnished with incredible heirlooms and artifacts. Early on, she’d found those things to be beautiful and unique, but now she only saw them as someone else’s clutter.

Her foul mood was easily whetted these days. So many causes for that, there were, a lot of which stemmed from her husband.

I could bear this awful rain and this awkward house, she thought, if James were here more often.

“Maybe then,” She said aloud, “I wouldn't have to wait so late to eat every night.”

She was starving right now because it was nearly midnight and she hadn't eaten since this afternoon. Her delayed dinner was a labor of love, a product of her having put off cooking for herself and her husband until he returned home. Now her son she’d fed, hours ago.

He really ought to be in bed, she thought with a faint smile, but he likes to wait up for his daddy, too.

And who would she be, having done the same thing every night herself, who would she be to deny him?

The woman cringed at the sound of something turning over and crashing upstairs. It was no doubt her boy, touching something he ought not to again. She feared it was something glass and that worry implored her to go and see what had happened.

She dried her hands on her apron and fussed at her hair; the thin and wispy copper strands were plastered to her cheeks and temples from the heat of that old-style stove she’d been slaving over. Upon reaching the staircase, she craned her neck and saw her child there, next to a mess that was indeed shattered glass, and shook her head.

“What did you do?” She asked.

“Nothin’.” He said too quickly.

She said knowingly, “I bet.”

The evidence was damning in the way her boy’s eyes averted hers, in the way he shuffled from foot to foot.

“Watch out for that glass,” She warned, and then added, “and go put some shoes on your feet.”

On her way to the kitchen to fetch a broom she muttered, “You’d think I raised him in a barn or something.”

Tool in hand, she returned to the stairs and climbed them with no small amount of effort: each step was punctuated with a quiet huff and a stomp of her flat-heeled loafers. She was out of breath and patience when she reached the top and saw that the child was still standing at the balcony.

“Didn't I tell you to go and put on your shoes?” She snapped. “Go before you cut your feet.”

He said, “Alright, Mama. I was um, waiting for you to come back.”

“Just go ‘head.” She told him wearily.

The woman made quick work of gathering the large and small and dusty shards of glass into a pile, and then realized she’d not brought the pan upstairs to collect the mess. She groaned at the prospect of facing the egregious task of climbing that flight of polished white steps, but then thought of something.

Why do what you can force on your child?

Very conveniently, the boy came rounding the corner of his bedroom’s doorway. He was the only one who slept on the top floor, a result of her and her husband indulging him. He obviously had no problem flying up and down those stairs.

“Won’t you go get me the dustpan?” She entreated.

He beamed, his smile full of baby teeth and gaps of ones that were missing.

“I already got it!” He declared.

He took his mother by the hand and led her to his bedroom.

She followed him in confusion, asking, “Why is it in here?”

“ ‘Cause,” He began, “I was playin’ with it.”

Ah. That makes sense, she figured. 

She stepped into the small room and immediately spotted the plastic thing, then bent over and picked it up. She shut the door behind her, and then cleaned up the glass, as well as the dirt and dust that had aggregated all over the wooden floor. With one hand gripping the handle of the dustpan and the other holding her son’s hand, the woman made her way back down the stairs.

“When my daddy coming back home?” The boy asked, with grammar as awful as only a child’s could be.

“Sometime soon,” His mother answered.

She took up her place brooding by the kitchen stove and her boy found a spot on the floor to occupy, pulling a toy car from his overalls pocket to amuse himself with.

Again she found herself muttering to herself about the rain, about the lateness of her husband and about her hunger.

“What you saying, Mama?” her boy asked, not for the first time.

“Don’t worry about it,” She told him.

He, of course, let the matter drop then, and went back through the house, up the stairs to amuse himself. Again there was a loud crash, a tell-tale sign of something amiss that compelled the woman to stop in her endless work over the stove and head to the staircase. Again she was met with the sight of her boy, high on the balcony, near the scene of his dastardly handiwork. With a heavy sigh she trekked up those steps once more to rectify the mess. For the umpteenth time she realized that the she’d only brought half of the tools needed to tidy the mess and her troubles were only partially eased with her son’s declaration.

“I got the dustpan up here, Mama!”

She was a bit relieved, then, as she followed her son into his upstairs bedroom, noting how much she and her husband indulged the boy; the example of his being the sole upstairs occupant, and voluntarily so, came to mind. She did clean the mess then, and headed back downstairs with her son.

“When is my daddy coming back home?” He asked her.

She answered, “He ought to be here soon.”

What she should have said was never, because that was the truth.

It was also true that she would continue in this cycle, this repetitive loop of tiring herself in the kitchen until her boy distracted her once more with his mischievous behavior: again she would sweat in that kitchen, brooding and muttering. Again her boy would break something upstairs. Again would she hustle up those steps and repeat the same process that always ended with her going back into the kitchen to repeat the behavior like some sort of machine, fixed in its gears with a set of motions to be enacted.

She was dead.

She had been for many years. This estate, the furniture in it, even the bright-eyed child; they were all the makings of her own imagination. Her brooding and mutterings were more than just brooding and mutterings in that she complained of her husband, late in more ways than one, and that she complained of her hunger, which was really her insatiable, unconscious longing for escape from this purgatory she’d been confined to. 

She placated the child, a part of her own mind, because the ‘child’ would never understand what it was that was happening: though it so badly wanted to make sense of things. And no matter how often these set of events repeated themselves, she’d not give up the notion that her husband would come at long last and she would eat and be free.