deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: There is a child in my house who is not mine. She asks only for simple
deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: There is a child in my house who is not mine. She asks only for simple favors, opening a window, or a jar. It’s possible one of us is a ghost. The insomnia has gotten worse. I have taken to walking through the house at night, through darkened rooms made strange by silence and moonlight. After lying fruitlessly in bed for hours, the sheets and blankets grow too familiar, stiff, restricting; sleep becomes impossible. I have come to enjoy these midnight walks, if enjoyment can be the right word for it. They break the monotony, and it is a relief to cast off the chains of responsibility, to dawdle around downstairs and stay awake for even longer. Who even needs to sleep? There is a child inside my house. She is not mine; I have no children. As far as I know there are no children of her age, matching her description, living anywhere near me, and in any case I have made sure to bolt the doors and lock the windows before retiring to bed at night. When I first saw her, perhaps a month ago, it was like seeing a ghost, the pale apparition of her in my kitchen. My insomnia perhaps blunted the shock. I was dimly under the impression that she might have been a hallucination, a figment, an afterimage clinging to the crumbling interior of my mind. She was a tiny thing, barely reaching up to my waist. I bent over and spoke to her in what must have been a dusty, patronizing tone, partway senile and out of touch. Was she all right, I asked her. How had she gotten here? She looked up at me with big wide eyes and moved her lips. Her words were muffled, like through cotton. Warm breaths, nothing more. But she pointed up to the cabinet, and I opened it for her, glasses stacked upside-down to trap the stale air. I looked down to her, and she looked up at me with the simple patience and anticipation of children knowing that they will be tended to. I took a glass down for her, and she took it with both hands and went to the sink, stretching out her arms to wrestle with the faucet. I turned the faucet for her, listened to the water rush into the glass. She drank with both hands, one long sip, and then lowering the glass as if to take a break, staring out with satisfaction at nothing. She finished drinking and set the glass down with a clunk next to the sink, and turned to walk away. I followed her. Somewhere between the kitchen and the stairs, I lost her, and she was gone. In the morning, the glass was by the sink, the inside still faintly damp. There were no fingerprints on it, no smudges. No sign that the girl had ever been. I have seen her many times since then. She inhabits my house quite comfortably. She knows where the dishes and utensils are kept, even though she cannot quite always reach them; she has found the groove in my armchair to comfortably sprawl out. I have done a quite thorough search of my house in daylight, and it is preposterous. There is nowhere she could hide all day without being found. I feel as though we must live in the same house, but at different points in time, or different dimensions of it, our realities only temporarily overlapping. I feel that she is well-kept, and must have a family to care for her. I have gone through all the rooms of my house, systematically, methodically, in daytime and in night. I find only the remains of my own existence, my detritus. The rooms do not change. There are no clothes left outside the hamper, no dirty dishes piled in the sink, no shoes scattered across the floor. There is no trace of this family to be found. All I have is the girl. She is very inconsiderate to me. I help her, often, during my insomniac meanderings, like when she is struggling, her hair hanging limply with sweat, to crack open a window; or when she stands in front of my refrigerator, the light casting a cold rectangle across the floor, heedless of the electricity she is wasting as she tries to open a jar of peanut butter. Every time, I approach, and she looks up at me, eyes expectant. We have never successfully spoken to one another. Our words fog up, get lost in the space between us. And yet she somehow knows, as well as I do, that I have my role to play. She asks me, wordlessly, and I comply. Once the window is open, and she is leaning on the sill looking out into the dark cool night, eyes half-closed, or once the jar has been opened and she is busily smearing its contents across a slice of toast, she is busily engaged in her own purposes and it is as if I have stopped existing for her, now that I have done what needed doing. Perhaps I do in fact no longer exist for her, and am simply an apparition who appears in her times of need. Or perhaps that is simply what all children - bless their selfish little hearts - are like. I have considered that she might be a ghost, or I might. It seems preposterous that I might be a shade. As unreal as my nights are, I experience the day quite clearly, with the glare of sunlight and the dull exhausted ache in my head and body that can only be due to blood and the frailties of flesh. But in darkness, all the experiences of the day become quite distant, and it occurs to me that ghosts after all were alive once before, and that this may be how they experience their memories of life - one day at a time, staggered, each one tumbling forward unexpectedly onto them and overwhelming them with its newness, so that they never realize they are already dead.The better argument that she is the ghost and I am not is that I am the one who interacts with the physical world for her. She mopes needily around the house longing for these small reminders of her earthly existence, and I oblige. But then again, perhaps that is the stuff of life, the simple inconsequential wants and satisfactions, and it is the shades who lift the cup down from the cupboards, set the faucets running, to watch in quiet longing as the living lift the water to their lips and drink. -- source link
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