Something that Happened When You Were a Child
Jan Stinchcomb
You’re one of the kids who live in two houses. After the rupture your parents become great storytellers, but they only want to talk about each other. As you get older, the stories mutate into tall tales. Your dad had three mistresses, and when he was really drunk, he would bring them home. Your mother was a thief and a sex worker––she’s hiding her police record from you. These stories are bad for your favorite fantasy, where your parents get back together and you all live in the original house with blue shutters. Even the house has changed. The new owners painted the shutters brown, inducing your first experience of dizzying full-body rage.
#
The water betrays you. You don’t mean to upset your parents, but you somehow get lost in the ocean waves, which pull you northward without your consent. We looked all over the beach for you, your mother cries, nearly hysterical, unusual for her. Use your head, your father says in disgust. This is so unfair. You look all around for the little boy you were playing with. He was right next to you in the water. You felt safe the whole time and had no idea you had drifted so far from the family beach towel.
Even stranger is the fact that your parents are together in this memory. Was this before the divorce? When you ask each of them if they remember this day at the beach, they claim it never happened.
#
A kid one year ahead of you in school disappears. You see her face, prettier than yours, in the local paper. Parents and teachers give scary lectures about strangers in cars, strangers in parks, strangers in malls. They seem to believe you have the power to prevent your own kidnapping. Your mother shakes when she delivers her speech. You can see her getting smaller right in front of you.
You’re rarely alone, only for a few blocks each day when you walk home from school, and then for a few hours at home as you wait for Mom or Dad to return from work. One afternoon it finally happens: a car slows down next to you as you are walking. The driver is not who you expected. He’s a kid in high school, not a real adult, and he uses words you have never heard before to describe your body. You freeze, tongue-tied, while he speeds off laughing.
Later you find out that the missing girl was driven by her uncle across state lines to live with her father. This confirms what you already suspected. Kids have no power when their own parents turn into strangers.
#
The ghosts you like best are real people exposed as greedy criminals on Scooby-Doo, or the actual Brady children in that beloved episode when they stage a haunting to prevent their house from being sold.
While you are living on the other side of the world, trying to get away from your miserable broken family, you learn that ghosts can lurk inside walls until the moment they conquer a room. They prey on your fear. They know you’re stranded, running short on cash and drowning in a language not your own. They come out whenever you are left alone in the centuries-old often freezing stone structure where you rent an apartment with two other girls. You’re always having weird dreams. You hear things. You begin to believe that buildings have memories.
Once you’re back in America, you visit a psychic who asks if you have been out of the country and offers to remove all the strange spirits still clinging to you.
#
It never happened to you, but there comes a time when everyone is talking about it. Apparently it’s an epidemic. The years go by, but you’re so busy with studies and work that you don’t pay much attention to these reports.
You’re at your high school reunion sitting at a table with people you used to know when the conversation shifts. They claim it happened to one of the girls you were friends with, someone you haven’t spoken to in years. This is why she’s not here celebrating. Her parents had to sell their house and move away.
You were close to her, weren’t you? someone asks. The table is waiting for you to tell them what went on in that house. Every sleepover is a treasure trove of information, as all children know.
Nothing ever happened when I was there, you say, and are met with disappointed silence.
Did you miss something? Are you the worst friend ever, or some kind of traitor? The conversation moves on to the next absent classmate. Someone buys more drinks for the table while hits from high school play in the background. These people are lucky, mostly wealthy, and merely in search of further distraction.
#
Every year after you return home from pounding pavement on Halloween, you check all your candy for evidence of tampering. Whichever parent you are with insists on this practice because the one thing that unites them is an abiding belief in danger. The candy inspection is a ritual signaling the end of the festivities, the moment when you drop your costume and turn back into a responsible schoolgirl. When you have your own children, you keep up the tradition of checking the candy, though you never explain why. Just make sure the wrapper is sealed, you tell your kids. Years later you hear the candy story was all made-up, pushed by the police, but you can’t get rid of the image of a child (one of your friends?) unable to talk because a razor is caught between his bloody baby teeth.
Jan Stinchcomb is the author of Verushka (JournalStone), The Blood Trail (Red Bird Chapbooks) and Find the Girl (Main Street Rag). Her stories have appeared in Bourbon Penn, SmokeLong Quarterly and hex, among other places. A Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, she is featured in Best Microfiction 2020 and The Best Small Fictions 2018 & 2021. Find her at janstinchcomb.com; Bluesky: @janstinchcomb; Instagram: @jan_stinchcomb
