The Return

Justin Deets has driven past this farmhouse three times in twenty-nine years. Once for Thanksgiving. Once for his mother's hip surgery. Once because his sister guilted him into it. Each time, he parked in the drive, walked through the door, and felt something in his chest clamp shut.

Now both parents are dead, three weeks apart, and the estate needs inventorying.

The house hasn't changed. Same furniture. Same positions. A clock on the mantle stopped at 3:47. His mother never wound it. "Time doesn't matter in this house," she said, and he was too young to hear the warning in it.

The first night, the walls breathe.

Justin had nightmares as a child. Bad ones. A doctor prescribed medication that stopped the dreams and took the memories with them. He's spent forty years not remembering what happened in this house.

Now the memories come back. The kitchen. His mother frozen at the sink. Something standing in the corner behind her, something angular and wrong, something with edges where a person should have curves. When she turned around, her face was a mask and her voice came from somewhere hollow.

He finds the photographs his mother hid in a shoebox under the stairs. Family portraits, dozens of them, where she had carefully cut a shape out of the background. The same shape. Every photo.

She could see it. She knew what lived here. She and his father stayed anyway, because the house needed someone inside it, and if they left, it would have followed their son.

Justin has been home for ten days now. He's stopped checking his phone. He sits in his father's chair and stares out the window for hours he can't account for.

The thing with edges has been very patient.