Tag: bedroom
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“She won’t rest.”
My daughter is almost nine but we still use a monitor so that we can hear her if she wakes up in the middle of the night. My wife has gone to bed and I am up late, doing some work I brought home from the office. The monitor crackles and my daughter calls for…
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not a cat, not a dog
This evening as I was taking my daughter upstairs to bed, she froze outside her open bedroom door. “What’s wrong?” Staring into her room, she said “I just saw a cat or a dog or something on my bed. It looked up at me and then slid under the covers.” I turned the lights on…
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morse
We awake to a burst of static from the baby monitor. This is not uncommon. It seems like almost anything can set it off, if we don’t put the damn thing in just the right spot. I reach over and shift the monitor on the nightstand, hoping to move it out of whatever signal is causing…
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a fall
When I get home after work, my youngest daughter meets me at the door. I’m late and phoned ahead to say they should start dinner without me. A plate of half-eaten food waits at my wife’s place at the same able. But she is nowhere to be seen. “Mama went upstairs,” our daughter tells me.…
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hard knocks
My daughter an I are in my office when my wife calls from the TV room. I hear her but it doesn’t register until she calls again, a rising note of alarm in her voice. “What’s wrong?” She is pale, intense. I can’t tell if she’s angry or something else. “I just heard…” She stops,…
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a sad girl
…lying in bed this morning, I woke to the sound of the bedroom door opening. I hear my wife slowly close the door behind her. I hear her footsteps on the floorboards, approaching my side of the bed. I cannot move, cannot open my eyes. I feel a fingertip on my arm, just inside the…
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echo | the recursive old woman
Another entry from one of my old journals, this time from 1996. It begins simply enough… I’m standing in front of a shelf full of journals and books in the dead man’s rooms. You can read the rest here.
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again
The voices again tonight. No music this time, no men. One or two women, I can’t quite be sure. Possibly a child. I told my wife about the voices a few days ago. She could tell tonight that I was hearing them again. And, of course, she cannot. We keep a fan going at night,…
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raised voices
Two or three times now, I have found myself unable to sleep because of the voices. It sounds for all the world like two men having an argument somewhere in the house. Sometimes there are women’s voices mixed in. Sometimes there are children. I can almost just make out what they’re saying. Almost. Sometimes there’s…
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home invasion
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated January 6th, 1997] I stand in the front window and watch as the car makes its second pass, making myself as visible as possible to the men inside . . . letting them know that there are people home and they’ll have…