“Will you check the tub in a minute?”
My wife comes into the room, a little cross. We are getting our daughter ready for bed.
“What’s wrong?”
“There was almost no water in the tub and it was cold.”
“Really?”
She repeats this again. Unspoken is the rebuke — or, perhaps, the fear — that something odd has happened.
It was full, I know. And warm. I checked it myself just a few minutes earlier.
Changing the sheet on my daughter’s crib tonight, strange flashes of faces in her room — white and black, bold stripes and contrast, large teeth and bulging eyes framed by wild hair . . . almost like the stark, menacing glee of Japanese oni masks.
These flashes, somewhere between a mental image and a visualization — not quite registered by the eyes or by the mind, but in a layer between them.
They’re there, they’re gone.
Puzzling.
Later…
Passing by the kitchen window I catch a glimpse of a dark figure striding across the roof of my neighbor’s house.
There . . . then gone.