When I was a child I lied all the time. Well, I didn’t really lie, I kept “telling stories” as my mother called it. I would concoct these insane narratives to entertain myself. I was obsessed with fairies and pixies as a young child and would tell my family that I saw them everywhere, that fairies would talk to me, and that pixies had “stolen my homework” when I didn’t want to do it. Not all of my stories were so cute.
When I was about 7 or 8 years old I became obsessed with these creatures of my imagination. I called them kalumnias, and they were like changelings that could take the place of your loved ones at any time, not just infancy. It wasn’t very creative but I was in 3rd grade. They’d latch on to one person and then take on the appearance of their loved ones, sometimes switching who they are impersonating to keep the victim on their toes. The ultimate goal of a kalumnia is to cause as much psychological pain to their target as possible. They usually take the place of family members who died suddenly or left with no warning as to arouse little suspicion.
There was an incident at school when I was around 9 where I tackled a girl at recess and tore some of her hair out, believing her to be one of these creatures. She was always bullying me so I assume I was just using that as an excuse to finally get her back for all the cruelty she had exacted on me. My mom was called and I had to be taken home, I was suspended for a week.
Three years later I finally got my first smartphone and about a week after receiving it I used it to call 911 on my mom. I was absolutely convinced that the person calling herself my mother was not my mother at all and she was one of those “kalumnias” and she was going to hurt me. They sent a social worker to my mother’s house, as my parents are divorced. My older sister and I were then interrogated for about an hour and a half about the conditions at home because of the call yet there was absolutely nothing wrong.
It was decided that the persistent bullying at school had resulted in excessive amounts of anxiety and paranoia and that I should be taken to a therapist for a bit. I was diagnosed with a severe anxiety condition and went through intensive therapy I don’t remember the name of. The therapy was successful and we rarely had incidents like that since. The lying stopped, and the stories are over. I still feel guilty about all that I put my family through. When I moved away for college I rarely visited due to the shame I feel for the person I was in that house.
Today I’m going back home. It’s spring break and I’m traveling home to see my mother and my sister August for the week. I haven’t been back since I moved, and honestly, I need a break. Though I’m ever so passionate, business school can obviously get tiring and my roommates are always loud at the most inconvenient hours. I need to get some good sleep.
I live states away from my mom, though my sister went to community college and still lives at home. I wanted to start a life away from home and start some sort of business so I moved out to Chicago. The flight home was an hour and a half long, though you know how flights are, it took me about 5 hours to get home.
I’m groggy and jet lagged when I finally stumble out of my Uber and onto my mother’s front porch step. The sun is setting as I ring the doorbell. My mother almost immediately opened the door. My mother has a tired face with large dark circles and lines around her eyes. She’s still ever so beautiful with her big green eyes that match mine, she just has a perpetual look of exhaustion. She has her long light brown hair in her signature loose ponytail, everything is just how I remember.
“June!” She exclaimed with a bright smile.
“Mom!” I wrap my arms around her and she hugs me back tightly.
My mother grabs me by the shoulders and pushes herself away from me to get a good look at me. She looks me up and down, inspecting me.
“You look exhausted! Come on in!” She gestures me into the house and I lug my bags into the house, then she closes the door behind me.
She makes sure to help me with my bags, though I am completely okay with taking my suitcase to my old bedroom myself. She just likes to help so much that I always let her. After my bags had been put away and I had taken a much-needed trip to the restroom, we sit down at the dining room table and my mother gets up to make some dinner for my sister and me, who is still in her bedroom.
My mother grabs some dry penne out of the cabinet and begins boiling the water. I start to zone out a bit and stare out of the window by the table. The sun is close to setting and the suburban landscape looks almost eerie as the shadows grow. A sound wakes me out of my haze and my head instinctively jerks to face the area the noise originated from. I tense up at the sight I turned to face. My mother is staring me straight in the eyes, her body stiff, and her hands held tightly to her side like an old toy soldier. She’s caked in dried blood from head to toe but the gore was mainly clumped onto her hands. The space under her fingernails brimming with flecks of scarlet. Even her hair is drenched, though since the blood is dry it clumped her hair together, making it look almost brittle. The biting smell of iron permeates the air, making me nauseous.
Just like that, I blink and my mother is clean again, standing over a boiling pot of water, pouring in a box of dry penne. Her hands are immaculate and her nails manicured. Her hair is shiny and soft, and the same light brown as mine. She slowly turns to face me with a slight smile on her lips, her face fell as she saw my expression, which I just realized had formed into a horrified moue.
“Everything okay, June?” She says anxiously, recognizing my expression from past episodes.
I blink the surprise out of my eyes and plaster an apologetic grin onto my face. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” I say this shakily, though trying to hide the dread I had just experienced.
“You looked at me like you had seen a ghost!” My mother replied, chuckling.
I laugh nervously in response and look at the old scratched-up table I’m sitting at. I pick at the peeling varnish to calm my nerves, a habit I had acquired as a teenager due to my chronic nerves. On the table I see the scratches from my adolescent days of fear, the minuscule holes carved by pencil led, and words I had indelicately scrawled into the table’s surface with a butterknife at dinner. The word “lie” is the easiest to read amongst all the marks. That word holds no significance to me. I just have always loved the shape of it. I trace the letters with my finger, which calms me as the combination of curves and rigid lines fill my mind. My mother hums and cooks as I trace.
I sketch the “e” at the end of the word a third time and as I do the table begins to pulsate under my pale finger. The table’s wood has become elastic and damp and slowly fills with a scarlet tinge. I rip my hand away as I see a vein crossing through the “i” in lie and it comes away drenched in thick red blood. The table seems to almost breathe, its surface rising and falling in the way of a breathing animal. I tumble backward in my seat, losing my balance out of horror. I stare in silence at my blood-drenched hand, body heaving in terror.
“June?” My mother exclaimed nervously.
I cannot even muster a response to my mother. I just keep staring at my hand as the blood drips down my palm and onto my wrist and forearm. I’m on the verge of tears but I feel almost too scared to cry.
“June, is everything alright?” My mother asks with mounting fear.
I finally remove my gaze from my blood-soaked fingers and look up at my mother, who is standing in the open doorway between the dining room and the kitchen. She looks confused and concerned, and as I still don’t respond she raises her eyebrows urging me to say something. My eyes flit down to my hands and they’re clean and pristine. I look back up at the table and it’s made of hard wood, the varnish peeling at the corners. I’m confused but my breathing turns from a fearful heaving to an anxious pant and I look up at my mother once again. She looks a bit scared by now due to my continued silence.
“Oh, I’m fine, I just thought I saw something and got freaked out.” I say this all with a forced grin and a chuckle, trying to make my fear comedic. I right my chair and sit back down.
“Alright-y then.” She pauses for a moment. “Would you prefer marinara or butter on your pasta?”
“Butter would be nice.” I respond, trying my best to feign a calm demeanor.
“Can you go get your sister from her room? I need to finish fixing up the food.”
“Sure!” I say, glad to have a reason to get up and move. I’ve always found walking calms me when I’m nervous like this.
I get up from my seat and venture into the hallway housing August and my bedrooms. My sister’s bedroom is at the very end of the hall and I walk slowly to the door. It’s dark at the bottom, meaning August has the lights off. This is commonplace for August, she’s always complaining that lights are too bright no matter how dim they are. August’s door still has her childhood name sticker on it, denoting this as her room. It’s covered in flowers and peace signs.
I knock softly on the door and say “Hey Auggie, it’s June. Dinner’s ready! We’re having pasta!”
Shuffling comes from behind the door as August comes to open it. I stand back when I hear her close and she opens the door. August has a kind face with big brown eyes, pink pouty lips with a strong cupid’s bow, and rosy cheeks. She smiles softly when she sees me. She still has the same haircut as she did throughout her youth, a chin-length bob with straight bangs. This haircut suits her round face well.
“Hey, June.” Her voice is soft and kind as it always has been. As a child I was often envious of how soft and calm her voice was, my voice was and still is harsh, biting, and loud by default.
We look at each other and smile awkwardly. We walk down the hall silently staring at our childhood photos that are hung up on the walls to the point of clutter. I fidget with my nails as we walk into the dining room. There are 3 plates of penne pasta on the dining table, 1 with butter and 2 with marinara, each with a corresponding fork next to the plate. I look into the kitchen to find it vacant.
“Hey, Auggie…”
“Yeah?” August says this between bites of food.
She has already begun eating her pasta and she is very engrossed in shoveling the marinara in. It looks like this is the first time she’s eaten in days, not just due to the rate at which she’s eating. She’s uncharacteristically pale, the circles under her eyes are a dark desaturated brown, her legs and arms are spattered with yellowed bruises, and since she’s wearing a tank top it’s easy to see her boney arms. She looks deathly skinny. She looks diseased, as if she’s rotting away. I haven’t seen her look like this since she was 16.
“Mom’s not in the kitchen, where do you think she might have gone?”
August looks up from her pasta for a moment to respond. “Probably to the bathroom” She goes back to eating intently.
“Oh, yeah, right.” I say this quietly.
I walk through the kitchen towards the bathroom and walk down the hall containing my mother’s bedroom and the only restroom in the house. As I walk an odd sound begins to become audible. It’s a sound of gagging and retching and it makes me nauseous just to hear it. I slow down walking as anxious tingles encase my whole body. I creep towards the noise, which I now realize is emanating from the bathroom.
The bathroom door is slightly ajar and as I approach the bathroom the retching sound gets louder and I am hit by the strong stench of decay. It’s insanely overpowering and I double over due to nausea. I cover my mouth and nose to keep out the smell and keep myself from vomiting. I stagger back a bit because it’s just such a strong smell. It’s the smell of death and rot. It’s the smell of rotten meat but hundreds of times worse. I try to move forward to find the source of the scent but it is so potent I fall to the ground.
I kneel, face leaned towards my knees trying to stave off the vomit I feel burgeoning in my throat, the acid from my stomach scorching my esophagus. Another wave of the scent makes me lurch forwards and my stomach heaves pushing acidic vomit into my mouth which I have no choice but to spit out onto the ground in front of me. I then stumble to my feet as quickly as I can trying desperately to evade the stench coming from the bathroom as I see blood leak out from under the partially open door. In the blood are chunks of something raw and at that sight, I turn and sprint down the hall back into the kitchen. I immediately rush to the sink and turn it on. I splash cold water on my face in earnest for what I estimate to be a minute and a half, then turn the faucet off. I take a deep breath leaning against the kitchen sink facing away from the faucet, hands clutching the granite countertop on either side of the sink.
“June? Is everything okay? You look… scared” August finally takes a break from her food, her face formed into an anxious pout.
I try to slow down my breathing in an attempt to speak and finally relax enough to verbalize something.
“I… I don’t know. There was- She- The smell- I-”
August stares at me in concerned confusion. I know this expression. She makes this face when she doesn’t know how to help someone but desperately wants to, it’s an expression full of pity. I usually feel enraged when others pity me but at this moment I want nothing more than for her to protect me as she did when we were small. I want my Auggie to hold me and shield me from the world like she used to. As my mind continues to crave safety a memory resurfaces, something I never wanted to remember until this exact moment. I clutch the edge of the sink for balance as the memory hits me like a truck.
When I was about 7 years old my mom, August, and I were driving down a dark road. We were coming home from seeing family in the south of our state and it was late because dinner ran long. August was around 11, scribbling on a notepad with a pencil, moonlight helping her see to place the lines. I was dozing off next to her in the back seat, barely conscious. The car was warm but not hot, and I was the most comfortable I think I had ever been in a car.
As I was on the verge of sleep I was jerked forward, waking me from my dream-like state. I look to see August was also thrown forward. Her notepad was flung into the floorboard, though August seemed not to care about that at all. She was staring out of the front window of the car in absolute horror, mouth agape. I was so young and small that I couldn’t see what she was looking at with such fear.
“Auggie! Auggie, what’s going on?” I said, my voice coming out more anxious than I intended, tears began to puddle at the corners of my eyes.
August didn’t even respond, she was so frozen with fear that all she could do was stare. Then it dawned on me, that I could ask my mother what happened. I turn to her, as I was directly across from her in the back seat so I had a full view of her. I was horrified by what I saw. She was draped over the steering wheel bleeding profusely from a gash on the front of her head and the rest of her body was completely limp. At the sight, I gagged and sick spilled out of my mouth and onto my lap. I had always had a weak stomach.
The potent stench of the vomit brought August to her senses. She unbuckled her seatbelt and got out of the car. I began to cry when I thought she was leaving, I was so afraid. August had just gotten out to come and grab me out through my door. She carefully unbuckled my seatbelt and scooped me out of the car. As I was facing the direction the headlights were pointing in I could finally see what August had been looking at with such fear. About 6 feet from the front of the car was a tall lanky creature, much larger thank the average human.
It was red, like a skinned animal and it was dripping with what seemed to be blood. It had long, blackened nails and sparse stringy black hair. Its head was just slightly too long, the width not proportionate to the height. Its eyes were oval-shaped gashes that took up the top half of its face, the other half was taken up by a maw of sharp long yellowed fangs. It was skinny, bones pushing out at harsh angles, some of the bones were inhuman like nothing the average skeleton had. I recognize this description so well. This creature mirrors my childhood drawings, the ones my teachers had to call home about. The creatures of my nightmares. A disgusting monstrosity. A kalumnia standing in the bright headlights of my mother’s old Subaru. I was never a liar. I haven’t seen my mother for years. I miss my mom more than anything even though I never really had enough time to know her at all.
I’m posting this so someone will know what I know, in case I don’t make it out of this house. If I die here I want the world to know I wasn’t crazy. I was never crazy. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure August and I make it out of this house and we can finally live in peace.