When I was five I saw something that almost wasn’t.
I remember Ms Lynch, our neighbour, showing up at our door. I could tell she was upset, and I remember thinking that she looked smaller. My parents sent me up to my room. A few minutes went by and I started to hear sobbing through the floor, coupled with quiet, unsure platitudes from my parents.
As I struggled to make out the words I became aware of something pale in the corner of my eye. I tried to look at it, but my vision never quite landed. My eyes would carry on and move over it against my will, so that all I was sure of was that there was a white shape in the corner. Somehow I felt like I was breaking the rules, like I was doing something that could get me into a lot of trouble. I spent what must have been a half an hour just trying to look at the thing, getting a little closer every time.
Then I could see it.
It was a frail, skinny shrunken figure, with huge, heart-breakingly human eyes. It looked so sad and afraid that it managed to unlock some reserve of intense empathy you wouldn’t think a child could have. It’s limbs were lumpy tubes that ended in featureless stumps and it’s lipless mouth was drawn and quivering.
It looked at me warily, suspicion spreading across it’s miserable face.
‘Hello’ I said, for lack of anything else.
‘You, you can see me?’ it murmured, water forming over it’s eyes.
‘Yeah’ I said, although I had the deep, nauseating feeling that I shouldn’t. ‘Who are you’.
The thing thought for a moment and said ‘I’m don’t think I’m a ‘who’ exactly. I think I’m…a thing that nearly happened’.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. But it’s what I am.’
‘Well, are you a boy, or…’
‘I dunno. Both. Neither’
‘Well, maybe we should pretend you’re a girl. Is that okay’.
The thing smiled awkwardly.
‘Yeah. I guess I might have been a girl. If…if I happened’.
‘And if you happened, you might have been named Sarah’ I said.
She giggled hoarsely, tears running down from her giant, ghostly blue eyes.
‘Maybe’.
And that’s how it started. Sarah was there all the time, which I didn’t mind. At that age you never really want your friends to go away. She followed me to school and looked at my books over my shoulder. When I went to the bathroom she stood right outside the door. She sat on top of the table when I was eating dinner. At first we talked a lot about what she was. Don’t let horror films fool you. Children don’t blindly accept this kind of stuff, and a five year old knows that this isn’t normal. However, after twenty minutes of Sarah not being able to put things she didn’t fully understand into words, the conversation would gravitate to tv or something else normal.
Over time she got more substantial. She was less thin and the sense of wrongness about her eased.
I could tell Sarah didn’t like me being around other people and friends, because we couldn’t talk and I wasn’t paying attention to her, but that didn’t make her any more petty and selfish than most children I knew. It seemed harmless, and it might have been, if I hadn’t made her able to touch things.
We were sitting in front of the window during a storm, and all you could see was the rain exploding into ripples on the glass. It was a few years after I’d met Sarah. She didn’t seem to get taller, so by then I was quite a bit bigger than her. I think we were playing monopoly, and I was moving the pieces for her as usual. Her disfigured stumps just passed through things, so it was the only way.
The roaring wind and boredom combined to wear down my patience, and I snapped at her:
‘Ugh! can’t you just move the pieces yourself’.
She looked up at me like a kicked puppy:
‘You know I can’t’.
‘Well why not?’
‘Because, because the pieces are real. And I’m not really real’.
‘Well I can see you, and I’m real’.
‘I’ve told you. After I didn’t happen I was like, I was sorta drifting away. Like there was a while when I was a thing that could happen, but then I didn’t and I was getting less and less real, like, even less than something that could be.I think… if you hadn’t noticed me I’d be even less. Gone. Like…you pin me down here. It works the same way with how you think about me. You started thinking I was a girl, and I started to feel like one. I coulda been a boy, I coulda been a girl, but with you I get closer to being a girl.’
‘So’ I said, ‘Me thinking about you makes you stay here. And me thinking you’re one way you coulda been, makes you more like that way. So…I really believe you can touch things. If you happened you could’ve touched things, so I say you can touch things. I think you’re real, and real things can touch things’.
She looked at the board and tentatively reached out a limb. It went through the little steel place-marker.
‘Try again’ I said.
And she did, again and again hopelessly sliding through the piece. Then it fell over.
We both gasped, and Sarah stared at her stumps with a quiet awe. The silence dragged on for a few seconds, before we both burst out laughing.
‘I’m real!’ she shouted.
‘Of course you’re real!’.
This didn’t cause any problems at first, though I suspect that was mainly due to Sarah’s quite gradual increase in ability.
Then my tenth birthday came around, and I was having a party in my house. Sarah had always hated days like that, when I was completely surrounded by other people so I wouldn’t even look at her for hours on end. But she knew it was coming and prepared for it, willing to occupy herself until the evening.
It seems like my parents thought that ten was some really significant age and conferred a quantum leap in what I was allowed to do. Every Time one of my friends parents called, they said there was no need to pick them up too early, or that it was no problem if they wanted to leave my friends a little longer. I could see Sarah looking more anxious every time one of these calls happened, and before long she was begging me to send everyone home. I just continued to act like I couldn’t see her.
Throughout the day I started getting to know a girl named Jessica who’d been invited mostly because she lived nearby. It was the fastest I can remember becoming friends with someone, to the point where we ended up spending the entire party focused on each other. My parents saw this, and given how close she lived asked if she wanted to sleep over. Sarah actually shouted ‘No!’, like she was in pain.
By about nine o’clock it was just me, Jessica, and my parents in the house. We were watching a movie and Jessica went up the stairs to use the bathroom. It was a few minutes before I noticed that Sarah wasn’t in the room with me.
I heard a yelp, and a series of loud smacks.
Me and my parents reached the bottom of the stairwell at the same time. Jessica was there, curled up and gasping, holding a bloody hand to her face. I looked up and saw Sarah at the top of the stairs. I’d never seen her look angry before.
Jessica went to the hospital and avoided me from then on.
I tried to confront sarah:
‘Why would you do that. Why did you hurt her?’.
‘Hurt her?’ Sarah growled. ‘She wasn’t hurt. I was hurt. You’re all I have. You’re enough for me, but you need Jessica, and Rebecca, and Megan. Why. Why do you need all them, when I just need you!’
I struggled for words.
‘Because…because I’m real Sarah’.
Sarah screamed ‘I’m real! I’m real because of you!'
She pulled clumsily pulled a pair of scissors of my dresser and lunged at me, missing and scraping the point along my scalp.
I hit her straight in the face,and it landed. I don’t know all the rules, but for the first time our connection and probably me teaching her to touch things allowed me to touch her. I pushed her down onto the ground I hit again and again and again, her flesh caving in like modelling clay and rupturing to squirt out thick black ink. She screamed and begged and nobody else could hear.
When I managed to stop myself I’d thought I’d killed her. In a second all the rage and instinct was swallowed by a wave of sickening guilt.
I stared at her leaking body until I heard a strained rasping and saw her chest rise.
‘Oh my God I’m so sorry’.
My door burst in, and my parents saw me kneeling down and crying, blood matting my hair. I think that was the only time they had any reason to suspect that anything was going on, but they took my word that I’d tripped while holding the scissors.
Sarah couldn’t stand up for about a day, and it was a week before all the dents from my fists had smoothed out and the wounds had sealed. After that she was more quiet and scared than she’d been when I first met her, always flinching if I moved too fast. After that she was a burden, something I was responsible for. I had to make sure she didn’t hurt anyone without making her feel scared. As horrible as it sounds, the beating was probably for the best. She let me make friends and have a relatively normal life, and I made time for her when I could.
Every year in school, as my social circle widened and my workload expanded, she got sadder and begged me to just stay at home. It was a constant balancing act between getting on with life and managing Sarah’s emotions.
The situation only continued when I left college, got a job and a husband. You can’t just go to your room to play when you’re married and live in a relatively small apartment. I could go days without saying a word to her and the effect was that her mood was veering from miserable to outright despair.
Most of our conversations happened on the nights I wasn’t that tired, after my husband had gone to sleep. It was on a night like that that she said ‘You’re making me less. You’re making me go away’.
And she was right. She had become almost as skinny as when I first met her.
I made a firm decision to somehow spend more time with her. I think it was the next day that I found out I was pregnant.
Sarah didn’t react well to the news, especially once the doctor visits started to cut even further into my spare time.
Sarah sat in the corner of the room when the baby was being born. She looked bitter. She looked hopeless and cheated.
When the baby, Jack, was out, he was passed to my arms. My joy and relief were soured by anxiety and caution as Sarah stumbled over, passing right through my husband.
‘Why’d he get to happen’ she said, her voice cracking.
After a few months I had to go to work. One day I somehow managed to get all the way to my cubicle before I realised something that made my gut drop. I hadn’t seen Sarah since I left the house.
My phone rang. My husband Paul was on the other end, gasping for breath and on the verge of tears.
‘What is it?’
‘Jack, Jack he…’
I stood up and started sprinting to the car park. The world was half a second from collapsing completely.
‘What about Jack?’ I screeched down the phone.
‘In his crib…there was a pillow on him. pushing down on him. Something was doing it…I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see.’
‘Is he alright’ I said, jumping down cement stairs five at a time.
‘I think so, but what did it. I couldn’t see!’
When I got home Paul was standing in the garden, cradling Jack. Jack was alive but crying like he never had before.
I went into house and saw Sarah slouched against the wall. She was absolutely emaciated, skin stretched perfectly into the outline of a skeleton I knew she didn’t have. I still don’t know how much of it was the result of my ignoring her, and how much the fact that she hadn’t been at my side in a good hour.
‘What now’ she asked hatefully, her feeble words slurring. ‘Do I get beat. Beat by the only person who sees me. The only person who knows I’m here.’
I thought about running over and kicking her face in, tearing her apart. But I knew that wouldn’t get rid of her.
‘No’ I said with a composure that surprised me. ‘You can’t beat something that never happened. Sarah never happened. There is no Sarah’. I spat out the last part and grey, dirty tears began to run down her face.
I never acknowledged her again. I moved into a hotel, begging my husband to just trust me and not panic. Every day I forced myself not to look at her. I acted like I couldn’t hear her when she called out to me for some kind of interaction. But it wasn’t just that I was ignoring her. I’d done that almost by accident for days in the past. I was actively telling myself that she wasn’t there, that I was alone.
It worked. On the occasions when my vision panned over her, or I just couldn’t resist a glance, I could see her getting thinner and smaller. After three days she had shrunk down to half her size and become more lumpy and wrinkled, like the someone had let the air out of her. She lay on the ground, pulling herself along and struggling to raise her head a few inches. I remember one of her eyes being covered with an oversized, sagging eyelid while the other stared up at me, pleadingly. I looked away.
As she got smaller it got harder to look at her even when I wanted to. Setting your eyes on her was sort of like pushing two magnets together.
The worst moment came after a week, as I stepped out of the shower onto something damp and cool that moulded around my foot.
I look down my eyes slipping over a black and white shape. Once I managed to see it I screamed and jumped back against the bathroom wall.
She was less than a foot long, narrow, corrugated, and unable to move. She no longer seemed to have a mouth but still those spectral, tainted blue eyes gazed up at me. Much of her below to neck had been completely flattened by my foot, a pool of shining black tar spreading out from where she had burst. I think she must have put every ounce of her remaining willpower, all she could get out of my remaining belief in her, into being solid for just a moment, into allowing me to step on her, just so I’d have to notice her.
Eventually I managed to get a hold of myself, and stepped out of the shower as if nothing had happened.
That night, as I was lying in bed and trying to put the image out of my mind, I heard something, so quiet it could almost have been imagined, yet icy clear and undeniably real. it was Sarah’s voice:
‘Thank you.’
I try not to think about what she meant by that.
I moved back in with Paul. He didn’t ask questions and soon everything was going fine.
Then I got pregnant again.
I lost it in the third month.
And that’s why I’m writing this. Because I’m scared. Not of Sarah, I don’t think there’s any way of bringing her back. Not of the memories of her, because most of those aren’t bad. I’m scared because sometimes I see a pale shape in the corner of my eye, calling out to me in some desperate, wordless way, and I don’t know if I have the strength to ignore it. I don’t know if I can just let it fade away.
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If you want an explanation of this story, here is a link, scroll through the comments (LINK)
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by reddit user TheEmporersFinest
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