I remember the first time my mother told me about Chigaro. It had been the day before my sixth birthday, and I was excited about the decorations she had been stringing up around the house and the smell of a cake baking in the oven. That warm anticipation turned icy cold when I saw her standing at the door to my room, a solemn look on her face. She told me to come and take her hand, and when I did so, she began to walk us through the house, room by room.
I wanted to ask what we were doing, but something about her stern expression and the tight grip on my hand seemed to forbid it. So instead we walked into a room, paused for a moment in silence, and then moved onto the next without any comment. When we had entered every room, my mother brought me back to my bedroom and shut the door behind us. Only then did she crouch down next to me and speak, her voice a tightly-bound whisper in my ear.
“Did you see anything that didn’t belong?”
I had pulled back slightly from my mother to look at her. Was this a game? Was I in trouble? I was very little, but I already knew to pick up my toys and keep things out of the floor. Had I forgotten something?
Meeting her eyes but still afraid to speak, I only shook my head slightly. Her eyebrows furrowed and she squeezed my hand harder—not enough to hurt, but almost.
“Stop and think. Did you see anything that didn’t belong or looked out of place? Something you didn’t remember seeing before.”
I didn’t dare pull my hand away, and I could tell by the intensity of her gaze that this was important, so I thought again, trying to go through each room in my mind. The hallway, no. The bathroom, no. Mama’s bedroom, no. Her office…wait, wasn’t there a different table in there? Yes, a low table of reddish wood I had never seen before. Pleased with myself, I smiled as I answered.
“Is it the table? The one in your office?”
My mother’s eyes fluttered shut as a low moan escaped her. She gave a slow nod and pulled me toward her, cupping my head with one hand while rubbing my back with the other. Her voice was muffled against my forehead as she spoke, but I could still hear the sadness in it.
“Yes, sweet one. That’s just the thing. That table.” She held me for a minute or more, embracing me silently before gently grabbing my arms and pushing me back slightly. “Except it’s not really a table. It’s a living thing. A real living thing.”
I frowned. “Like an animal?”
She nodded slightly. “Like an animal, yes. I don’t think it’s really an animal, and I think its very smart, but yes…” My mother gave me a slight smile. “Yes, looking at it as an animal…a wild animal…isn’t a bad way to talk about it.” Sniffing, she went on. “Because you remember what we do with wild animals, right?”
I piped up immediately, happy to seize upon something more familiar. “We stay away from them!”
Nodding, my mother wiped at her eyes. “That’s exactly right, sweet one.”
But this led to other questions, and this time I did ask. “But why do we have a wild animal in the house? And what is it?”
She stood up and led me to the bed where we sat down. I didn’t like that she was crying, but her voice grew steadier as she talked. She told me that the thing that looked like a table was called Chigaro, or at least that’s what she had been taught to call it since she was a little girl my age.
My mother said the word meant chair in a language they spoke in a far off place called Zimbabwe, and while that might sound silly when it looked like a table, Chigaro didn’t always look like a table…or a chair for that matter. Every few weeks it changed to look like something different—a new lamp or dish, a new book or ottoman. There were only two ways to recognize where it was—either realizing that there was some object that didn’t belong or by actually touching it. She said if you touched it, you would get real sick to your stomach until you stopped touching it again. I could tell from her expression that touching it was really bad.
I asked her where it came from and again, why was it in our house? She said it had been in our family for nearly eighty years. My great-grandfather had traveled a lot in his later years, and one time when he came back, everyone noticed a new painting hanging on the wall. The family assumed that he had brought it back as a surprise, but he swore he hadn’t. A few days later, the painting was gone, but there was a new radio in the parlor.
This had been a source of excitement and mystery at first, until my mother’s father, himself just a little boy at the time, had tried to turn the radio on. Instead of hearing static or music, he heard a shrill screech through the speaker as he collapsed to the ground, vomiting. Chigaro’s effect on those that touched it had grown much less severe over the years, but it still paid to avoid prolonged contact.
Over the next few years, they had tried different solutions to the Chigaro problem. They tried talking to it, but it did not respond. They tried attacking it, but it was always back the next day in a new form. They even called in a priest, but he left angrily after hearing their incredible story, convinced they were playing a prank on him. Eventually they moved, but that didn’t work either.
Because it follows the family. It was always assumed that my great-grandfather accidently brought it back on his trip, as it stayed with him until he died. After that, it went to my mother’s father, and then to her. One day, my mother told me, she would be gone and it would come to stay with me.
She could see I was growing scared, and she reached out to stroke my hair as she went on. “It’s nothing to be afraid of, not really. Just don’t touch it if you can help it, and move away quickly if you do. And don’t stare at it. It…well, it doesn’t like that very much.” She offered me a smile. “Just follow those rules like the smart little girl that you are, and everything will be fine. Okay?”
And for the most part, it was fine. I grew up in that house and then later another across the country when my mother remarried briefly. My stepfather was rarely home and I doubted she ever told him about Chigaro at all.
She rarely talked to me about it either. She’d occasionally ask if I had noticed what it had changed into or if I had seen it do anything “different”. I never knew exactly what she meant by that, and she would never elaborate, but that question and its implications would always fill me with sharp new dread. It reminded me that we had an intruder in our lives—a monster that was frightening not because of what we knew about it, but because of all we didn’t understand or suspect.
I would have periods where I wouldn’t sleep more than an hour or two a night, and when I did, my slumber was plagued with night terrors. Between the ages of eight and twelve I had a terrible stutter, and I frequently wet the bed until I was fourteen. Therapists attributed these things to “underlying unspecified stressors”, “a nervous temperament”, and my favorite, “growing pains”.
Not that any of these things were wrong, I guess, and I know there are people who grow up much harder than I did. I always had food and a fairly stable home life, I was kept clean and healthy, and even my fears of Chigaro would periodically fade with the passage of time and familiarity. It was only when I was newly confronted with the strangeness and unknown danger of it all…well, those were the really bad times.
I moved out as soon as I turned 18, and aside from holidays, I never stayed in my mother’s house for more than an hour in the years that followed. In some ways, the infrequency of my stays made it harder—I was less sure of what items were supposed to there and those that were Chigaro in disguise. It was disquieting in a way I can’t fully explain, as though I had lost one of my senses. Or like I was walking across an unfamiliar field littered with mines, afraid of touching that cup or sitting on that chair, and terrified of staring at something long enough for me to finally learn what Chigaro did when it was displeased.
I felt guilty leaving my mother in that prison, but she honestly seemed content enough most of the time. She would try to get me to come back home more often, but I think she understood why I couldn’t. And for all her flaws, I know she loved me.
She died six months ago in her sleep, and it was two weeks later before I received all the keys and documents I needed as executor of her estate. I had access to her bank accounts, her cars, the house, of course, and…a storage unit key. I had never known my mother to keep anything in storage—our homes were never mansions, but they were always large and well-furnished—full without excess. Yet when I went and talked to the manager of the storage unit lot, he said she’d had one of their largest units for nearly twenty years.
I felt a mix of nervousness and excitement as I unlocked the padlock and rolled up the front door to the unit. Perhaps it would be empty or full of junk, or maybe there would be prized items of monetary or sentimental value. Either way, it was a distraction from my constant worry about when Chigaro would finally show up in my home and start haunting my own family.
The door slid up with a solid thunk as my eyes adjusted to the shadowy interior of the unit. It was a huge space, and most of it was filled. Not with one kind of thing, but several of every kind of thing. Furniture, electronics, books, plates, statuettes…I had the passing thought that maybe my mother had been a burglar and this was her hidden stash from years of taking random objects from neighbors’ homes.
But then I saw the red wood table.
It was sitting on top of a small floral loveseat that I remember almost bumping into when I was ten or eleven. I had come around the corner one morning and it was just sitting in the hallway. Sucking in a breath, I had recoiled and given it wide berth as I went on to the bathroom.
And there was the coatrack that had appeared the night of my junior prom. I had been coming downstairs to get picked up by Josh Breslin, and he was standing so close to it, and I was afraid he would bump it and get sick and…the night hadn’t gone very well after that.
Or the teapot. The little flowered teapot sitting on a stack of cardboard boxes in the back corner of the unit. That was the first time that Chigaro had appeared in my room. I had woken up when I was seven to see it sitting on my dresser, and when I realized what it had to be, I peed myself a little.
That’s when I knew that nowhere in the house was safe.
But how could this be? How could all this be here? Unless my mother had just…?
Biting my lip, I turned on the light against the wall and stepped inside. My harsh breathing and the irritated buzz of the fluorescent lights above me were the only sounds I could hear. It was as though everything else was frozen. When I looked back out, nothing seemed right or real, as though the angles were all wrong.
That’s when I reached up and pulled the door back down, shutting out the world.
Tomorrow is my little girl Jessica’s sixth birthday. My husband is baking her a cake while I hang up balloons inside and get an inflatable jumping castle blown up in the back yard for her and her friends. She’s old enough now for birthdays to be really fun—for her to remember things more clearly and realize there’s a point to the things we do.
For her to follow rules and understand why they can’t be broken.
So I go into the sunroom where my daughter is watching a cartoon on her tablet with her stuffed bear, Jasper Scruffins. She’s loved that bear since she was a baby, and while it’s old, she’s always treated it with a surprising amount of respect and care. Jessica has always been as smart and thoughtful child, which is why I think this will go so well.
I take her by the hand, forcing myself to hide my excitement as I lead her quietly from room to room. She giggles a bit at first, but a couple of glances from me and her face grows drawn and worried. When we are done, I take her back to the sunroom and Jasper. Maybe I’ll use the little blue bear as a way of explaining Chigaro to her. It’s just another companion that you have to treat with care.
Her big blue eyes are troubled as she looks up at me, searching my face for some sign of what is wrong. Letting out a sigh, I stroke her hair for a moment before I begin.
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