The thing that isn’t there.
That’s what me and my sister always called it growing up. The thing that isn’t there. It was partially a joke, and partially our way of acknowledging that no one would ever believe us, no matter what we did.
I only have a faint memory of us in the garden on that first day it spoke to us. We were probably five or six, digging at worms and pretending we were helping make rows for our mother’s tomato plants when we really just wanted an excuse to root around and throw dirt at each other. That’s when we heard it.
Play. Please. Please play.
Me and Juliet looked around at the same time, and seeing no one else there, we stared at each other. We were fraternal twins and very close, but we normally didn’t have any freaky twin telepathy. That day though…I think we both knew from the start that something was very wrong.
We told our mother, of course, but she just laughed it off. She tried to act like it was an imaginary friend we’d made up, and when we kept on, she threatened to not let us play outside without supervision if we couldn’t be big girls and not make up stories. We glanced at each other and then agreed we must have just made it up.
The next day, we heard the voice again. It was so soft and delicate that it felt like the words were just being carried along on the breeze, passing between us as we walked along a wooded trail behind the house.
Play. Please. Please play.
We both froze for a moment waiting for further noise or some sign of who or what the voice was coming from. But there was nothing. We started walking again, this time a bit faster.
Play. Please. Please play.
The voice sounded a bit louder now. A bit closer. I think I almost ran, but then I saw Juliet picking up a rock. I didn’t know what she was going to do with it at first—maybe try to hit the invisible thing with it? But then she caught my eye, gave me a nod and tossed me the rock.
It was a slow arcing underhanded throw, and I still barely managed to catch it. I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do with the rock, but seeing her outstretched palm, I made my best guess and tossed it back to her. We did that back and forth a handful of times when the voice broke the woods’ silence again.
Good. Good.
From then on, we rarely went more than a month or two without the thing that isn’t there coming around. Or maybe it was always there, silent and invisible and watching. Either way, when it spoke, it always said the same thing in the same breathy, barely-there voice.
Play. Please. Please play.
And once we played a game for a minute, it would fall silent again, seemingly satisfied.
Over the years we tried to convince our parents from time to time or make our friends understand. Everyone always thought it was a weird joke or that we were just lying. The couple of times we got really upset about it our parents would humor us for a short time, but it always ended with them being patronizing and giving us restrictions for awhile in the name of “helping us to settle down”. What it actually did is teach us that no one was going to believe us, and that all we had was each other.
That being said, for the most part it wasn’t that big of a deal. We got used to the thing being around, strange as that might seem. And it never tried to hurt us or anything…
Okay, that last isn’t exactly true I guess. When we were fourteen, we went through a period where we decided we weren’t putting up with it any more. We were going to ignore whatever the thing that isn’t there was, and hopefully it would just go away.
And when it came the next time, that’s exactly what we did. It asked us to play for over an hour, its voice getting stranger and rougher every time it asked. When it stopped talking after the fifth try, we thought we’d won, but by that night we realized our mistake.
We started throwing up. Having chills. Running a fever and aching all over. Our parents thought it was the flu, and at first so did we. But after the second day of misery, I thought about the thing that isn’t there. About us ignoring it and how it might not have liked that. So I crawled out of bed and rooted around in my closet before going to Juliet’s room. Sleeping fitfully when I approached the bed and shook her, she woke up quick enough when she saw what I had in my hands. She scooted over to make room for the checkerboard and we began to play.
We were well again within the hour.
I’m thirty-two now, and for the last fourteen years, I’ve been free from it. When I moved away from home, the thing apparently decided to stay with Juliet instead, because I haven’t heard a peep from it ever since. I would have probably convinced myself it was all just made-up bullshit from when I was a kid, but every time I talk to my sister, she brings it up. About how it still comes around, maybe even more now than it did when we were younger. She never says it, but I can hear the fatigue and resentment in her voice. It hangs between us—the unasked question of why she got saddled with this thing for life instead of me.
Except, as it turns out, that burden didn’t last too long. Last month Juliet was killed in a freak accident of some kind out in Nevada. Our parents won’t tell me everything, but I learned enough to know something fell from a building under construction and killed her as she was walking nearby. It’s devastated my parents, and while I didn’t talk to her every day any more, not even every week, I still feel like a big part of me has just been ripped away.
And what came back to me…well, that’s why I’m writing this all down.
Because yesterday the thing that isn’t there spoke to me again for the first time since I was eighteen. One month to the day of when a two-ton steel girder somehow broke its welds and fell two hundred feet, at a sharp angle and long distance, to crush my sister like an ant being speared by God. Its voice is coarser now, deeper, but still somehow wispy and ill-defined, like a breath of poison flowing into my ear. I recognized it right away, even though the words were different this time.
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