u/dudeitsBryan

I work second shift at a plant about twenty-six miles from my house. Get off at eleven. The road home is a two-lane county route that doesn't even have a number most people would recognize. No shoulder. Corn on both sides most of the year, then black dirt, then corn again.

I've driven it for nine years. I know it the way you know a song you didn't mean to memorize.

There's a house about halfway. Maybe twelve miles in. Set back from the road, gravel drive grown over, no mailbox left. Roof half collapsed on the south side. Front porch sagging. I've watched it die slow, windows went first, then the screen door, then the paint. Last winter the porch swing finally fell.

Nobody's lived in it since I started at the plant. I asked an old guy at work once. He said the woman who lived there died in the late eighties. Family fought over it. Never sold. Just rotted.

You drive past something for nine years, you stop seeing it. It becomes part of the road. The way the curve at mile fourteen has a deer carcass that turns into bones every winter. The way the gas station at the four-way has the same handwritten sign about cigarettes. You notice it the first hundred times. Then it just is.

I don't know why I noticed the porch light.

It was a Tuesday. Late October. Cold enough to fog the windshield if I didn't keep the defrost running. I was thinking about nothing , like about whether I had eggs at home, about a kid at work who keeps fucking up the inventory sheets. And I came around the bend before that house and the porch light was on.

Just on. Yellow bulb. Bare. Hanging from a wire above the door.

I slowed down. Didn't stop. Just slowed enough to look. The light made a circle on the porch boards, and I could see well nothing. Just porch. Just the place where the swing used to be. The door was closed.

I drove home.

I told my wife about it the next morning. She said maybe somebody bought it. Maybe somebody's fixing it up. She said it like that was the obvious answer, and it kind of was. Houses get bought. People fix them up. Even ones that look like that.

The next night driving home, the light was on again. And the night after that.

I should explain ,so there's no neighbors out there. The closest house to it is a dairy operation about a mile south. The closest house north is mine. So if somebody was fixing it up, they were doing it at night, alone, twelve miles from anything.

Friday I got off at eleven, slept till seven, and drove back out there in daylight.

Place looked the same as it has for nine years. Roof caved on the south side. Porch sagging. Windows dark and most of them broken. Gravel drive grown over with what was left of last summer's weeds. No tire tracks. No tools. No ladder leaning anywhere. Nobody fixing anything.

The porch light bulb was there. Naked, hanging from its wire. I walked up the drive close enough to see it. The wire ran into the porch ceiling and disappeared. Couldn't tell if there was still wiring in the house. Couldn't tell anything.

I didn't go up on the porch. I'm not sure why. It just felt like something I shouldn't do.

I drove home and didn't tell my wife I went out there. We've been married eleven years. I tell her everything. But I didn't tell her this.

That night driving home from work the porch light was on.

I'm not a guy who scares easy. I worked corrections for six years before the plant. I've been around things people would rather not know about. I'm not bragging for real I'm telling you so you understand when I say I started to feel something I hadn't felt since I was a kid. Something low in the stomach. The kind of feeling where your body knows before your head does.

Monday night the light was on and the door was open.

Not wide. A few inches. Just enough that the porch light made a wedge of yellow on the floor inside. I slowed almost to a stop. I could see , and this is going to sound stupid but I could see the floor inside. Linoleum. The kind they put in farm kitchens in the seventies. Yellow and brown pattern.

That floor has not existed in that house for years. Those windows have been open to weather for years. There is no kitchen floor in there. There is rot and animal shit and whatever else thirty years of nobody does to a room.

But there it was. Yellow and brown linoleum. Clean.

I drove home and I didn't sleep.

Tuesday I called in sick. First time in two years. My wife asked what was wrong and I said I thought I was getting something. She put her hand on my forehead the way she does and said I didn't feel hot. She said I should go to the doctor. I said I would.

I didn't go to the doctor. I sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and tried to figure out what I was going to do.

Here's the thing I want you to understand. I am thirty-eight years old. I own a house. I have a wife and a daughter who is fourteen. I work fifty-two hours a week at a place that smells like burnt corn and machine oil, and when I come home I eat dinner and I watch TV and I go to bed. I am not a person who has experiences. I am a person who has a life.

I drove out there Tuesday afternoon. Two o'clock. Bright cold day, sky like a sheet of tin. I parked on the road and I walked up the drive.

The porch light was off. Of course it was off. It was the middle of the day.

I went up on the porch.

The boards held. They shouldn't have but they did. The door was closed. I tried the handle and it turned. I'm telling you the truth, really I didn't break in. The door was unlocked.

Inside, the kitchen had a yellow and brown linoleum floor. A table. Four chairs. A fridge that was running so loud I could hear it. Dishes in the drying rack next to the sink. A coffee cup. A plate.

There was no smell. No animal smell. No mildew. The air was a little stale, the way a house is stale when nobody's been home for a few hours. That was all.

On the kitchen table there was a piece of mail.

It was addressed to me. At my address. With my name on it.

It was a phone bill. From the company we use. For last month.

I don't know how long I stood there. Probably under a minute. I felt my body decide to leave before my head caught up. I walked out of that kitchen and off that porch and down that drive and I got in my truck and I drove home, and the whole time my hands were shaking so bad I couldn't grip the wheel right.

I got home and my wife was in the kitchen making dinner. She turned around and smiled at me. Asked how I was feeling. Said she'd called and left me lunch in the fridge but I must've gone out because the truck was gone when she came by on her break.

She works at the credit union in town. She comes home for lunch sometimes. I knew this. I have known this for eleven years.

I said yeah, I went out for some air.

She said good, fresh air is good for you, and turned back to the stove.

I went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed and I tried to think. I tried to think about the phone bill on that kitchen table twelve miles out on the county road. About how it got there. About who put it there. About what they wanted.

And then I heard her in the kitchen, humming. The same thing she always hums. A song from a movie we saw on our second date. She has hummed that song for eleven years.

And I realized I had not heard her hum it since last Tuesday.

The Tuesday I first saw the porch light.

I'm writing this from the bathroom. I locked the door. I can hear her in the kitchen. She's still humming. Dinner smells like dinner. Everything in this house looks like my house.

But the bathroom mirror, the one over the sink, the one I've shaved in front of every morning for eleven years it has a small chip in the bottom corner. My wife dropped a curling iron in the sink in 2019 and it bounced up and chipped the mirror. I remember the day. I remember her crying because she thought I'd be mad about a mirror.

The mirror in front of me right now does not have a chip.

She just called my name from the kitchen. Said dinner's ready.

I'm going to have to come out of this bathroom.

​

I don't know if this is the right sub for this. I'm posting from my phone in my car in the Harris Teeter parking lot because I can't be in the house right now. If a mod takes this down I understand. I just need to get it out of my head.

My daughter is three. Her name is Hallie. She started at a new daycare in August because I got promoted and the hours at the old place didn't line up anymore. The new place is fine. Licensed. Clean. Ms. Tasha runs it out of a converted ranch off the old highway and there's six kids and a fenced yard and a rabbit named Butter. Hallie loves it. She cried when I picked her up the first week because she didn't want to leave.

About three weeks in she started saying a word I didn't know.

*Moppin.*

That's how she said it. Mop-in. Two syllables. She'd say it in the car on the way home. She'd say it in the bath. I asked her what moppin was and she said *moppin is the man.* I asked her what man and she said *the man who lives in the ceiling.*

I laughed. I want you to know I laughed. Kids make stuff up. My nephew had an imaginary friend who was a refrigerator for a whole year.

I asked Ms. Tasha about it at pickup. I said hey, does Hallie have a friend at school named Moppin, or is that something from a show you all watch. Ms. Tasha's face did a thing. She said no, honey, we don't watch anything like that. She said it quick. She changed the subject to snack schedules.

That night Hallie was in the tub and she said *moppin says you have pretty hair mama.*

I sat on the bathroom floor and I said baby, where did you hear about moppin. I said it light. I did not want her to feel my hand shaking on the edge of the tub. She said *at school.* I said who told you. She said *moppin did.*

I said moppin goes to your school.

She said *moppin goes where I go.*

I pulled her out of the tub early. She cried. I put her in her pajamas and I put her in my bed, not hers, and I locked the bedroom door which I have not done since her father left. I lay awake until almost four. She slept like a stone.

The next morning I kept her home. I called Ms. Tasha. I said I needed to ask her something strange and she said okay. I said has a child at your daycare ever talked about someone named Moppin. There was a pause that went on too long. She said — and I am writing this down the way she said it — she said *that name hasn't come up in a long time, sugar.*

I said what does that mean.

She said she'd call me back.

She did not call me back.

I drove over there at pickup time the next day even though Hallie wasn't there. Ms. Tasha came out to the car. She would not let me in the house. She said *some of the kids over the years have had a friend they talk about.* She said *it's never been a problem.* She said *if Hallie is upset by it, you don't need to bring her back.* She had her arms crossed the whole time and she was standing between me and the front door like I was going to try to get past her.

I said is there something in your house.

She said *baby, there's something in a lot of houses.*

I have not taken Hallie back.

That was eleven days ago. I thought — okay. Whatever it was, it stayed there. She's home. She's safe. She hasn't said moppin in a week.

Last night I went in to check on her before I went to bed. She does this thing where she kicks her blanket off and I always tuck her back in. I opened the door and she was sitting up. In the dark. Facing the corner by her closet. The corner where the ceiling meets the wall.

She was whispering.

I said Hallie, baby, it's late. Lay down.

She said *I know mama, I'm telling him goodnight.*

I said telling who.

She said *moppin came with us.*

I turned the light on. The corner was a corner. Paint and drywall and a little smudge where she'd touched it with a crayon months ago.

She said *don't turn the light on, you'll scare him.*

I picked her up and took her into my bed and she fell asleep on my chest. I stayed awake.

At some point around 3 a.m. I heard something in her room. A soft sound. Like somebody letting out a breath they'd been holding a long time. One breath. Then nothing.

I got up and I got her dressed while she was still half asleep and I put her in the car and I drove to the grocery store parking lot because I couldn't think where else to go and the lot has lights and people.

I'm writing this from the driver's seat. She's in her car seat eating crackers. She's fine. She's happy. She asked me why we're at the store so early and I told her we were going to get doughnuts.

I don't know what to do. I can't go to the police. What would I say. I can't call her pediatrician because I already know how that conversation goes. I thought about calling my mother but my mother would say things I can't hear right now.

Hallie just looked up at me from her car seat. She had cracker crumbs on her chin. She smiled.

She said *mama, moppin says stop typing.*

I have not told her what I'm doing on my phone.