Breathing Through the Cracks

When I was a child, I believed my family could survive anything.

That is the lie children tell themselves when laughter still carries through the house.

My mother used to dance barefoot through the kitchen while dinner simmered on the stove. My father carried me through the hallway on his shoulders while I laughed hard enough to lose my breath. During storms we gathered beneath blankets in the living room while rain crawled crookedly down the windows and television light flickered softly across the walls.

Back during those years, the house still felt warm.

Human.

Safe.

I revisit those memories often now, though part of me wishes I couldn’t. The pleasant ones always arrive first. Gentle. Familiar. Every good recollection eventually guides me toward the rot waiting beneath it.

The shouting.

The drinking.

Doors slamming hard enough to shake dust from picture frames.

I was sixteen when my family finally began collapsing in full view of itself.

At first my parents tried disguising it. Arguments stayed buried behind closed doors. Bills vanished into drawers whenever I entered the kitchen. My father started sleeping on the couch while my mother cried in the bathroom with the faucet running.

But homes absorb misery quickly.

Eventually resentment seeped into every room.

Dinner stopped happening together. Dust gathered across shelves my mother once cleaned obsessively. My father wandered through the house smelling of stale beer and cigarettes while exhaustion dragged beneath his eyes like wet sandbags. Some nights he disappeared until morning. Other nights he returned furious at existence itself.

Every evening ended the same way.

Fighting.

Sometimes I heard glass shatter.

Sometimes my mother screamed.

Other nights frightened me worse because neither of them spoke at all. The quiet carried tension severe enough to make the walls feel strained.

I learned how to disappear inside my bedroom.

I would shut the door, put on my headphones, and turn my Walkman loud enough to blur their voices into distant vibrations. It never fully drowned them out. Fragments still slipped through the music.

My mother sobbing.

My father cursing.

Furniture dragging violently across the floor.

Over time, I stopped feeling like their son.

I became another item inside the house.

A lamp near the wall.

A chair nobody notices until it blocks the doorway.

Depression settled into me slowly after that. Looking back, I doubt anyone realized because sadness had already become the natural atmosphere of the home. I stopped sleeping properly. Stopped talking much at school. Some mornings I stared into the bathroom mirror and barely recognized the hollow-eyed stranger staring back.

The frightening part was how quickly hopelessness became familiar.

Not easier.

Just familiar.

The night with the knife arrived shortly afterward.

I remember every detail clearly.

The candle beside my bed.

Incense smoke twisting lazily toward the ceiling fan.

Rain tapping softly against my bedroom window.

I remember sitting there thinking how strange it was that nobody would notice if I vanished.

Not right away.

That realization hollowed me out worse than anything else ever had.

I walked into the kitchen while my mother sat alone at the table staring toward the television without actually watching it. Flickering blue light painted exhaustion across her face. She looked worn down beyond repair.

I opened the silverware drawer.

The metal rattled sharply through the kitchen.

Nothing.

Not even a glance.

I grabbed the steak knife and slammed the drawer shut hard enough to make the utensils jump.

Still nothing.

That hurt more than I expected.

I stood there another moment waiting for her to acknowledge me, but she remained trapped somewhere deep inside herself.

So I walked back down the hallway carrying the knife.

My bedroom door slammed behind me hard enough to shake the frame.

From deeper in the house, my father shouted for me to keep it down.

That was all.

No footsteps approached.

No concern followed.

Nobody came.

I sat on the edge of my bed and placed the blade gently across my wrist. My hand trembled violently despite how numb the rest of me felt. The steel pressed cold against my skin while my pulse hammered beneath the edge.

That was when something struck the window.

Crack.

I turned instantly.

At first I thought a branch had hit the glass, but the storm had already passed. Nothing outside moved.

Yet the darkness beyond the window looked wrong.

Not darker.

Denser.

The streetlight across the road had vanished behind a mass of blackness too heavy to feel natural. I stared toward it while pressure gathered slowly inside my chest, similar to the sensation before panic fully takes hold.

Except this felt deliberate.

The blackness near the glass tightened slightly.

Every muscle in my body locked rigid.

Something stood outside my window.

Even now I struggle describing it because memory refuses to hold the shape together for very long. Whenever I attempt recalling details, the image slips apart like disturbed smoke.

But I remember the feeling.

It knew I was looking directly at it.

And somehow—

that terrified me less than it should have.

Adrenaline flooded my body so violently my hands began shaking. I stood from the bed and pointed the knife toward the window with both hands like a frightened child attempting to threaten a thunderstorm.

For the first time in months, I screamed for my mother.

She burst into the room seconds later.

The instant she entered, the darkness outside disappeared.

The streetlight returned.

Rainwater gleamed softly across the pavement again.

Nothing stood beyond the glass.

My mother looked at me, followed my stare toward the knife, and froze.

Confusion collapsed into fear across her face.

“What are you doing?”

Her voice sounded thin and fragile.

I tried explaining about the thing outside the window, but the words tangled together uselessly. She barely heard them anyway. Her eyes never left the blade in my hand.

She approached slowly with her palms open.

“Give me the knife, baby.”

I kept trying to explain.

She kept asking for the knife.

Eventually I understood what she knew she had interrupted.

I handed it to her and sat heavily onto the mattress while my entire body shook uncontrollably.

Neither of us spoke a single word.

The next morning she tried explaining everything to my father.

He reacted exactly the way I expected.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered from the kitchen. “The kid’s unstable.”

I stood frozen in the hallway listening.

A moment later came the part that stayed with me.

“Maybe everybody in this godforsaken house has finally lost their damn mind!”

The quiet afterward hurt worse than the sentence itself.

Because my mother never defended me.

I think resentment truly rooted itself inside me during that moment.

Not toward her.

Toward all of it.

The house.

The fighting.

The suffocating misery swallowing us room by room.

After that night, the house began feeling aware of us.

I started noticing sounds moving through empty rooms long after my parents had gone to bed. Slow creaks crossing the hallway floorboards. Wet scratching buried inside the walls. Some nights my bedroom doorknob rattled softly once or twice before falling still again.

I blamed stress.

That explanation survived four days.

My father returned home drunk near midnight on the final night I ever saw him. Their argument started almost immediately. Dishes slammed in the kitchen while accusations tore back and forth between them like thrown knives.

I lay on my bed listening to music through my headphones, trying to bury their voices beneath static and bass.

Abruptly the song slowed.

The singer’s voice dragged unnaturally lower.

The music warped.

A violent burst of static ripped through the headphones, followed by a sound I still hear during sleepless nights.

Screaming.

Not one voice.

Many.

Long agonized shrieks tangled together beneath violent clicking noises that crackled through the speakers like bones snapping underwater.

I tore the headphones off instantly.

My cassette tape had been dragged apart inside the Walkman. Long strands of mangled tape hung from the player like black entrails.

That was when my father screamed.

A real scream.

I sprang from the bed and opened my bedroom door—

—and saw him hanging in the hallway.

His body hovered several feet above the floor while invisible force crushed his throat. His face had turned dark red. Veins bulged violently along his neck. His boots hammered against the hallway wall in frantic uneven impacts while his fingers clawed helplessly at empty air.

My mother stood nearby.

Frozen solid.

Not screaming.

Not moving.

My father’s eyes found mine.

I’ll remember that expression until the day I die.

Absolute terror.

Not confusion.

False Recognition.

As though he suddenly understood something dreadful had seeped out of me and lashed out into the environment.

His body twisted sideways violently.

His wedding ring scraped against his throat.

The sound of him gargling snapped my mother from her paralysis.

She screamed.

Instantly, my father dropped.

His body struck the hallway floor so hard the walls trembled. He rolled onto his side choking violently while my mother collapsed beside him sobbing hysterically.

A second later she looked up at me.

“You did this!”

I remember backing away slowly.

“What did you do to him?!”

I could not speak.

Because my father was still staring directly at me with terror pouring from his eyes like he truly believed I had caused it.

I shut myself inside my bedroom after that.

At some point during the night, the house fell completely still.

When morning arrived, my father was gone.

His clothes.

His boots.

His cigarettes.

Everything.

My mother stood alone in the kitchen staring into a cold cup of coffee.

“He’s not coming back,” she said quietly.

She sounded emptied out.

I noticed immediately that the house felt different without him there.

Not calmer.

Starving.

Rain returned later that evening.

Without my Walkman, the bedroom felt oppressive while I tried falling asleep. The storm weakened gradually until only scattered droplets tapped against the roof outside.

That was when another sound joined them.

Tap…

Tap..

Tap.

Water striking wood.

Inside the room.

I sat upright slowly.

The sound came from the corner beside my closet.

At first I thought exhaustion was distorting my vision.

A second later the darkness gathered inward.

A figure crouched impossibly low to the floor with limbs folded together at grotesque angles. One leg bent sharply backward while the other dragged uselessly behind it with a wet scraping noise.

The smell reached me next.

Rot.

Blood.

Standing water forgotten somewhere without sunlight.

The thing shifted slightly, and liquid dripped steadily from beneath its hanging jaw.

My heart nearly stopped.

The creature remained motionless after realizing I could see it.

Watching me.

Its enormous hand twitched once against the floorboards.

A moment later it dragged itself across the room.

Its ruined limbs pulled the rest of its body behind it in crooked jerking motions while thick black fluid streaked across the floorboards beneath it.

A choking sound rattled deep inside its throat.

Not aggressive.

Suffering.

Like drowning slowly.

I screamed for my mother.

The creature lurched toward the bed so violently its limbs folded beneath it.

My bedroom door burst open.

My mother rushed inside—

—and saw it.

Her scream filled the room.

The creature stopped inches from the bed and turned its head toward her.

For one unbearable moment, nobody moved.

A second later the thing folded downward and vanished beneath the bed in a blur of snapping limbs and scraping bone.

I launched myself from the mattress directly into my mother’s arms.

She dragged me into the hallway.

Behind us, my bedroom door exploded inward.

The creature came crawling after us on all fours.

Its limbs cracked violently beneath its weight while it raced down the hallway with impossible speed. Thick black blood splattered across the walls behind it.

My mother fought desperately with the front door lock while I screamed behind her.

The creature reached us just as the door swung open.

Its hand wrapped around my ankle.

Pain detonated through my leg instantly.

Burning agony flooded through the bone itself like heated metal forced beneath my skin.

I looked down and saw its face inches from mine.

Its eyes were pale and dead.

Its jaw hung crooked beneath strands of black saliva and blood.

And somehow—

it looked miserable.

My mother pulled me with everything she had.

The creature crossed the doorway—

—and shrieked.

Smoke curled from its flesh instantly.

It released my ankle and recoiled backward into the darkness of the house.

A moment later came the voice.

Soft.

Calm.

“You gave me a place to rot.”

The hallway fell still.

Rain tapped softly against the porch roof.

“I was here long before you noticed me… seeping through the cracks. Yearning in the darkness.”

Something dragged slowly across the floorboards deeper inside the house.

“And long after you leave…”

The voice lowered further.

“I will find you.”

My mother slammed the front door shut hard enough to rattle the frame.

We abandoned everything that night.

The house.

The photographs.

Our clothes.

Every trace of the life we once lived.

We never returned.

My father never returned either.

He had gone missing.

My mother refuses to speak about that house now. Whenever I bring it up, her expression empties completely, as though part of her never escaped from it.

As for me—

there are nights when I still wake with burning pain wrapped around my ankle so vividly I can feel its fingers tightening around the bone.

During heavy storms, I sometimes discover thin trails of black moisture gathered along the baseboards near my bed.

By morning—

they are always gone… for now.