24 Oct Kaleidoscope

Part I

I bought the farmhouse because of the windows. Not the charm, not the space, not the price—though all three were part of the pitch—but the windows. They were tall and old, the kind that rattled in the wind and caught sunlight in their glass like it was alive. When we moved in, I told myself that light was the point of it all. A house full of light could make grief feel smaller. I told myself I needed and deserved that after Elise died.

Five years later, I’m not sure if I meant it, or if I was already lying to myself.

When the doctors first told me there’d been complications during delivery, and that I’d be going home alone with my newborn daughter, it didn’t fully sink in right away. I didn’t understand what that truly meant until I had to rock her to sleep one night, sitting in a dark apartment that smelled like antiseptic and flowers gone bad. As I rocked her in my arms, I promised her that someday we’d start over somewhere brighter. I kept that promise, but if I knew then what I know now, maybe I wouldn’t have.

These days, most mornings start the same. The radiator ticks awake, the sky comes up pale and wet, and Lila sits at the kitchen table with her crayons scattered like broken glass around her cereal bowl. She hums when she draws, tunelessly, the same way Elise used to when she cooked.

That morning, I noticed she’d chosen unusual colors again.

“Grass isn’t supposed to be white,” I told her. “Is that supposed to be snow?”

She didn’t look up. “No.”

“Oh? What is it then?”

She pressed harder, the wax squealing against paper. “It’s the in-between part. You just can’t see it yet.”

I smiled, the way you do when you don’t want to discourage a child’s imagination. I’d learned that lesson quickly: never challenge the logic of a five-year-old. They live in a different world, one with rules that shift like sand. But the way she said in-between stuck with me.

After breakfast, I rinsed our dishes and looked out the window above the sink. The sky was already brimming with rainclouds, and for a second I thought I saw the reflection of another figure beside me. A flicker of movement that didn’t belong. I turned my head, half expecting to see Lila standing there, but she was still at the table, talking to her drawing.

She does that sometimes—talks to her pictures as if they’re listening. I asked her about it once. She said she wasn’t talking to them, but through them. I didn’t press.

When I left for work, she was crouched under the window, tracing her hand over the wooden sill like she was feeling for something.

* * * * * *

Evenings are the quietest part of the day out here.

The farmhouse sits at the end of a dirt road that turns to mud when it rains. Beyond that, fields of corn stretch to the horizon, then blur into forest. The closest neighbor is a quarter mile off, a retired carpenter who keeps to himself. It’s peaceful, but that peace can turn on you if you’re not careful. You start to notice things—sounds you shouldn’t, shapes in the periphery.

Lila says the house “talks in colors.” I thought she meant creaks and groans, but one night she asked me why the air in the hallway was “green like mint.”

She was supposed to be asleep. I found her standing by the mirror at the end of the hall, barefoot in her nightgown, staring at her reflection.

“Back to bed,” I said softly, not wanting to scare her.

She pointed at the mirror. “They were here a minute ago.”

“Who?”

“The ones who live in the glass.”

I picked her up, feeling her heartbeat against my shoulder. “There are no people there. It’s just us, kiddo.”

She didn’t argue, but when I tucked her in, she whispered something that turned my blood to ice.

“They don’t like it when we call them people.”

I asked what she meant, but her eyes were already closed. I stood there a while, listening to the wind howling outside and something scraping against the glass. I told myself it was a branch.

That’s when I first felt it, that prickle under the skin that says you’ve been noticed. That you’re being watched.

* * * * * *

The next day, I caught Lila drawing again, but this time she’d pinned her paper to the window. I told her it’d ruin the glass, but she ignored me, filling the page with jagged streaks of color I didn’t recognize. The crayons didn’t seem capable of producing those hues—shimmering, glowing shades of pink and green.

“What’s this one called?” I asked, feigning interest.

“Rainbow glass,” she said. “It’s what the world looked like before it went to sleep.”

Before it went to sleep.

That line sat in me all day, even after I dropped her off at school and drove to work. I couldn’t shake the image—an entire world closing its eyes, dreaming itself into another shape.

When I came home that evening, the drawing was gone. The tape still clung to the glass, but the paper had vanished. I checked the floor, the counters, even the trash bin, but found no sign of them. I told myself I must’ve moved it earlier and forgotten. But when I went upstairs to check on her, I found the drawing folded neatly under her pillow. She was asleep, breathing slowly and evenly. I started to take it, but she stirred and murmured, “Don’t. They’ll get lost again.”

I froze.

“Who will?”

She smiled faintly in her sleep. “The colors.”

Later that night, I sat in the living room, the only light coming from the lamp beside my chair. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t think. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the reflection from the window earlier that morning—the second figure beside me.

I stood, went into the kitchen, and stared out that same window again. My reflection looked pale and drawn. There was no one beside me this time. But as I leaned closer, I noticed something strange in the glass. A faint shimmer of color, just beneath the surface. It pulsed once and then faded.

When I turned away, I thought I heard Lila’s voice from upstairs, soft and happy. She was talking to someone.

I went to check on her.

“Sweetheart,” I asked, “who are you talking to?”

“The ones who live in the glass.”

I froze.

“Don’t worry, Daddy,” she said, giggling. “They like you.”

Part II

Something was wrong with the crayons.

Not in the way she used them, but the way they looked afterward, like they’d been bled dry. Wax worn to translucent husks, colors that never quite stayed the same shade twice. One morning, I found her sitting cross-legged on the floor with a sheet of paper in front of her, drawing circles inside circles, each one filled with shifting hues that seemed to move when I wasn’t looking directly at them.

“Hey, Lila,” I said, crouching beside her, “you’re going to run out of paper soon.”

She didn’t answer. Her tongue poked out between her lips, that intense little expression she wore when concentrating.

“Hey,” I said again, softer this time. “What are you making?”

Without looking up, she said, “It’s not what I’m making. It’s what they’re showing me.”

I glanced at the page.

The colors were wrong. Not in the artistic sense, but wrong as in they weren’t meant to exist. My brain couldn’t decide what I was looking at. There was a pale blue that looked gray from one angle and purple from another. A yellow that darkened like wet paint whenever I blinked. The shapes within the circles bent inward on themselves, and for a second, I felt dizzy, like I was falling through something that wasn’t there.

“Who’s showing you, honey?”

“The ones who live in between.”

I wanted to ask what that meant, but I didn’t. There’s a point where a question stops being innocent, and I was too afraid to know which side of that line I was on.

That night, I had a dream, or maybe it was something else. I was standing in the kitchen, looking through the window into the fields, where the moon hung low in the sky, swollen and pale. The corn shimmered silver, bending in all directions at once. I remember thinking the air looked too thick.

Then I saw Lila out there, barefoot in her nightgown, standing in the middle of the rows.

She was holding one of her drawings, the paper flapping soundlessly in the wind.

When I called out to her, the sound didn’t carry. The fields stretched, rippling away from me like a reflection disturbed by touch. And in the glass of the kitchen window, I saw something behind my own reflection, an outline made of colors I didn’t recognize, shifting and watching.

I woke before I could move.

* * * * * *

The next morning, Lila was already up. She was staring at the refrigerator door where a dozen of her drawings hung under mismatched magnets.

“Why’d you put them all together like that?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“They fit that way,” she said. “You just don’t see the rest yet.”

I looked closer. The pictures formed a pattern, subtle at first, lines and swirls that carried from one page to the next, like puzzle pieces forming a greater image. When I took a step back, I saw something hidden in the arrangement. A shape.

It almost looked like a person.

That was also the first time I noticed the humming. It was a faint, electrical drone, coming from the light fixture above us. I’d heard it before, but this was different. It pulsed in slow rhythm, matching the rise and fall of Lila’s voice as she sang to herself under her breath.

“Lila,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, “where’d you learn that song?”

She tilted her head, still humming. “I didn’t learn it. I remembered it.”

“Remembered it from where?”

She smiled. “From before.”

* * * * * *

After dropping her off at school, I sat in my truck in the parking lot longer than I should have, staring through the windshield at the pale winter sky. The color of it reminded me of her drawings.

That’s when the thought came, small, quiet, and absurd: What if she wasn’t imagining any of it?

That evening, I went to check on her before bed. Her night-light threw faint amber light across her walls, which were now covered in a bevy of taped drawings. She was awake, whispering softly.

“Who’re you talking to?” I asked from the doorway.

“Them,” she said without hesitation. “They like it when I draw. It helps them stay remembered.”

Her phrasing always struck me as strange. I sat on the edge of her bed and brushed a strand of hair from her face. “You’ve got to sleep, sweetheart.”

“I know,” she said. “But they don’t.”

I told her she was just overtired, that maybe she was dreaming before she even fell asleep.

She frowned at me. “You can’t dream before you sleep, Daddy.”

Then she rolled over and pulled the blanket over her head, and that was the end of it.

Or rather, it should have been.

* * * * * *

Later that night, I went downstairs to get a drink of water. The house was quiet, but not still. The hum from the light fixture was back again, low and steady. I stood under it and listened. It wasn’t just sound. It had tone and rhythm, like something was breathing through the wiring.

The kitchen window glowed faintly, though the outside was pitch-black. I stepped closer, thinking maybe it was moonlight through the clouds. But as I leaned in, I realized the glow wasn’t coming from outside. It emanated from inside the glass itself. Soft hues, swirling just beneath the surface. Pink, blue, green. The same shifting, impossible colors that Lila had drawn.

I touched the glass. It felt warm. And somewhere upstairs, I heard her voice.

“Daddy,” she whispered, though she couldn’t have known I was listening.

Then, faintly, another voice answered, echoing hers a heartbeat later.

“Daddy.”

It was uncanny—nearly identical—but it wasn’t hers.

I stood frozen, hand still against the warm pane of glass, my reflection rippling like water disturbed.

When I finally turned off the light, I could still see color bleeding faintly in the darkness.

Part III

The first time I tried to photograph one of Lila’s new drawings, my phone didn’t know how to process it.

It should’ve been simple: point, tap, done. But the screen stuttered, like the image kept slipping a fraction to one side and then snapping back. The camera clicked and saved something anyway. When I opened the photo, it was wrong. Blocks of gray and lime and violet had broken the picture into a spiral, like the pixels had been rearranged by a drunk cartographer. I took another and got the same result. The file name appeared, the thumbnail looked normal for a blink, and then it collapsed into a jumble of little squares.

I told myself it was the phone. Then I tried the school copier.

The printout jammed. When I cleared the tray, half a page slid out, a smear of color and lines that formed the suggestion of a mouthless face, with eyes like ovals cut from smoked glass.

I fed the jammed half into the shred bin and did my best to put it behind me, as unsettled as I was.

* * * * * *

Her drawings changed when we weren’t watching. I know how that sounds, and I know how memory lies. But I started taking photos of them anyway—dumb, blurry shots just to be sure—before the camera started failing me. In the morning, a page on the refrigerator was one thing; by evening, the same page had new lines, a different tilt, and a spiral that hadn’t been there before. Once, a color inverted across the whole page, as if it had been flipped to its negative without anyone touching it.

I accused myself first. Maybe I’d missed details. Maybe I was overtired.

I tried an experiment. After Lila went to bed, I took the newest drawing from the fridge—a lattice of staircases that bent back into themselves—and sealed it in my desk drawer in the living room, under a tangle of rubber bands, an old stapler, and tax folders. I locked the drawer.

The next morning, the drawing was taped above Lila’s bed.

She was still asleep, hair fanned over her pillow, the tape pocked with little fingerprints. The page itself had changed again. All the staircases now led to the same small square at the center. Someone had drawn a door there. Just a simple rectangle, with no handle.

I stood in the doorway and whispered her name. She rolled toward me, squinting at the light, and smiled.

“Did you take the picture from Daddy’s drawer?” I asked.

“It didn’t like the darkness,” she said. “It found the light.”

* * * * * *

The next set came fast. She filled three pages in an afternoon while I graded papers in the kitchen. I kept getting pulled from the stack by the sound of her crayons. They made a noise I don’t remember them making before, little squeals and soft rasps that didn’t match the speed of her hand. Her wrist moved slowly. The marks arrived quickly.

When she finished, she spread the pages across the floor in a row. The first was a field of tiny squares, each with its own color, none of them repeating. The second was a long tunnel of diamond shapes layered inside one another, the edges slightly off so they seemed to shiver if you stared too long. The third looked simple: a broad horizon line, a box of a house, a circle of a sun, and the ring of a pond. A child’s drawing. But the light in the scene was strange. The sun glowed where it shouldn’t. The shadows under the roof pointed the wrong way. The pond reflected a sky that didn’t match the one above it.

“Where is this?” I asked.

“It’s here,” she said. “But the other way.”

“What other way?”

“Sideways,” she said, and moved her hand through the air like she was parting curtains.

* * * * * *

I started hearing her at night, the whispering. At first, I thought she was talking in her sleep. Then I realized she was answering someone.

The baby monitor had been in a box since she turned three, but I unpacked it and plugged it in anyway. I sat on the floor in the hallway outside her room and listened to static. White noise rose and fell like distant surf. Every so often, her voice surfaced, a little echoing ripple, followed by a second version of the same word half a beat later, distorted, as if played back through tinny speakers. I told myself it was interference. I turned the monitor off and still heard it. I turned it back on, and the sound seemed to come from the wiring, the walls, the glass.

At some point, I knocked and opened her door. She was awake, lying on her stomach, coloring with the night-light behind her.

“You need sleep,” I said.

“Later,” she said without looking up. “They don’t forget as fast if I do it now.”

“Who are these people?”

She shrugged. “I told you, they’re not people.”

“Lila.”

She finally looked at me, more serious than I’d ever seen her. “They don’t like it when you call them that.”

I sat down on the floor beside her and watched her fill a circle with herringbone strokes until it began to resemble a tunnel. There was depth where there shouldn’t be. I pressed my palm to the carpet to steady myself and found it warmer than it should’ve been.

“Sweetheart,” I said, “where are they?”

She lifted her chin toward the closet door. “They’re on the other side of the glass. They say you can learn to look sideways, too.”

I reached for the closet handle and stopped. The mirror glued to that door had been there since before we moved in. Somewhere behind it was a slab of particle board and a closet full of winter coats and a box of Elise’s homemade scarves I hadn’t been able to give away. My hand hovered until I felt ridiculous and put it down again. I told her I was right across the hall if she needed me.

“Okay,” she said, already drawing again. “Don’t be scared.”

I told her I wasn’t.

She knew I was.

* * * * * *

The next day after school, I tried to talk to her teacher. I kept it careful—how was she doing socially, creatively, any unusual behavior? The teacher smiled and said Lila was kind, focused, and unusually patient for her age. “She likes working alone,” the teacher said. “Her drawings are… detailed. We don’t always know what they are.”

Back at home, I stood in front of the refrigerator and looked at the arrangement again. The pages formed a path, I was sure of it now. Not a line you’d follow with your finger, but a progression. If I slid from one page to the next with my eyes half-lidded, a movement revealed itself in the color, like watching a time-lapse of frost growing across a window.

I took one page down just to break the spell. It was the simple one, of the house, pond, and sun. I studied the shadow lines again and the unfamiliar way the light lay on the roof, as if the sun were a lamp held too close and too low. When I put it back, the magnet didn’t grab the metal. It stuck to the paper instead. I tugged and felt a little resistance. The sheet bent, and a crease ran through the house’s roof. In the crease, the crayon line glittered, a tiny thread of glass dust.

I washed my hands twice after touching it and tried not to think about why.

* * * * * *

The living room mirror was the first to blink.

It stood on the old oak dresser we’d brought down from upstairs, leaning against the wall. I sat in the armchair with a pile of grading and looked up in time to see my reflection move a moment late, just long enough to perturb me. Then it was normal again.

I set the papers aside and stared straight at it, breathing slowly. Nothing further happened. I looked down at the stack, turned one page, and saw the motion again in the corner of my eye. I kept my gaze on the papers and watched my reflection continue to sit very still while, at the edge, a small hand slipped into the frame and pressed flat against the mirror’s glass.

My throat tightened. I turned my head and saw only myself. The mirror showed me a tired man and a room that needed dusting.

I stood and crossed to the dresser. Up close, the glass didn’t show a handprint. It showed an oval area a shade darker than the rest, as if breath had fogged it from the other side. By the time I dragged my fingers across it, it was gone.

“Mom would’ve hated that,” I said out loud to no one, because talking to the absence sometimes kept it from sinking its teeth in. “Smudges on the mirror.”

From the hallway, Lila said, “She doesn’t mind now.”

I didn’t hear her feet. I didn’t hear her door. She was just there, halfway between the light and dark, hair mussed and pajamas twisted from sleep.

“How long have you been awake?” I asked.

“Since before,” she said, and smiled in a way that made her look both older and younger. “Can I show you something?”

* * * * * *

She took my hand and led me to the kitchen. The window above the sink was black glass. The porch light was out. She climbed onto the stool we kept for her and pressed her palm to the pane.

“Look sideways,” she said.

I tried. I don’t know how else to describe it. I kept my eyes on the dark and slid my attention, like the way you pretend not to stare at someone on the bus. At first, there was only my reflection and the faint yellow of the room behind me. Then the black took on depth. The pane didn’t feel like a flat boundary anymore. It felt like a shallow box full of slow-moving water. Colors rose inside it like bruises blooming on delicate skin. The darkest ones came first, pushing out toward us, then retreating when I blinked.

I felt a tap from her fingers on my wrist, a little insistence. “Don’t blink,” she said. “They’re shy.”

Something pale moved in the lower right of the pane. It wasn’t a figure, but rather a structure, with angles within angles, a delicate cage of lines flexing like ribs. The longer I held my gaze, the more it clarified, and the harder it was to keep breathing evenly. My chest ached.

I blinked and it disappeared. The pane went black again.

Lila let go of my wrist and looked satisfied. “See?”

“I… saw something,” I said.

“They were trying to be friendly.”

“Who?”

She tilted her head and tapped the glass twice with her fingertip. “The ones who remember. They like that you show people how to make pictures.”

“I teach teenagers how to draw,” I said.

She hopped down from the stool, already losing interest in my confusion. “They don’t mind if you don’t get it yet. They said to tell you that you almost know how.”

“How to what?”

“How to look,” she said, and padded back down the hall.

* * * * * *

I lay awake for hours. I got up once to check the porch, to make sure the lock was turned. The cold night air cut through the door’s seams and made my teeth chatter. Through the window, I stared at the field until it became just a field again and the sky started leaking color at the edges.

On my way back to bed, I passed the refrigerator and stopped. The pages had shifted. There was no new tape, no new paper, just a slight rotation of a sheet near the bottom and, above it, a subtle slide. The figure hidden in the arrangement had sharpened. It stood where the paths converged. The face was the same: eyes dark and wide, the place where a mouth should be left blank.

I lifted a hand without thinking and touched the blank place. The page felt cold. My fingertip tingled. A faint hiss came from somewhere inside the kitchen.

Instinctively, I went to the sink and rinsed my finger. When I came back, one more small thing had changed: a pencil line had appeared at the bottom of the face, as thin as thread, the start of a mouth that hadn’t quite opened. I turned away before it finished.

I told myself that Lila and I needed help. A professional who would name what this was in small, careful words and walk us back to a world that obeyed its own rules. The name came up from somewhere: a child psychologist in town I’d heard about from another teacher. Lockhart.

I wrote it on a sticky note and pressed it to the fridge, blocking the place where the mouth would eventually be.

From down the hall, Lila’s voice carried, soft and sleepy. “It won’t help to cover it, Daddy.”

I didn’t answer. The hum in the light deepened, then settled.

When I finally slept, I dreamed of the door in the center of the staircases. It had no handle on my side. A glow came through the edges, thin as fishing line.

Part IV

I don’t know what I expected from a shrink’s office, but it wasn’t what I found.

The place looked more like a daycare than a clinic—pastel walls, shelves of wooden toys, drawings hung with tape instead of frames. It smelled faintly of coffee and Play-Doh. Safe, in that manufactured way institutions try to be safe.

Dr. Karen Lockhart met us in the waiting area. She was in her forties and bright-eyed, wearing a blue cardigan and a polite, overused smile. The kind teachers and social workers wear after years of repetition.

“Hi, Lila,” she said warmly, crouching to my daughter’s height. “Your dad tells me you’re quite the artist.”

Lila hid behind my leg, clutching her sketchpad.

“She gets shy with new people,” I said.

“That’s all right. So do I.”

The session was supposed to last an hour. I sat in the waiting area, nursing lukewarm coffee from a paper cup while rain streaked the windows. I could hear their voices faintly down the hall, Lila’s high and soft, the doctor’s calm and steady. Every few minutes came the scrape of crayons against paper.

When they finally emerged, Lockhart was pale.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” she asked.

I followed her to her office. She shut the door halfway, leaving it ajar as a show of transparency. The space was small, filled with color charts and children’s artwork.

“She’s… fascinating,” Lockhart said carefully. “Very bright. Very verbal for her age. But she says some things that are… well…”

“Strange,” I finished.

Lockhart smiled uneasily. “She mentioned something about people who live in the glass?”

I nodded. “She’s been saying that at home, too.”

“I see.” Lockhart tapped her pen against a notepad. “Has she experienced any recent changes? Family, environment, sleep?”

“No. Nothing new.”

“Has she had any… unusual dreams?”

“She doesn’t tell me much about them. But she’s been drawing more. It’s like she’s… remembering something.”

Lockhart hesitated before writing anything down. “She said the same thing to me. That she’s ‘remembering’ the world ‘before it fell asleep.’”

The words hit me like cold water.

“She’s said that to you, too?”

“She has.” Lockhart forced a small laugh. “Kids pick up phrases. She might’ve heard it from you.”

“I didn’t say it first,” I told her.

Her pen stilled, and for a moment, neither of us spoke. Outside, thunder rolled across the valley.

* * * * * *

That night, I tried to convince myself I was being paranoid. Kids repeat things. Psychologists act surprised to get you to open up. Nothing more.

But just before midnight, my phone buzzed with a voicemail.

“Mr. Kline,” Lockhart said, her voice trembling slightly, “I’m sorry to call so late. I just… I can’t sleep. I need to ask—has Lila ever mentioned anything about lakes? Or… or my father?”

My stomach tightened.

She continued, “She said something this afternoon, something I didn’t tell you earlier. She said, ‘You dream about the lake, but he’s not there anymore.’”

The message crackled. She took a breath.

“My father drowned in a lake when I was sixteen,” she whispered. “I’ve never told anyone that. Please, if anything else happens—”

The message ended there.

* * * * * *

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat in the living room with the lights off, staring at the rain dripping down the windows and listening to the distant peals of thunder. The reflections on the glass shimmered faintly, distorting the room into subtle waves.

From upstairs came a sound like soft humming. When I checked, I found Lila asleep in bed. Her hands were tucked under her cheek, her breathing steady. On her desk sat a new drawing, one I hadn’t seen before.

Dr. Lockhart’s office.

Every detail was there—the rainbow rug, the bookshelves, the artwork taped up, the framed diploma. And in the reflection of the office window, a second Dr. Lockhart stood behind the first, smiling. With no mouth.

I couldn’t look at it for more than a second. I turned it over, my hands shaking.

When I left her room, Lila mumbled in her sleep, “She’ll remember soon. Then they’ll come for her, too.”

* * * * * *

The next day, Dr. Lockhart canceled our follow-up. Her voicemail was short: “Something’s come up. I need to take a few days off. I’ll reach out next week.”

She never did. I called twice, but her office line went straight to an automated message: This number is temporarily unavailable.

By the third day, I stopped trying.

That evening, Lila was at the kitchen table, drawing again. I told her the doctor wasn’t feeling well, that we’d see her later.

“She’s gone,” Lila said matter-of-factly.

“Gone where?”

“Back through the glass. They remembered her.”

She said it matter-of-factly, as if she was explaining the rules of a game I didn’t understand.

The house felt different after that.

The silence had texture, a thickness, like the air before a storm. Every reflection seemed a shade too deep, as if the light inside them had layers. The bathroom mirror fogged up whenever we ran water, whether cold or hot. The TV screen, when turned off, showed faint colors pulsing beneath the black. I kept catching my reflection a second too late. And sometimes, just for an instant, I thought I saw Lila’s drawings in the glass—those impossible geometries and spirals, faint and alive, moving like veins beneath the surface.

When I tried to wipe them away, the glass felt warm.

That night, she woke me from the couch. Her small hand rested on my shoulder.

“Daddy,” she said softly, “they said it’s almost time.”

“Time for what?”

“To wake up.”

Her eyes reflected the light from the hall lamp. But behind that reflection, I thought I saw something else—a pattern of color, faint and shifting, like the memory of a sunrise I hadn’t lived through.

She smiled sleepily, crawled onto my lap, and fell asleep against me.

I didn’t move for hours.

* * * * * *

When the rain finally stopped, the glass panes in the house began to hum. Not all at once—first the window above the sink, then the bathroom mirror, then the TV screen. The sound was low and hollow, like wind passing through a flute.

Lila said it was “them whispering.”

I asked what they wanted.

She shrugged. “To be whole again.”

The hum lingered through the night, blending with the cicadas outside until I couldn’t tell which was which.

By morning, Dr. Lockhart’s office called back—but it wasn’t her voice. A receptionist told me she was “on leave indefinitely.”

When I asked why, there was a pause.

Then, quietly: “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but… she had some kind of breakdown, and checked herself into a psychiatric ward. She kept saying her reflection wouldn’t stop… smiling.”

I thanked her for her time and the information and ended the call.

I looked at Lila sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, coloring the same impossible shapes as always.

She didn’t look up, but she said, “She’s not scared anymore.”

I didn’t ask how she knew.

Part V

The clocks came next.

Not all of them—just enough to notice. The oven said 7:12 while the phone insisted on 7:09. The wall clock in the hallway hung stubbornly at 6:58 for what felt like five real minutes before leaping forward abruptly, as if embarrassed. I tapped the glass on each one, the way you do when you want something mechanical to repair itself. The second hands jittered, then behaved.

Lila ate her cereal without comment. Milk ringed the bowl in a shining meniscus that didn’t quite match the tilt of the table. I told myself I was just tired.

“Daddy?” she said. “If you hold still long enough, time stops trying to catch up.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“You know who,” she replied. Her shoulders rose and fell. “It’s easier to hear them in the morning.”

I kept a log after that. Grading went in one pile, the new notebook in another. I jotted down dates and times on each entry, little details I wouldn’t trust to memory in a week. The shadow of our backyard shed at noon didn’t align with the sun. The kitchen light hummed a whole step lower when Lila sang. My reflection yawned a fraction late.

I wrote it all down, then closed the notebook and tried to live like normal people do.

It lasted until dinner.

We were clearing plates. I set a drinking glass on the counter too close to the edge. It tipped, fell, and hit the tile with a sharp crack.

But the glass didn’t shatter.

It folded.

I watched the cylinder collapse into itself like a paper lantern wrenched by a fist—rings telescoping inward, ridges multiplying, spirals forming. When I knelt, the air smelled faintly sweet. On the floor lay a small puck the size of a cookie, ridged with concentric lines. I touched it. It was warm. It left a faint wet spot on my fingertips that evaporated under the kitchen light.

“Sometimes they forget how to be here,” Lila said. “It helps if you don’t stare.”

“What happens if I do?”

She considered. “It hurts.”

“Who?”

She looked at me like I’d asked why water is wet.

I told myself there was a simple explanation. There always is… until there isn’t.

I drove into town for much-needed replacement bulbs and came home with a hammer. Not because I intended to use it, but because I wanted the option. I set it on the dresser beside the living room mirror and stared at my face until my eyes crossed and the edges doubled.

That night, I dreamed of the hall mirror. The glass turned liquid, not the splashy kind, but the surface-tension kind, with a skin or film you could press your thumb against and see the thumbprint linger on. In the dream, something pressed back from the other side, the print wider and longer than mine. When I woke, my pillowcase was damp where I’d been clenching it.

Lila was at the foot of the bed, knees tucked to her chin. “They said you’re getting better at it.”

“At what?”

“Looking.”

* * * * * *

I tried not to use the mirrors. I shaved by memory. I brushed my teeth with my eyes closed. After I washed my hands, I stared at the floor as I dried them.

Of course, we still had the windows. I kept the curtains open during daylight because that’s what we bought this place for. But I closed them every night. I no longer wanted to see what was outside looking in.

“Don’t break anything,” Lila said as if warning me away from a live wire.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“They’ll only come back different.”

I glanced at the hammer on the dresser and moved it to a drawer.

* * * * * *

I lasted until the hallway.

The small mirror on the closet door had been harmless for years. Cheap glass glued to particleboard, warping at the edges where moisture got in. I caught it catching me wrong one too many times—my shoulder out of sync, my blink arriving late, a white flicker where Lila ought to be standing that melted when I turned.

I opened the drawer, retrieved the hammer, and returned to the mirror.

I swung.

The blow rang through the narrow space, thudding in the joists, the head of the hammer bouncing a little in my grip. A crack ran from top to bottom like a lightning bolt. Behind me, a sound rose—low at first, then higher.

I swung again. The crack branched. Triangles formed. One piece the size of my palm fell and struck the baseboard. It didn’t break. Instead, it slid inward, vanishing into the mirror as if the glass had swallowed it.

I froze, hammer midair.

“Daddy,” Lila said behind me, voice calm, “leave it.”

“It’s broken.”

“It won’t be.”

She was right. The fissures narrowed. The triangles knit. The split sealed until only a wavering seam remained, like a healed scar. When I raised the hammer again, my reflection didn’t mirror me. He stood empty-handed, breathing, and it took my breath one beat longer to arrive where his chest rose.

I put the hammer down.

“You don’t have to fix anything,” she said, and slid her hand into mine.

* * * * * *

When the storm finally broke, I decided we needed air. We drove south down County Road 12 until the fields sloped and the trees stood back from the ditch. I parked by the old Miller place and told Lila we were having a picnic. It was too cold to call it that, but kids forgive lies when juice and snacks are involved.

We crossed into the field. The corn had been harvested months ago, rows of stubble combed toward the horizon. Low clouds skimmed the far hills. The light had that washed-out winter quality that makes distance feel like a thing you could kneel down and touch.

Halfway out, the world sighed. I don’t know how else to say it. The ground under my boots softened, not mud-soft but mattress-soft, a give that made my ankles protest. The horizon drew a little closer and then farther away, as if we’d taken two brisk steps without moving. Lila didn’t wobble. She kept walking, humming that tune she couldn’t have learned anywhere.

“Lila?”

“It’s okay,” she said. “This is them being polite.”

“Polite?”

“They’re folding the outside so you don’t have to go as far.”

“I’d rather go the normal way.”

She shot me a sympathetic look that belonged to someone forty years older. “We already did.”

We ate slices of apple on a plaid blanket. When I poured her juice, the stream hung an instant too long between bottle and cup, a translucent cord trembling before it collapsed. The air smelled faintly metallic, like rain infused with pennies.

On the walk back, I stepped around a shallow puddle and glanced down. My reflection stared up where it ought to. But below mine, a second face hung dim and mouthless, its eyes set a fraction too far apart. The surface dimpled as if it were breathing. I blinked and saw only my own face again.

“All right,” I said to myself. To the field. To whatever was listening.

I took Lila’s hand and didn’t let go until we reached the porch steps.

* * * * * *

Night stretched long. The hum of the house sorted itself into layers, one tone under the walls, another under the glass. I lay on the couch with the notebook open on my chest and watched the ceiling darken and lighten by degrees, as if clouds were passing through a roof I knew was solid.

When I finally slept, I woke to the feeling of being gently lifted and then set down again. The curtains moved, though the window was closed. A smear of color crossed the kitchen doorway—muted pink, then green, then a blue that quickly faded.

I sat up and found Lila in the kitchen, perched on the stool by the sink.

“Don’t blink,” she said.

In the pane, the dark deepened. Lines sketched themselves in light—not bright, exactly, but present—angles laid upon angles, a ladder that had decided to curl into a shell. The structure flexed, then steadied, then flexed again to make space for something to slip past. I had the sensation of looking up from the bottom of a well while someone climbed down, but the rungs were on the inside of the air.

My body did what bodies do when they think they should run. My legs tingled, my scalp tightened, my breathing and heartbeat quickened.

I gripped the edge of the counter.

“It’s okay,” Lila said, and patted my forearm three times with the exact cadence Elise used to whenever I was upset.

“What are they?” I asked, not expecting an answer I could understand.

“They remember being light,” she said. “It’s hard to be heavy.”

The shape in the pane paused, seemed to consider, then leaned, and the suggestion of a face resolved. It wasn’t that of a human, nor was it that of an animal. It was a pattern where features should be. The place a mouth would belong remained blank.

“What do you want?” I whispered.

The blank place widened—the closest thing it had to a response.

“They want to be whole again,” Lila said. “They thought sleeping would help. But sleeping made us forget.”

“Us?”

She nodded, giving me a small, sad smile. “We forgot together.”

The pane cooled under my palm. The shape withdrew, unspooling through itself until only a simple black sheen remained.

I sighed.

“They said you’re almost ready,” she added, already sliding off the stool.

“For what?”

“To remember,” she said, stifling a yawn.

* * * * * *

On Friday, I drove into town intending to get groceries and pulled into the hardware store instead. The bell over the door rang faintly. I bought a roll of heavy canvas, a dozen drop cloths, and painter’s tape. At home, I draped every reflective surface. The house looked like it was preparing for surgery.

Lila watched from her chair, swinging her feet. “It won’t help,” she said, matter-of-fact. “They’ll just push harder.”

“I need a day,” I said. “One.”

She pointed at the covered mirror. “You’ll like them better when you remember.”

That night, I dreamed of the field again. The horizon drew close enough to touch. When my fingers met it, the surface flexed and let me in. I woke with my hand pressed flat against the canvas-draped mirror, the fabric warm where my palm had been.

From her room, Lila called softly through the dark, the sound landing exactly where the hum did. “It’s almost time, Daddy.”

I didn’t ask what it was nearly time for. The clocks had long since given up, and time had become unreliable.

Part VI

It happened the way a dream turns. One moment you’re certain of gravity, walls, sequence. The next, everything tilts, and the tilt never stops.

For days, the air inside the farmhouse had felt wrong. Light lagged a half beat behind motion, like the world was buffering. When I looked through the windows, I could see the valley below our hill—but not the way I remembered it. The distance seemed to breathe, hills rising and sinking like a tide I couldn’t feel.

I kept telling myself it was simply exhaustion, that I’d simply been stretched too thin between work and worry and was losing my mind. That I needed more sleep, better sleep. Maybe medication, maybe a vacation. But then, one night, Lila asked me to sit with her in the dark.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “They said you’ll understand now.”

* * * * * *

I heard the clock in the kitchen faltering again, hands twitching. The hum beneath the glass had grown lower, almost comforting now, like the purr of something large and content.

Lila sat cross-legged on her bed, the night-light reflecting in her eyes. She pointed at the wall beside her desk. All of her drawings were gone. Every page, every scrap, had been stripped clean. In their place, the wall itself shimmered—paint rippling faintly, like oil beneath the surface.

“Where did they go?” I asked.

“They’re not gone,” she said. “They remembered where they belong.”

When I stepped closer, I saw patterns surfacing in the paint—spirals, lattices, fractal lines—like the bones of her drawings reassembling themselves in color too faint for daylight.

“What are you seeing?” I whispered.

“The before place,” she said. “Before this one woke up.”

“Lila—what before place?”

She tilted her head. “You called it light once. But it was never light. It was…everything. It folded itself to sleep so it could dream us.”

My chest went tight. “You’re saying this—our world—was the dream?”

She nodded. “And it’s ending soon.”

* * * * * *

Outside, thunder cracked, but no rain followed. The sound felt too close, as if it came from beneath the floorboards. The walls flexed with it.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “Why now?”

She stood and took my hand. “Because you still think you have to keep me safe. But you can’t keep something safe that was never supposed to stay.”

I sank onto the edge of the bed, my pulse unsteady. “Lila, honey, what are you saying? I love you. You’re scaring me, and I don’t understand.”

“You will.” She smiled sadly. “You’re already remembering.”

Her pupils widened, and for an instant, her eyes caught every color I’d ever seen—and others that hurt to look at.

“Remembering what?” I asked.

“The way we used to be.”

At that exact moment, the room brightened, but not from the lamp. Light leaked through the corners, seeping out of the walls like water from cracked plaster. It wasn’t white, or yellow, or any color I could name. It was alive.

The hum deepened until I felt it in my ribs. The windowpanes vibrated. Reflections twisted and merged, showing angles of the room that shouldn’t exist. I saw myself from above, from behind, from inside the glass.

“Stop!” I pleaded. “Please!”

“You asked what they wanted,” Lila said softly. “They want to be whole again. They were broken when the old light folded. They’re here to remember the shape of things.”

She turned to the window. Her reflection didn’t follow. It waited, half-formed, on the other side.

“Lila—”

She pressed her hand against the pane. Her fingers sank slightly, rippling the surface. “They’re waiting for me.”

“No!” I cried out. I moved to grab her, but when I did, her skin refracted under my touch, shimmering like heat over asphalt.

She looked back at me, her voice layered, more than one tone speaking through her. “You can’t stop remembering once it starts.”

I wanted to tell her I didn’t want to remember, that I only wanted her here, small and human and mine. But even as I thought it, the words felt childish and misguided.

She smiled. “It’s okay, Daddy. We were never apart. And we never really will be.”

Then the world began to bend. The walls stretched upward, the ceiling unspooling into light. Every surface melted into fractal geometry, repeating endlessly toward some impossible center. The air buzzed, thick with color and heat, but Lila wasn’t afraid. She glowed brighter, her silhouette softening until she was nearly translucent.

“They’ll find you when you stop trying to stay,” she said. “When you remember, they’ll remember, too.”

The floor cracked beneath my feet. Layers of reflection unfolded beneath me, each one a copy of the room, the house, the hill, the sky. Worlds upon worlds, all of them stacked like panes of glass. And through all of it, my daughter’s voice stayed close, warm against my ear.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said sweetly. “You were with me before the first dream. You’re just waking up again.”

Then she stepped backward into the light. The pane rippled once, then stilled.

And she was gone.

* * * * * *

I called her name until my voice broke. The light dimmed, and the air cooled, but the world didn’t go back to normal.

It never went back to normal.

The farmhouse looked similar, but wrong. The colors were too clean, as though everything had been freshly painted by someone who didn’t understand texture. My reflection stared back from every window, hollow-eyed and slightly delayed.

I tried to write it down, but every sentence dissolved into shapes, lines that looped into themselves until the ink turned colorless.

I sat there in the dark until dawn, the world still humming faintly, as if it had only half woken.

When the first sunlight touched the window, it refracted. Not a rainbow—something deeper, something endless. And for a heartbeat, I heard her voice again, soft and close.

“It’s okay, Daddy. You’ll remember, too.”

Part VII

There are days now when the house feels almost normal. If I sit quietly enough, keep my eyes down, and don’t think about the way light moves across the walls, I can just about convince myself it was all a dream. But dreams don’t leave echoes.  My daughter was gone.

When I wake in the morning, the windows glow before the sun has risen. A pale, colorless light that doesn’t seem to come from anywhere. The glass hums faintly, like a tuning fork struck miles away. I tell myself I’ve grown used to it, that it’s just the old wiring.

I haven’t turned on the lights since she left. The bulbs don’t behave anymore. They pulse too slowly, and it makes my head hurt.

I called the police the next morning. They searched the property, the nearby woods, even the creek behind the orchard. The officer in charge, a tall man with a round face and tired eyes, asked me if there’d been a custody issue, a threat, anyone with reason to take her.

“No,” I said. “She’s gone, but not… gone.”

He studied me for a moment, then nodded the way people do when they’ve decided not to argue. They took my statement, filed a missing persons report, made a note about possible trauma, and left a number for “support services.”

I didn’t call.

There’s no number for this kind of thing.

Lila never returned. Not physically, anyway.

* * * * * *

That first week was the hardest.

I’d stand at the kitchen window each morning and stare out into the fields. The light hit the corn in a way that never looked the same twice. Sometimes it shimmered as if covered in dew, even when the air was dry. Sometimes it bent in curves instead of lines.

Every once in a while, I’d see movement between the rows—a flash of white fabric, the curve of a child’s arm—and my heart would stop. I’d run outside, barefoot, calling her name until my throat was raw, but there was never anyone there. Only the wind, whispering through the stalks, repeating my words a second too late.

I kept the curtains closed after that. I knew they were still there, but the reflections were easier to live with when I couldn’t see them.

One night, I woke to the sound of humming. This time, however, it wasn’t coming from the house. It was a human hum, soft and uneven, like a child singing to herself in the dark. My heart stuttered.

I followed the sound down the hallway, past the covered mirrors, to Lila’s bedroom.

The air inside was warmer than the rest of the house. Her nightlight, the little plastic moon she loved, was glowing again, even though I’d unplugged it weeks ago. The cord hung loose against the wall.

The hum stopped as I stepped in, and the moonlight dimmed. And in the window, faint and fleeting, I saw her.

She wasn’t quite solid, more like a reflection without the glass to hold it. Her hair moved in slow waves, as if she were underwater.

“Lila,” I whispered.

She looked at me, and her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her. Not at first. Then the sound reached me, not through my ears, but from inside my head, like a memory playing back from another life.

“It’s almost time,” she said wistfully.

And then she was gone.

The room smelled faintly of ozone and crayons. The shimmer on the walls pulsed once, twice, and went still.

I sat on the floor beside her empty bed until morning.

* * * * * *

I used to think remembering was just the act of calling something back. But this—whatever it is—feels more like something remembering me.

The world flickers now, sometimes only for a moment, sometimes longer. I’ll blink and the furniture will rearrange itself. The stairs will have one step too many. The hands of the clock will slide backward in lazy arcs before catching up again. It’s not frightening anymore. Just… exhausting.

I think of her voice whenever it happens, of her words: “We were never apart. And we never really will be.”

I started painting again, not for work or for anyone else. I suppose I just wanted to see what would come out.

At first, it was landscapes—fields, trees, the outline of an old barn. Then, without meaning to, I began adding colors that didn’t exist in any spectrum I knew. Shades that refused to dry properly, that seemed to shift when I looked away.

I don’t remember mixing those pigments.

Sometimes I’ll find a new canvas on the easel that I don’t recall starting. The brushstrokes are mine, but the forms aren’t. Spirals, arches, doorways. Shapes that feel like memories trying to bloom.

When I finish one, I hang it in the hallway, only to find it vanished by morning.

Where the canvas was, the wall has changed, just slightly—a faint ripple, like glass under pressure.

I’ve stopped hanging them now. I think I know where they go.

* * * * * *

Last night, I dreamed of the before-place.

It wasn’t light, not exactly. More like awareness made visible—endless, layered, and folding through itself. I saw patterns like her drawings. Shapes within shapes, breathing and alive.

And somewhere in that vastness, I heard her laughing. I turned toward the sound and saw her walking on air, her outline radiant and indistinct, surrounded by those same impossible colors.

“Daddy,” she said, “it’s beautiful here.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’m not ready.”

She shook her head. “You don’t have to be ready. You just have to remember.”

When I reached for her, the light folded inward, and I woke with my hand outstretched toward the ceiling. My palm was warm, as if I’d touched sunlight.

* * * * * *

This morning, the sky was wrong. I don’t know how to explain it.  It felt… deeper… like something vast and awake was looking back at me through it.

The farmhouse is quieter now. The hum beneath the walls has settled into a steady rhythm.

I can hear her sometimes, faint but unmistakable, in the quiet moments.

“Don’t be afraid.”

I’m not. Not anymore. Because she was right. Remembering doesn’t hurt—it heals.

The world isn’t breaking. It’s unfolding. And somewhere beyond the glass, in that great kaleidoscope of color and sound, my daughter is waiting.

The light is starting to seep through again. I can feel it at the corners of my vision, shimmering and patient.

When it comes again, I won’t fight it. Not this time.

This time, I’ll step forward.

This time, I’ll remember.

And Lila and I will never be apart again.