30 Aug The Man at the Fence

I’ve started and deleted this more times than I want to admit. The drafts always stall at the same place, where I have to write my brother’s name and follow it with what became of him. Caleb. Seven years old when this began, with a cowlick that never stayed down and a laugh that made adults turn and smile without knowing why. I can write that much. The rest lingers in my mind, and I can’t help but think of it even while I’m trying to talk about other things.

If you’re here for entertainment, I’m not your guy. I’m telling this because I need someone outside my life to tell me I’m not inventing patterns where there aren’t any. I tried to give this to a professional once—Dr. Rowe, who keeps a box of tissues within reach and who says things like ground yourself in what you can verify. He asked me for dates and names. He wanted artifacts: school records, appointment slips, a clipping from the paper about the night Caleb… never mind. He meant well. But the truth doesn’t always leave paperwork.

I grew up in a town so small the welcome sign bragged about it. We had one grocery store, two bars, a church that rang the hour whether anyone was inside or not, and a playground at the edge of a field where the cicadas were louder than traffic. I tell you that so you understand how rare it was for someone we didn’t know to stand by the fence and watch children play.

I’ve learned to avoid playgrounds these days. If I cut across a park, I stare at my shoes. Store windows are worse. They throw back a dozen warped versions of me, and sometimes, in the corner of my eye, I become paranoid and think I’m seeing him again, that man by the fence. On good days, I can convince myself it’s stress. On bad days, I cross the street and take the long way around the block, because it feels safer to be foolish than to be right.

My parents don’t talk about that summer. My dad pretends not to hear if I bring it up. My mom pretends she’s lost the thread of the conversation and asks if I’ve eaten. They’re both kind people, and they became experts at silence. There’s a talent to it. You can hold a family together with quiet if you try hard enough. You can also hide inside it until you forget what you’re hiding from, which works until someone says your brother’s name.

Caleb knew things afterward. That’s the sentence I keep circling. He knew things no seven-year-old should have words for. I’m not saying he was a genius. I’m saying he woke up speaking like he’d read a book nobody had written yet. I don’t know how else to frame it without sounding dramatic, and I’m trying not to do that because even without embellishment, the truth sounds insane.

This began when I was twelve years old, with a stranger who stood grinning by the chain-link fence the way a person waits for a bus that’s never late. He didn’t call out, not at first. He just watched. I remember the sun on the metal bars of the jungle gym, warm through my palms. I remember Caleb’s hand slipping from mine. And I remember a face I still can’t picture in my head for more than a second before it slips away, as if memory refuses to grip it.

I know how that sounds. I’ll tell you what I can recall in a moment. For now, understand this: whatever Caleb saw when he looked up at that man—whatever looked back at him—didn’t stop when we went home. It followed us inside and set up shop, and it taught my brother to say things that kept me awake long after I was old enough to live on my own.

I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m telling this because, a few weeks ago, I cut through a schoolyard on my way to work and saw a figure by the fence that made my feet stutter, and everything came back to me so fast I swear I tasted dust. I didn’t approach him, but I’m sure it’s the same man from my childhood, and it’s important you know how this all started, so we can stop him before it happens again.

* * * * * * *

The summer it happened was hotter than most, though I don’t think the weather matters. It just sticks in my head. The blacktop around the swings shimmered like it was about to melt, and the metal slides could brand your thighs if you weren’t careful. Caleb didn’t care. He was always the kid climbing too high, leaping off before anyone told him to stop. I was three years older, already at the age where I was supposed to be responsible, which meant keeping him from splitting his head open while Mom worked the evening shift.

That day, we were at the park past the ball diamond. It sat at the edge of a field that just kept going until it hit the tree line, the kind of place where kids made up dares about creatures waiting in the grass. Most of them were nonsense stories whispered to scare each other, but I’d take those over what really waited there.

I saw him first—a thin man, standing motionless beyond the fence where the weeds grew chest-high. He wasn’t walking a dog or carrying a ball glove or doing anything you’d expect. He was just standing there, watching. At first, I figured he was one of those drifters who cut through town now and then, the kind Dad would mutter about under his breath. But this man didn’t move on. He leaned against the fence like he had all the time in the world.

Caleb noticed next. He froze halfway up the ladder of the jungle gym, squinting like he was trying to get a better look. That’s when the man raised a hand, not a wave exactly, just a slow motion to come closer.

“Stay put,” I hissed at Caleb, but he was already climbing down.

The man didn’t say anything—his presence did the talking—and before I knew it, Caleb was drifting toward him, like the whole playground had tilted and gravity was pulling him across the asphalt.

I chased after, my stomach tight. I thought maybe I’d tell the creepy guy off, or yell something crude to scare him away. But when I got close, my plans fell apart.

The man leaned down slightly. Caleb tilted his chin up. Their eyes met.

I wish I could tell you what I saw on his face. I’ve tried for years to pin it down, to put words to it, but every time I think I’ve got it, the memory goes hazy, like trying to sketch something from a dream: you remember the shape, the feeling of it, but the details smear.

All I can say is it was wrong. His face wasn’t ugly, or scarred, or monstrous. It was… something else. Something my mind didn’t know how to file away. My stomach turned, my knees felt hollow, and I grabbed Caleb by the arm hard enough to leave marks.

“Don’t!” I whispered. I don’t know why. The man hadn’t moved, hadn’t even smiled. His face—whatever it was—was enough.

Caleb’s eyes stayed fixed on him, wide and watering like he was looking straight into a strong wind. His lips parted, and I swear I heard him whisper something, though it wasn’t a word I knew.

I yanked him back, nearly dragging him across the grass. The man didn’t follow. He stayed right there at the fence, one hand resting against the metal links, calm as you please. And though it was the middle of July, I remember thinking how pale his skin looked.

When we got home, Mom scolded me, blaming me for Caleb’s skinned knee, and Dad told me I should’ve kept him out of trouble. Neither of them listened when I said there’d been a man by the playground. Neither cared when I swore he’d been watching.

I stopped insisting after a while. But that night, when I went to check on Caleb in bed, I found him wide awake, staring at the ceiling. He turned his head slowly toward me, his eyes huge in the dark, and whispered, ”I know the shape of things now.”

I didn’t sleep a wink until the sky started to lighten.

* * * * * * *

The morning after, Caleb acted like nothing was different. He ate his cereal, left the milk ring on his upper lip the way he always did, and begged Mom to let him watch cartoons before church. I almost convinced myself I’d imagined it—the whisper, the look in his eyes when he said he knew the shape of things. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that change doesn’t always announce itself with a scream. Sometimes it seeps in slowly, until you realize you’ve been living with it for weeks.

At first, it was little things. Caleb started drawing, which wasn’t unusual—he’d always had a box of broken crayons under his bed—but the pictures changed. He wasn’t drawing stick figures holding balloons or lopsided houses with smoke curling from the chimneys anymore. Instead, he filled page after page with spirals. Some had jagged lines cutting through them, like diagrams of something mechanical. Others looked organic, twisting like roots. He’d press the crayons so hard they snapped in half, then keep drawing with the stub until his fingertips were stained green and black.

When I asked what the drawings were of, he shrugged and said, “Maps.”

“To where?” I asked.

“To underneath.”

He wouldn’t explain more than that.

The whispers started next. Not muttering like a kid talking to himself—Caleb answered someone. He’d sit cross-legged in the corner of our room, lips moving, hands twitching like he was counting off on his fingers. I thought maybe he’d made up an imaginary friend, but then I leaned close one night and heard words that weren’t English. They weren’t Spanish either, or any language I’d ever heard. The sounds were sharp and wet and odd, like they weren’t meant to be spoken with a human mouth.

I shook him. “Where’d you learn that?”

He looked at me with wide, innocent eyes. “He told me.”

“Who?” I demanded.

Caleb frowned, like I was being deliberately thick. “The man. The one at the fence.”

I didn’t push him then, but my chest knotted tight.

A week later, at dinner, he asked Dad if he knew the stars weren’t in the right place anymore. My father nearly choked on his food.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked.

Caleb calmly recited a string of numbers. Angles, distances—stuff he shouldn’t have known. Dad told him to stop making things up. Mom got that worried pinch at the corners of her mouth and suggested maybe he’d read something at the library, but I watched Caleb’s face as he rattled off figures, and there was no pretending in it. He wasn’t showing off or trying to impress anyone. He was reporting what he’d seen and heard.

That night, I woke to the sound of him crying softly and shivering. I crept over to his bed and found him curled tight, fists pressed against his eyes.

“What’s wrong, Caleb?” I whispered.

He shook his head, shoulders jerking. “I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to see it when I close my eyes.”

“See what?”

“The way things really are.” His voice cracked on the last word. “It’s too big. It doesn’t end.”

I didn’t know how to comfort him. I was only twelve, scared myself. I climbed into his bed and held him until he managed to fall asleep again.

But I didn’t get any rest. I lay awake for hours, staring at the shadows on the ceiling, listening to him breathing. I couldn’t stop thinking about the stranger by the fence, and how he hadn’t moved, or spoken, and hadn’t needed to. He’d just let Caleb look. That’s all it took.

I told myself kids grow out of phases, and that this was just another one, but every night the whispers got stranger, the drawings darker, and the look in Caleb’s eyes a little further from the boy I knew.

By the end of that month, I realized I hadn’t seen him smile or heard him laugh once since the day at the playground.

* * * * * * *

I can mark the night everything crossed from “strange” into “unforgivable.” The whispers and drawings could almost be chalked up to imagination. Even the numbers, though they made no sense coming out of a seven-year-old’s mouth, might’ve been him parroting something he’d stumbled on in a book or overheard from an adult. But what happened that night wasn’t borrowed, and it wasn’t pretend.

That was the night Caleb tried to share it with me.

It started when he shook me awake after midnight. Our parents were already asleep, and the house was gone quiet except for the hum of the box fan in the hall. He stood over my bed in his pajamas, eyes bright and wet like he’d been bawling.

“You have to see,” he whispered. “You’ll understand if you see.”

I tried to roll over, mumbling at him to go back to bed, but his voice cracked, desperate, and I gave in. He pulled me by the hand across the room. He’d cleared a space on the floor, shoving our toys and clothes into a corner. There, on a sheet of printer paper taped together into a makeshift canvas, he’d drawn something with black marker. It wasn’t a picture. It wasn’t even scribbles. It was… an arrangement. Circles inside circles, crooked angles running between them, repeating symbols that looked like a language I’d never seen. The lines weren’t even. Some were jagged, some looping, as if he hadn’t had the right tools to draw what he’d seen.

Caleb knelt in front of it and pressed his palms against the paper. “Look at it.”

I sighed and crouched beside him. At first, all I saw was nonsense, nothing but marker bleeding into paper—but then he started murmuring under his breath, the same wet syllables I’d overheard in the dark.

And the lines shifted.

It was my eyes that twisted, like the picture was sliding behind my vision. My stomach lurched the way it does when you miss a step in the dark. For a split second, the room around us peeled back like wallpaper, and something vast leaned in from behind it.

I don’t have the right words to describe what I saw. They weren’t monsters, not shapes exactly. They were more like hints of a pattern so huge I could only glimpse pieces at a time. Spirals opening into spirals. Darkness dotted with lights that pulsed like living eyes. A hum that wasn’t sound but still buzzed in my skull, like the static before lightning hits.

I gasped and shoved away from the page, leaving sweaty prints on the wood floor with my palms.

Then Caleb laughed, a raw, too-old sound coming out of a seven-year-old’s throat. Then he collapsed onto his side, hyperventilating, clutching at the paper.

“It doesn’t stop,” he whispered, rocking himself. “Once you’ve seen it, it doesn’t stop. I’m sorry.”

Our parents came running when they heard him shouting incoherently. Dad grabbed him up, tried to shake sense into him, while Mom cried and prayed under her breath. Meanwhile, Caleb’s eyes rolled back, lips still forming those guttural syllables even as he sagged against Dad’s chest.

He didn’t wake properly for two days after that.

When he finally came to, he spoke like he’d been somewhere else.

I didn’t tell anyone what I’d seen. Not then. I was afraid of what it meant that I’d seen any of it at all. Afraid it meant the man by the fence hadn’t only touched Caleb, but me as well. And I swear to you, when I closed my eyes that night, I saw the spirals still turning… and I felt them watching me back.

* * * * * * *

After that night, Caleb was never the same. Whatever the stranger had planted in him had taken root, and my brother—my real brother, whatever was left of him—was pushed further and further beneath the surface.

At first, our parents pretended it was manageable. Mom dragged us both to church twice as often. She whispered with the priest in the vestibule, her hands shaking on her purse strap while Caleb sat in the pew, doodling in the hymnals. Dad tried to bury himself in work. When he was home, he’d turn the television up louder than usual, like a wall of sound could keep the truth from bleeding in. But the truth was everywhere.

Caleb stopped playing outside or asking to ride his bike, and gave up kicking the soccer ball in the yard. Instead, he spent hours sitting on the floor in the corner of our room, rocking with his knees pulled tight to his chest, muttering words I didn’t recognize. His notebooks filled with symbols and diagrams. He tore pages into strips and taped them together into crude scrolls.

When Mom caught him scrawling on the walls with a marker, she broke down.

It wasn’t just drawings. It was his eyes. He’d look at you too long, as if seeing something inside you you didn’t know was there. Once, I caught him watching me while I tried to finish my homework. I snapped at him to stop. He tilted his head and said, “You’re scared because you saw it, too.”

I didn’t answer. By then, everyone in the house had isolated themselves in one way or another. Mom cooking without speaking, Dad retreating to the garage, me lying awake night after night listening to Caleb whisper in the dark.

By the time he was twelve, they sent him to a facility in a neighboring county. Officially, it was “for observation.” That was the phrase my father used when the neighbors asked. In truth, it was because he’d woken us all one night screaming in a voice that didn’t sound like his. The doctors called it a psychotic break. They talked about early-onset schizophrenia, prescribed him medications and forced him to attend therapy. None of it helped.

Visiting him was the worst. He’d sit across the table, pale and gaunt, his fingers twitching against the laminate surface. He’d smile, but it was wrong, like he was smiling at something standing behind me. Sometimes he’d murmur numbers under his breath, or close his eyes and whisper in that strange language. And once—just once—he leaned forward, close enough that I felt his breath on my ear.

“You can’t outrun it,” he whispered. “Once you’ve looked, it never forgets.”

I didn’t visit him much after that. I told myself it was because I had school, because it was too far to drive, or because he didn’t even know I was there, but the truth was simpler: I was terrified. Every time I saw him, I felt a little less certain that he was my brother.

He died when he was nineteen. The official report labeled the cause of death as “seizure complications.” I never asked for more detail. I didn’t go to see his body. Mom did, and she came back white as paper. Dad never spoke of it at all.

I told myself he was finally free, but that was a lie. His whispers never left me. I still dream of spirals, of black skies filled with flickering lights that pulse like eyes. I still wake with the memory of strange syllables in my throat, as if I’ve spoken incantations in my sleep.

And every so often, when I pass a playground, I feel like I’m being watched.

* * * * * * *

I told myself for years that what happened to Caleb was sealed away in the past, that whatever had crawled into him died when he did. I convinced myself that the stranger—whatever he was—had passed through town and moved on.

I believed that until three weeks ago.

It was a Tuesday morning, early, the streets still slick with dew. I was cutting through the neighborhood to save time, half-awake, coffee cooling in my hand. I came around the corner by the elementary school. Kids were trickling into the yard, laughing and shoving each other, backpacks bouncing on their shoulders.

And then I saw him.

He stood at the far end of the chain-link fence, exactly where I remembered him from all those years ago—the same thin frame, standing stock still, hands resting against the metal. And though his face blurred in my vision the way it always had, I knew he hadn’t aged a day.

For a second, I thought I’d imagined it, that exhaustion had finally broken me. But then I saw a little boy, no older than Caleb had been, slow his steps. He turned toward the fence. His friends kept going, but he lingered, staring.

My stomach dropped.

I froze, coffee spilling over my hand. Every instinct screamed at me to run across the street, to grab that boy and yank him back the way I’d yanked Caleb, but my legs locked, and my throat closed. I couldn’t move or shout, couldn’t do a thing but watch.

The boy’s head tilted, just slightly. Then his eyes widened, lips parting.

I broke. I turned and ran, and didn’t stop until my chest burned and the school was blocks behind me. I told myself I couldn’t save him, that even if I’d tried, it wouldn’t have mattered. But the truth is, I was terrified, afraid that if I looked again—really looked—I’d see what Caleb saw.

And so I’m here now, telling this, not for closure or to gain your sympathy, but as a warning. If you ever see someone standing still at the edge of a playground, watching, waiting—don’t let your kids near him. Don’t let yourself near him. Don’t try to make out his face or speak to him. Don’t give him the satisfaction of being seen. Because once you look, you don’t get to stop. It stays with you, forever.

Caleb’s gone, and I’ve built a life around pretending I’m fine. But some nights, when the house is quiet and I’m dozing off, I hear my brother’s voice again, whispering numbers and syllables I still don’t understand. And sometimes, I hear another voice beneath his—older, patient, reminding me I can’t outrun what I’ve seen, and that it won’t rest until I see the real shape of things. That it’s only a matter of time before I understand, just like my brother did.