The White (?) 2

My family has been living in this little white house for a very long time.

My parents told me that our family had lived in this tiny white house, yellowed from the years and poor maintenance, since way before I was born. This has always been my home, my only home, as well as my mother’s and her mother’s and everyone’s mothers before that.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been able to see a white creature the size of a small child at the side of our doorstep. Without any distinguishable features or even a clear outline of its body, it had nothing but a large pair of grey, dull eyes always facing straight, away from the house and onto the street.

As a child, I was quite calm and never mentioned having the ability to see this white creature. Somehow, I knew that if I spoke out about this, everyone would disapprove; so, I didn’t speak for many years. Not until now. I’ve never kept a journal before, though this may very well be a narrative considering the ridiculous events about to transpire.

 

This will also be the last time I’ll ever write.

 

Anyways, I saw it most days, whenever I left the house and came back, just hovering there in a white haze. However, rainy days were rather particular. On rainy days, when the skies were grey and foggy, the creature would almost meld into the faded white of the house as if it was never there. But I knew. It was still staring straight at the street with its large, grey eyeballs unfazed by all time and circumstance.

Even when I was twelve, amidst all of puberty’s awkward glory and teen drama, that white creature existing outside of my house was the only thing I kept absolute silence about. Before then, though I knew it strange, it was all just a common occurrence to me. But, the more I grew and learned things every child should and shouldn’t know, the more I became unsettled.

The white creature was no longer an occurrence as natural as the leaves falling in the autumn time, I realized, it was something to be feared.

A ghost? A demon? A being on another plane existence that somehow only I could see? It was clearly a supernatural abomination.

As soon as I started feeling that way, I started to leave and enter the house from the side entrance. When questioned, I merely dodged.

Then, on the night of my seventeenth birthday, my mother was reminiscing with my grandmother about something too familiar to me: They had also seen the white creature in their early years.

They laughed, calling it the “family guardian”, and recounted the phase in their teen years when they went through what I also went through. I didn’t chime in with my own experiences for I didn’t want to answer why I haven’t said anything after all those years, and I was completely satisfied and relieved when I learned that they both stopped being to see the white creature when they reached twenty.

Good, I thought. Just three years left.

No longer fearful, I started to use the front entrance again.

 

I went on with my life as per usual, merely ignoring the white ghost, until I turned twenty-one and was still seeing it.

I couldn’t understand why. Why was that thing still there? I spent many sleepless nights obsessing over the existence of the white creature even though it had been there my whole life, even before my whole life. I couldn’t tell my family. I knew them, and they would not take it lightly. Not because of the white creature, but because I sounded absolutely insane.

It was maddening, and I was tired.

Finally, after much persuasion, I accepted it. After all, it was supposed to be our family guardian.

When I was twenty-five and getting ready to finally graduate, I proposed to my boyfriend. My mother was probably happier than both of us combined. We soon began preparing for the wedding, but it turned out to be quite taxing. I ultimately decided to move in with my boyfriend-turned-fiancé since he already had a place of his own.

It was a big event, as a daughter of our family had never moved out of the house before. But it was a new era, a generation. It was time for change.

Just four days before moving out, I ignored the white creature as usual when I was stepping out of the house. However, something strange and utterly horrifying happened.

It probably happened in mere seconds, but it felt like an eternity to me. Just as the door clicked behind me, the white creature started to move. Its eyes turned, ever so slowly, towards me. Those balls of grey were always focused on the street, but they had decided to shift its attention towards me. As its eyes seemed to grow bigger and darker and clearer, my joints became frozen stiff and my scream was left stuck in my dry throat. Suddenly the black eyes dropped to the ground, shattering into a smoke, and my long-awaited scream finally escaped.

Just as I blacked out, I remembered the eyes-less white, ghostly body of the creature move like an animated fog and seep into me.

I woke up in the hospital surrounded by my family and fiancé and terrified of what happened prior to my collapse, but it was all forgotten when the doctor gave us the most amazing news.

I was having a baby.

 

The next nine months went by absolutely smoothly. I graduated, the wedding was in order, everyone was supportive, and the baby was growing healthily inside of me. Pretty soon, we found out we were having a baby boy, a phenomenon unprecedented in our family. It was such a cause for celebration. Never once did our family’s white guardian cross my mind. Life felt perfect. It was perfect.

Then the baby came.

It was a couple weeks early, nothing too unusual. Many babies that were delivered a little early have turned out to be just fine. Even the ultrasound from a couple of days ago showed no abnormalities. I was not worried. I was actually quite excited that my child had decided to come into my arms sooner.

The “baby” I had birthed had no abnormalities for it was neither an average child nor a disabled child. It was a monster.

When the doctor pulled the lump of meat out of me, he went and threw up on the side; the nurses had either fainted or run away.

Raising my upper body with all of my strength to peer at what made the doctor and nurses act the way they did, I got to see it too. Its arms, legs, head, and torso were in all the wrong place, and it cried with a bit of a throaty voice. One thing I noticed, that reminded me of something I had conveniently forgotten during those wonderful and fearless months of pregnancy, was that it had no eyes.

God, it was eyes-less. Just like the white creature that dropped its own. It went into my body and… came out as if it was one of mine. Like the doctor, I threw up at the sight and thought of it.

It may not have started that way, but I was haunted by the white creature most of my life. It seemed I could never be free. Maybe it decided to follow me when I decided to leave the house. But, why? Why me? I wanted so desperately to escape that I took a scalpel nearby to seek a more permanent peace.

While lost in such thoughts, I thought I heard it cry out my name. In that nasty, unhuman voice that will always echo in my ears wherever I go. I don’t quite remember if it did say my name. We were all going crazy at the time.

The doctor, after gaining consciousness, managed to save my life. I blame him for doing so, but no one can deny his courageousness and professionalism. But I still blame him.

 

I don’t know what happened to that thing afterwards. I never asked. And I never forgot �" my nightmares never let me.

Everyone thought I was distraught from losing my “baby”; they thought it had died in childbirth. Unfortunate, tragic even, but still normal. What happened in that operation was not at all normal.

I knew I would never heal, and my fiancé knew that too, so I moved back to my childhood home. Since then, I never stepped out of the house or even peered through the windows because I was scared that the white creature may return to its post, eyes-less or not. I had enough seeing it in my dreams.

One day, I was helping my mother clean up the basement as the last clean-up happened when my grandma was a young girl. I had visited down there several times before, surprised every time by its lack of spiderwebs, much less spiders, rodents, or roaches. I went far in where the most antiquated things needed the foremost care and found a silver chest that piqued my interest. It was most likely over a hundred years but the things inside seemed to still be in very good condition.

I flipped the journal to the first page titled, “The White __?___”. I immediately threw the book away because I didn’t need to read on to know about the topic of its contents. I took a moment to just breathe, and that was when I noticed the top of a glass jar peeking out from underneath the dresses in the chest. As if my arm wasn’t my own, I reached out towards it while my heart beat faster and louder.

There, we were reunited.

 

 

God, please, I can’t anymore.

Please…