I want to be a good father; I really do. I went into parenthood with big aspirations. I was going to be the dad who went to all of his kids’ soccer games, who got the best presents at Christmas, who volunteered at school. My kids would look forward to me coming home from work. They would brag about me to their friends, and I would put all other dads to shame.
I was prepared to handle all the devilry and hardship of children. Hell, I was a wild child, and I expected my kids to be the same. I didn’t anticipate my wife being the devilish one. I didn’t expect things to go so badly after having one kid. I sure as hell didn’t imagine a divorce that would castrate me, but it all happened, and I gave up on my dreams of being a perfect dad.
When the courts finished skewering me, I ended up as the weekend dad. To a newly-single man, this sounded like a sweet deal, but it took a month to realize I can’t keep up with a ten-year-old. For those first few weekends, I ran my ass off spoiling my son while my ex-wife posted pics on social media of her and her girlfriends/boy toys going out to bars and concerts. Eventually, my spite was so intense, I lost that special dad magic.
My revised goal was to support my son as best as I could from my recliner. After the soul-crushing 9-5 work week, it was what I could muster. Phillip never seemed to mind; he’d spend most of his weekends exploring the field behind my trailer. Our trailer community was relatively small, and our few neighbors were old farts barely able to leave their homes. Again, Phillip didn’t seem to mind; he was good at coming up with games by himself.
My only rule was to stay away from the cottonwood forest off on the far end of the field. Most of the cottonwoods were old and falling apart, and I didn’t need to lose my son to a brittle branch and gravity. The occasional storm would cause half the trees to come crashing down, but the woods never seemed to thin out. The cottonwoods were also a half mile away, and I didn’t trust him to go that far safely.
That weekend, however, he must’ve gone stir crazy or something because he broke my rule. Being the kid he is, he snitched on himself. I had just finished a joint when he came barreling in the front door. He crossed over the room to my chair without taking off his shoes, clutching my shoulder and staring me in the eyes.
“Dad,” he said, “I went into the cottonwoods.”
I sighed. In the immediate haze of my high, I wished I could have just zoned out and let him be, but I felt a need to appear like I cared about accountability. “Phillip, I appreciate you telling me, but—“
“Dad. There’s a girl out there. She’s in the ground, and I think she needs help.”
“In the ground? Like buried in ground?”
Phillip’s eyes never strayed from mine. “No. She’s in a room in the ground, and she’s crying.”
That was enough to get me off my ass. My son wasn’t a liar, and his story was crazy enough to let me know something was very wrong. I made sure my phone had a charge, grabbed my shoes, and jogged out the door, following right behind Phillip. My thoughts were fuzzy from the weed, but my anxiety was enough to keep me grounded.
Phillip dove through the cottonwoods, never hesitating as he weaved through the trees. He turned right at a tree with a red handkerchief nailed to the bark. He darted left at another with an X carved onto the trunk. I cursed to myself. Maybe my kid was a liar because none of this shit would’ve been here if he only came once. As a stitch seized my side, I acknowledged this system would at least guide us to our destination more quickly.
That destination was a clearing roughly another half-mile into the cottonwoods. Here, the ground swelled into multiple hills where the grass grew up to my knees. Off towards the other end of the clearing slouched a rotting shack, half of its roof caved in from decay. Phillip stood rigidly in the depression between two hills, his head bent into his chest as he stared at the ground. I stumbled to him, breathing raggedly. I came to rest by him and see what interrupted my weekend laziness.
It was a window. It couldn’t have been bigger than 3’ by 3’, but it lay perfectly flat in the ground as if someone placed it in the dirt like a tile. It looked about as thick and as mundane as my bedroom window, but it was in the ground and absolutely pristine. No dirt, no scratches, no smudges. I felt like I was in a god-damn Windex ad.
Windex or not, I could barely see anything through it. There was something definitely underneath, but it was too dark for me to make out anything. Given the sun baring down on my back, I assumed whatever was down there would be lit up. When I kneeled to stare more closely, I thought I saw movement, something shuffling directly underneath the window. The darkness, itself, had this grayish, grainy look to it, making me think I was looking at a tarp pushed against the window rather than pitch black.
I stood up and rubbed my eyes. My head was swooning, and I figured the weed was making me see more than my eyes were.
“Dad,” Phillip whispered, tugging on my shirt sleeve, “See her? In the corner? I think she’s crying.” I looked at him and back at the window, screwing up my eyes to see anything. I knew my eyes were getting bad, but this bad?
“You see her, for sure, Phillip?” I mumbled. “This isn’t some prank, is it?”
“No, Dad, I don’t even know her.”
That did it for me. Rather than question how the hell my son saw a girl when I saw jack shit, I blamed the weed and poor vision. I ignored the insanity of a window in the middle of nowhere. Some father instinct kicked in, and I decided I wanted to be a hero in my kid’s eyes. I looked at the shack in the distance.
“You wait here, Phillip,” I commanded as I started jogging toward the shack. “Yell if something happens.”
In my delusions, I imagined I would find some pedophile or crazed lunatic in the run-down home, hoarding children in an underground dungeon to satisfy some fetish. When I approached the doorway, I began to doubt my thinking. The door lay splintered in two outside of the shack, grass poking through the gaps in the wood. The rest of the shack appeared warped and fragmenting, as if it could crumble into chunks of sawdust if I so much as brushed against it. If some creep lived here, he had done nothing in the last century to touch up the place.
I took a step inside, and the ground crunched underneath my foot. Shards of glass littered the entire floor, some chunks as long as my arm. The shack’s windows were all broken, but two panes of glass could not carpet an entire room. Smashed wooden furniture, deep gashes carved into the wall, fungus and weeds growing like a pestilence. There was no hidden room, no trap door. There was just scratched pieces of glass and wood. Every hair on my body stood alert, screaming at me to run.
Phillip yelled for me, and I then listened to my hair. I barreled out the doorway, calling for him. He hadn’t moved since I had left, his head angled to the ground. My heart jumped as I stumbled next to him. “What’s wrong?”
He looked at me, his pupils dilated. “She’s looking at me, Dad. She’s smiling and waving.” He looked back at the window. “Is that good?”
I swallowed whatever spit was left in my dry throat as I questioned what the hell was going on. I looked down and recoiled immediately.
A massive face pressed against the window. Its bulbous, bloodshot eyes were the size of my head, but its pupils were no more than pinholes, jittering as they watched us. Its mottled skin sagged in excess all over it, clumping in trenches of wrinkles. In the layers of flesh, I could not see any nose or mouth, and the only thing that could’ve possibly distinguished it as female was thick, ragged strands of gray hair which grew sparsely from her scalp.
“What do you see, Phillip?” I hissed.
He looked at me nervously. “I…I told you, Dad. She’s down there…looking at us.”
“No shit it’s looking at us, but how the hell is that a girl?” I screamed as I grabbed his arm and jerked him from the window.
Phillip yelped, and the glass snapped beside us. From the nothingness beneath, a four-clawed talon had sprung forth, rapping against the window. The creature’s head shook furiously, its pupils firmly fixed on me as a hole opened from the bottom of its face. It expanded, revealing a hellscape of pinprick teeth, continuing unendingly into its throat.
It pounded against the glass and roared noiselessly at me. The initial strike had left a thick crack along the center of the window, and each progressive blow created spiderwebs along that crack. From behind me, Phillip muttered something, but I couldn’t hear him. My ears rang, and my vision blurred. It was a nightmare, a living nightmare, and my reaction was to piss myself. It could shove me down its gullet and chew me into a fine paste, and only a window held it back. What could I do? What could I do but run, dragging Phillip with me?
I brought us back to our trailer. Even if Phillip only saw some girl, he was smart enough to recognize it was something very bad. Once through the front door, I locked myself in my bathroom and vomited until there was nothing left but fear. When I was lucid enough to leave the bathroom, I found Phillip in our bedroom. Despite his questioning glance, he asked nothing, so I didn’t try to explain anything. I told him to stay inside for the rest of the day, and thank God, he obeyed me. While he did something on his tablet, I took to mine, tearing apart the internet in search of the monster in the window. At some point, I lost consciousness, having found nothing.
I dreamed. I dreamed of my last fight with my ex-wife before we separated. My life crumbled with each word she spat, and I was buried alive under the debris.
The faint light of the early morning pulled me back to the physical world. In the bed next to mine, Phillip slept with his back to me. I contemplated how I could protect him, if I needed to. I had to see if that window was still there. I gathered my tablet and a fresh set of clothes and shuffled out of the bedroom. As I dressed, the liquor bottles in my kitchen called to me, coaxing me to drink myself into oblivion.
Restraining myself, I left the trailer without so much as a shot for courage. I headed toward the cottonwoods, jogging across the field. A light but cold wind bit through my jacket and numbed my cheeks. I took it as an omen as I passed into the trees.
The grass grew more sparsely in the woods, and the roots of the cottonwoods pushed upward against the ground, creating an uneven landscape. Dead tree branches and shrub mottled the spaces in between. The rest was dirt and leaves. In my intoxicated stupors in the past, I often made it a little way into the cottonwoods before collapsing to the ground and weeping like a child. As such, I was very familiar with the woods floor.
I was not familiar with a glass floor, especially not a third of the way into the woods. I stood at the base of the elongated window, my heart stuttering rapidly. It was the same window as before, no more than a yard wide, but it was longer. Oh god, it was so much longer. Somehow, the window had become a path in the woods, stretching as far as I could see in the direction of the clearing.
It was growing. As I fell to the side of the path, the glass seemed to envelope the ground before it. Dirt and grass fell into the darkness beneath the window as the glass replaced the ground. The path slowly pushed forward, swallowing a foot of ground in less than a minute.
Dumbfounded, I picked myself up and began plodding beside the window. Clawed hands slapped against the glass and strained to push the monster forward before disappearing into the writhing, grayish mass underneath. Every square yard had a talon or two, no matter how close I came to the clearing. What began as a head was now an inverted centipede, unimaginably long and infinitely more horrifying. I stopped watching, fearing that any more would make me start hyperventilating.
The path ended where Phillip and I first found the window. No talons grew here, but the monster’s pulsating body remained. It now measured almost a half-mile long, and it would only stretch farther. I crouched beside the glass and pressed my hands against my ears as if to hold the thoughts tearing through my brain. My mind couldn’t cope with this insanity, by my terror understood what was happening. It was scrabbling toward my home, and I couldn’t stop it.
I focused on the crack in the glass and screamed, wracked with despair and contempt. The crack would grow bigger; the talons would tear Phillip apart, and its teeth would hurt so much. I screamed, my own powerlessness crushing me. I screamed because destroying my vocal chords was all I could do. If the creature heard me, it didn’t care.
Despair gradually faded into numbness. When I had let go of my hope, I was able to begin walking home. I marched alongside the glass path, my steps heavy and stiff. In my haze, I could just barely hear the scrabbling of claws as the creature heaved its body forward. From the time that I first saw it this morning, it had extended the path another 30 or so feet. Its head pressed against the glass at the end, its eyes boring into the ground before it.
Offhandedly, I took several pictures with my tablet. Every damn one came out as a snapshot of dirt and leaves. Not a monster in sight in the photos, but it was clear as fucking day in front of me, and I was well past the point of questioning my sanity. I slipped the tablet in my jacket pocket and pushed on.
When I got home, Phillip was up but still in bed. I imagined I looked half-dead, and he watched me expectantly, as if waiting for an explanation for yesterday’s incident. I didn’t explain a damn thing; it was too real, too fresh. Instead, I hurried him through his morning routine and took him out that day. We ate out for every meal, saw a movie, and visited a park. We shared a solid father-son day, and I was an empty husk. I wasn’t kidding him. Every meal was silent; the movie was boring as hell; and he spent most of the time at the park playing with others while I zoned out on a bench.
We returned home shortly before his bedtime, and I instructed him to get ready for sleep. As he did so, I stepped outside and stood in the field behind our trailer. The sun had long since set, so I couldn’t see anything through the grass. Based on its progress this morning, the creature was probably halfway across the field by this point. God knows how this prediction was supposed to help me.
“Dad?” I glanced over my shoulder, finding Phillip in his pajamas and sneakers. He stared at me as he clutched both of his pants legs. “Is she going to be okay?”
I choked back a half-laugh, half-sob. “Yeah, she’ll be fine.”
He didn’t seem to be relieved or any less tense. “Are we going to be okay?”
I turned back to the field and gritted my teeth. “Absolutely, Phillip, we’ll be okay.” The words rattled through my teeth. “Tomorrow, your mom will pick you up, and I’ll handle all of this.” I forced on a smile and faced him again. In my best attempt to be fatherly, I gently grabbed his shoulder and guided him back home.
“What are you going to do?” he asked as I tucked him into bed. I squeezed his shoulders and pressed my lips against his forehead, mimicking a kiss.
Gazing blankly at his face, I said, “I’ll handle it.”
That night, I dreamed I was hanging from a rope, dangling above a black nothingness. Phillip was holding onto my legs, sobbing and screaming for help. Above us, I could see light. My grip was slipping, and Phillip was so heavy.
His cries startled me from sleep. I shot to a sitting position and shouted his name. In his bed, catty-corner to mine, he lay in a fetal position, his covers cocooned around him. My parental instincts willed me to comfort him, and I swung my legs off my bed. My bare feet touched on cold glass, and I shrieked, throwing myself back into bed. I scrambled over to the edge of the mattress and stared back at the ground.
The monster had consumed all of the floor, replacing it with its window. Underneath, the dark canvas churned, barely noticeable in the morning light from our single window. Its head—misshapen, disembodied, and the size of my torso—pressed against the glass beside Phillip’s bed. Its eyes trembled in their sockets, fixed on where he shook.
“Phillip,” I choked, clutching my sheets. My mind raced, trying to figure out what the hell to say to my kid. I didn’t know how to explain this, even given the monster’s screwed-up reality-bending logic. My trailer wasn’t even attached to the ground, so how the hell did it get up here? How the hell did any of this happen, and why the hell was it happening to me?
I bounded over onto his bed and embraced him. The pounding immediately followed. Over the edge of the bed, I watched as tens of tendrils slapped against the glass, raking it with their claws before retracting. The room echoed with their beatings, but my furniture and trailer did not shake, as if the glass absorbed all of the force.
When the first crack appeared, I sat up abruptly and pushed away from Phillip. The hands collectively recoiled. My hands shook as I gently removed the comforter off of my son. He remained hunched in a ball, his eyes tearful and watching me.
“Why is she doing this, Dad?” he choked. “How is she here? What is she doing? What does she want from me? Dad, are we going to be okay?”
My lungs couldn’t hold my breath. Gasping for air, I shifted to the edge of the bed, allowing my bare feet to rest against the glass. It numbed my feet, and my body tensed. Directly beneath my feet, the monster’s mouth opened. Its teeth scratched against the glass as it chewed at the space below me. I bit the side of my tongue, willing myself to remain calm for Phillip.
“Phillip, describe to me what she’s doing.”
His eyes flitted between mine and the floor before he leaned over the bed. “She’s still down there, Dad. She’s just smiling at me. What’s going on?”
The ramshackle cabin flooded my memories again. I knew what was going on.
“Phillip, there are good and bad spirits out there,” I said in monotone, hoping my poker face made up for the bullshit I was spewing. “I don’t know what kind this one is, but I think we can find someone who can.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. Now listen closely, Phillip. Your mom is going to be here in twenty minutes. You’re going to get ready and go with her. When your mom comes, don’t say anything about the girl if she doesn’t say anything. You got that?”
“Why can’t we—“
“Listen, Phillip!” I snapped, my mind reeling. “You don’t say anything. Nothing. Whether this girl is good or bad, do not give her attention until I figure this out. Okay?”
“Okay,” he mumbled, the tears returning to his eyes. He was a shaking wreck who was just told by his father to act naturally. I wanted nothing more than to embrace him, but I wouldn’t dare to touch him, not with that monster watching us. Instead, I wore my best smile and launched myself off the bed.
The monster made no movement as I tiptoed to the doorway, its eyes now focused on Phillip. He gingerly got out of bed. He shivered as his feet touched the glass, but he quickly went about his morning routine. As I left to make breakfast, I saw the head follow his path.
As long as I didn’t look down and ignored the bile in my throat, I could pretend things were normal. For the first time in a long time, I made a hot meal for the two of us. I made sure he brushed his teeth and combed his hair. Together, we gathered his toys and homework into his travel backpack. It felt good to be a dad, even if my son didn’t smile through any of it.
When there came a gentle knock on my door, I jumped and rushed to open it. “Claudia! Good morning! Phillip’s all set and ready to go!” Phillip stood behind me, his head down.
“Holy shit, Rich,” she exclaimed, her brow furrowing. I tensed and began to sweat more. Did she see it? “Phillip’s wearing the same clothes he wore on Friday!” No, she didn’t. “They’re filthy, and you didn’t even bother to wash them. He probably hasn’t even bathed all weekend? Was it too much for me to expect that you could take care of him for two days? I mean, Jesus, Rich, this entire place is disgusting. Did you just get high off your ass this weekend?”
She pushed past me and grabbed Phillip by his wrist, pulling him to the doorway. The room erupted with thunder as a swarm of claws rammed against every square foot of floor. The monster’s head chewed wildly at the glass at the foot of the door, its wiry hair slapping against its face as its teeth scraped against the window. Phillip hid behind his mother, squirming to pull away from her grip around his wrist.
I could barely hear my ex berate me. I apologized and apologized as I heard the glass splinter and crack. I promised to do better, but neither the monster nor she would shut up. She yelled at me, accusing me for not caring for my child. A loud snap came from the bedroom. She threatened to take away the little visitation I had, claiming I was unfit to be a parent. One of the monster’s teeth lodged itself into the floor. Phillip cowered behind his mother and began crying, still twisting to get away. She turned on him and scolded him to keep still before resuming her tirade on all my character flaws. A crack formed across the living room floor like a lightning bolt. They wouldn’t stop; none of it would stop. Not with me there. They would just keep going until we all broke.
I lunged forward and slammed the door into my ex-wife’s face before locking it. The stampede of fists froze abruptly, and each slowly snaked back into the darkness. My ex’s voice, conversely, kept screaming profanities through the door. I had just committed another offense to crown my mountain of failings. I stood paralyzed, focusing on breathing. I could hear Phillip begging for her to stop. Eventually, she threw her last insult and left, leaving me in silence.
The floor was no more than a constellation of cracks. Whatever wasn’t splintered was scratched or smudged. Between me and hell was only a fragile layer of ice, and everything felt ready to cave in. I was about to be swallowed whole, and she didn’t notice a damn thing. I shook, my body wracked with fear and deep contempt.
The claws soon returned. They pressed in unison against the glass, straining to push the thing outside of the front door. The beast’s head was already halfway under the entrance. It would be at my ex’s home soon enough. Ten miles wouldn’t stop this thing.
I watched the floor until the head had disappeared, at which point I jolted to my bedroom. I threw on my clothes for work and tossed the rest into a suitcase. I did a quick sweep of my home, searching for anything else of value. A tablet, a picture of Phillip, and my stash of weed: my treasure trove of value. Everything else could go up in a shower of glass.
I bounded down the glass steps of my porch, past the growing path of the monster, and into my car. As I turned on the ignition, I dialed my boss. During a meeting last week, he mentioned a week-long business trip a couple states away. At the time, I wasn’t too keen about unending conferences, but now, the monotony seemed like a dream, a good one for once. I figured I could use my vacation time to extend my break, and who knows? Maybe I could use a move to a new environment. I’d call my ex-wife once I had everything arranged. I still had time before it got there.
Since he was born, Phillip has always been my main focus, and he’ll always be that. I’m certain he’ll be till the day I die. It’s just that no amount of dad magic can fix all this. I know I’m not a good father; I fucking know it, but what am I supposed to do?
I never met my aspirations, not even close. A younger me would have been disgusted with who I am now, but I was so naïve back then. I could not fathom the horrors; no one could. No one can blame me, god damn it. I may have not been the perfect dad, but that dream is dead. For now, I’m glad I at least got the chance to be a father.