The Old Trunk

      My mom passed away last month. We all suspected it was because of a heart attack, though none of us could say for certain that that was how she died; she simply passed away, as if all of her at once had just shut down. It was like her soul had decided to just move on, and that was that.

           My dad hadn’t been in the picture since I was little, so my mom’s property had been left to me in her will. I started clearing out the place, finding things I would want to keep and other things that would be better off given to Goodwill. I recently finished up with her shed when I decided next I would clear out the attic and just work my way down through the house. While up there I found pretty much anything one would expect when thinking of an older woman’s attic –dilapidated mannequins that held old pieces of clothing, stacks of cardboard boxes strewed around everywhere, and small knickknacks and curios like a cracked pair of glasses or a ballerina figurine whose meanings and nostalgic purposes have faded in time. I admit the curiosity and lost memories of these last few items tug at my heart for reasons I couldn’t fully describe, but otherwise, I found this to be tedious, boring work.

           That was until when I pushed a few more overly-packed cardboard boxes to the side and I came upon a dusty lockbox with a heavy padlock keeping it latched shut. What I initially found curious about this was how thick the lock was to keep such a simple-looking box sealed. Then I noticed the dust wasn’t as thick in very distinct lines marking the lid of the trunk, as well as the padlock. I realized these marks were those of fingers as if someone not too long ago had opened the trunk and looked inside. The only person who that would be, of course, would’ve been my mother. It quickly became important to me that I see what was inside this trunk – what was so important inside that my mom had to look inside so soon before her passing?

           I dragged the locker downstairs and sat it on the table. I dug through my mom’s room trying to find the key for that ancient lock. I tore through dresser drawers and rifled through coat pockets in the closet. With a heavy sigh, I dropped on the bed. When I did so, I heard a faint, metallic clang. I lifted the mattress and sure enough there was the key, lying against the bedframe's metal lining. I rushed downstairs with the key clutched tight in my fist, and unlocked the footlocker with such a feverous excitement the likes of which I haven’t felt since I was a child on Christmas. It was such a bright curiosity I had to see the contents of this box that my fingers were visibly trembling.

           When I opened the lid, my heart sank. Not in a dejected way, but in a sort of relaxed, “of course” kind of way. Inside the box were no secret jewels or ancient gold, but photographs, dozens of photographs. I smiled, and I felt my eyes getting wet. Of course, somehow my mother knew her time was close, and she decided with her limited time that she was to look in this old chest for the richest treasure of memories. I scooped them up carefully as if I were picking up a newborn puppy. I found old photos of my grandpa holding me as a baby. There were pictures of my grandma and her friends, and my uncle doing a stereotypical uncle-face at the camera.

           I came upon a photograph of my mom, she was young – maybe eleven or twelve years old. My smile deepened as I looked at how little she was standing in her room with a wide grin on her face, blissfully unaware of the future. Then I saw a weird stain on the picture, a smudge on the corner of the ceiling that looked like a frenzied silhouette of a man looking downward at my mother. I set the photo down and looked at the next one, and I frowned. It was another picture of my mom. She was about sixteen in this picture as she sat on a park bench, and there was that same shadow. It loomed over her on the park bench as if it were trying to look at something in her lap. I shuffled through the pictures, my frown deepening as I did so.

           In each of the pictures of my mother I looked at, each one she was a little older, and that shadow a little closer.

           Here is a photograph of my mother with her arms wrapped around me on my sixth birthday, and the shadow in the picture – this twisted visitor – squeezed its too-long fingers over my mom’s shoulders as it looked down at me from behind her. Its eyes had become visible now, two orbs of deep red glowering down at me from its perch on my mother’s shoulders.

           This last one was the final straw for me. The initial tremor in my hands from the excitement of opening the box had turned to quaking shivers that ran up and down my body as if I were sitting on a waterbed filled with needles. My spine felt contorted and awkward in my discomforting anxiety. I know what some of you might be thinking, reading this – some people enjoy ideas of the supernatural and the macabre. But I refuse to believe in something like that, in monsters who lurk in the unseen. The ghoulish visitor who seemingly stalked my mother for her whole life in these photos was nothing more than lens flares, spilled coffee stains, and practical jokes, and I wasn’t going to let this be something get to me; I wasn’t going to let something so trivial as a boogeyman disturb me like this. I took the stack of photographs – regardless of whether or not they had the creature over my mother pictured – and tossed them in the fireplace. I know it was a trick of my overworked imagination, but for a split second, I thought I saw an impassioned shadow of a disproportionate man reach up from the smoldering film.

           I finished my work on the house for the day and laid down in my bed. Throughout most of the day, I had managed to shove the idea of that apparition in the photos out of my mind, though now that I lay here, the dim glow of the outside streetlights piercing in, I felt my mind reaching towards it again. I did my best to shove the idea out of my mind, to ignore it all. Yet there was now a question brewing in my mind and trying to escape from my lips. It was a question that felt important – gravely important – whose answer I knew would be detrimental to the remainder of my life, however much longer that may be. As I kept my eyes locked open and looking upward, this question ran laps around my mind like a frenzied creature locked in the gaze of a predator.

What is that fucking thing on my ceiling?