Echoes of My Childhood Room

July 2026

I don’t just wake up; I come to. I am as I am today—a forty-year-old man—but I find myself standing in my childhood bedroom. The window offers the only source of light, slivers of moonlight cascading through open curtains to reveal the old green shag carpet. Above me hangs a bare bulb with a pull chain. I instinctively reach for it before remembering I ripped the chain out in a fit of anger one summer. The light doesn’t turn on, but I stare up at it anyway.

Stepping out of the room, I enter the shortened "T" of the hallway. It's illuminated faintly by a streetlamp outside the stairwell window. I look down to the right toward my mother’s room, but I can’t see anything. In fact, it's completely dark; the space where her door and the hall closet should be is swallowed in pitch black. I can't remember the last time she ever slept there.

Ignoring my sister’s room entirely, I make my way toward the stairs. I tiptoe down into the foyer. I’m not sure why, but I do. At the bottom, I recognize our front door. Even the old storm door is still there—the one that had to be replaced after a gang busted it in when I was sixteen. The inner wood door held them back, and I’m briefly reminded of my badass mom threatening to chop off their manhoods if they came through.

I walk into the living room. The TV is on, but it's not playing a movie or the bouncing DVD logo I remember. It’s a broken, roaring static—just like Poltergeist. On the coffee table, a half-lit cigarette still smokes in a plastic ashtray, surrounded by stacks of DVDs. My mom always loved a good movie. In the corner, the Christmas tree is still standing. But it's February, isn't it? Why hasn't she taken it down?

A low rumble begins to vibrate through the floorboards. I slowly make my way toward the rear of the house, passing through the cluttered dining room. The table is exactly as it always was, piled high with papers and books. Between the windows sit the birdcages for the parrots my mom used to have. They're empty. I sneak over, half-hoping to see a familiar face like Rosalita or Cricket, but there is nothing.

With each passing step, the eerie, unsettling feeling grows into a heavy dread. As I inch closer to the kitchen threshold, I can hear the shower running. Along with the sound of the water, I notice a brilliant red light emitting from beneath the bathroom and basement doors. It's so intense I have to raise my hand to shield my eyes.

Then comes the unmistakable, deafening crack of lightning, and the red light instantly vanishes, plunging the space into darkness. Suddenly, the low rumble explodes into the roaring sound of an incoming train. The floorboards flutter. Half-filled coffee cups on the counter vibrate excessively until they rattle off the edge and shatter on the linoleum.

Before I can even process the fear, the basement door shatters, blown violently open.

And the darkness exits.

It’s so thick it feels fuzzy, consuming the house bit by bit as it surges forward. I immediately claw at myself to run, but my legs only let me backpedal. I scream for her.

"Mom. Mom. MOM!"

Each word grows louder until I’m tearing my throat at the top of my lungs.

And then, my wife is shaking me awake.

She tells me I was screaming in my sleep, asking if I’m okay. I lie and say yes. But as I lie there in the dark, my thoughts remain trapped in that house. I think back to the nightmare and the heavy, sinking realization that hit me as I screamed: my mom wasn't there. She was gone, she wasn't coming back, and there was no one left to save me from the darkness but myself.