That Smell

When I was nine, my mother went missing for about six minutes.

Not missing like grocery store missing.

Missing like a snag in the fabric of reality. Gone.

She stepped into the pantry, the door closed behind her, and I heard the air distort. Like reality exhaled through an altered speaker.

I shouted for her. Frantically beat on the door.

When the door opened again, she walked out normally.

Except something had happened in there. I remember the strange smell of her skin, metallic chlorine-like.

Later she kept insisting nothing had happened. "You were tired," she said. "You’re dreaming when you’re awake."

But I wasn’t dreaming. Her eyes had turned wrong for six days after. Something inside her blinked when she thought no one was looking.

Now I'm twenty-two and she’s gone for real this time. The body in the ground was mother-shaped residue. Skin like hers. Hair like hers. But no scent. No metallic chlorine-like smell.

I moved back into the house last month. The neighbors said I was brave. The mailman offered condolences in the form of a package that didn't have a return address.

But I hadn't ordered anything.

Inside was a voice recorder. I touched it and got goosebumps.

I pressed play.

"Sweetheart. If you’re hearing this, it means the knot snapped again. Don’t panic. I’ve anchored myself to the house. I think I got it right this time. I think I can hold."

I panicked. My lungs didn’t remember how to breathe. My knees remembered how to fail.

I sat on the warped pine floorboards of the pantry.

There was a soft stirring inside the walls.

"You were right. About the pantry. About what you experienced. There’s a fold. A wrinkle. And something that watches. I don’t know what it wants. I don’t think it knows either. But it smells like metal and pool water when it’s near. I remember who I am now, but only when I’m in the walls. Out there, I’m its residue. Here, I’m me. Don’t let it wear my face."

The pantry door shut, though I didn’t touch it.

A smell: Burnt circuits. Metallic chlorine-like air.

Very softly, a breath in my ear. “Sweetheart,” it says in my mother’s voice.

I curl in on myself, like a child would.

It’s not that I didn’t believe before. It’s that I hoped I was wrong.

Because now I understand:

She didn’t go missing.

She was taken.

And part of her stayed.

And part of it came back.

That night, I didn’t sleep.

In the dark, something moved behind the drywall. My name whispered through the wires.

I sat in the pantry with the voice recorder and listened to my mother explain how to become the anchor.

I smell of metal. Of pool water. Of something older than both.

In the mirror the next morning, I blink twice...

and both times aren't mine.