Short Stories

November, 2024

The Frog

They say what you fear most in this life is the thing that killed you in the last. All I know is that I was unmade slowly, silently, like the frog brought to boil in water too warm to notice.

The stain on the ceiling hasn’t grown. I measure it twice a week just to be sure. But still, it remains there- a dull, creeping silhouette that won’t budge against my copious amounts of bleach. It’s just water damage, the inspector said. “Harmless.” 

The first sign was in the bathroom, a shadow pooling in the corner of the ceiling. It wasn’t much at first. Only a faint blotch. When I brushed my fingers over it, they came away streaked with something darker, something that left a faint trace of itself even after I scrubbed my hands clean.

“It’s nothing,” the first inspector insisted, months ago, as I paraded him around the house, demanding he check every crack and crevice. “A bit of water damage. Cosmetic, really. The structure’s solid.”

To pass the time, I invite new inspectors- they’re always men, to the back room where the shapes mostly live, one after another, and watch as their words dissolve into the air like smoke. They never have any clue what they are talking about. I nod, imitating agreement, and let out a sigh as their certainty crumbles under the weight of my breath. It’s not their assurances I crave but the spectacle itself. For a moment I catch some relief and hold it tight before it dissipates again. 

Even if God Himself descended, meaty and dressed in khakis, clenching a clipboard in His calloused hands, not even He could pry this suspicion from me. I’d let Him try, and it wouldn’t change a thing- but oh, how his folly it would soothe that unrelenting itch.

My trouble began with a cough. A dry, persistent rasp that lingered at the back of my throat like an unanswered question. I assured myself it was the season. Autumn always stretches the air too thin, leaving it sharp and brittle. But I wasn’t fooling myself. The house was whispering something I couldn’t quite hear. 

The walls exhaled at night, low and groaning, like an old man settling into the final quarter of his life. 

With each passing day, the air grew heavier and left a dampness that seemed to soak the whole house. I stopped wearing clothes.

Like everything during that time, it was subtle at first, just enough to make me question my senses, but unmistakable in the moments before sleep, when the silence pressed hard against my chest. Am I dying? The thought would pass through me, like Tommy from the East Bay once would, lingering for my affection, familiar in his weight, but never staying long enough to become mine.

Each night, I lay awake staring at the ceiling. In the blink of an eye, the shadow would shift, taking new shapes like a bruise under the skin. I dreamt of spores blooming unseen, a secret symphony of decay. In the mornings, my breath became light and shallow. My cough deepened and rattled from somewhere low and distant, until I couldn’t recognize my own sound. 

I scrubbed the ceiling with bleach until my arms trembled and the fumes stung my eyes. The stain faded, but it didn’t disappear.

By the end of the week, it would return, darker and more defiant, a web of black veins branching into new territory. 

Gasping for fresh air in my lungs, I flung the windows open, but it made no difference. The smell wasn’t something you could air out. It was the kind that lived in the wood, in the walls. In me.

No better was the kitchen. The cabinets carried a sweetness, sharp and faintly sour. Breathing in the scent made my insides crawl. Before you ask- yes, I did empty them; I cleaned every corner until my eyes were bloodshot, and my fingers were raw peroxide. Nothing visible. Just the foul smell. 

The crawl space door had been painted shut, with edges cracked and peeling like old skin. When I pried it open, the smell surged upward, wet and overripe, and I hesitated before lowering the flashlight into the dark.

The beam found tendrils first, thin black threads snaking across wooden beams. It looked like it had always been there, like it belonged to this house more than I did. It became certain then- I am a guest in my own home. 

I didn’t climb in. Not yet.. 

Instead, I called an inspector. I needed another hit. He crouched beside the crawlspace, his gloved hand tapping a beam with casual indifference. “Looks worse than it is,” he said, the words hollow as the wood beneath his touch. “Some surface growth. Nothing structural.”

Nothing structural. I turned the phrase over in my mind like a loose tooth. The house was holding together, just barely, while something quiet and unrelenting devoured its core. I rolled my eyes. Idiot. 

At odd hours of the night I’d be awake, damp with sweat from the thick air in my room. My dreams were full of collapse: ceilings buckling under invisible weight, walls splitting open, undoing the zipper of its seam, to reveal what had always been hidden. I’d open my eyes aching with longing. What sweet relief just a tiny rip would bring. 

One night, unable to bear it any longer, I went back to the crawlspace. Flashlight in one hand, crowbar in the other.

The smell hit me first. It was no longer sour, but sweet and cloying. The mold coated everything in patches of black. I touched one of the beams and it crumbled under my palm, soft as ash.

The flashlight caught on something buried in the corner of the back wall. It was a box, tucked coyishly into the shadows as though it were hiding from me. Yeah, right. 

The soft cardboard of the box had been warped by time. Inside, I shuffled through the yellowed papers with curled edges, until I found a photograph. 

Standing in an apron at a kitchen sink, a half-smiling woman turned slightly towards the frame, her face angled into shadow. She was young, but her eyes were heavy, and her mouth was caught in a shape that was not quite a smile, but not yet a frown. I didn’t recognize her, but her expression felt quite familiar. For a brief moment my own reflection, the one I’d seen in the mirror during nights when the house seemed too still, flashed before my eyes.

Beneath the photograph was a note in smudged ink: Don’t let it grow.

I don’t sleep much now. The stain on the bathroom ceiling has crept down the walls, and I am mesmerized by the mosaic of its jagged edges. The kitchen cabinets have started to swell and the wood is splitting along invisible seams. Surely the house is shrinking, I say aloud to myself each morning, each time with more conviction than the last. I feel it pressing inward. Soon it will fold in on itself.

The box sits on the kitchen table. I have yet to open it again, but I orbit its gravitational pull each day. Around the sun I go, veering away when I burn, but staying close enough to survive. 

I don’t go out. I need to be home. My nights are consumed by the careful watching of dancers across my walls. When I’m impressed, I’ll give them a smile. I know they are flattered by this. 

Sometimes, in the reflection of the window at night, I catch my own eyes- sunken, ringed with shadows. My skin looks sallow, thin, as though the house is starting to seep through me.

That’s the thing about mold. By the time you see it, it’s already inside you.