I Worked For National Geographic As A Field Photographer And Weird, Unexplainable Things Have Been Happening To Me

I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Everything feels like it’s moving too fast. We’re three weeks from the date of birth, and I don’t feel ready to be a dad. Ava assures me that I’ll be amazing, but I have second thoughts. I’ve always been too headstrong. Too bombastic. Too much of a showoff. Too stuck in my own regiment; too self-concerted; too much of a fuck up. I don’t want to pass that on. I wish I knew the baby would be just like her mom; get no traits from me. But that’s not how it works.

I think too irrationally. I worry about shit that I totally shouldn’t. I pace around the living room in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep and think about whether or not I should be alive. You’ve read the stories, there shouldn’t be a doubt in your minds that I shouldn’t. But yet, here I am, furiously typing into my laptop at 2 AM, trying to make sense of nothing and everything all at once. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, or maybe its something else.

This house no longer feels right to me. The vibes have somehow changed over the past few months. Ever since the baby, the house has been more active. Not in terms of visitors coming over to see us or feel the baby kick. No, there have been less of those. There’s been more motion and movement in the night. Ava never hears it because she’s always sleeping, but I do. I’m always awake.

I met a ghost, in one of my dreams. It claimed to have lived here. In this house. Ava never mentioned it being haunted, so I guessed it must have been long before Ava’s family moved in. But the ghost wasn’t dressed in old timey outfits and talked with more normalcies than I do. She was cool. Casual. Dressed a little hipster-ey but not completely overdone. She was very polite too. Her name was Margot. She’s 17, and she wants to be a writer. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that she was dead, so I asked her what she wanted to write. And she just stared off into space, before dissipating. I think I woke up then; I know I was downstairs.

The house is beautiful and we’ve lived here happily since we got married. There was none of this before. The walls never whispered in the stillness of the night. There were never shadowy figures that blocked out the light of the moon through the bay window. But the madness isn’t only confined to the house itself; all the best things happen right outside the door.

The ice cream man came at 3:30 AM last week. Bewildered, I went outside to tell him to turn off the music because my pregnant wife was sleeping upstairs. He said “Of course sir, my apologies,” and went into the truck to retrieve me something. When he came back, a distinctly familiar bunny mask covered over his face. I yelled at him to take it off, and he obliged, pulling it up and revealing to me a hideous scar that ran down from cheek to cheek and bled profusely. I woke up in my bed screaming, with the taste of vanilla on the back of my tongue.

But don’t think that this stuff only happens at night. A few days ago, when I was typing up the post about Nam Koo Terrace, the doorbell interrupted me. Ava was taking a mid-afternoon nap, so I rushed over and grabbed the door. It was just some random kid doing delivery service for Amazon. But as I signed for the package, I noticed a man sitting across the street from my house in a black car, staring at me through his dark sunglasses. He watched the house for hours until I decided to go out and talk to him. When he saw me coming, he quickly put the car in gear and sped away. I put my hands on my hips and watched the car pass out of sight before headed back. As I reached the door, quite perturbed, I looked back at the road, and noticed a blue sedan was sitting in the spot. I had heard no sound of a car moving.

The weirdest of all the things that happen are the girls who play ring-around-the rosie in the front yard at 2:27 AM. They’re like clockwork, every single night for the past four days. They’ll be there. At first I just went outside and yelled at them, but they paid no attention. I tried to pull them apart, but my hands went through their skin. So, now I just watch them. I pour myself a tall glass and sit in one of the Adirondack chairs outside. They start walking down the hill at 2:24, play until about 3:05, and then scamper down the hill. The only thing: I wish I knew what language they’re speaking, so I could understand them. I think it’s Chinese, but I haven’t been able to decipher anything so far.

I stopped mentioning all of this to Ava when she mentioned I go to the doctor. She calls someone sometimes. Takes it in the bedroom instead of in the living room. I don’t know what she has to be so damn private for. Maybe she’s planning me a surprise party, but it’s not very close to my birthday. I guess it’ll just be a very well thought out party. If I say nothing and act like I’m getting a good amount of sleep, she says nothing and smiles during meals. That’s all I really want. Just to see her smile.

I wish Margot would come visit again. She’s nicer than all the other people here. She at least had the decency to talk to me for a little while before disappearing. Everyone else just wants something and then they get out of your face. Well, what if I want something. It should be a two-way street like that. I don’t like that it isn’t, but there isn’t a whole lot I can do about it.

Ava is angry because I’ve been writing too much. She says I should stop hunching myself over the computer and making these silly stories out to be more than they are. But I haven’t been doing that. It’s all true. The devil cursed me. The spirits of Nam Koo still haunt me. The Bunny Man is still waiting to get his revenge. And we’re trying to bring a baby into the world. There couldn’t be something more vulnerable coming into a caustic situation. I guess I’m stressed because I don’t want them to take my curses. I don’t want my mistakes to play out on them.

Maybe Ava is right. Maybe I will be a good dad. Before she went to sleep, she said something about baby names. I feel lighter writing all of this down. The house feels still. I just remembered that Margot hugged me when I saw her, like she loved me, even though she didn’t know me. And in that second I had a flashback, except I don’t ever remember the memory. It was of pushing a much smaller version of her in a sled down a huge snow covered hill. Halfway down was this incredible jump. She held the reigns like a pro and maneuvered right in front of it. She flew off it, lost control, got freaked out, and tried to jump off. She landed hard in the snow and started to cry. So instinctively I ran down, scooped her up in my arms and held her close. After I wiped the snow off her face, she gave me a big goofy grin, and smushed a mitten full of snow in my face.

I don’t know where it came from or what it means. But it makes me happy. At 2:27, the girls didn’t come. I stood in the bay window confused, before pouring the beer I was going to drink down the drain. The walls didn’t seem to whisper. It was funny, in a way, like they had run out of things to say. I went upstairs and got into bed, for once, with very little thoughts in my head.

In fact, there was only one. I really like the name Margot.