Work Text:
[TRANSCRIPT]
Statement of Anonymous, regarding experiences at a homeless shelter. Recorded direct from subject, 11 December, 2023.
Statement begins:
I didn’t start seeing it until December, really. I guess that’s when the shadows set in.
The nights were cold, dark, and long last winter—back when I smoked a pack a day and still slept at the shelter. There wasn’t a Christmas; we made it ourselves, with a ring pop and gift bags of socks and a new notebook long since lost.
But it was snow turned to slush on Christmas morning, and the night before, I was lying, sweaty and cold, under a blanket in the darkness of our dorm room. The tree outside, swaying gently in the ghost of a breeze, cast long shadows through a crack in the curtains, and, heavy with exhaustion, I looked at the wall beside my mattress to find the silhouette of a grim reaper’s scythe.
At first I squeezed shut my eyes and tried to sleep, telling myself it would be gone in the morning, but sleep wouldn’t come. Finally, sweatpants-clad and aching, I hauled myself from bed and went down for a smoke break. Even with nicotine in my veins, the comforting scent of smoke, and the presence of a kind shelter worker, I couldn’t shake the icy goosebumps all down my back.
I asked around: could the workers see it? (They could). Had anyone used an ouija board in the building? (Unknown).
One night I heard, at three AM, the dull thud of a truck smashing flesh, and the building shook around me. I had to consciously hold myself to my bunk—I had begun to think of bed six as marked—to keep myself from rushing downstairs and calling for help.
In the morning, there was no blood on the pavement, but I know what I heard.
It got worse, after that.
I changed bunks twice in an effort to escape the crawling shadows and the bullying from my peers—whispers as I fell asleep, the moving of my things. I look back now and wonder how much of it was actually them. For a single night I slept in the women’s dorm in an effort to escape the angry cis boys who seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room.
On the floor was a doll.
A soft doll, about three, four inches in height.
It had a pin through it.
It looked like me.
I didn’t dare touch the thing. I quickly decided to deal with the bullying by going silent, and didn’t speak for months; I moved back to the men’s side with no voice to speak of the following night.
I changed to a top bunk.
The shadow followed me to bed seven.
Finally, one night, dark and cold as hell in the dead of January, mist filling the streets, the entire alley echoed with a chorus of horrible voices speaking in unison like an out of tune violin, and I ran. I ran, and ran, past downtown hotels, past closed-up bars and to the dancing black waves of the river, following the path at its side until street lamps around me stopped flickering out, and looked to my right, and saw pearlescent-lit gates, shrouded in soft white fog. Only then did I slow my pace; I doubled back, looking for them, and found only a statue where they had stood not an hour before. I lay down on a bench, then, and slept.
I’m housed, now, by some small miracle. Even though I left the scythe behind when I moved, I still have dreams. Nightmares. That unison chorus of horrible voices appears all too often in my sleep. And though I haven’t had a streetlight go out since, sometimes I go to the river, and think about that night: the stench of ice cold sulfur, and the shadows.
I haven’t gone back to the shelter.
I avoid that side of the street.