Feels Stories

In Life, Mom Loved 3 Things

For as long as I'd known her, mom loved three things: dad, her children, and her collection of baby alive dolls. The day she died, it was sad, but I could still feel her reassuring presence around me. It felt a lot like when you scratch your knee and your mom kisses it better. That bubbly feeling you feel--- the flush of happy energy you can only get from a mother's love. Even though she was gone, I could still feel her in my heart.

Time passed, and I eventually redecorated the house and stored mom's baby alive dolls up in the attic. I couldn't bring myself to get rid of them because she loved them so much, but if you'd seen them, you would have understood why I wanted them out of sight. They were eerily realistic, straight out of uncanny valley: I didn't like looking at them. And besides, I needed the extra space. My wife was pregnant with our first child, and we were going to set up her nursery in the room where they'd been kept for so many years.

Before long, my wife and I welcomed Eva into the world. She was perfect in every way: 10 little toes, 10 little fingers, and bright green eyes. My mother's presence, which had once followed me like a shadow, began to drift away, and I started feeling her only when I was around Eva. I could feel the love she felt for my child. Through the baby monitor late at night, I could hear her singing softly to Eva. No, I wasn't picking up a neighbor's frequency, if that's what you think. I'm sure it was my mom: the voice was exactly like hers. There was no denying it.

The first time I actually saw my mom was one summer evening when a storm was brewing. My wife and I ran from room to room closing all the windows. The old house didn't have air conditioning, so we tended to keep everything open whenever it wasn't raining. When I got to Eva's room, the curtains were fluttering in the growing breeze. As they fell, they looked as though they were draping over the silhouette of a woman basking in the warm glow of the streetlight. She looked peaceful, angelic, beautiful. She was standing by the crib, hands on her chest, watching my daughter sleep. The form remained for a few moments, then the curtain went flat against the wall, and she was gone.

After that, I would catch glimpses of her whenever I walked by Eva's room. She was always gone by the time I realized what I'd seen and did a double take, but I could tell she was there, a quiet, loving watcher. Sometimes, I'd hear her footsteps, other times, the distant echo of a voice calling Eva's name.

However, one day, Eva went missing. I found her crib empty and the window left wide open. I panicked. I didn't know where she was. She was too young to crawl out of her crib. I looked out the open window, and felt my stomach sinking. Someone must have taken her. I'd stupidly given some pervert the perfect opportunity to steal my daughter. For weeks, I drove all over town, naively hoping to feel my mother's presence luring me to wherever my little girl had been taken. I knew mom would be by her side, protecting her from whatever monster had taken her. But, after weeks without a trace---and what felt like hundreds of hours wasting precious time being interrogated by the police, I lost hope.

It was then that I started noticing the scent that permeated from the attic door. Still in a haze of grief and anxiety, I unlocked the latch, pulled it open, tugged the ladder down, and climbed up. The attic smelled of the sickening scent of rot. Along with the scent, however, came my mother's loving aura. Fighting cobwebs, I made my way through the narrow space and to the pile of mother's baby alive dolls. They were sitting in a semi-circle around an antique wooden table I'd stored up there months ago. The dolls looked as though they were having a tea party. Tight in the middle of them –as though she was the guest of honor–, was Eva's body.

In life, mom loved three things. In death, she loved just one, and she made sure she'd have her forever.