CALLIE’S 2nd BIRTHDAY
11:13 A.M.
SEPTEMBER 27, 1992

Callie’s face is bright pink with baby cheeks and cake. Aunt Trina leans down to leave a sloppy kiss on the top of her head as she carries two glasses of wine, one white and one red. They are both for her because she likes to switch back and forth between the flavors, but only on special occasions. The room bursts with people, everyone pushed against someone else like it’s a crowded concert.

The camera sits on a side table, evident by how there is no shaky cam, and lingers on Callie for several frosting-filled minutes. No one sits with her, but adults swan by in long, floral dresses and washed out jeans and touch her like she’s a good luck statue at a college. Mr. and Mrs. Parker make small talk in the kitchen. They are not worried about their daughter because the family is so large there is always someone to keep an eye on her.

A man sits by himself in the corner, some cousin or other, but no one pays him any mind. He doesn’t move, body stiff like he’s the background figure in a painting. He doesn’t smile, not even when Uncle Hector launches into his loud story about the time he fell asleep on top of a horse and slipped off into the mud during a date, an anecdote that inspires raucous laughter even though he tells it at every family function. The man’s face is vague and it’s possible he doesn’t have a face at all. It is so indistinct that everyone’s attention skates over it and assumes they’ve seen eyes and a mouth and a nose where they should be. They don’t dare double-check.

Callie’s little hands are balled into fists that she aimlessly hits against the tray on her highchair. Then she turns to look at the man in the corner and her hands still. The camera can’t capture her face anymore, but she keeps her head in that direction for longer than a small child normally does, transfixed by the man everyone else ignores. She’s so motionless it would look like the camera had frozen if it weren’t for everyone around her moving, even the man now, who stands up and waves. Callie waves back. He snakes through the swarm of boozy, Parker partygoers and pats the top of her head. She stares up at him and there is fascination but no fear in her expression. She doesn’t know what to fear because she doesn’t know what she is looking at.

When he leaves, no one says goodbye. Both sides of the family assume he is from the other. He looks like no one but could be anyone. The camera only shows the dining room and sliver of the kitchen so there’s no way to say he even really left.

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SUMMER DAYS
2:35 P.M.
JULY 16, 1994

The plastic kids’ pool in the backyard is empty, but the water inside moves like someone just clambered out of it. The camera studies the pool for a few minutes, and the water ripples so long that something huge must have crouched there. The footage cuts to a vibrant scene of a few chubby toddlers screaming as they run through a sprinkler. As one of them falls, so does the camera, and Mr. Parker runs to help the child back on their feet. The camera shows mostly grass since it’s nestled in the yard that needs to be mowed. The camera lifts again, higher and higher, but Mr. Parker is in the background holding a toddler to his chest.

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SNOWSTORM
1:10 P.M.
FEBRUARY 19, 1995

A window shows snowflakes chasing each other outside where the sky is a clinical blue. Child-sized snow angels are pressed into the yard like cookie cutter shapes and there’s a snowman with a raisin smile drooping down its chin. There are no cars driving or parked on the street, all of them packed snugly in garages. There is only clean and quiet winter.

Low chatter drifts from another room in the house, along with the solid sound of mugs being set down on a table. The Parker family is not on camera, but the comforting background noise of their conversation makes it easy to picture them, rosy-cheeked after coming in from the snow, warming themselves with hot chocolate that steams Mrs. Parker’s glasses.

The white landscape is placid until bunches of snow toss up in the air. It looks like something sprouting from the ground or a beach bum emerging from being encased in a mermaid body made of sand. Someone did bury themselves there, just under the row of snow angels, body flat as the road so none of the Parkers felt themselves making shapes on top of it.

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INSOMNIA
12:40 A.M.
JUNE 10, 1996

Mr. Parker is exhausted but can’t get to sleep. He sits at the dining room table with an open book, but he’s not reading it. He zones out, eyes resting on the top corner of the room. After a few minutes he zones back in and wonders if he’s looking at a leak in the ceiling but decides that’s a problem for the morning, and his eyes go out of focus again. The fatigue piles on, but there is some reason he can’t close his eyes.

He snaps to attention when he sees the corner of the room is wet and growing. A fat drop of liquid absorbs into the page of his paperback, the words underneath seeping out of its shape as if escaping. He swears the liquid didn’t reach to the space above his head only moments before. But the tiredness finally caves in on him, and he passes out, eyes shutting at last. Whatever was keeping them open needs rest too.

The leak in the ceiling that is not a leak skulks past him to hide somewhere else so when Mr. Parker wakes up, he’ll shake his head and think he imagined it, like he has so many nights before.

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SLEEPOVER
1:45 A.M.
APRIL 25, 2003

Callie’s friends sit in a circle in the living room, giggling about their science teacher’s pit stains and the terrible glittering makeovers they’ve given each other and the unexpected sex scene in the book they’ve all been reading recently.

Footsteps thump down the stairs, and the girls freeze in place before breaking down into fierce whispers telling each other to shut up. They don’t want to get in trouble because a drowsy Mrs. Parker has already come down after being woken up and said their classmate Logan Frederick would be just as cute in the morning, and they could talk about him then.

The footsteps stop but no one ever enters the room. Gradually the girls relax, thinking Mrs. Parker suddenly remembered her own girlhood and decided to leave them alone to enjoy their buoyant youth. It doesn’t matter that it sounded heavier than her tread and like more than two feet, or that they never heard retreating footsteps; they think they’re in the clear and start comparing crushes.

When they eventually slither into their sleeping bags and settle their heads onto their pillows, there is one more body lying down in the room than Callie invited. It isn’t shaped like them but with so many girls spread out in the dark, it is hard to tell.

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THANKSGIVING LEFTOVERS
10:00 A.M.
NOVEMBER 24, 2005

Half-eaten pies covered in aluminum foil line the table. The mostly devoured turkey sits exposed and cold, and Mrs. Parker starts carving off pieces to make sandwiches for the week. The leftover mashed potato bowl has been licked clean.

Mr. Parker makes fun of Callie for finishing off the potatoes in the middle of the night. She swears she didn’t, so he targets Mrs. Parker next. But she rolls her eyes and says if she had come down for a midnight snack, he should know her well enough to guess it would have been pie, but she hadn’t done that either. He thinks someone doesn’t want to admit to their nighttime noshing and isn’t sure why, because it’s all good fun. He doesn’t even like leftover mashed potatoes that much, so  he lets it go.

If he put his head anywhere near the bowl, he would smell saliva that certainly didn’t belong to his wife or daughter or anything human, but he simply sets it on the dishwasher rack and cuts himself a sliver of breakfast blueberry pie, the fruit smell masking the spot where it too was bitten into in the middle of the night.

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PRACTICE
4:17 P.M.
AUGUST 15, 2007

Close-up of Callie’s neck as she adjusts a camera on her windowsill. She steps back until she’s in frame and then beams at the camera, but she appears to be facing the wrong direction. That’s because she is looking at a different camera than the one that is looking at her.

“Hello, Davison High. I’m Callie Parker and I’m running for your class president.”

Her smile drops and she shakes her head before putting on a bigger smile and a more chipper voice. “Hey, Davison High! I’m Callie Parker and I’m running to be your class president. A vote for me means a vote for—shit.”

She reaches for her notebook and reads over the script she’s written, muttering to herself. “A vote for me means a vote for progress.”

She sets the notebook back down, straightens her posture, and tries again. But the third time is not the charm.

“Bathroom break,” she says in an annoyed tone, like what she really wants is a break from herself. She turns to leave her bedroom, getting smaller and smaller as she walks down the throat of the hallway.

“Hi Davison High, hi Davison high, hi Davison high, I’m Callie Parker, Callie Parker, Callie Parker, Parker, Parker.”

It seems like her camera is tripping up and repeating her in a strange loop. But her camera isn’t running, and when she returns and starts rehearsing again, she can be heard clearly above the repeating whisper of her own voice being used without her.

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WRAPPING PRESENTS
11:05 P.M.
DECEMBER 24, 2007

Mrs. Parker sits alone in the glow of the Christmas lights. She hums to herself while she prepares last-minute gifts. She doesn’t mind that it’s hard to see as she pens names on the wrapping paper. She likes the peaceful alone time. But while her time might be peaceful, it can’t be considered alone time. When she places a present under the tree, a palm unfurls to take it. She thinks it’s soft Douglas Fir leaves brushing against her own hand.

A few bulbs on the tree blink out one by one and then it’s the whole string, like the darkness is infectious. Mrs. Parker stands up and tuts under her breath. She reaches to twist one of the bulbs, just in case, but it doesn’t fix it.

The streetlights outside the window allow enough light for the camera to catch the outline of Mrs. Parker in her robe and the decorated tree and the figure that is only visible from behind the tree because its smooth, hairless head peeks out at the top where the angel rests. There is no room to hunch behind the tree, so its arms must hang low to the ground, dangling at its feet.

Mrs. Parker shuffles out of the room, mostly blocking the view of an arm that trails long and snake-like in the air behind her, lingering above the nape of her neck. It could pounce but it doesn’t. Then she is gone, and the hand stops in front of the camera nestled in a stocking and puts up a single finger that would look like a shushing finger if the grinning mouth wasn’t across the room.

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LIVING ROOM
6:25 P.M.
MARCH 25, 2008

This is a tape the Parker family doesn’t own. It’s not even finished filming yet. But the family is finished watching their box of home videos and are stretching their limbs and smiling at each tape like the past has made them like each other better in the present. It’s as if they have not noticed any of the dark things hiding in their old memories, eating into the fabric of their lives like moth holes.

They move towards the kitchen where we can’t see them through the window anymore. But we’ll creep back in and continue to watch. We feed on lurking, and they make it so easy to fester in the corners of their eyes and every room in their house. The Parkers don’t realize the tapes they found are not their family home videos, but ours. And yet, with lives so pressed and interlaced, what little difference it makes.