The Ceramic Cascade

In the heart of Cebu City, my older sister, Mara, and I rented a small two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a dilapidated building. The paint was peeling, and the hallway smelled of dampness and old wood. Our unit, unit 3B, had a narrow kitchen with overhead cabinets that creaked ominously. We moved in at the start of March, and the first few weeks were uneventful, save for the occasional gecko skittering across the walls.

But everything changed after our grandmother visited us in April. She was a superstitious woman from the province, and she insisted on blessing the place with holy water. She muttered prayers under her breath as she walked through each room, her eyes lingering on the kitchen cabinets. She warned us, ‘This place has old bones. Be careful with the dishes.’ We laughed it off, chalking it up to her age and folklore.

A week after she left, the disturbances began. It was a Tuesday, around 7 PM, when we heard a loud crash from the kitchen. Rushing in, we found shattered ceramic shards scattered across the tiled floor. The overhead cabinet door was wide open, and every plate and bowl inside had tumbled out. Mara, an electrical engineer, examined the hinges and found them intact. ‘Could be a temperature thing, or maybe a draft,’ she said. We cleaned up and moved the dishes to a plastic container under the sink, thinking it was a fluke.

The next night, the same thing happened with a set of glasses. The cabinets burst open as if thrown, and the glasses exploded into glittering fragments. This time, Mara checked the wall for any signs of warping or settling. ‘The building’s old, maybe there’s a shift,’ she reasoned. But when we took the hinges apart, there was no corrosion, no misalignment. They were as solid as the day they were installed.

I started to feel uneasy. The incidents weren’t just random; they were targeted at the dishware. It was as if something wanted to break anything made of ceramic. One evening, I was alone in the kitchen, reaching for a bowl that we’d left on the counter. The moment my fingers brushed it, the bowl shot across the room and shattered against the wall. I stood frozen, my heart pounding. There was no rational explanation for that.

Mara dismissed it as a trick of the light or a sudden draft, but I knew better. The air felt thick, charged with an unspoken presence. I began to notice the ceramic doorknobs rattling in their frames. The tiles in the bathroom would crack one by one, as if something was stepping on them invisibly. The fear grew, but we were engineers, trained to find logical answers. We convinced ourselves it was the building’s foundation settling, or maybe a high-pressure water pipe running through the walls.

Then came the final straw. Our grandmother had given us a precious heirloom: a hand-painted ceramic vase from her village. We kept it on a shelf in the living room, a token of our heritage. One night, as we were watching TV, the vase flew off the shelf and smashed into a thousand pieces right before our eyes. Mara finally admitted it wasn’t normal. She suggested we move out, but the lease was binding.

I started sleeping with a hammer under my pillow. Every creak, every shift of the building, put me on edge. One night, I woke to a sound like grating ceramic. I crept into the kitchen, and there, in the dim glow of the refrigerator, I saw a figure crouched by the pantry. It was small, gaunt, with skin that looked like unglazed clay. It was holding a plate, stroking it like a prized possession. Then, with a sickening snap, it bit into the plate and began to chew.

I screamed, and it vanished. The next morning, we found the pantry door open and every ceramic item we had left reduced to fine powder. Mara called a priest, but he refused to come, saying the building had a history of ‘ceramic hauntings’ — a curse from the old pottery factory that once stood here. He told us to leave and never look back.

We broke the lease, packed our things, and moved to my aunt’s place in the suburbs. But the dreams stayed with me. In them, I see the creature, and it whispers, ‘More bowls, more plates, more shards for the collection.’ I can’t shake the feeling that it followed us, hiding in our new apartment, waiting for the first piece of ceramic to appear.

Now, I’ve thrown away all our dishes. We eat from metal pans and cardboard containers. But still, sometimes, I catch a glimpse in the kitchen — a flicker of something gray and brittle moving in the corner of my eye. And I know, this is just the beginning. The ceramic cascade will never end.