The Cursor’s Vigil

The first thing I noticed about the house on Maple Street was the way the kitchen linoleum buckled near the back door, as if something beneath had tried to push through and given up. We moved in on a scorching July afternoon in 2007. My father, Roy, kept saying it was ‘character.’ My mother, Diane, spent the first week scrubbing every surface with vinegar and lemon, as if she could wash away the previous owners’ residue. My little sister, Clara, who was five, declared the attic her ‘princess tower’ and insisted on dragging her plastic tiara up the pull-down stairs. I was nine and old enough to know better. The house felt wrong. Not haunted—not in the way the movies showed, with rattling chains and moaning specters—but wrong in the way a room feels when you’ve forgotten something important. I didn’t tell anyone. There wasn’t really anyone to tell. Roy was at work until nine, and Diane was too busy trying to make a home to notice her son’s discomfort. Clara was too busy being five. So I kept it to myself, that crawling sensation at the back of my neck whenever I walked down the hallway to the bathroom.

The desktop computer sat in the corner of the living room, a bulky beige tower that hummed like a distant swarm of bees. It was always on, because Roy said turning it off and on was bad for the hard drive. The monitor was a heavy CRT that gave off a warm glow and a faint ozone smell. On weekends, Clara and I were allowed to sleep on the pull-out couch, watching movies until our eyes burned. I was always the last to fall asleep. On a Saturday night in late September, around midnight, I was watching a rerun of some show about a detective with a photographic memory. The volume was low, but the room was silent except for the hum of the computer and Clara’s soft breathing. Then the mouse started clicking.

It was a wired mouse, the kind with a red LED underneath. I saw it clearly in the glow of the screen. The cursor was moving across the desktop, opening folders, closing them. The clicks were rapid, almost frantic, like someone was typing a message in Morse code. I froze. I wanted to call for my parents, but I was frozen, my throat tight. The cursor stopped. The clicks ceased. I told myself it was a malfunction, a hiccup in the ancient machine. I turned up the volume to drown out the hum, and the clicking started again—more insistent now, as if the cursor was demanding attention. I was about to get up and unplug the thing when my mother appeared in the doorway, squinting against the screen’s glare.

‘What are you doing up?’ she asked, her voice groggy. ‘And why is the TV so loud?’ I had no idea how loud it had become. It was blaring, the detective yelling about a clue. I fumbled for the remote and turned it down. The clicking stopped the moment the volume dropped. My mother sighed, told me to go to sleep, and shuffled back to the bedroom. I heard her door click shut. The clicking started again. This time it was not frantic. It was slow, deliberate. One click. Pause. Another click. It was the sound of something taking its time. My skin went cold. I pulled the blanket over my head and squeezed my eyes shut, praying for sleep to take me. It did, eventually, but the clicking followed me into dreams—a sound like a metronome counting down to something.

November 7, 2007. A Tuesday. I remember because the date was printed on the top of the school newsletter that sat on the kitchen counter. At school, I had a stomachache that wouldn’t go away. I felt like something bad was lurking just behind the horizon, like a storm brewing, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. When I got home, the house was quiet. Too quiet. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the wall. She didn’t look up when I came in. She just said, ‘Grandma passed.’ I didn’t cry. I just stood there, watching the clock on the wall tick. At midnight, I couldn’t sleep. I went downstairs to get a glass of water. The computer was still on, the screen saver drifting through floating windows. As I walked past, the cursor began to move. It clicked on the ‘Start’ menu. Then it opened a text document. The cursor blinked patiently, waiting for input. I watched, heart pounding, as it typed a single word. It was my grandmother’s name. Then it typed another word. It was the date: 11/07/2007. Then the cursor stopped. It did not move again for the rest of the night. I unplugged the computer from the wall. I never told anyone. But I knew, in that moment, that the house had been waiting for this. And I knew it was not done with us.