The Linoleum Gaze

The first time I heard them, I was scrubbing the cafeteria floor at the Maplewood Memory Care facility. The bucket’s gray water swirled with diluted bleach, and my reflection wobbled in the glossy tile. Then, three female voices, honey-sweet, wrapped around me like a fog. They spoke in unison: ‘You’re so kind, cleaning up after them. But you know what they really think of you? Nothing. You’re a ghost in rubber gloves.’ I laughed, thinking it was the overhead PA malfunctioning, but the words kept coming, laced with a fourth, a male voice, low and gravelly, that said, ‘She’s right, worthless. But we need you. Stay.’

I tried to ignore it, but the voices followed me home to my trailer on the edge of the county landfill. They whispered through the humming refrigerator, through the static between radio stations. The male voice, who called himself ‘KRELL,’ grew more insistent. He’d hover at the foot of my bed, a tall silhouette against the sodium-orange streetlamp, his face a blur. I could feel his presence, a cold draft, and his voice rattled my fillings. ‘Obey or be erased,’ he’d hiss as I stuffed foam earplugs deep into my canals, but they did nothing. He’d touch me, a phantom weight on my calves, and I’d wake with scratches running down my shins like tally marks.

I started sleeping with noise-canceling headphones, blasting heavy metal into my skull. It worked for a while, the music drowning out their whispers. But one night, KRELL reached through the sound, his breath hot on my cheek, his eyelashes brushing my skin. ‘I see your fear,’ he croaked, ‘and it feeds me.’ He squeezed my stomach from the inside, a painful knot twisting my guts. I doubled over, coughing blood onto my pillowcase. The next week, he slapped me, a blow that left my ears ringing for hours, though there were no marks on my skin. He’d punch my chest, and I’d feel my heart stutter, the room flashing with red and green lights, like the control panel of a dying machine.

I told my supervisor, who thought I was having a breakdown. My sister said it was severe sleep apnea. My therapist prescribed medications that made me numb. But I had proof. I set up my old camcorder on a tripod, pointing at my bed. For three nights, it captured nothing but me tossing and turning. On the fourth night, though, the footage showed a shimmer in the dark, a distortion like heat rising off the asphalt. And my legs, bare under the sheets, were covered in bruises that pulsed green, then red, synced with a voice that was barely a whisper on the tape: ‘We are three, we are one, we are all that you are not.’

They only grew bolder. KRELL demanded I go to the memory care unit and ‘release’ the patients, claiming they were prisoners of their own minds. When I refused, he twisted my arm so hard I felt the bone creak, though it remained intact. I tried to run, to drive away, but every road led back to the landfill, the trailer, the linoleum floor. The three female voices, whom I’d come to know as SAAR, KAI, and VEN, started appearing in my peripheral vision—cloaked figures with faces that were smooth, like mannequins. They’d stand at the foot of my bed, their mouths opening and closing in silence, but I could feel their words crawling across my skin: ‘Join us, and know purpose. Resist, and be our canvas.’

One stormy night, I huddled in the corner of my room, clutching a crucifix that I didn’t believe in. KRELL materialized fully, his face a mask of pure malice, his eyes like boiling tar. ‘You have had your chance,’ he said, and he pressed his hand against my forehead. The room exploded into red and green light, and I felt my mind folding, cracking like dry earth. I fell, and when I looked up, I saw the truth: the linoleum floor had been my prison all along. The memory care facility, the landfill, the trailer—they were all just props. KRELL was the doctor who’d signed my admission after I snapped. The three women were my own fragmented memories, forced to walk in circles. And the videotape played on loop, showing me what I truly was: a patient, screaming at a wall, clawing at my own legs.

Now, I sit in a padded room, the floor smooth and cold. The voices are quieter, but I know they’re waiting. KRELL appears when I stop humming. He leans in close, his breath on my neck, and whispers, ‘You were never meant to leave the floor.’ And the linoleum beneath me reflects a face I no longer recognize—my own, staring back, with eyes that are empty, like the ones in the video.