The Linoleum Pattern

My grandmother used to tell me about the winter we spent in that drafty farmhouse outside of Grafton, Vermont. I was barely a year old, just learning to sit up on my own, and my mother was a young widow trying to piece together a life from the scraps my father had left behind. The house had been in her family for generations, but it had been empty for nearly a decade when we moved in. The landlord, a man with watery eyes and a nervous tic, warned us about the draft in the north bedroom and the coil of rusted wire in the cellar, but he never said a word about the linoleum.

The kitchen floor was covered in a pattern of faded, interlocking diamonds, like the scales of some ancient serpent. My mother spent hours scrubbing it, trying to lift the grime that seemed to seep from the very color, but the pattern remained stubbornly dull, as if the design itself had been burned into the material. I was too young to notice such things, but my mother would later tell me that she felt a constant weight in that room, a pressure against her temples that made her want to close her eyes and never open them again.

Every morning, she would lay me on a quilt in the center of the kitchen floor while she fixed her coffee, and I would gurgle and coo, reaching for the sunlight that slanted through the window. But as the weeks passed, I grew quieter, more still. She found me staring at the linoleum, my tiny fingers tracing the lines of the diamonds, my lips moving as if in conversation. She would call my name, and I would blink and smile, as if waking from a dream. She told herself it was just a phase, but she started to avoid the kitchen after dusk.

It was on the fourth Sunday of January that everything changed. My mother woke to an unfamiliar silence. No crying, no babbling, just a thick, heavy quiet that pressed against her eardrums. She padded down the hallway, her bare feet cold on the warped floorboards, and pushed open the kitchen door. The room was bathed in a pale, gray light, and there I was, not in my playpen, but sitting cross-legged on the floor, my back straight, my head cocked at an angle that made her heart lurch.

The playpen gate had been lowered, the latch lying open on the floor like a snapped wing. The overturned basket of wooden blocks was scattered around me, but I wasn’t playing with them. I was staring at a spot on the linoleum where two diamonds met, and I was laughing, a high, tinkling sound that seemed to come from somewhere else entirely. In front of me, as if drawn in chalk, was a crude figure, a stick-like outline of a person, but with far too many joints, the arms and legs bending in impossible ways.

My mother spoke my name, her voice trembling. I didn’t turn. Instead, the laughter stopped, and I slowly lifted my hand, pointing at the figure. The air grew cold, and the smell of damp soil and rot filled the room. She rushed forward, scooping me up, and as she did, she saw that the figure on the floor was moving, its lines squirming like worms, and there was a faint, wet sound, like a mouth trying to speak underwater.

She didn’t look back. She packed what she could and drove us to her sister’s house in Montpelier, leaving most of our belongings behind. The next day, she returned with the sheriff to collect our things, but the kitchen floor was bare, the linoleum ripped up in strips, revealing the black, sodden boards beneath. The figure was gone, and there was no sign of anything else, but on the wall above the stove, someone had written in a shaky, childlike hand: ‘WE PLAYED.’ The sheriff said it looked like old grease, but my mother knew better.

I’m thirty-two now, and I’ve never been back to Vermont. But every once in a while, when I’m in a place with patterned linoleum, I feel a tug at the edge of my memory, a sensation of being watched. And sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see that figure, and I hear a voice that is not mine, whispering the words I spoke as a child, words I had never been taught: ‘He wants me to stay.’