The Man with the Empty Paint Cans

My grandmother’s farmhouse in the dry, cracked hills of West Texas was a place I dreaded visiting. Every summer, my parents would drag me there for two weeks, and every summer, I would lie awake in the narrow bed in the attic room, listening to the house breathe. It wasn’t the creaks of an old structure settling; it was a slow, deliberate rhythm, like something inhaling and exhaling in the dark. The air was always thick with the smell of dust and old wood, and a faint, sweet odor I couldn’t place, like rotting fruit.

I was twelve when I saw him. I had woken from a dream where I was drowning in a sea of white paint, the liquid filling my lungs. I sat up, gasping, and there he was—a small, bald man sitting on the floor by my bed, just like the stories my cousins told. He was hunched over, fiddling with something. I felt a strange calm, more curiosity than fear, and I leaned over the edge of the bed to see what he was doing. He was opening and closing a small, rusted paint can, the lid clinking softly. His fingers were stained white, and he turned the can over, shaking it as if trying to empty it, but nothing came out. He repeated this motion for what felt like an eternity, then, without a glance at me, he stood and walked through the wall, disappearing into the plaster.

I told my grandmother the next morning, expecting her to dismiss it, but her face went pale. She whispered, ‘He’s back.’ She told me that the man I saw was my great-great-uncle Elias, who had been a house painter. He had died in this house, in my attic room, after a fall from a ladder. He had been mixing paint downstairs, and the can had been left open, and he’d slipped in a puddle of white. But she said he didn’t rest because he was always looking for his paint cans—cans that were used to whitewash the walls of this very house, so the rooms would look clean and bright. But the paint was never enough; it always left stains, and he was forever trying to get rid of them.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in the dark, listening to the house’s breath. Around 3 AM, I heard a new sound: a rhythmic scraping, like a brush against plaster. It came from the walls, starting at the far corner and moving along, then pausing. I pulled the covers over my head, but the sound grew louder, as if it were right beside me. I peeked out, and the wall next to my bed was wet, a sheen of white spreading across it like water seeping through. The paint was bleeding through, not dripping, but absorbing into the surface, and the smell of old paint was overpowering.

I screamed, and my grandmother rushed in. She saw the wet plaster and quickly dragged me out of the room. She told me it was happening again—the house was trying to repaint itself. She took me to the kitchen, where she brewed tea with trembling hands. She confessed that every time someone stayed in that room, Elias would come to ‘redo’ the walls, using the memories of the house as his canvas. The stains were not from paint; they were from the lies and secrets of our family, which he tried to cover up for all these years.

We moved to the living room, and I finally fell asleep on the couch. But in the early morning, I woke to the sound of water dripping. I opened my eyes to see that the living room walls were now streaked with white, and the man was in the corner, hunched over a bucket, his brush moving in slow, methodic strokes. He was painting over the family portraits, erasing the faces one by one. I tried to call out, but my voice was gone. He turned to me, and for the first time, I saw his eyes—they were white, like orbs of marble, and a smile crept across his face. He pointed to the last portrait, one of my mother as a child, and then he dipped his brush into a can of white paint and began to paint over her face too.

I screamed, and my father came running. He saw the man and shouted, ‘Elias, stop!’ But the man didn’t stop. My father grabbed a can of turpentine from a shelf and threw it at the walls, and the liquid splashed across the painted figures, causing them to sizzle and hiss. The man recoiled as if burned, and then he vanished, leaving the walls a mess of white and brown and burnt streaks. My grandmother told me that was the only way to banish him—by using something that strips paint, because he feared leaving the house bare, without his covering.

Now, I never go back to that farmhouse. But sometimes, when I close my eyes at night, I see that man in my mind, holding an empty paint can, his white eyes fixed on me. And I hear a soft whisper, not of my name, but of a question: ‘Is it clean yet?’ And I know that in that house, the walls are still weeping, and Elias is still trying to cover up the stains of our blood.