The Puddle in the Porcelain

I was fourteen, and my family had just moved to a dusty town in the middle of nowhere. Our new house was a creaking Victorian with peeling wallpaper and a basement that smelled like wet earth. My parents worked late, and my older brother was always at his friend’s house. So most afternoons, I had the place to myself. I hated it. The silence was too heavy, and every floorboard groaned like it was alive.

One scorching summer day, I decided to take a cold shower to escape the heat. The bathroom was on the ground floor, off the hallway that led to the kitchen. It had a clawfoot tub with a rusted showerhead, and the door had a habit of swinging shut. I left it propped open with a brick, because I couldn’t stand the thought of being trapped in there with the door closed. I turned the water on full blast, letting it pound against my back, and I closed my eyes.

Then I felt it. A prickling on the back of my neck, like I was being watched. My eyes snapped open, and I turned my head to the right, toward the sink and the mirror. There, standing between the toilet and the door, was a girl. She was only visible from the shoulders up, as if she were submerged to her collarbone in the floor. Her hair was stringy, plastered to her skull, and a dark liquid dripped from her scalp, pooling on the tiles below. But it wasn’t blood. It was ink, thick and black, spreading like a stain.

Her face was pale, almost translucent, and her eyes were wide, too wide, with no whites, only pitch black. She stared at me, and I couldn’t move. I was frozen, the water running over me, my heart hammering in my chest. Then she did something that chilled me to the bone. She smiled, and her mouth opened, and a torrent of ink spilled out, cascading down her chin and chest, turning her white dress black. She raised a hand, and I saw her fingers were elongated, like spider legs, and she pointed at me. Then she mouthed something I couldn’t hear, and vanished.

I scrambled out of the tub, slipping on the wet floor, and ran barefoot and soaked down the hallway, out the back door, and into the blazing sun. I didn’t stop until I reached the end of the block, my chest heaving. I never went back into that bathroom alone again. I would hold it in all day, or use the rusty outhouse in the backyard. My parents thought I was being dramatic, but I knew what I saw.

A few weeks later, my brother found an old photograph in the attic, curled and yellowed. It was of a girl in a white dress, standing in front of our house, her hair neat and her smile normal. But in the background, just barely visible, was the shape of a person in the bathroom window, and the face looked exactly like the girl I had seen. On the back, handwritten in faded ink, were the words: ‘For Etta, who drowned in the well.’ I never learned who Etta was, or what really happened in that house, but I know one thing: the ink never washes off. And sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I think I see a faint dark tear sliding down my own cheek, and I’m not sure if it’s my imagination or something else entirely.