The Well of Sunday

My name is Clara, and this is the first time I’ve put this into words for anyone but my therapist. She thinks it’s a manifestation of my grief, but she didn’t see what I saw in the farmhouse on the outskirts of Redmond. I was a night nurse at the county hospital, and after a particularly brutal shift where I lost a patient, I drove home in a daze. The autumn rain had turned the gravel road to mud, and the headlights barely cut through the fog as I turned into the long driveway lined with dying poplars. The house had been my grandmother’s, left to me after her stroke, and it always felt like a sleeping thing waiting to wake—its dark windows, its creaking porch, the old well in the backyard that had been capped for as long as I could remember.

That night, I was too tired to eat properly, so I just microwaved some soup and went straight to bed, still in my scrubs. My room was on the second floor, with a window that looked out over the drive. I remember staring at the ceiling, my mind replaying the beeping monitor from the ward, when I heard it: a child’s crying, soft and muffled, coming from the hallway. I froze. The sound was too close, too real—not the wind, not the pipes. I tried to tell myself it was a cat, but then I heard running footsteps, small and quick, padding down the hall right outside my door. My body felt heavy, like I was pinned to the mattress, and I couldn’t even turn my head. My eyes darted to the crack under the door, and I saw a shadow pass, and then stop. The crying stopped abruptly, replaced by a high, trilling laugh—the kind of giggle that belongs to a child playing hide-and-seek, but it was wrong because it was coming from right outside my door.

The door creaked open slowly, even though I knew I had locked it. I tried to scream, but my throat was closed. A little girl stood there, wearing a yellow dress that was stained with dark, wet patches like she had been in the rain for hours. Her hair was stringy and hung over her face, and she was barefoot. She walked toward my bed, each step leaving a wet footprint on the hardwood. Her head was tilted at an impossible angle as if her neck was broken, and she said nothing, just advanced. When she reached my bedside, she stopped and slowly raised both arms, reaching for my neck. I felt pressure on my throat, not hands but something like cold water seeping into my skin, and I couldn’t breathe. My lungs burned, and my vision started to darken. I fought with every ounce of my will, but my limbs were like stone. I thought of my mother, of the abandoned well in the yard, of a name I hadn’t heard in years—a little girl who drowned in that well in 1952, the year before my grandmother moved in. The house had been silent about her, but I had found old newspaper clippings in the attic.

Just as I was about to pass out, a dog barked from somewhere outside, and the pressure vanished. I gasped, sucking in air, and the girl was gone. The door was open, and I could hear her laughing from the hallway, then fading away. I lay there trembling for hours, my throat sore. In the morning, I found her footprints on the floor—small, wet prints leading from my door down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door, where they ended at the capped well. The cap was ajar, as if something had pushed it from below. I called my parents, but they told me it was just stress from the night shift. They said I should take a break. But I know what I saw, and I know what I felt. The worst part is that I haven’t told them the rest—that in the days since, I’ve seen her in the corner of my eye, and that last week, I heard her singing the same song from the well, and my hands are starting to leave wet prints on things. I’m writing this from my car, parked on the main road, because I’m too afraid to go back inside. But she’s already in the back seat, her reflection in the rearview mirror, and she’s smiling.