The Little Man

He was there again tonight. He was there every night. The little man waiting beside the stairs, behind the banister, close to the wall, half hiding in the light. The little man who waited for me every night. He never did anything, he never said anything, and he never moved. He just waited. He was waiting when I opened the door late at night, when I crossed the hall, and when I woke up early from a strange dream, I would see him downstairs blending into the silent, sleepy dark. The neighborhood would sleep, and he would wait.

Sometimes I would peek from upstairs over the rail at the spot where the little man always stood, and I would see him there, waiting for me. If he made a noise, it was only one and it resembled the sound of tears. On the rare nights when he tried to say what was wrong, he would only speak in a wordless cry, and it would be so slight and so soft in its sound that I sometimes wondered if it had been there at all.

I don’t know what he is waiting for, and I never ask him. I know he could never answer in anything other than a cry, but I was still too frightened to try. I was worried that if I asked him the question, one day he just might answer, and I would have to know why he was always there, waiting for me.

Tonight, I unlocked the front door and stepped inside. My shoes thudding noisily across the hardwood floors, and the door making a similar thud when I closed it. I turned and saw him; the man made of a silhouette in the witching hour of 3 a.m. He was waiting for me. I had left a lamp on down the hall, and the shadows were rounding out the shape of him perfectly, making him seem almost too real. I could tell that he was sad.

I came home late, and he knew it. There were tears in the air, I could hear their echoes like ghosts that couldn’t move on. He'd thought I wasn’t coming home. He’d thought that I’d left him alone.

I walked around the hall, past the man, and where he stood, just barely there. I stopped when I was out of sight, waited for a moment, counted to ten, and then I leaned my head back to look down in the hall again. I saw the man, but this time he wasn’t waiting.

He moved. His head was also leaning, craning forward as if he’d been trying to peek at me just as I was him. We stared at each other until the sun came up.

I don’t know what he wants, and I don’t know who he is, or who he was, but I think the only thing he wanted was not to be alone in the dark.

Rachel Roth