It is Not a Generous God

I knew when he showed up that he wasn’t my dad. Well, that is if it can be called a he. Momma said that the police had finally found daddy after the cave-in; that he’d needed time to recover. Before the accident, dad was a ‘forensic anthropologist’ (whatever that meant), and he spent most of his time spelunking in caves when he wasn’t with me. He would always get a certain glint in his eye when he talked about how much we can learn from the people of the past, and back when I was really little, he’d bring me old jewels and coins that he found on his digs.

“You, Amalie, are a princess,” He said, when he bestowed Momma and I with precious rubies and sapphires. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise”.

What happened in Missouri was never supposed to happen. Like my dad’s interests, cave-ins were supposed to be a thing of the past. I mean, the last time someone died in a cave in the United States had been in 2011, twelve years before my dad went missing.

The last time I heard from my real dad was May 11th, 2023, two days before my eleventh birthday. I spent my birthday watching my momma burst into tears in a police station, stammering on about how dad was supposed to be home yesterday, and that we still hadn’t heard anything from him.

Later that night, we turned on the news and saw that a major tunnel in the Ozark Caverns had collapsed. I didn’t sleep that night. Neither did momma. We just laid awake curled into each other under the covers, pretending that if we laid very, very still, that it would all go away. During the next few days, a flurry of neighbors that I barely recognized came by with cards and casseroles, as if their hospitality could fix the pit of dread I felt.

So many of them told me that my father was a great man, and that they were sure the rescue teams would find him. All it did was make me angry. How dare they tell me dad was a great man, as if I didn’t know that already. How dare they tell me he could be found, when I was sure he was dead. I couldn’t explain it but I felt a physical absence those first few days, as if the string that had tied us together had been cut. I knew in my heart, as much as I didn’t want to believe it, that he was gone.

Momma cried so much those first few days that she was beginning to see things that weren’t really there because of the dehydration. She stopped going to work for a few weeks and we lived with Uncle Ellis, who always made sure momma slept at night and made me mac and cheese for lunch. He even sat me on his knee like dad used to do, but he didn’t bring me rubies and sapphires, or check under my bed for the Chupacabra when I couldn’t sleep.

I was determined not to let Momma see me cry those first few days. I would make my Aunt Clara drive me to school everyday, and right before homeroom, I would go to the bathroom and write a letter to my dad in one of the stalls. That’s when the tears would come, coursing in red hot streams down my face.

By then, many of my classmates had heard that dad was missing, but none of them dared to question me about it. They would just look at me with pity like I was a kicked puppy, which somehow felt worse than if they had asked me what happened. My best friends, Justice and Ramona, were more careful around me when we played house at recess, as if I was a bomb waiting to be set off. Sometimes I would even find my teachers whispering to each other, only to abruptly stop when I walked in for math class. I think that’s all I really became to people when it happened. The little girl with the missing dad.

At some point in that blur of grief, Uncle Ellis came home with a golden retriever puppy for Momma and me. He believed that if we had something to take care of, it would help us keep our heads above the water. Momma stamped her foot and insisted that he shouldn’t have, but little by little, we fell in love with him. We named him Alex, because my dad’s middle name had been Alexander. We thought of it as our own little homage to him.

It was almost two years later when we heard that knock on the door. I was in sixth grade, and though I thought of him everyday, time was beginning to turn the sharp pain of my father’s absence into a dull ache. I was focused on getting through middle school, and what I was going to wear to the semi-formal in December. Michael, the boy I had a crush on, was going to be there and I was determined to make a lasting impression.

Despite that, I was still thrilled when dad showed up on our doorstep. He smiled at Momma, and the chip in his tooth that he’d gotten from playing hockey when he was younger was as charming as ever. He was still wearing the painter’s jeans he had on when he went missing, which were now covered in dust and soot. Momma screamed and threw her arms around him, and everything was almost normal. Almost.

Those first few nights that he came home, I didn’t leave his side. Momma even let me skip school, which she usually never did, even when I was sick. We played board games, took Alex on walks in the park, and watched TV, but most of all, we laughed. Momma and I hadn’t laughed that much in two years, and the muscles in my face hurt by the end of the night. It was as if I had forgotten how to smile.

Eventually the novelty of having dad home began to wear off. He melded back into our lives as if he had never been gone at all, and I was beginning to forget what it meant to hurt. That was when my curiosity made a vicious return. Why had he been gone for so long? Where had he been? Was he just holding out on us? Was I not worth coming home for?

One day after school, when Dad and I were taking Alex on a walk in the local park, I got up the courage to ask him why he’d been gone for so long.

“Dad?”

“Yes, Amalie?”

“What happened down in that cave? I mean, why did it take you two years to get back to us? If you were in the hospital, you could’ve called us. You know we would’ve been there. You know we would’ve helped you. I just-”

“That’s enough, Amalie”. He said sternly, with an edge to his voice that I hadn’t heard since he and Momma were fighting when money was tight. Being a forensic anthropologist didn’t always pay like a traditional career would, especially when he was between projects.

“I just want a straight answer from you! I spent years grieving you, and then you showed back up like nothing even happened. What happened down there? Why would you do that to me? Why would you do that to Momma?”

“I said, that’s enough!” He roared, so suddenly that Alex began to bark at him. I flinched, but the look on dad’s face made me more confused than anything else. He didn’t look like he was frustrated with me. He looked lost, as if he actually didn’t remember what happened in the caverns.

As the weeks went on, it became clear to me that he didn’t remember much at all. On my birthday, I wore a plastic tiara, and Momma called me Princess Amalie. I turned to dad, and with a cheeky smile on my face, I asked him if he’d brought any new rubies for me.

He stared at me blankly, as if he didn’t understand the language I was speaking. Something about the way he looked at me made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There was no life behind his eyes.

“No. There are no jewels in the caverns. He is not a generous god”.

This raised a brow from Momma, but she insisted that he had just made an ill-fitting joke that only his fellow anthropologists would understand. Nonetheless, Momma took dad to a doctor to be psychologically examined. The neurologists found nothing wrong with his brain structure, and we were told by a smiling doctor with a receding hairline that his mental state was perfectly normal.

Normal. Nothing about any of this was normal. Even at 12, I didn’t believe what they were telling me. I guess that’s why I decided to take matters into my own hands. On the computer that my middle school gave me to do homework, I decided to start looking into the site my dad has been working at. What I found made my mouth feel like cotton. Rescue teams had found every single body under a heap of rubble except one: my father’s. I told Momma what I’d found, and all she said was, “Of course they didn’t find his body. He’s right here with us”.

By then I was beginning to accept that I was alone in my suspicions. It was only when dad completely forgot who Uncle Ellis was that Momma took him to the doctors for the second time. Once again, we were greeted by a smiling doctor in a lab coat that told us that dad’s brain looked healthy.

I had enough sense not to tell Justice and Ramona about… about what? That I felt like my father was someone else? That I thought someone- or something had replaced my father? I knew I'd end up going straight to the guidance counselor if I said anything like that.

I tried to keep going on with my life like nothing was wrong. I got more involved with the dance team at school, and I helped my student council with planning our semi-formal. But it only got harder and harder to ignore the presence that was my father.

One night, I woke up to find that I was riddled with hunger. Given recent events, it had gotten more difficult for me to eat because I was always rattled with nerves. I rubbed at my tired eyes, flung my covers off, and dragged myself out of bed. I began to lazily pad down the hallway but something stopped me dead in my tracks.

From the kitchen, I heard snapping and clicking, followed by what I could only describe as the sound of wriggling flesh. I felt my breath catch in my throat, and I just barely had the foresight to grab the letter opener that we kept on a coffee table by the door. I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to keep moving forward. It was stupid, but I thought that maybe, whatever I was about to find would finally prove to Momma that something wasn’t right.

It took everything in me to stop myself from screaming when I reached the kitchen doorway. ‘Dad’ sat at the kitchen island, hunched over two textbooks. I watched as his skin loosened and tightened again, like the pulse of a heartbeat. It looked like there was something crawling under the surface, waiting to ooze from his pores.

Watching his skin squirm was almost comforting when I realized what the snapping sounds were. His bones contorted and twisted in angles that I knew weren’t natural, until he snapped them back into place. As much as I didn’t want to, I forced myself to get closer to him, so I could get a look at what he was reading.

I don’t know why seeing the textbook he was reading was what broke my guard down. I realized with a start that he was reading Essential Psychology, as well as an anatomy textbook that Momma had to buy during her nursing exams. Whatever this thing was, it was studying how to be human.

I ran. I didn’t care how loud my footsteps were, or if this thing would kill me because I had discovered what it was. My heart pounded against my ribs as I thundered back up the stairs and slammed my bedroom door shut. I turned the lock and slumped against the frame, whispering a prayer under my breath.

I waited for hours for the thing to come up and find me. I know I didn’t get a wink of sleep that night; I just sat frozen against the frame. I thought that it was only a matter of time before it came bursting through my bedroom door, reaching out for me with its broken fingers.

And yet, it never came. I realized with some relief that in its frenzied transformation, it hadn’t noticed the little girl lingering in the kitchen. By the time Momma came to get me for school the next morning, I had almost convinced myself that it was all just a nightmare; that I’d had a particularly bad experience with sleep paralysis.

I fell asleep in school that day. Ms. Kensington had been droning on and on about decimals, and I felt my eyelids growing heavy. I awoke to whispers and stares from my classmates, and I realized with a start that I had been out cold. Ms. Kensington shook her head disapprovingly, and wrote a pass for me to go to the nurses office.

The nurse fussed over me, going on about how ‘the circles under my eyes were too dark for a twelve year old’, and that I was ‘clammy and bordering on a fever’. She called Momma to come pick me up, and I almost pleaded with her not to. As long as I was at school, I didn’t have to face if what I saw last night was real.

Before I knew it, I was on the way home with Momma. I tried to keep up with her small talk, but I could only get one word out at a time before my brain started to cannibalize itself again. The next few hours passed by in a blur. I tried to keep myself busy with books, puzzles, and games. Momma insisted that since I was catching a cold I shouldn’t leave the house, and I felt like I would go crazy if I let myself have even a moment to think.

During dinner, I couldn’t help but feel like Dad was looking at me differently. Like I was in on something that only he knew. I may have imagined it, but I swore that he even winked at me when I hugged Momma goodnight. This time, I took the letter opener upstairs with me and shoved it under my pillow.

Despite everything, my exhaustion from the day before won me over that night, and I found myself in a deep, peaceful sleep. That is, until I heard Alex start howling. His barks were about as close as I think a dog could get to wailing. I catapulted out of bed, the letter opener clutched tightly in my fist.

For the first time since all of this started, Momma was right behind me. Every line in her face was screwed up with worry, and she held a baseball bat that she and dad kept under their bed. As we got closer to the kitchen, I nearly slipped on the tile, as I realized that the ground was slick with a pool of water.

‘No, not water’. I thought to myself, as bile rose in my throat. ‘Blood’.

By the time we rounded the corner it was too late. The thing was hunched in our living room, and for the first time, I got a good look at what was lurking underneath. Its spine was hunched, and it had long, pointy fingers that looked like talons. Its eyes were shrunken, and it smelled horribly of rot.

I heard the crunching. I saw the blood. But I was still willing to accept that this was all a horrible nightmare. Until it turned, and I saw Alex’s dog collar in its hands. It wiped its mouth, and I realized that all was lost.

“Who are you?”, was the only thing Momma managed to whisper. And all of these years later, I still don’t know.