The mug was the first thing to vanish. It was nothing special – a sea-turtled freebie we’d picked up in Maui over spring break, having easily spent over $50 in the souvenir shop. I’d reached for the coffee pot, turned around to pour, and the mug had disappeared. I took it as a divine sign that I’d had enough and emptied the remaining coffee down the drain.
The next morning, I made tea instead, but lost track of my cereal bowl. My daughter reported that her math homework was missing, but I took that as an excuse and scolded her for fibbing. Her retainer was missing, too, and her new Adidas. “Dad’s going to be so mad,” she said, and we agreed not to tell him when he came to pick her up.
Next, was the string of twinkly lights we’d weaved through the framed pictures and knick-knacks on the mantle and had left up long after the holidays— Our house, our rules, we’d decided. We planned to keep them up all year. But there was no sign of them when we returned home late from softball practice. And no sign of silverware when we went to eat our Taco Time salads — just crumbs and wooden fast-food chopsticks in an otherwise empty drawer.
Growing worried about our safety, I installed a Ring doorbell. We thought maybe we’d catch a cat burglar, or maybe even a ghost, but it rang only for Amazon drivers. We entertained ourselves for a while by telling jokes to the drivers through the microphone—knock-knock / who’s there?—but then the Ring doorbell disappeared, too.
The TV remotes, the dog’s water bowl, the lamp with the retro paisley design that we never turned on—gone, gone, and gone. Each morning, we’d survey rooms to see what had disappeared. I tried making it a game. “Let’s play Nancy Drew,” I said, but when I turned around, the magnifying glass was gone, the notepad, my reading glasses. “This isn’t fun, anymore,” said my daughter. She wanted to leave, but we had nowhere else to go.
She started sleeping in my room again, like when she’d lose a tooth, worried that she’d be all alone when the fairy arrived to take it away. She brought with her a blankie she’d long outgrown and a picture book from years ago, when we were all still a family. We taped a flashlight to the nightstand, tethered the bed to the floor, and clung to one another, afraid of what we’d lose next.
Kelle Schillaci is a Seattle-based writer whose stories have appeared in The Penn Review, Los Angeles Review, LEON Literary Review, Gone Lawn, Flash Frog, Citron Review, Ghost Parachute and other literary journals. She can be found at @kmschillaci.bsky.social.