Haunted by Diarrhea

The tumble down the stairs didn’t look too bad. She seemed like she was going to make it as the ambulance arrived and took her off – all covered in blood from that crack in her head. A few days after her visit from Vermont was cut short by the accident, I felt a cold gust of wind. It shouldn’t have stuck out to me so much, but it did.

She’d been complaining about the restaurant we had taken her to the previous night. On and on, she went, about the quality of the food. After a few hours of this business, my dad had declared that we could go out for another meal. This time, she’d get to pick the restaurant. She stated “I want to go to the Olive Garden” – then, just to make sure my dad’s guilt didn’t disintegrate before we got to the Olive Garden, she added “…even though I still don’t feel very well.”

As she was raving about the bread sticks and telling us to be prepared for the best meal we’d ever had, she slipped. We didn’t bother going after the ambulance took her off. I still don’t know if she was right.

It wasn’t until around a year after that Christmas that I worked up the nerve to inquire into her whereabouts. My parents had kept up the façade that she’s headed back to Winooski directly from the hospital. That is what you tell a kid when their dog dies, not when their teenage cousin cracks her head open on the staircase that he walks up every night to go to bed. The howls I had heard through our paper-thin walls made more sense now. I was still very angry they had lied to me, but impressed at how well composed they’d kept themselves in my presence during the weeks after the accident – or as impressed as an eight-year-old can be.

The howls grew louder. I thought my mom, finally out in the open with her grief, was really letting it all out until one night when her and dad went to the movies. I heard it and it wasn’t coming from their room. It was across the hall from them, the extra bedroom. I didn’t dare look. Once you fully acknowledge something, there’s no denying its very existence. I put my headphones on and turned my Beatles tape waaaaaaay up. I wished I had louder music.

The moans got louder and louder. I got so scared, I ran out of the house. As I fled into the middle of the street, unsure of where to go, my neighbor almost hit me with his car.

After I explained what was happening, he laughed at me before reassuring me that he would “check it out.” As he turned the knob on the door to the extra bedroom, he fainted. I didn’t know what to do, so I ran. I ran for my life.

I came home hours later to find my mother bawling and my father looking anxious, talking to the police. They were simultaneously relieved and angry to see me. The cops were ecstatic that they didn’t have to do any work, but annoyed they had been required to come over. I told my parents about what had happened and why I’d run away. They told me they didn’t know what I was talking about and that Jeff wasn’t here.

Months went by; Jeff’s house went up for sale. Someone towed away his car. Nobody acknowledged any of it. A young couple with a newborn moved in and Jeff faded from everyone’s memory. When my parents are out, I still hear my cousin wailing from the extra bedroom.

“Haunted by Diarrhea” originally appeared in the infamous Haunted by Diarrhea zine.