My Borrowed Son

Weirdness in the Walls

Chapter Nineteen | Weirdness in the Walls

For the past two weeks, persistent thoughts continued to nag at the young teen. Everything he did seemed to bring up the most peculiar sensations and odd thoughts. Something about that lunch with his mom continued to bother Parker.

Why did she seem nervous?

Where had that drill bit come from if not from her tool kit?

Did Parker really see a shadow that night when the power in his miniature house started flickering?

The whole thing felt surreal. Confusion clouded every thought and made everything feel off. The entire time, the little boy found himself drawn to the curiosities of the wall.

Parker knew as well as any young boy how houses were constructed. There was drywall and support beams and load bearing walls as well as dozens of cords and electrical connections along with pipes that filled the spaces a normal person couldn't see. Like the veins and arteries and organs in a person, there was a lot in a house that was unseen.

What else might be unseen?

Mice, for one, were like viruses of the body of the house. They were unseen and could cause a lot of damage when left unaddressed.

But even Parker knew that mice didn't know how to draw and write.

Try as he might, Parker's scouring of the internet provided no reference to the sketch he found along the baseboard just inside of the electrical cover when he went poking around two weeks ago. There were no carpentry marks that he could find that looked like the mark he found, though he learned quite a bit about architecture and construction shorthand.

Parker concluded it was either something the previous tenant left or something that was an in-house design for whoever built his family's home.

Because, deep down, Parker found himself wanting to discount a third option – that someone else made that mark; someone like him.

It was impossible.

Parker knew his condition was rare and that there were practically no reported cases about it. He knew because he spent a lot of time trying to research it on his own late at night when his mom was sound asleep. It was a move of, what he considered, desperation to find someone else to talk to about why he was the way he was.

Being small was hard...

And Parker wished he could talk to someone about it from time to time – someone who was like him who would understand. Someone to compare notes and experiences with.

Perhaps, in the back of his mind, he wanted someone else to be there so he could talk to them.

But the thought of some strange person who was small like him living in the walls sounded like something out of a fantasy book. Parker had heard of stories like the "BFG" by Roald Dahl and "Thumbelina" by Hans Christian Anderson, but those were fiction stories meant for kids.

On the other hand, Parker did exist.

He was alive.

And he was approaching four inches tall now with all of his recent growth spurts.

So... didn't that mean that those stories could have pulled from a realistic source?

Was it really so far of a stretch to think that these stories might have been pulled from true experiences with someone his size?

These thoughts were keeping Parker awake at night and distracted during the day. It was really bothering Parker. What was worse was that his friends were noticing his absent stares as his mind whirred and worked the same problem over and over. It felt like kneading the same ball of dough as it deflated only to rise again.