A vase on my lawn

My remote job offers me a lot of freedoms that a traditional in-office job obviously can’t.  One of my favorites is that I don’t have to dedicate my mornings to a rushed breakfast, leading to stumbling out the door, hoping traffic is not especially apocalyptic.  Instead, I get to curate my morning routine. 

I wake up about 2 hours before work, 5 AM, to go on a run, shower, water my plants, and do a surface-level cleaning in my kitchen, bedroom, etc.  However, one of my favorite pastimes in the last, say, fifteen to twenty minutes before work, is watching the sunrise while sitting on my front lawn.  I live in a rather secluded area, with forest surrounding most of my humble one-story home, breaking to a clearing that stretches down a hill directly in front of my house.  The scenic view is a joy I indulge in every day, perfect for lightening the spirits before the grind continues at the ol’ office desk.  I never grew tired of it, and never thought I would.  Until last month, when I noticed a vase sitting in the middle of the lawn.  

It was a plain-looking vase, just a white plaster-looking piece you could find at a million different box stores, from Ross to Target.  It was… deceptively mass-produced looking, and far too clean to have just been some random debris that was blown out of the woods. It sat upright, just a couple of yards away from where I relaxed on my lawn.  The morning dew coated it, cool wind brushed by it, and I stared at it all the while, curiosity about the lost decorum tickling me.  I made my way to it; its height was about to my knee.  Rather large for a vase in my opinion, but a vase nonetheless.  Stupidly, I looked into the nearby treeline, thinking perhaps someone had, for some reason, dropped it on their way through the woods.  Realizing how dumb that was, I instead stooped down to pick it up.  I knew a plant or two that could use the extra room this hefty container allowed for.  As I tried heaving it up, I gasped, almost throwing my back out.  The vase was either extremely heavy or DEEPLY rooted to the ground.  My curiosity stoked further, I tried jostling and twisting it to no avail.  It sat firmly in place.  No amount of pulling or pushing loosened it from the earth it stood on.  

Slightly irked, I retreated inside to begin another day at my desk, thinking little of the obtuse vase squatting on my lawn.  Thoughts of lame pranksters came to my mind, but again, I live in a relatively secluded area.  My nearest neighbor is about 10 minutes down the gravel road I drive down to reach the highway.  And there sure aren’t a bunch of young suburban teens pulling some obscure internet-trending prank in this “neighborhood” we live in.  Either way, my thoughts were occupied by the oncoming day, so I didn’t dwell on the strange object nesting outside.  

The next day, I noted that it was still there.  I ignored it; I didn’t want it to ruin my overall positive energy, as I had just finished my run and wanted to soak in the morning air.  It was only as I turned to go inside that it caught my eye.  The vase seemed to have something under it now.  Just barely peeking through the grass, I saw.  It looked like the top of a square nightstand was bulging from the earth, propping the vase.  I walked over to examine it to find that it was an incredibly clean, flawless, oak nightstand, most of which was still buried beneath the vase it carried.  I again tried to pull and prod, hoping this was just some freak incident of buried furniture being revealed.  Again, it would not budge.  

At this point, I couldn’t let it go, so I made a mental note to look into it further after work.  Well, evening came around.  It had rained a little in the afternoon, so a muggy, dense fog was lurking over the property.  With a garden shovel and gloves, I marched out into the moist atmosphere.  The sihohotte of the vase stood erect in the fog.  As I approached, I noticed it was even higher off the ground now.  When I reached it, I saw that the nightstand had pushed almost completely out of the ground.  It’s dark wood in factory condition, not a sliver of dirt on its thick standard four legs.  The polished oak gleamed in the damp air.  My confusion was harassing my thoughts when I noticed the nightstand’s drawer.  A single drawer, simply designed, like a thousand others I have seen.  I stared at it a moment.  Its knob mocked me all the while, before I decided to pull it open.  

With a smooth grace, the drawer soundlessly opened.  Inside was a single picture frame.  The black rectangular border of cheap plastic had the phrase, “The Neighbors,” etched into it.  My nerves began to sway, and a cold sweat on my brow mingled with the suffocating evening fog.  In the frame was a picture.  A family picture of a father, mother, and two children, dressed in their Sunday best.  There they stood in single file, hands on each passing shoulder.  Their faces were missing, hollowed out, blank.  Like a cutout you stick your head through for pictures with friends.  

I shakily returned the picture to the nightstand drawer and closed it.  I returned inside, feeling a sickening unease burrowing into my stomach.  My sleep was haunted by this lingering paranoia.  The nightly sounds of chirps, hoots, and howls, outside my window, once a calming presence, now seemed to mock me in a melancholic choir.  The rising sun blurred through my window as I pushed off my morning routine.  I didn’t want to go outside.  I could barely stomach looking out my window.  Procrastinating for most of the morning finally got to me; shaking off what felt like a childish fear, I marched to the nearest window.  My facade of courage was stunted when I peered outside.  More furniture was sticking out of the earth.  The backrest of a couch, a lampshade, and the frames of beds.  Four beds.  Even what looked like a door frame, facing directly toward my house, was protruding from the grass.

I closed my shutters.  I decided then, and there I would go out after work and dig out this…this joke that something or someone was pulling on me.  The rain came again.  It did not stop this time.  I clocked out and immediately went back for my garden shovel, gloves, and spade.  Marching onto the lawn in my raincoat, I was battered by the wind and rain.  Even still, I could see it.  It had grown since this morning.  Walls were sprouting all around the soon-to-be interior furniture and appliances that continued to pop from the earth.  

Its front door was almost entirely grown.  Its heavy wood was engraved with the words “Howdy Neighbor” just below the slim tinted window. I stared at the door as the torrent pelted me, before shaking out of it and kneeling at the base of the door.  Time for answers.  Grateful for the rain, I dug into the soft earth and began my search for the source of this absurdity.  With each thrust of my spade, I would look up at the door, its monolithic presence looming over me.  The words “Howdy Neighbor” filled me with a dread that I could not understand.   

After a couple of minutes of panicked digging, I hit what I thought would be more of the wall. I shoveled out the last few clumps of dirt and cleared the mud away to see what I struck.  It was roots.  Not more wall, but roots.  I threw the shovel into the ground in frustration, the confusion overwhelming me.  Eventually, I maneuvered into the house, jumping over the short wall, essentially a fence, for the moment, and planted myself next to the nightstand.  It had fully grown.  Its legs rested on the beginnings of a carpet that was starting to overtake the now patchy grass.  The hope for answers that I could understand was dwindling in me as I desperately shoved my spade into the earth just at the base of the nightstand.  Roots, just roots beneath it.  The downpour intensified while I sat there.  However, it was not the reason I was shaking.

Numbly, I sat there, beside the bed and its stand, both pieces of furniture fully and prestinely real.  I lost track of time; I don’t know how long I was there.  Until I was jolted back to reality by a sickening groan.  I bolted to my feet to see the source of the low wailing noise.  The walls had grown several more inches.  The front door was complete.  A fear so cold it stung seeped into my heart.  I was IN the house, the walls my full height.  I ran to the entrance and fumbled with the knob when I noticed it.  The wall beside the doorframe had a rectangular abnormality that protruded slightly out of the plain yellow wallpaper.  I dared to examine, when, with a pop, a picture frame burst from the wallpaper.  With a glance, my fear irradiated through me sevenfold, and I fled the building back to the safety of my home.  

Slamming the door behind me, I collapsed, hyperventilating on the floor.  A cocktail of confusion and anxiety fried my mind.  The image sat perfectly framed in my mind’s eye, radiating the suffocating terror that I lay drowning in.  What I saw, after the wallpaper had seamlessly healed around it, like skin wrapping around a piercing, was a picture.  That faceless family, waving at me from behind the glass, with the words, “Welcome Friend”  engraved on the border. 

The weekend has come, and I haven’t left my house since that evening.  I’ve spent most nights awake, daring from time to time to peer out my bedroom window.  The house is almost complete now.  The beige walls have begun to grow a roof; it extends each hour, just barely covering the top of the house.  It will be fully grown soon.  Windows started popping out of the walls, the dark interior staring at me day and night—the rain.  The rain hasn’t stopped; it escalates the house’s evolution with each passing hour.  Inch by inch, the home develops.  The front door now has a little stone path leading towards my house.  I see it has a doormat too, although I can’t read it from here.  

Thoughts of burning it down had crossed my mind.  But this damn rain is only getting heavier.  The forecast never even mentioned a sprinkle, let alone this downpour.  All I can do for now is try to rest, forget about the house for a while.  But those pictures.  They won’t leave my mind.  Those frames are fixated on my thoughts.  Like a spiraling fever dream, they spin through my head.  Their faceless, waving presence greets me every time I close my eyes.  

The wind is picking up again.  My windows rattled, drawing my attention.  The roof is finished.   Curtains appeared in the windows.  I stared at them for a moment, cold sweat beading all over me.  The blackness inside that house pulled me, lured me, and I couldn’t turn away.  Until the curtains were sharply drawn closed.  

I think I sprained something as I sprang, falling backwards away from my window.  A coldness enveloped me as I tried to rationalize that I didn’t see what I saw.  The rain was obscuring my vision after all, and the wind may have blown through that house and rattled those curtains closed.  I curled up on the floor, that returning fear surging through me.  I crawled to my window, begging for an assurance that the terror for what I knew was to come was false.  Limply, I raised my head and peered outside.  That house, in its pristine glory, sat in the rain, silent.  With dry, quivering eyes, I looked at those front windows, curtains still as stone.  A light flickered on inside, showing through the sliver of breakage between the fabric. 

My throat closed, my head burned with the desire to run screaming out into the woods.  But I couldn’t look away.  Rain pelting the earth, I sat frozen, squatting at my window.  My vision began to blur, and my breath would not come.  That house, looming over me, radiated that horrid light through the night.  And all I could do was sit and watch.  Until I saw it.  A shadow, brushed by the curtains.  

Next thing I knew, I was choking back tears as I pulled away, dragging my dresser to barricade my window.  I couldn’t take it anymore, I ran to my front door, locking it, before shakily sitting on the floor.  I pulled out my phone and began to dial 911.  I needed someone, anyone, to come out here.  As I held the phone up to my ear, I dared a glance out my kitchen window.  The operator answered, but I couldn’t speak.  My eyes bulged, and my stomach erupted in a burning spring of panic.  The front door of the house across my lawn was opening.  

I’ve been locked in my closet ever since.  My phone cut out before the operator had a chance to determine if this was a buttdial or an emergency.  Even if the police are coming, it’ll be too late.  The neighbors have been knocking at my door for several hours now.  My mind is in a weird state of exhausted calm… but the knocking is only getting louder.  I think my door just caved in.  Time to meet the neighbors.