By Friday, Dan has found four popsicle sticks in places they do not belong.
One on the bathroom counter.
One balanced on the windowsill above the kitchen sink.
One tucked beside the lamp on the end table like it had been placed there carefully, for a reason only Ellie understood.
And one in the cupholder of his truck.
That last one makes him laugh.
Not because it makes any sense, but because it is so completely her.
He holds it up between two fingers when she climbs in the passenger seat after school.
“Bug.”
Ellie looks over, backpack half-zipped, Moss tucked under one arm. “What?”
Dan waves the stick. “Why is there a popsicle stick in my truck?”
She squints at it like she’s never seen it before.
Then shrugs.
“In case you needed it?”
He snorts. “Needed it for what?”
She thinks about that seriously, resting her chin on Moss’s head.
“I dunno yet.”
That is definitely an Ellie response.
Dan shakes his head, but doesn’t start the truck right away.
She finishes buckling her seatbelt before staring out the window.
“Some kids said he’s weird,” Ellie says softly, gripping Moss tighter.
Dan’s hand stills on the steering wheel.
His mind flashes back to a few months ago, when Ellie’s therapist pulled him aside and told him that she’s working through the trauma of her mother’s “disappearance” and that the dragon has become a safe toy. She reiterated that it is perfectly normal and healthy, but that this would probably happen. She warned him that the best thing to do was reassure Ellie that it’s okay to have Moss.
“Oh yeah?” he answers after a moment.
She nods once.
“They said I’m too old for stuffed animals.”
Dan leans back slightly, looking at her.
“Those kids sound like they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
She glances at him.
“Yeah,” she says simply.
Then, softer:
“Moss doesn’t care, he protects me anyway.”
Dan smiles faintly and starts the truck.
“Good,” he says. “Because neither do we.”
“Did you sign it?”
Dan glances over at her as he drives. “Sign what?”
“My aquarium slip.”
He winces. “Damn. I forgot.”
Ellie groans and tips her head back against the seat dramatically. “Daaaaad.”
“I know, I know.” He reaches over at the next stop sign and squeezes her knee. “I’ll do it as soon as we get home, Bug.”
“You promised.”
“I did.”
She crosses her arms and stares out the window for all of three seconds before speaking again.
“Do you think they’ll have jellyfish?”
“Probably.”
“And sharks?”
“It’s an aquarium, Bug. I’d hope so.”
She grins, appeased.
Then, after another moment passes:
“Do you still think we can go to the lake when it gets warm?”
The question lands softer this time.
Not out of nowhere like before. More like she has been carrying it quietly and is checking to make sure it still exists.
“Yeah,” Dan says. “I still think that.”
“What if it…” Ellie stops mid-sentence, her eyes unfocused as she tilts her head slightly toward the window.
Dan glances at her. “Bug?”
She doesn’t answer, too focused on whatever got her attention. The look on her face makes him nervous.
He swings his eyes back to the road, trying not to panic. “Bug,” he calls a little louder, but still nothing. “Ellie?”
She flinches hard, and her eyes focus on him.
“What was that?” he asks shakily.
“The humming,” she says. “You didn’t hear it?”
“No. What does it sound like?”
“Like something is trying to learn how to be here.”
Dan’s throat goes dry and his stomach drops.
He tries not to show the panic that statement ignites, so he changes the subject.
“What were you going to ask before?”
She shakes her head slightly. “What if it rains?”
“Then we decide on a different day to go,” Dan answers, his chest loosening slightly.
She nods, satisfied with that.
Moss rides home on her lap, the seatbelt across one wing.
At home, Ellie drops her backpack by the table and immediately goes digging through it.
Dan signs the permission slip while she stands there watching him so closely it feels like supervision.
“There,” he says, holding it up. “Officially handled.”
She beams.
“And my twenty dollars?”
He laughs. “Tomorrow morning.”
“You better not forget.”
“I feel like I’m being threatened.”
“You are.”
He presses a hand to his chest. “By my own child.”
She takes the paper from him with great seriousness, folds it, and slides it back into her folder.
Then she disappears down the hall with Moss under her arm.
A few minutes later, Dan finds another popsicle stick on the bookshelf.
He doesn’t remember seeing it there that morning.
He picks it up, smiling despite himself.
“Bug?”
No answer.
He sets it on the counter.
By evening, there are two more.
One by the sink.
One beside Ellie’s pillow.
He doesn’t mention it. Not because it matters.
Just because some things feel better left exactly as they are.
There are always little traces of Ellie everywhere.
Crayons with the wrappers peeled off and left in bright curls on the coffee table.
Mismatched socks kicked under the couch.
Tiny hair ties in the bathroom drawer, in the cup by the sink, looped around doorknobs.
Popsicle sticks in places no sane person would ever think to leave them.
Ellie is in the living room later, lying on her stomach with her homework open in front of her, though most of her attention is on a sheet of notebook paper she keeps dragging back over the math worksheet.
Moss is tucked under her arm again.
Dan folds laundry on the couch and watches her every so often over the basket.
She taps the eraser end of her pencil against the paper.
Draws.
Stops.
Draws again.
“What’re you working on now?” he asks.
She doesn’t look up. “Just stuff.”
“That sounds suspicious.”
“It’s not.”
He waits.
After a minute, she says, “I think jellyfish are weird.”
“That so?”
“They don’t have brains.”
He folds one of her tiny shirts and sets it aside. “Some people might say the same thing about me before coffee.”
That gets a small laugh out of her.
She bends back over the page.
For a while the room is quiet except for the muted television and the soft flick of fabric as he folds.
Then she says, “Do you think fish know they’re in tanks?”
Dan glances over. “What?”
“At the aquarium,” she says. “Do you think they know they’re not supposed to be there?”
He studies her for a moment.
Her voice is casual.
Her pencil is not.
She’s pressing hard enough to leave grooves in the paper.
“I don’t know,” he says carefully. “Maybe they just get used to it.”
She is quiet for a beat.
Then:
“That’s sad.”
Something about the way she says it makes him set the towel in his hands down.
But before he can answer, she pushes herself up from the floor and says, “Can I have a popsicle?”
“You just had one yesterday.”
“So?”
“So no.”
She stares at him.
Then at the freezer.
Then back at him.
“You’re mean.”
“I’m responsible.”
She considers that.
“Moss says those are the same thing.”
Dan points toward the hallway. “Homework and dinner first, then maybe.”
She flops back onto the rug with the kind of theatrical suffering only children are capable of.
He smiles despite himself.
Dinner is grilled cheese and tomato soup because neither of them feels like anything complicated.
Ellie dips the corners of her sandwich into the soup until they go soggy.
Dan pretends not to notice.
She tells him two girls in her class got into an argument about whether sharks are scary or misunderstood.
“And what did you say?” he asks.
“That both can be true.”
He looks at her over the rim of his glass.
“That’s a very grown-up answer.”
She shrugs and tears a piece of crust off with her fingers.
“Ms. Parker said a lot of things are two things at once.”
That sits with him longer than it should.
They finish eating in silence. Afterward, Dan gives Ellie her popsicle, and they rinse the bowls together at the sink. Just as they finish loading the dishwasher, Ellie darts past him and disappears into the living room.
By the time he dries his hands and follows, she is kneeling on the couch, looking out the front window into the dark.
Moss dangles from one hand.
“What’re you doing?”
She does not turn around immediately.
“Listening.”
Something cold slips along his spine.
“For what?”
Now she looks back at him, expression open and puzzled, as if the answer is obvious.
“I don’t know yet.”
He forces a smile he doesn’t quite feel.
“Well, whatever it is, you can listen for it tomorrow. Bedtime.”
She climbs down without argument.
That bothers him too.
A few nights later, he wakes to find her standing beside the bed.
For one wild second, his heart slams against his ribs so hard it hurts. The room is silvered with moonlight, and her small figure at the edge of the mattress looks almost unreal, hair tangled from sleep, bare feet pale against the wood floor.
“Daddy?”
He pushes himself up on one elbow. “What’s wrong?”
Her voice is small when she says, “It’s louder tonight.”
He sits up fully, already reaching for her. “Come here, Bug.”
She climbs into bed without protest, all narrow limbs and warm skin, and curls against his chest. He listens with her, because that is what fathers do when their children are afraid—they lend their own calm, even if it has to be manufactured.
“It’s probably just the power lines.”
She doesn’t answer that. Her fingers catch in the fabric of his shirt.
After a while she whispers, “It knows me.”
Dan closes his eyes.
Children say strange things all the time. They dream, they imagine, they make myth out of shadows and meaning out of ordinary noises. That is what he tells himself while holding her.
But children do not usually say things like that with the solemn certainty of someone remembering, not inventing.
He doesn’t sleep again that night.
The days begin to blur.
Not in any way he can explain.
Not in any way he can point to.
Just—slightly.
Mornings come too fast.
Evenings settle too quietly.
Time feels like it’s slipping past something instead of moving through it.
The television glitches for a second longer than it should before correcting itself.
The kitchen clock skips forward three minutes.
Then back again.
A glass left on the counter turns up in the sink.
He doesn’t remember moving it.
Ellie asks him the same question twice.
Not absentminded.
Exact.
Word for word.
“Did you sign it?”
He looks up. “Yeah, Bug. I signed it yesterday.”
She blinks.
“Oh.”
Like she doesn’t remember asking.
The neighbors mention strange things in passing.
Power flickers.
Phones cutting out mid-call.
Birds gathering in strange places—then taking off all at once like something startled them.
Ellie keeps listening.
Not constantly.
Not obviously.
But every now and then—she goes still.
Head tilted.
Eyes distant.
“Bug?”
She blinks back.
“What?”
He starts checking on her at night.
Not enough to call it worry.
Just—enough that sleep doesn’t come easy anymore.
Sometimes he wakes and thinks he hears something.
But when he listens—there’s nothing.
And that’s worse.
That night, the house is quiet.
The kind of quiet that settles in deep once everything else has gone still.
Ellie is asleep.
Moss tucked under her arm, one small hand curled into the fabric like she’s holding onto him even in her dreams.
Dan stands in the kitchen, barefoot, drinking water straight from the tap because sleep won’t come easy.
It hasn’t for a while.
At first—he thinks it’s the refrigerator.
The sound is low.
Almost too low to notice.
It runs beneath everything else—the pipes in the walls, the faint hum of electricity, the quiet breathing of the house around him.
Steady enough to feel mechanical.
Normal enough to ignore.
For a few seconds, that explanation holds.
Then—it stops.
Not fading.
Not trailing off.
Gone.
Dan lowers the glass slowly.
Listens.
Nothing.
No refrigerator.
No pipes.
No wind.
No insects.
Just silence.
Complete.
Wrong.
He stands there longer than he should, eyes drifting toward the hallway.
Toward her room.
Then he shakes his head, forcing a breath out, and turns off the kitchen light.
By morning, he’s almost convinced himself he imagined it.
Almost.
By the end of the week, the humming has become impossible to dismiss.
He finds Ellie at the table before sunrise, still in her pajamas.
A green marker in one hand.
Moss in her lap.
There’s a popsicle stick beside her elbow, though he has no idea where she got one this early.
Sheets of paper are spread out in front of her.
More than yesterday.
More than the day before that.
Not homework.
Not sharks.
These are different.
He stops in the doorway.
Something in him goes still.
“Bug?”
She glances up.
Her expression is calm.
Too calm for that hour, for that light, for the shape of those drawings spread across the table like she had been called there.
“What’s all this?”
“Nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing.”
She looks back down and drags the marker across the page.
“It’s just what it feels.”
Dan feels the muscles in his shoulders tighten.
“What it feels like?”
She doesn’t answer right away.
For a second, all he can hear is the marker moving over the paper.
Then Ellie lifts her head.
Her eyes flick past him—
not to him—
but beyond him—
toward the dark window over the sink.
When she speaks, her voice is quiet.
Certain.
“It found us.”
Episode III — The Night it Comes
Great writing so far, loving it!