The Thing That Followed My Family for Twenty-Five Years

The Thing That Followed My Family for Twenty-Five Years

I'm 24 now. This started before I was even born — while I was still inside my mother, sometime around 24 years ago. I only know the beginning the way you know a story that's been told to you a hundred times, not the way you know something you lived. But I lived plenty of it myself, and I'm still living pieces of it. It started with my mother, long before I existed. We didn't have a bathroom back then. Just a "kacha" house — mud walls, no electricity, that kind of place. If you needed to go, you went outside. One day my mother took my older sister out to the washroom area. On the way, she bumped into something — a cat, she said. Just a cat. Nothing that should have mattered. But after they came back inside, once my mother lay down to sleep, that's when it started. She told us she saw something coming up from under her feet, right there in the bed. It kept happening. Night after night. They took her to kobiraj after kobiraj — traditional healers, the kind people…