This post is part of ARC’s Chronicles of Change and Hope series. This is a curated project for sharing stories, songs, prayers, poems, images, or insights that capture a moment of connection or new life. It is a place to share small acts of resistance or transformation you want others to know about. Rights remain with the contributors. To contribute to Chronicles, read more here.
Today’s short story contribution comes to us from Evan Underbrink, an author and academic who works in the fields of theology, the arts, and ecumenicism. He currently holds a Master's of Theological studies from Duke Divinity School, and Teaches Theology at Charleston Catholic High School in Charleston, WV. Talking about this piece, Evan says:
I felt like this is something I wanted to contribute because the central theme is vital hope for those struggling with our current isolation. Our monsters come out to play when we are alone. We must do more than placate them with diversions. We can no longer rely on work, on busy-ness, to drown them out. This time is time to make friends with our monsters, perhaps transforming ourselves in the midst of this night.
The Domovoi
ER Underbrink
I.
It wasn't so bad at first. Distance was kept, and I was mostly free to have my own space. I began the day a little hungover, but managed to get up by 6:50 a.m. My alarm clock went off at 7 a.m. as I brushed my teeth. It was a jaunty six second loop of birdsong, meant to be calming. My girlfriend hated that sound, after so many nights at my place waking up to it. I had gotten into the habit of waking up ten minutes early to turn it off before she had to bear that canned twittering. We used to sleep back to back; that way I could watch for her monsters, and she could watch for mine.
She wasn't there that morning. She wasn't going to be there, with the lockdown in place. Essential travel only. I didn’t quite cut it, and she had to work at the bank. A siren wailed in the morning air. For just the hair of a moment, It made its presence known, in the silence and in a little tickle in the back of my throat.
I made sure there was no time for It... that. The alarm clock was round. One of those types which slowly light up ten minutes before wakeup, before the fake birdsong. The light always woke me up first, looking not altogether like a little cloudy sun. I remember buying the clock as a concession to the fact that I didn't want WiFi in my apartment. Too much wasted time on the internet. Too many distractions. I would loudly proclaim myself an introvert, even a hermit. The alarm clock was round, bright, plastic. Silent. I turned it to radio.
Shower. I bought the hemp peppermint soap that shivers the skin a bit when put on. I fiddled with the hot and cold knobs, trying to push the heat just under the point of pain. Steam rose, imperceptibly. I wonder if It could move the steam, as I think on it now. In the moment, I only thought about the lessons I had to prepare that morning. It was my first year as a High School teacher at a prep school. I thought about my co-teacher, from whom I was about to heavily steal lessons. I thought about the email I was going to write, excusing the theft. I would explain that, given I'd never taught this class or material before, I had no idea what to do now. I was underequipped, unprepared. I needed help. It would take a few days for me to reflect that I wasn't actually making excuses.
Shower done. Clean, save for the things I brought with me from my travels. Some things cannot be so easily cleaned away. Dry off. Brush teeth. I walked out of my bathroom and began packing things for the day: laptop, book, travel mug. I still didn't have internet at the apartment. It knew that. I also knew that eventually the cafes would close. But, in the early days, I was unprepared. I had this hope that I would still be able to escape to some place with people, where I would be safe. It knew better. I knew better. Denial is a strange and awful addiction.
I arrived at the coffee shop at around 8:30. Three people were there, talking about how the stock market was shut down for a second day. I graded papers, posted borrowed assignments. It was quiet, tame in settings like coffee shops. It had others of its kind to socialize with, leaving me alone. It would only occur to me later, with the experience of time, to ask whether They breed in public spaces while we are distracted by our own comfort.
I was about to watch a movie in the cafe, when I got a phone call. The internet service installer was seeing if he couldn't come early. He'd had three people cancel that morning. I rushed home to meet him. He was a nice young guy named Jason. He wiped his boots very thoroughly before stomping onto my freshly vacuumed carpet. To be honest, I wouldn't have minded the bit of dirt to clean up later. We joked about how the world was ending. When he left, I had access to the whole internet: thousands of online messages, emails, videos, pornography. I sat in my comfy chair, alone. With It.
II.
On day two, I vacuumed the carpet where Jason had walked. It was a little stronger that day, but manageable. The new toy of the internet kept my attention away, and it was quite nice to post my lessons while still in my pajamas and unclean. I called my parents, my friends, anyone. That night, I found the bed made, and the sheet top folded in a way which was not my custom. That was when I knew things would become a problem. It had become They.
I had time enough. Time consider in the twilight hours my faults, my indiscretions. Time to think of Moscow, wild nights, and what monsters in mind and flesh I might have brought home with me. Time for you, and time for me. Time for a thousand visions and revisions- yet some things cannot be revised. Some things are, brute and indiscriminate in the march of weeks and days and hours and
My alarm rang at 8:00am. Such a small detail. Tiny, insignificant. Yet who has the words to describe such a dreadful sound? It was an ice pick to the mind, a shattering place in time. Three beers the night before could not have convinced me to reset the alarm and then black it out from my memory. Perhaps it was daylight savings? But no, that was weeks before. No human since Jason- who nicely wiped his shoes where later I vacuumed- had entered my house. Let anyone describe, then, how my alarm had managed to be set one hour beyond my clockwork regularity.
Likely, I reset it in the night, perhaps I had snoozed it before waking up. Or I had more than three beers the night before. The dry taste in my mouth failed to provide any evidence either way. Failing those, maybe this is just a story, and of course little things like that are bound to happen when we've willingly suspended our disbelief in trust that little details, such as an extra hour's rest, have some meaning.
Most of these thoughts greeted me at 8:05 when I arose from my bed, in the same clothes as the first day. And then the time was 8:40, with no intermediary force but me, and Them. Along with a sense as deep inside me as my bones that something was peeking around the corner of the door at me. Something big, but skeletal, with flesh wasted away by disease and madness. Was that the laugh of some other apartment tenant? The walls were thin enough.
Work can be a kind of salvation unto itself. I had little time to consider what was growing around the corners of my sight, despite my frantic cleaning. Bugs, no doubt. Some kind of bug. I ignored any scratching, putting in my headphones. Now it was time to post my lessons, write my emails, and resist the temptation to put a bit of whiskey into my morning coffee. Two students emailed me. They wrote:
Mr. Underbrink, Dr. F-- challenged us to write a teacher "thank you" right now. i picked you because wanted to say, you've been a great teacher this year, and ive learned so much!. I really like our new online lessons. Thank you for putting in so much hard work!
Mr. Underbrink
i really like these online worksheets!!
I read over my co-teachers work for that day. It was wonderful writing: personable, caring, and covered all the material well. I decided to put in an extra hour to add my own ideas. In the end, I settled on half an hour, changing some of the stories and adding a new question or two. I couldn't quite banish the ghost on my shoulder, feeding me the image of my students calling me lazy, laughing as they compared assignment with their peers in the other class. But then, all good lessons have their element of theft. We borrow the best elements, what works, from those who have gone before. Eventually those lessons get sanded down into books, and then textbooks, and become part of the tradition. It's a comforting thought.
I walked to the shop down the road for groceries. Living in West Virginia, I've grown used to a level of talking between strangers rarely seen outside of public buses in other states. Months ago, before the lockdown, I remember a man across the street from me shouting over, "look at this tree! It needs trimming. Well, ain't enough work for me since the company laid me off. Maybe I should see about trimming trees?" As I kept walking, I passed a man eating a sandwich, he told me enthusiastically, "man this is spicy!"
Today, I smiled as I passed a lady walking her dog across the street. She smiled, and pulled her dog closer. The next person didn't look at me. I crossed the street away from him. At the shop, a sign on the door read, "limit six persons in the store at a time." I couldn't help wondering how many of Them were peeking around the corners, jumping on the tomatoes, shivering in the refrigerators next to the last carton of milk, hitching a ride upon the flesh. I collected my supplies: two bottles of wine, potatoes, eggs, Brussel sprouts. I would try my best to keep healthy, not binge, not fall into the forgetting oblivion of my vices. They grow in the empty spaces of our self-forgetfulness into indulgence. When I had returned home, I found a few more had come with me.
III.
The domovoi is a magical creature from Russian folk tales. Its name comes from the Russian word Dom, which means home. Cousin to the house elf or gnome of Western Europe, it lives in the larger family of feyfolken. Like with many in this class of creature, our reception is tempered by our experience. For the scientific mind, such little stories are a distraction, a silly story which may provide fodder for an anthropological excurses.
The psychological mind to which I feel some personal affinity, finds them to be the extension of the psyche attempting to fill human needs through the medium of our fantasy. A house elf is a wonderful pet to have for an isolated farmer trapped in the winter months. A drunk may make goblins, which is perhaps an easier recourse than try to piece together what he did in last night's binge. In all the easy explanations, the subtle snare that we are the ones who determine what really is, we the harbingers of the real, permeates.
The very nature of disease, which we can only see through special, nearly magical, means, balks at these easy interpretations. A disease is just as invisible to our normal senses, and its treatment not functionally different from the bans of uncleanliness used by ancient Israel, the witch doctor advising special brews and rituals. Much of medicine may simply be the careful testing and application of the old superstitious cures, better understood and dressed up in a shiny lab coat of objectivity. What terror awaits the mind which recognizes there may be dozens of goblins, trolls, ettins, giants, werdles, woozles, and wallomps at your elbow reading with you, just as there are billions of germs, bacteria, parasites, and fungi. Of both orders, They seem mostly comfortable not to affect us, and so we ignore them. Until they do touch our flesh.
I do not find this a particularly comforting notion.
…
By the fifth day, I had gotten into the habit of taking baths after finishing the little work that was keeping me in some semblance of routine. The carpet was getting dirty. (the sense that I was not alone in the bathroom began around here, but I ignored it). Clothes were strewn about the floor. The alarm clock had been unplugged, unnecessary with the invisible internet spread spiderweb like across my apartment. Before my phone alerted me that here comes the sun, my girlfriend texted me with the reminder not to eat meat that day. (the small, quiet sound of scattering paws, like bugs, like rats, and begun to seem more than just in my mind. Perhaps a neighbor). It was a good Friday, coming up to the Good Friday. My Catholic friends were sharing jokes about giving up a few more things than expected this Lent. I ruminated on these things, in the tub. Baths are the best for days like this, where one needs an excuse to do nothing for an extended period but lay and think in the middle of the day.
The presence of sound and shadows outside the shower curtain had finally become so palpable, so real, I could no longer relegate it to the back of my mind. The maddening, irregular padding sounds! It was more than just other, it was wrong. I could perhaps have handled it if some stranger had stumbled into my apartment, wracked with disease, begging for help. A plague victim, the one who tested positive, they have flesh that can be touched, fed, treated, loved, caressed. It would be flesh against flesh. I could act, I could do, and expect the other to do to me in turn.
This, this was an offense. In intangible horror may spring from flesh, but it is the aberration of the material. Whatever pawed at my mind, my ears, the carpet, was not touchable. The steaming water about me might have been dry ice for the shivering that began in my spine and shook every hair, every inch of skin. They were out there, in my lonely places, no longer happy just to peek out of the corners of my eyes. Worse, they were inside me. My flesh had brough back the domovoi, my flesh and mind may be the home of more. I must account for the invisible monsters which plagued the world, which were driving us mad, causing us to hide in our homes, holding as ransom the lives of our children, sick, and elderly. It was time to come to terms with the closet, the door and doorknob, the stranger, the loneliness. I opened the first bottle of wine, and poured a full glass.
It, they, we, were no longer alright.
IV.
The clock sings at 7:18. Snoozed, it turns off around noon. Breadcrumbs are strewn about the kitchen floor, milk spilled and dried on white tile. The day has become inconsequential, dead or sleeping beneath the carpet. The night comes before it. Or was it after? I lay on the floor and stare at the ceiling fan. It seems to switch from clockwise to counterclockwise with a mind of its own.
Stillness.
It is impossible to tell the story of that Saturday in a direct chain of events. For those who have already discovered that to be human is to exist on at least three layers of the Real, this will be no surprise. The silence gave me time to experience my own story fully on each level. In writing this story, I add a fourth. You may choose the story or stories you choose. I have no say in the matter.
My body arose some time later and cleaned the dusty fan blades. My hands picked up the empty wine bottles, milk carton, swept up the bread crumbs, and deposited them into the trash chute outside my apartment. My legs propelled me to the washing machine, where clothes were deposited and washed. My skin was cleaned by water in the shower. I watched a movie.
Having experienced something of a psychological breakdown induced by isolation and the necessary changes of routine imposed by statewide lockdown procedures, my psyche had manifested the specific fears of loneliness and general fears of the disease into palpable physiological reactions, most keenly felt in the exacerbation of the flight-fight response. Given no recourse to the invisible and intangible threat faced, my body shut down for a day, and then recalibrated to the new “normal.” Having survived depressed and psychotic breakdowns before, my mind naturally went down the well-worn grooves of recovery and return: get some exercise, clean your room, make a schedule.
I rose from my laying position to find myself surrounded by some dozen small creatures. This one was nearly entirely hair, with muscular limbs and a hooked nose protruding from his flaxen mane. He lapped up the milk and breadcrumbs with a satisfied grunt of “kruto.” A many armed creature with more beard than face went about washing dishes with phenomenal speed, his legs dangling as a pair of arms supported his naked body. A hairless mannequin jerked its way to the window and attempted to clean the outside windows before falling the four stories down. And there were the hundred bugs which swarmed and clicked across the carpet, picking up every conceivable form of debris. A two-foot-tall businessman in a green suit, with pointed ears and pointed shoes, went off to fix my clock and make my bed. The domovoi finished his snack, and hopped upon my inner thigh. Once he pulled back his hair and stared into my face, I recognized that he had my face, as did the dishwashing werdle, and the elf’s hooked nose was a spot-on match to my own. I gave the domovoi a slice of bread, a glass of milk, a pinch of salt, and antibiotic, and a penny. I do not remember at which gift the creature finally broke into a half smile, but soon after I found myself placed by my new tenants in bed, and put into a magical sleep.
V.
It was Sunday morning. The clock had been plugged back in, the clothes washed and folded, the floor vacuumed, and the lessons planned for the next day. I had finally come to read each of my co-teacher's lessons fully each day. Where I agreed, I kept what was written. Where I had a different view, I modified. The tradition was being passed on.
I do not know who folded the clothes. I can't remember when the clock had been reset. During that day, and for many days after, there would be an hour or two of which I would lose track. It would be noon, and then suddenly four. I couldn't even begin to recall where the hours had gone. The domovoi, or the disease, or my own mind, had stolen them from me. But in exchange, the bed was made, the lessons ready to be assigned, and a cup of tea was waiting, nice and hot, next to a comfortable book.
We cannot choose what monsters enter our lives when we are alone. We do not know from what savage gardens they originate. Still less do we know what terrible things the stranger might bring, or leave on our carpets to be vacuumed up. At our worst, we are not even able to control how we feel about these circumstances. Our hearts can be pulled any which way by the invisible powers of luck, wonder, and otherness which is our world, and for which our powers of science and language can only provide a foggy view into that which really is. We keep ourselves as safe as we can, and yet we must befriend the monsters of this world, lest they consume us.
At least, such were my thoughts as I sipped a cup of tea I couldn't remember making, praying a prayer I couldn't remember starting, and thanking a God I couldn't remember first meeting. At last, when all was returned to some form of normal, We were alright.