"I know where all the missing socks go."

"What?" I chuckled a bit at my toddler's sudden interruption to the short-lived quiet I'd earned myself by entertaining her with a new--more expensive than I would've normally gone for--toy from the store. It was interesting enough to have kept her occupied for about a record-breaking thirty minutes before she spoke up again. With something intriguing, no less. Maddie was only four and a half, but had a vivid imagination that I adored and encouraged for her. We didn't always have money on hand to afford every new, fancy toy firetruck that lit up and blared little sirens when you pressed different buttons, or every frilly, glittery dress she saw when we went to the store, so for her to find near-unlimited joy in running around the house shouting and giggling over what new adventures her mind had created for today was a relief. We weren't dirt broke, per se; we just couldn't afford everything that some of the other families could, and if she hadn't noticed it already, then it wouldn't be long before she did. She was a bright kid, and there was no denying it, but I hoped that she would stay blissfully unaware of the little things she was missing out on until I got that raise my boss had been promising and rent went back down again. But I could worry about that later. For now, I could entertain my little girl's newest adventure.

"The socks!" she announced, smiling, "they go missing, and--and I know where they all go." She fidgeted around with her hands animatedly like a lot of little kids do when they're talking, having turned away completely from her newest toy: an electronic dinosaur with bendable parts that opened and closed its mouth when you moved it a certain way and made sounds like roars and growls when you pressed a button on its side. She'd been on a dinosaur kick for a while, taking a break from her usual interest in toy vehicles with flashy colors and lights, and when I saw it at the store, I just couldn't help myself. I was sure she'd love it, and even if she had her imagination to entertain her whenever it had been a while since she got anything new to play with, I wanted her to have the experience of getting spontaneous gifts; a delight I never had as a kid. And of course, when I brought it home and presented it to her, she was ecstatic, and wouldn't even tear her eyes away from it for half an hour straight. I was beyond overjoyed.

"Oh really?" I drawled out, sounding as clearly intrigued as possible, "can you tell me where they all go?" I leaned in, having moved from the couch where I had been re-reading a favorite book of mine to kneel on the carpet down on her level.

"No!" She squealed, giggling to herself loudly.

I gasped dramatically, clutching my chest with one hand. "I don't get to know? Well why not?" I kept up a playfully offended expression to go all in on my act.

She giggled some more before she spoke between laughs, "Because--because it's a secret!"

"Oh yea?" I laughed along, "well, you know, mommy is really good at keeping secrets." I leaned in close and whispered dramatically, "so if you tell me I won't tell anyone!"

Maddie hummed loudly as if considering my offer, before doing some excited little hops and proclaiming, "okay, but you can't--you can't tell people, cause--cause it's a secret, and you don't tell secrets, okay?"

I wondered to myself where she'd gotten the whole "secrets" bit, since as far as I could remember, as of yet I hadn't gotten around to explaining the concept, and if I had, then it wasn't very in-depth. Promises, deals, and lying I'd gone over at least a few times, since they'd come up every so often, but not secrets. I decided that I'd ask her father about it later; not that I was all that worried about it. If she was discovering new things on her own, perhaps from overhearing her father and I talking, then that was just another sign that she was remarkably smart for her age.

"Oh, I promise I won't tell anyone," I smiled confidently and whispered in close, "not even dad."

Maddie giggled and bounced on her toes with excitement before she leaned in too, holding her hands up to cup around her mouth secretively as she whispered into my ear, "the holes in the house."

I paused at that. I was expecting something more like a monster that steals clothes, or about how they magically disappear, or anything else like the wild and fun scenarios she normally came up with. This was...different. For a moment, I'd forgotten I was supposed to be playing along and my expression faltered, and she looked at me with a confused expression. I then remembered my role and smiled again, playing up a laugh. "The holes in the house?" I asked enthusiastically, "where do the holes go?"

Her expression returned to giddy and she laughed. "The big room!"

Again, I faltered, but maintained my expression. This was different from her usual elaborate stories, but she was clearly still having fun. I had to keep it up. Surely this was going somewhere. "Wow! How big is the big room?"

"Super duper super big!" She exclaimed, throwing her hands up and out to emphasize her storytelling.

"Wow!" I returned, stretching my arms out to mimic her, "and where is the big room?"

She hummed thoughtfully, putting a hand to her chin as if in contemplation. I was sure she'd seen her dad do it more than a few times. "I don't know where it is," she started, "but it's where Rufus went."

I froze. My expression fell to one that must've looked almost scared. I tried to find the words. I might've been holding my breath. I swallowed thickly and tried to compose myself. "Honey," I said, my voice gentle, but a bit too shaky, "you know Rufus passed away. It's very bad to tell lies about someone who passed away."

Rufus. Didn't think I'd have to hear about him again this soon, much less from my toddler, and much less in one of her make-believe stories like this. Our five-year-old cat had died less than a week ago. We buried him in the backyard, since our town didn't have a pet cemetery, and because somehow it just felt right to have him buried instead of cremated. So we had a family service and everything for him, bought a small gravestone with his name engraved in it, and let the little memorial serve as a marker for his final resting spot right at home; his home. Sometimes Maddie would go up to the gravestone and talk to him in her baby voice like she always did, or toss his stuffed toy mice or cat treats onto the disturbed topsoil in front of it. It was sweet, while it lasted. Two days after he was buried, we came home from picking Maddie up from preschool to find that the grave had been dug up, the cardboard box he had been buried in was sitting open in the grass, and Rufus was gone. We had to console Maddie for hours after that, and anytime his name came up, she'd start crying all over again. We assumed that a predatory bird or a stray dog that hopped the fence had scavenged him, but what had happened didn't really matter at that point. We brought the gravestone inside and set it on a shelf, but later had to put it up and out of view when Maddie kept crying anytime she saw it. So for her to come to me, making up stories about Rufus...it was rattling.

"I know he passed away," she chimed casually, "and now he's in the big room, cause we don't need him anymore."

That struck something in me. "Maddie," I said, sternly, "we don't make up stories about someone who died. Never."

"It's not a story!" she whined, "that's where he went! I promise!"

I was getting agitated, and I was trying to keep my cool, but this was going too far. It was so unlike her to do inappropriate things like this. "Madison, we do not lie, and we do not make promises that aren't true," I emphasized. I was trying not to tear up.

"I'm not lying! I promise!" she practically cried.

I realized that she was getting upset as well, and I forced myself to take a breath and backtrack. Maybe she'd had a bad dream and thought this was one of her stories. Or maybe she heard something from a movie. She wouldn't lie like this unless there was a reason. I steadied myself. "Ok," I said as coolly as I could, "I believe you." I thought for a moment. "Can you...show me the holes in the house...that lead to the big room?" I almost felt foolish asking, but if I could get her in a position where she couldn't prove it all, maybe she'd admit she was lying, or realize that she'd imagined it all.

She sniffled a bit but nodded quickly and started to run off into the house. I staggered to my feet from where I had been sitting on the floor and followed her into her bedroom, where she was standing in front of her open closet door, just pointing into it, lip trembling slightly and eyes watering. I carefully stepped into the room, as if in anticipation, but forced myself to calm down with a few slow breaths. There is nothing wrong.

I walked toward the closet to look where she was pointing. There is nothing wrong.

I looked at her, but she only stared back at me with a determined look, just pointing. There is nothing wrong.

I took a deep breath and stepped closer, leaning down and peering inside, looking between toy boxes and pushing clothes on hangers out of the way until something caught my eye. There is nothing wrong.

On the far left side of her small closet, towards the corner, it looked like there was something dark on the floor. There is nothing--

A hole. A trick of the light? No. I was sure. There was a tennis ball-sized hole in the floor where the carpeted floor and the wall met. A shaky breath left my mouth dry and agape as I stared at it. From what little I could see in the dark closet, there was nothing particularly off about it aside from the fact that there was a hole to begin with. Its very presence in the closet, in my house, its audacity to exist at all, for some reason filled me with an inexplicable fear. Or perhaps it was a fear of something inexplicable. The second it dawned on me, I snatched my phone out of my pocket so quick I nearly dropped it, and I turned on the flashlight, aiming for the hole to get a good look at the thing, all the while my daughter just standing in my peripheral vision, unmoving.

My throat was dry. I could feel the perspiration from my fright gathering enough to feel on my skin, gathering on my eyelashes; or perhaps it was the tears pooling in my eyes. I really couldn't tell. I couldn't pull an ounce of my attention away from the hole. It was strangely...perfect. A perfect circle in the floor, or perhaps a bit more than a half-circle, as some of it seemed to disappear under the wall of the closet. The hole was utterly and disturbingly dark. No matter what angle I held the light at--though I didn't try to step any closer--I couldn't actually see into the hole, nor could I see what one might call the "side" of the floor. Put simply, beyond the seemingly two-dimensional hole in the floor, there was nothing past that line to even imply that it was a hole. One might've assumed it just was a very, very, impossibly dark painted circle, since you couldn't see into it or through it, nor see the walls of the hole, if there were any. It was just...a hole. But none of that was what made me squint my eyes at a detail that caught my attention, nor what made me dare to move closer, even kneel down on the floor to get a better look, nor what made my breath catch in my throat and my heart sink and my stomach twist once I realized what I was looking at and a horrible reality came into fruition. No. Something else made me shriek wildly, startling my daughter so badly that she screamed too, before I haphazardly hoisted her up into my arms and sprinted out of that room and out of the house, slamming the front door behind me hard enough to startle Maddie again, who was already crying and begging me, asking me what was wrong, what was going on. But I didn't stop running until I was on the other side of the street, stopping on the sidewalk to gasp for breath and set Maddie down to briefly console her, telling her it was okay, that I believed her, that she didn't lie to me, babbling about getting ice-cream later and a new toy dinosaur before I regained enough sanity to realize I'd left my phone in the house. I picked Maddie up again and went to knock desperately on the door of my neighbor whose house I'd stopped in front of, who let me in immediately upon seeing how distraught we both were. The kind old woman let me use her cellphone to call my husband, so I could beg him to leave work immediately and come to our neighbor's house, giving little explanation. I pondered calling 9-1-1, but I argued internally about whether this was worth it, or how I could even explain it to them. What was there to explain? In my mind I played out the scenario where I called the police and tried to show them the hole, only for it to have disappeared out of thin air by the time we got there. Then they would call me crazy. Call me an unfit mother for scaring my kid like this with such a grotesque delusion. They'd take her away. The thoughts and the fear ran through my mind faster than I could handle them, but I tried to shut it down. He would be here any minute now, and we would figure it out. It would be okay.

As I sat in my neighbor's living room, bouncing my leg apprehensively while my neighbor and her wife distracted my daughter with sweets and board games, I couldn't help the recurring images of what I'd seen flashing through my mind over and over again. The gut-punch of realizing what I'd been looking at was nearly as bad as what it was. The hole, as I concluded, was not perfect. It looked clean and untarnished from a distance, especially in the dark, but up close, with light, there was more. Rufus. Or rather, I supposed, traces of him. Lining the edges of the hole, there were dried, reddish-brown and deep red stains in the carpet and on the side of the white-painted wall. There were red bits of something chunkier in some places, and in others there were little tufts of orange or white fur. Rufus was a rather large cat. Not a Maine Coon, but on the bigger side. He was heftier, too, and I knew some of it was my daughter sneaking him pieces of turkey or ham from dinner. My dead, fifteen-pound orange cat and the barely tennis ball-sized hole in the floor dirtied with traces of him created a gruesome picture in my head that would likely plague my dreams and nightmares for a long time, if not the rest of my life.

Maddie was telling the truth. I hated it. But it was true. I left Maddie with my neighbors after my husband arrived, tires squealing in an abrupt stop just outside before he ran into the house to embrace us both, bombarding me with questions about what on Earth I'd been babbling about on the phone and why Maddie and I were crying, but I just pulled him outside and started to march back to the house. I didn't want Maddie to be with us when we went back to it.

To my relief and slight astonishment, the hole was still there when we got to the closet. I was still half-expecting it to be magically gone and for my husband to call me insane, and yet, there it was. Using the flashlight from my phone that was still lying on the floor, I showed him what had prompted my desperate call. He ended up storming out of the room and out of the house to dry heave in the grass, while I tried not to break down sobbing as the reality started to weigh down on me. As if it hadn't already. I suppose it just became all the more real once I was sure I wasn't hallucinating it all. After we both calmed down from the sight, we composed ourself as best we could and joined our daughter again.

We weren't sure how to approach explaining any of this to our neighbors even if we wanted to, but they were beyond understanding and accepting, going off of our demeanor. They let us into a guest bedroom for some privacy amongst ourselves, and they even offered to let us stay over for a night or two while we sorted out whatever this was, but we politely declined, swearing we'd be fine just finding a motel. Still, we did take them up on spending a bit of time in the guest bedroom to talk alone.

After some uneasy silence with the door closed behind us, Maddie surprisingly spoke up first. "Mommy?" She asked, voice small in a way that broke my heart, "am I in trouble?" She sounded so scared, and I just pulled her into a hug, trying to hide the tears forming in my eyes.

"No, no, sweetie, no, you're not in trouble," I comforted, my voice cracking and shaking, "you told the truth even though I didn't believe you, even though you promised you weren't lying, and I am so sorry, sweetie."

My husband joined us, and we were just kneeled on the floor for a long moment in a worried embrace.

"Don't cry, mommy," she chimed in sweetly.

"Oh, don't worry," I assured, wiping my damp face with the long sleeve of my shirt, "mommy's just...just..." I stopped. "Um...sweetie?" I tried to level my voice. "How did you know? About the hole? How did you find it?"

"I was looking for my socks!" She exclaimed, far too nonchalantly, "I had a big bunch of socks that got ripped, so I didn't need them anymore, so they were for the trash, but then I couldn't find them anymore, and I was looking all over the place. Then I found the hole under my bed first, and one of my socks under there, and then--"

"What?" I interrupted, sounding on the verge of hysterical as I gripped her shoulders, trying not to fall apart, "what do you mean, under your bed? The hole was in your closet. You showed me."

"I only found that one yesterday," she said, "I found the one under my bed a while ago."

Yet another punch to my stomach had me sickened all over again. My mouth was unbearably dry and I tried to swallow nothing as I prepared my question, recalling something from earlier that my daughter had said, but that I apparently forgot, having brushed it off when I didn't believe Maddie's tall tale. I had so many questions. Too many questions. And worse than that, a fear for the answer. I feared something that I didn't understand. Something that I wished I had never learned about, or even better, had never existed. I feared the unknown, and yet feared the thought of what it would mean to know.

"Sweetie," I rasped, "how many are there?"