A Childhood Drawing I Tore Up And Burned Has Come Back To Haunt Me

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I thought I had erased it—those crooked lines I made at eight years old, when I still believed the world under the pond behind our house was watching me. I drew it once in a fit of terrified inspiration: a girl with a hollow womb cradling a single unblinking eye, water-lilies floating in a path toward something too big to fit on the page, tentacles curling behind half-seen stones.

When my mother found the drawing, she said it was “not a thing a child should make.” I tore it up and burned it behind the shed, each scrap curling like a dying insect. I remember the smell of the smoke: bitter, metallic.

But now, decades later, it’s back.

It began with dreams—quiet at first, sketches more than visions. A woman standing in water up to her thighs, her hair drifting like strands of river weed. In her hands, the eye. Always the eye. Then came the boy on the bank, half-serpent, half-me, holding up a flower as if offering an apology. Behind them, the great shape rose: tentacles etched with a patience older than my nightmares.

Soon the dreams weren’t dreams anymore.

I would wake with pond water on my sheets, mud under my nails, a faint ring of cold around my wrist where something had held me. When I walked past mirrors, I saw reflections that weren’t positioned correctly. The drawings returned too—not mine, but perfect reproductions in charcoal on the underside of cabinets, beneath my pillow, on the inside of the bathroom door. And always more detailed than I could ever draw.

The eye in the woman’s hands changed each night. At first, it looked like mine. Then it didn’t.

Last night, I went to the pond. I don’t know why—I told myself it was to prove it was just a childhood echo. The moonlight was thin as scraped bone. The lilies were exactly where I’d drawn them years ago. And then she rose from the water exactly as before: calm, dripping, with the eye cupped like a fragile offering.

“You shouldn’t have burned it,” she said without moving her mouth.

Behind her, the tentacled thing stirred, its surface shimmering with the marks of a thousand tiny strokes, like a drawing brought to life.

I think the eye is mine now.
I think it was always meant to be.

And tomorrow night, when they come again, I don’t think I’ll run.