Addiction was slowly killing our mother, rocking her gently to sleep like a lullaby buried deep in the foam of a worn mattress, and every piece of her that fell apart we tried to save like it still mattered. When her back teeth fell out, she left them on the edge of the bathtub, and I was seven years old, keeping them in a matchbox so they wouldn’t disappear forever, because maybe one day we could put her back together again. Our house was falling apart the same way she was, ceilings stained with water, stairs rotting, radiators bleeding rust in the winter, but it was still our home, and that was because of Anna. My sister Anna became our mother long before she should have, putting bandages on my scraped knees, heating up dinners in the microwave, telling me ghost stories at night and laughing softly when I crawled into her bed because I was too scared to sleep alone. She taught me how to dance barefoot in the living room with MTV blasting, always let me shower first so I could have the warm water, never complained about taking the cold one after. Every morning before school she brushed my hair, even when I screamed and hit her for pulling at knots, and she never stopped trying to take care of me no matter how much it hurt her.

Anna had dark hair like our father, whoever he was, while I was blonde, and she always wanted to look like our mother, like Marilyn Monroe, like becoming her would somehow make her loved the same way. When I turned eighteen, Anna left and never came back, and sometimes I still dream about her, about her hands in my hair, even if it hurt, because pain meant she was still there. Our mother was impossible to keep up with, and we learned early that we would always be chasing after her, always too late, always trying to fix something already broken. When she drank just enough, she could be wonderful, waking us up at three in the morning with pancakes dripping in jam, calling our school pretending we were sick so she could take us to the beach instead. I remember one day when I was nine, driving home with the windows down, warm air filling the car, Anna newly blonde, and for a moment I couldn’t tell which one was my mother and which one was my sister. Those were the moments that made everything else harder to understand, because they felt real, like maybe things could actually be normal if we just held on long enough.

But when she drank too much, everything fell apart in a way that felt permanent, like something inside her cracked open and never closed again, and Anna would disappear into herself, staying up all night watching old black and white movies, repeating lines she already knew by heart. When I was five, I used to cry when I found our mother passed out, thinking she would never wake up again, and Anna would wipe my tears and tell me she was just sleeping, like the princesses in my stories. We would sit beside her and wait, sometimes for hours, and when we got older, we stopped waiting and started carrying her, dragging her from the bathroom floor to the bed, cleaning her, changing her, pretending we knew what we were doing. There was never any doubt about it, Anna was the one keeping us alive, holding everything together while everything else collapsed around us. And then there were the times when she didn’t drink enough, when the house became colder than winter, when the fridge emptied, when cigarettes burned into the wallpaper and her eyes turned hollow and distant. She would scream over nothing, and once, after I spilled juice on the couch, she dragged me onto the carpet and burned all the cushions outside while Anna sat next to me, silent, holding me together while everything else burned.

It was October, I was thirteen and Anna was sixteen, and our mother had been gone for two days when she called from a payphone, laughing, telling us she was having fun with new friends, and wishing me a happy birthday one day late. I hung up before she finished speaking. Anna gave me presents anyway, lip gloss, nail polish, things I didn’t question, and we went to the beach together, eating a homemade cake with sand stuck in the frosting, tasting sugar and salt at the same time. That night we didn’t talk much, something heavy hanging between us, until she stumbled on the stairs and I smelled the alcohol on her breath and saw something shift inside her that terrified me. I ran to the kitchen and poured every bottle down the sink, and when she tried to stop me we fought, the last bottle slipping and shattering on the floor like something final, like stars breaking into pieces we would never be able to fix. Later she made dinner, real dinner, and we ate in silence while something inside me softened again, because she wasn’t our mother, she wasn’t lost yet, not completely.

Then we heard the sound outside, something soft at first, like crying, something that didn’t belong, and we went out onto the porch under the weak glow of hanging lights, listening to something that sounded like a child but felt wrong in a way I couldn’t explain. When I stepped closer, Anna’s voice stopped me, sharp and tense, and when I looked into the darkness I saw it too, something crouched in the bushes, arms wrapped around its legs, mouth opening and closing in a broken imitation of crying. It stood up suddenly, too tall, too thin, and something inside me snapped into panic. I ran, dragging Anna inside, slamming the door, watching as it walked slowly toward the house like it had all the time in the world. She grabbed me and told me not to turn around, her voice shaking in a way I had never heard before, and then the knocking started. Soft at first, then harder, then violent, something hitting the window like a head smashing into glass, over and over until it shattered. We ran upstairs, locked ourselves in the bathroom, listening as it moved through the house, opening doors, laughing in a high broken voice that sounded like it was learning how to be human.

Anna gave me a knife and told me she would go get her phone, told me to lock the door and not open it for anything, not even for her, and I promised even though I didn’t want to. The moment she stepped out, something slammed against the door, the handle shaking, screws loosening, and then silence. I sat there alone, holding the knife, listening to my own breathing until a voice came from the other side, soft, familiar, calling my name. It sounded like our mother, apologizing, crying, begging to be let in, and for a moment I believed it, I wanted to believe it, wanted her to hold me and tell me everything would be okay. My hand moved toward the lock, and then I heard Anna’s voice too, calm and wrong, using my full name in a way she never did, and something inside me stopped. I knew. I knew that whatever was outside that door wasn’t my sister, wasn’t my mother, wasn’t anything human. I backed away, curled into the bathtub, holding the knife while it screamed and begged and pounded until the noise from downstairs finally changed into something else, voices, footsteps, people breaking in.

When it was over, they carried me outside, past claw marks on the door, feathers from torn pillows floating like snow through the hallway, and I saw Anna standing under flashing lights, alive, real, holding me as everything finally stopped. There was no creature, no demon, no thing pretending to be human. It was just our mother, broken beyond repair, high and desperate, smashing herself against the house trying to get to the alcohol she had hidden. She wasn’t trying to get to me, she was trying to get to the bottle. She had learned how to mimic voices, almost perfectly, but not enough to fool me completely. That was the night I understood something I wish I never had to learn, that real monsters don’t hide in the dark or outside your window. They live inside people, inside bottles, inside needles, inside the slow decay of someone you love. And in the end, it’s up to you whether you let them in.