The Webcam

This is sixteen years old... not my best work... or close to it... but why not?

One fine, spring day there was a young man at home, playing on the internet drifting from site to site to site to site without much direction; just surfing as it were. He’d go to a site, click a link from there, which took him to other sites whose links he clicked as until he found himself on a website with an eerily familiar image on a webcam.

It was a room just like the one he was in with a poster on the wall, much like the poster on his own wall, and a desk and computer much like the desk and computer in his own room. The big glaring difference was that on the webcam there was a quite large fern plant in a purple planter. Otherwise, it looked exactly the same; even the sunlight from the window looked identical.

He stared and stared at the image on his screen, then at the room around him. Down to the very minute details, the room on the computer and his room were exactly the same except for the plant. Several times the young man even looked in his own room where the fern would be were his room the one on the screen.

Because of his real world responsibilities, the young man had to leave for work. Before leaving though, he saved the web page to his favorites and turned off the computer.

Hours and hours later, after work, the young man came back home. With the sun down and the street lights on, he went back up to his room. Neglecting to turn the lights on, he headed straight to his computer where he felt compelled to go to the website again.

The room had no one in it again. It seemed to be the same time of night on the screen as it was in his own room again. On the screen the desk lamp was on.

Realizing the darkness in his own room, he flicked his own desk lamp on to match the room on the screen. To his surprise, nay, to his horror, next to his real life desk was a large fern in a purple planter.

It was then that the young man started to get really freaked out.

The plant from the website was now in his room.

He stayed up for hours watching the screen, waiting for some kind of explanation or for someone to appear in the room, but no one ever did. Eventually he fell asleep at the computer with his face on the keyboard.

The next morning he woke up and found the web cam still on. Just like his room around him, the sunlight came in through the window and like before there was still no one in the room.

The room on the webcam had something new in it. On the desk, right next to the keyboard was a yellow rubber duck.

The young man instinctively looked next to his own keyboard. There was no rubber duck.

Again, the young man’s real world responsibilities called and he had to go to work. Like the day before, when he came back home, the image that had been only on the screen when he had left seemed to have materialized in his room.

Next to his keyboard was a yellow rubber duck.

The young man became quite suddenly and quite acutely suspicious of anyone and everything. To say that he was paranoid would have been a massive understatement.

Over the next few days, as if the fern and the rubber duck were not enough, more items appeared in his room in the same way. There was a red stapler, a banana, which the next day was only a banana peel although the young man never touched it, let alone ate it, a blue balloon, and on the seventh day a baseball glove which hung over the monitor.

Finally, the young man had a day with no work and nowhere to go.

He grabbed a three bags of potato chips, a two liter of root beer, a two liter of cola, an apple and took them all into his room, where he locked the door behind him, intending to stay the entire day until he could see, once and for all, who on the computer was behind all of this.

He sat and watched and watched and sat and then sat and watched some more. Nothing happened. He’d go from watching the room to watching the screen and back and forth for hours until, quite suddenly it seemed, his eyes closed and his mind drifted off to sleep.

When he awoke, it was still day, but, in the western sky, the sun was clearly on its way down. On the screen there was nothing new, but in his own room, on a shelf next to the window was a pirate flag.

Frantically the man looked at the webcam, but there was no pirate flag to be seen on it.

This gave him pause. Never had an item appeared in his own room first. The young man doubled his efforts to watch the monitor and to do so with more diligence than ever before.

Glued to the screen, he considered the objects and began to wonder if they had been selected at random or it there was, perhaps, some deeper meaning.

A fern. A rubber duck. A red stapler. A banana, which was eaten the next day. A blue balloon. A baseball glove. And now a pirate flag.
What could it all mean?

Thoughts and memories seemed to float in and out like an ominous mist.

His father had a red stapler, didn’t he?

Wasn’t his mother’s favorite food bananas?

He himself, as a small child, had a rubber duck much like the one on the desk, hadn’t he?

Were these memories real or perhaps the fantastical musings of an overworked, over-paranoid mind?

Bit by bit he began to place the objects together, like puzzle pieces, into a mental narrative. Whether or not it was factual was beside the point because he believed that it was.

As a young boy, one afternoon he and his brother were playing together in the house as boys often do. The boys had on their baseball gloves and, with the yellow rubber duck instead of a ball, they were playing catch. They had been playing a bit rough for inside the house which their mother had warned them of several times. She hardly looked up though, as she was munching a banana as a healthy afternoon snack and working at her desk stapling together pamphlets for a church fundraiser that she had been organizing.

Then there was an accident, a horrible accident in which a chain of events occurred with each of the webcam’s objects, as well as the pirate flag, playing a particular role.

The young man’s older brother had thrown the duck to him, he caught it and immediately threw it back much harder than he had intended to. It was poorly aimed. The duck knocked the fern which had until then been at rest next to their mother’s desk. The fern began to fall towards the mother. Stapler in hand, she reached out to catch the falling plant, which she did, causing her to accidentally squeeze the stapler, forcing a single staple to shoot across the room directly into the blue balloon that the older brother had just brought home from school. The balloon burst and the noise that accompanied it shocked the mother so much into forcing a wee bit of that banana she’d been chewing down the wrong pipe.

She began to choke.

The boys didn’t know what to do. They stood over their mother and watched as she changed colors, gasping, reaching; becoming more and more frantic. Finally her eyes widened with one final, desperate breath and then she fell silent.

In a cold sweat, the young man realized that this had been a suppressed memory. He had known all along that his mother had passed away when he was a child, but the details he had never, until just that moment, actually remembered it.

He had been living under the assumption that his family had kept the details hidden from him to protect him from some sort of emotional discomfort, which in a sense actually did turn out to be the case, just not in the way he thought it was.

As the shock of the new memory was just beginning to dig its roots into his mind, the young man fell back in his chair as, from the corner of his eye he finally noticed movement on the computer screen.

He picked himself up off of the floor, and, with only the top of his head and his eyes hovering above the desktop, he saw the figure of a woman place the pirate flag, with its death sign of skull and crossbones, next to the window on the shelf.

The woman on the webcam hovered above the pirate flag for just a moment then looked towards the monitor, seeming to meet the young man’s gaze.

It was his mother.

In shock, in horror, and with the utmost guilt, the young man took his own life right then and there.

When his body was discovered two days later, the website was still on the computer monitor, but no camera was ever found in the young man’s room.

Photo by Wu Zhongyi on Unsplash