A short story I recently read

Tiptoe, by Laird Barron

Read it here in 15 minutes.

Thinking about why I love it…

This story mixes the everyday with the creepy. From the first paragraph, we have a mixture of comics (normal), playing catch (normal), and shadow puppets (moving towards creepy). The shadow puppets are made up of standard animals (normal) and ‘Mimis’, which the narrator doesn’t recognise as animals (definitely creepy). The narrator’s father likes to play a game like tag, which he calls ‘tiptoe’ (normal); he seems obsessed with this game (creepy), and he moves into strange animal-like poses when playing it (creepy); initially, the narrator enjoys the game, but the father takes it too far, scaring his youngest son (creepy), and getting up to some odd things at a group hike and picnic…

A sense of foreboding builds throughout the story. The narrator reveals he has begun to suffer from anxiety, which a girlfriend suggests is caused by childhood trauma; we learn that the narrator’s father used to put on a persona for work (‘wearing that coldly affable expression he put on along with his hat and coat’); there is the suggestion of a link between a missing woman and the father (‘a missing woman on the six o’clock news; my father, polishing his glasses and smiling cryptically’); there is a suggestion that the narrator’s father is not even human, although that could just be childish imagination (‘The shadows of his arms kept elongating; his shadow fingers ended in shadow claws’); and the suggestion that the missing brother, Greg, may be just like his father…

The story ends with a revelation – an old photo is found of the father behaving like an animal swinging in the trees, in order to scare some children. Although the photo proves the father’s strangeness, and further hints that he isn’t human (‘Bloated and lanky, jaw unslung. Inhumanly proportioned’) it doesn’t resolve anything, as it doesn’t answer any of the many questions about the father, namely, what was he really, what did he do in private in relation to the missing women, and what did he want to do to the children in the photo?