Height marks

When we moved in, the kitchen doorframe was covered in pencil lines. Height marks, the kind parents make. Little dates beside each one, going back to 1971. We liked them. We painted around them.

The first new mark appeared in October. It was higher than the others, about where my shoulder is, with that morning's date written beside it in the same careful handwriting.

I assumed it was my son, playing a joke. He swore it wasn't. He's nine, and he couldn't have reached it anyway.

The next morning there was another mark, a few centimetres higher. Then another. Every night, something stood against our kitchen doorframe and measured itself, and every night it was taller.

By December the marks were above the top of the door, on the wall itself, reaching toward the ceiling. We stopped sleeping downstairs. Then we stopped sleeping much at all.

Last night it reached the ceiling. There's no more room to grow.

This morning, instead of a date, there was a name written beside the mark.

It was my son's.