“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”

- Tennessee Williams

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As the sun was beginning to set on October 31st, Tessa Rosenberg put a bowl of candy out on a folding chair and refreshed her DoorDash app four times.

It was filled with candy she couldn’t quite afford. But she loved Halloween, and it had been a hard year in their corner of eastern Tennessee. A hard decade, to be honest. Jobs were scarce and people were stressed.

Tessa put her hair in a braid and pulled on her jacket before locking the door behind her, a little sad that she couldn’t afford to stay in that evening. She was 43 and had been delivering food to strangers in the valley of Mountain City since 2018. It wasn’t the kind of thing she had seen for herself at this point in life. And it wasn’t, she knew, the kind of thing her mother had imagined for her especially.

Her mother imagined her with children of her own by now, probably. A house with a finished basement. In the least: insurance. Though she’d never said anything outright, she had developed a particular way of asking her daughter how work was going that always made the answer feel like a guilt-ridden confession.

“Still doing the delivery thing?” she’d ask.

“Still doing the delivery thing.” Tessa would reply.

“Well. It’s honest work, honey.”

She could never hide her disappointment.

It had been different in 2020. Back then, people thanked her for being an essential worker. They wanted her to stay safe. Twenty dollar tips were left with notes saying they’d been afraid to go to the grocery store and were grateful Tessa was willing to bring them food. They cried when she dropped something off because they hadn’t seen another person in eleven days. They called her a hero.

Now they were back to calling this kind of work what they always had before the world shut down: ‘Lazy’. ‘Unskilled’. ‘Uneducated’. ‘Taking the easy way out’. They told her that if she wanted a “real” job, she should just go get one. As if what she did wasn’t real, and as if there were other jobs to be had.

Tessa didn’t blame the customers, exactly. People in these parts of rural Appalachia were exhausted. Everyone in America was exhausted. They’d all been chewed up and spit out and forced to pretend that the shape of things was normal again. That the shape of things hadn’t been changed forever by that collective trauma.

But the reality was that rent still came due on the first. And Tessa desperately needed to see a dentist; the work she’d wanted done the last three years put off thanks to the state of the economy.

Tonight at least, the app was busy.

She climbed into her car, started the engine, and promptly accepted an order from a barbecue place just off the highway. The food’s destination was a subdivision on the edge of town; new construction-type homes that more or less resembled shoeboxes from the same store. The tip was $7. Not bad.

The restaurant was packed with families in costumes. A little boy dressed as a pirate had dropped a handful of ketchup packets on the floor and was crying. His mother was apologizing to the cashier while holding a baby in one arm and plastic sword in the other. The manager a few paces to the right caught sight of her and said: “Picking up tonight, Tessa?”

“You know it.”

He handed her the bag without looking up.

She left.

Two hours later, she had delivered a handful of orders: A pizza to a woman in a witch hat who’d tipped two bucks. Pad Thai to a college student who’d written:

^{PLEASE DONT KNOCK !}

^{DOGS WILL BARK IF DOOR IS TOUCHED (theyre assholes)}

—then opened the door anyway and apologized for the wait that had been all of ten seconds. A family-size order of mashed potatoes went to a man who stood in his underwear and asked if Tessa was the driver or the food. Fucking gross.

At each house, the same ritual: park, walk, photograph, leave.

Airing out on the hood of her car and polishing off a couple Snickers bars, a new order appeared from Millie’s, a diner that had been around for as long as Tessa could remember. No substitutions. No special requests. The pay was $29.65, including tip.

The destination was almost a half hour outside town, up a road Tessa knew more by reputation than experience with a single number address followed by a county road designation. The pin on the map sat deep in the hills where cell service came and went.

She hesitated.

The order was good money; the sort of cash that could cover the gas needed to get there and leave extra to put toward groceries the next day. She stared at the map again showing the pin plopped in a blank patch of green.

She accepted it.

. . .

Millie’s was nearly empty when she arrived. A waitress with blue-streaked hair and a rose tattoo trailing up her arm sat behind the counter reading a Peter Straub paperback. She lowered the book when Tessa entered, revealing black cat ears.

“DoorDashin’ tonight?”

Tessa nodded, recognizing her from the last time she was in a few weeks before.

The waitress disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a paper bag folded tight at the top.

“This one’s going a long way out,” Tessa said, trying to size up any hint of a reaction from the woman.

“Yeah?” the waitress said sauntering over.

Closer up, Tessa could read the letters across her nametag: Stacy. She made a mental note to remember that for next time, then tilted her phone toward her. “Weird question but do you know this area by chance? Uh—” she paused, considering how to finish that sentence. “Lone woman going there at night and all that.” Then she shrugged, already regretting the question in fear she was coming off paranoid.

Why did shit like this embarrass her so much? It shouldn't have.

Stacy glanced at the screen and something changed in her face. It wasn’t exactly comforting. She looked back up at Tessa with an unreadable expression. “You been out that way before?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Well.” She exhaled, a whiff of peppermint gum on her breath. “Just be careful. It’s pretty remote.”

Tessa waited for more. But she simply made her way back to the counter and picked up her book.

“Happy Halloween.”

Outside, the night held enough chill that Tessa could see her breath. The clouds above had thickened, concealing a crescent moon. Across the road, children moved in little packs between distant porches, their costumes flashing in the headlights of cars that passed with slow caution. A little girl in a white dress crossed the street, feathered wings bobbing behind her and a crooked gold halo sitting on her head. Tessa watched her a moment longer than she meant to before entering the address again, thinking about how the trek’s pay would allow her to splurge on some oat milk at the store in the morning. She missed having that with her coffee.

. . .

For the first ten minutes of the route, things felt familiar: convenience stores, churches, scattered homes with plastic skeletons tied to porch railings. From there the way narrowed, those houses appearing to thin, and the trees leaning in close enough to swallow the sky.

Tessa turned down the radio to hear the directions better.

In four hundred feet, turn left.

She did.

Her tires crunched over the gravel, and the car dipped into a rut hard enough to make the bag on the passenger seat slide. The map still showed another mile to the destination. Only the white sweep of headlights ten feet in front of her were visible.

She thought about the waitress’s warning. Just be careful. What the hell did that mean, anyway? People in mountain towns like theirs said things like that all the time. Most of it was nonsense. Still, she found herself slowing down to a crawling pace as the car ambled forward.

The road bent around some more before the house finally came into view. It was old, with a steep roof and a porch that ran the length of the front. A single bulb burned above the door.

Tessa parked and grabbed her phone, which showed one bar of service. She double checked the delivery preferences set by the customer:

She glanced again at the house. A bowl sat on the porch filled with candy, an empty wooden chair beside it. Tessa couldn’t discern what was more unnerving to her: the fact there were no decorations to accompany the setup, or the fact one existed at all this far out in the sticks.

She grabbed the bag from the passenger seat and got out. Operating more from instinct than courtesy, she climbed the porch steps carefully; their boards creaking under her weight. She set the food down and prepared to take the delivery photo, zooming out to get the full door in-frame.

The camera refused to focus. She sighed and rubbed the lenses with her sleeve before trying again.

The screen showed the bag, door, and bowl of candy just off to the right. Then, next to the chair—

An impossibly large shape appeared, facing the road. It was crouched as if weighed down by something it carried on its back and slowly turned its head toward Tessa — the top of it scraping the porch covering. She could see that its mouth was sewn shut, the stitches in a zig zag pattern across its lips.

Tessa gasped and jerked backward, sending her phone flying into the dirt. She looked back up and—

The space next to the chair was empty.

Heart racing, she moved to pick up her phone and held up the camera again.

The figure was gone.

Just a trick of the light, she thought. A reflection. Her own shadow maybe, cast strangely by the hue of the bulb.

That doesn’t explain the stitches though, does it Tes? her mind mocked.

Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut the FUCK up— she retorted as a shiver ran through her.

She snapped the picture and tapped the COMPLETE DELIVERY button in the app. It was time to get the hell out of dodge.

Then the front door opened.

A tall, gaunt woman gripping onto a walker was in the doorway, dressed in a red housecoat that reached her ankles. White hair gathered messily at the nape of her neck.

“Hi there,” Tessa said softly, caught completely off-guard. “I-I have your food.” She shakily pointed where it was sitting, still coming down from the fright.

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The woman looked at her then down at the bag. Then she stepped out from the threshold, the combination of her bare feet and the sliding of the walker somehow making no sound against the boards. Mottled fingers with nails cut close to the skin reached down for the brown paper. She clutched it with an uneasy slowness and grimaced as she raised herself back up. Her glance moved subtly toward the empty chair — a simple gesture that made Tessa want to crawl out of her skin.

The two women stared at each other for a few moments before Tessa gave an awkward smile. “Well anyway, have a nice night, ma’am.” She turned and started toward her car.

“You look nice with your hair up like that,” she heard from behind her. The woman’s voice almost sounded coy.

Tessa stopped cold. Dread rushed into her veins, the feeling of ice hitting instantaneously as she nearly lost her balance. She turned around as the woman was shutting the door, feeling lightheaded.

How could she have known to say that? Why did she say it?

She thought again of the thing with the stitched mouth.

“Hey!” Tessa shouted as she stomped back toward the porch, adrenaline shooting through every inch of her nervous system. Hot, boiling anger consumed her every thought and impulse as she banged loudly on the door.

“What the hell did you just say?” Her voice sounded embarrassingly small against the massive backdrop of forest surrounding the house.

She pounded again with both fists as the wood shuddered beneath each blow, sending pain through her knuckles. “Open the door!”

Nothing happened. No footsteps. No answer. No acknowledgment.

Tessa backed away slowly, breathing hard as she descended the steps for a second time.

What the fuck just happened?

She let the silence marinate as she started back toward the car again, fumbling her keys twice before finally managing to unlock it. She shifted into reverse back up the gravel drive, groupings of birch trees re-engulfing the house like a scene on a video tape being rewound.

The road twisted between the slopes of the 421. Her hands trembled as she caught herself repeatedly checking the rearview mirror, half-expecting to see the figure standing behind her and smiling with stitched lips busting open at the seams.

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But nothing was there.

She tried to reason with herself. The woman was old, probably confused. Her house was strange and the road to get there was unfamiliar at best — not to mention Tessa herself was exhausted. The shape caught in the lens was nothing more than a trick of the camera. The space next to the chair had been empty all along. Obviously.

But those stitches…

And the hunched posture of the thing in the specific way it stood, too big for the roof of the porch.

And the woman’s voice. You look nice with your hair up like that, she’d said.

The words followed Tessa back down the mountain, slipping between the sounds of engine and tires as asphalt rolled underneath. That line: the same one she’d heard a hundred times before. Two hundred, maybe.

In her grandmother’s bathroom. The smell of lavender shampoo and the soft scrape of a brush through her hair. The details were so sharp they brought tears to her eyes.

Bubbe.

Tessa’s throat tightened. She hadn’t thought about those afternoons in years. Her grandmother had been dead for almost two decades, and the memories of her had settled into the comfortable, ordinary places where grief eventually learned to live: a recipe written in faded pencil, a photograph on her mother’s mantel, the occasional smell of cinnamon and chocolate that brought her back to the kitchen of her childhood, where she was taught to make loaves of challah and babka every Friday to help prepare for Shabbat. They were beautiful moments that threaded together a beautiful upbringing. She loved her grandmother more than she had ever loved anyone or anything.

But there were other memories, too.

The stories.

Because Bubbe was a Holocaust survivor; the only member of her family who made it on the other side of the war after they were all deported to Bergen-Belsen during the autumn of 1943. She was just 16 when the British liberated the camp, having lied about her age when she first arrived seventeen months before. She’d learned early that being younger made you vulnerable in a place where that word, and so many others, were interchangeable with death.

Bubbe rarely spoke about what she’d seen. When she did, she talked quietly and without embellishment. She told her granddaughter about life-threatening hunger and how it made people more defensive than animals in cages; she told her about the sicknesses, the terrible uncertainty of waking each morning without knowing if she’d still be alive by nightfall.

Somewhere in the primal desperation she felt her soul leave her body, she told Tessa. Their religion taught that this was something that happened when they went to sleep; the neshamah, the soul, wandered during that time. This was why each morning the Modeh Ani prayer thanked the divine for returning it safely. But for Bubbe, even in the decades that followed and after having children and a grandchild of her own, her soul never came back the same according to her. It had wandered so far away in that place, in that hell, that by the time it returned, it wasn’t whole anymore. And how could it be?

She never described the worst things in detail. She didn’t have to. There was one story she told more than once, though.

She’d been lying on the ground that fateful Spring day, going in and out of consciousness. She was so weak she could barely open her eyes. A soldier in a uniform she didn't recognize knelt beside her and leaned over her face, his mouth moving and saying words she couldn’t hear for some reason. She was starving and feverish, not having eaten for three days. Behind the soldier’s head, she saw enormous wings.

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“I thought he was a mal’akh,” Bubbe had told her while brushing knots out of her hair; a ritual they had every Friday after she walked home from the bus stop. “I thought G-d had sent an angel to take me far, far away from there. To a place of only sunrises and sunsets.”

Tessa remembered the way her grandmother’s fingers always paused saying that part. Then she’d finish tying the end of a braid and gently turn her around with a smile before gingerly putting her thumb under her chin and saying: “You look nice with your hair up like that.”

In Jewish tradition, angels weren’t the gentle, cherubic figures of other belief systems. They could inspire absolute terror. Their appearances marked something beyond any realm of humanness; something whose purpose might be impossible to comprehend. And for thousands of years, visions of them had been described in the literature as immense and strange, bearing little resemblance to anything a person might call ‘beautiful’, with too many eyes and giant stature. Even when one came bearing good news, the response was always met with fear.

Bubbe had been afraid, too. She’d watched the soldier’s lips move without hearing a sound and couldn’t understand why. Later, she wondered if G-d had made him silent in that moment because she was already so frightened. Tessa had a more rational approach: her grandmother was on the brink of death when the camp was liberated. She nearly died, and was seeing things.

But Tessa dreamed of that angel for years. A luminescent face on colossal shoulders with wings the length of a semi unfurling behind it, and a mouth stitched shut with thick black thread. A silent, horrific angel.

A silent, horrific angel: The thing Bubbe insisted saved her that day.

A silent, horrific angel: An unexplained moment in history whose presence of being there, then was the reason Tessa was here, now.

It showed up incessantly in her head almost every night for years. The nightmares had terrified her so badly that she eventually asked Bubbe to stop telling the story all together. She still remembered one particular conversation:

“Bubbe?” Tessa had asked as her grandmother brushed her hair. “Will an angel ever come for me?”

“Angels are messengers, meine sheynkeit. They come to deliver something.”

“Then why doesn’t mine talk?” Tessa asked. “Its mouth is sewn shut.”

The brush stopped. For a moment, Bubbe’s reflection looked like someone Tessa had never seen before.

“Perhaps,” Bubbe whispered. “It has a message it cannot deliver yet.” She resumed brushing Tessa’s hair, but her eyes stayed on their reflections in the mirror. “When I was rescued, I thought a part of me had stayed behind. Something I could never get back.” She gathered Tessa’s hair at the nape of her neck, her fingers always so gentle. Bubbe beamed, tears in her eyes. “Then you were born, and sometimes, when I look at you still, I feel it again. Whatever it is that I lost.”

Tessa began to cry, though at the time she didn’t understand why she reacted that way. She only knew that Bubbe’s voice sounded different when she said that; that there was something in the way she looked at her that made her chest ache.

Then Bubbe kissed her forehead and wiped her cheeks with her thumb, smiling as if there had never been anything in the world to be afraid of. She turned Tessa around to face her, just as she always did, and gently lifted her chin.

“You look nice with your hair up like that.”

Back in the present, Tessa wiped away a tear with the back of her hand. Because now those exact words had been repeated more than thirty years later in a part of town she’d never been to from a woman she’d never met.

She rubbed at her temples as a headache began to set in. Then she removed the hair tie holding her braid.

. . .

By the time Tessa reached her neighborhood, she’d almost convinced herself that fear had rearranged the night into something laughably impossible from the hour earlier. She had been tired. She had been alone. She had seen a weird woman in a weird house in a weird part of town and allowed a haunting memory to take hold of her. That was all.

She pulled into her driveway, creeping past the folding chair and bowl still sitting out. She killed the engine and stifled a yawn as she walked over to collect them.

A few houses down, she could see that someone had strung orange lights around a mailbox. The typical sounds of Halloween drifted through the neighborhood, echoes of children calling to one another a few blocks away.

She picked up the bowl and realized not a single piece of candy remained. “Little vultures,” she muttered under her breath with a smile. Then she folded the chair and tucked it beneath her arm.

Halfway up the drive, she stopped. Because something dark lay across the threshold of her door.

At first she thought it was a strip of black plastic; the kind that could come loose from a garbage bag and catch on something that rustled in the wind. But there hadn’t been any wind that night.

Tessa walked closer to find that—

It was a feather.

She stared at it, waiting for her mind to make it into something else. She dropped the chair and bowl.

Nearly as long as she was tall, it was a single plume of charcoal. Its edges were delicate and almost translucent, but the shaft running through its center was as thick as her wrist; fine barbs laying along it in tight and overlapping rows, each one glistening faintly like the scales of some lagoon creature.

She crouched and extended her hand, stopping just short of touching it. Then she registered something standing on the open lawn just beyond the side of the house, perfectly still in front of a mature sugar maple. The thing was at least fifteen feet tall with an unnaturally broad frame and skin like candlewax. Its outline blended almost perfectly with the shadows to the point she’d almost missed it entirely. Only its eyes betrayed it, two molten-gold glints suspended in the night, shining with the same unmistakable brilliance of coins held up to the sun.

Tessa squinted, heart beating out of her chest, as she realized its shoulders were hunched. She cried as they began to move.

Enormous wings stretched across her half-acre of yard, those charcoal feathers whispering against one another somehow. The grass flattened beneath them as if a helicopter was hovering above. The porch light began flickering wildly.

It was something ancient; something that had been there when the first living things crawled from the primordial sea, gasping into a world that had never known breath. Something that had watched humanity burn over and over through every millennium while never once needing to look away.

Tessa understood, with a sudden and terrible certainty, that it had finally come for the part of her grandmother that never made it home. For the one part that still belonged to it, and for the one person who could lead it there. It had been waiting for this moment. And it knew for eternity that it was always going to happen this way. It knew before that war, before the first one tens of thousands of years preceding it. It knew from the beginning of time and space, before there was a before.

It told Tessa this without speaking. She looked back up, and its mouth began to open, no longer confined to the stitches of her mind and dreams and waking fears. Above her, the stars had disappeared one by one behind its wings that somehow, impossibly, continued to unfold — wings that had no business fitting under the same sky where things like stars existed.

Tessa screamed.

. . .

^{ONE MONTH LATER}

Stacy Greer stood just outside Millie’s at the end of her shift smoking a cigarette she promised herself she wouldn't and staring at the missing poster taped to the diner window. Beneath the headline was a photograph of Tessa Rosenberg, last seen on October 31st.

The waitress took another drag as she looked some more at the woman’s face, recalling how she’d shown her a delivery address that night and asked if she knew the area. Just be careful, Stacy had told her like some bumbling idiot with a superiority complex. Now, she wished she’d said more; gave Tessa her cell number maybe, and asked her to check in when she got back okay. Something. Anything.

She couldn’t change any of that now. But she remembered the address, and figured the least she could do was investigate a little. It wasn’t like local law enforcement was doing shit about any of this.

The late autumn sun sank behind the mountains as she drove up the highway. The road grew narrower and the trees closed in around her headlights until she finally reached the house off a rural turn; the red pin surrounded by green on Tessa’s phone screen that night flashing in her mind. Stacy threw the car in park and stared in horror—

Because every window was boarded up with a porch sagging from decades of rot. Weeds swallowed the steps. It was clear no one had lived there for a very, very long time.

Yet from somewhere deep inside came the unmistakable sound of a woman laughing.

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Additional Insight, Inspiration, + References

Featured artwork as follows:

To Rabbi Miriam, who I still consider one of the most profound mentors I’ve worked with and learned from: Thank you for everything.

And lastly: A Reference Glossary for some of the specific terminology used in this story. I strive to make this space as accessible as possible, and understand that some people may not be as familiar with certain Jewish innuendos. Given this, I’ve provided some explanations below to bring context to several passages in Wings. You’ll find everything in the chronological order it appeared in the narrative:

‘Bubbe’ (pronounced BUB-bee) - A Yiddish word for ‘grandmother’ in Jewish culture. It often carries a warm, affectionate feeling and brings to mind a loving matriarch who shares family traditions, stories, food, and wisdom.

Challah - A rich, fluffy bread that’s usually braided and a little sweet. A traditional addition to a Shabbat table and for most chags/holidays.

Babka - A sweet bread made from twisted layers of dough filled with chocolate, cinnamon, or other sweet fillings. It’s rich and buttery, almost like a cross between a cinnamon roll and coffee cake.

Shabbat - A sacred day of rest that begins at sundown on Friday evening and ends an hour after sundown on Saturday evening. It’s a time to step away from the busyness of everyday life and make room for the simplicity of being present.

Neshamah - The Hebrew word for ‘soul’ that more accurately transliterates to ‘breath of life’. It refers to the spiritual essence inside a person that makes them uniquely alive. This is an important principle in Jewish thought as its beliefs clearly distinguish from other religions it often gets mistakingly lumped with; in Judaism, people are souls with bodies and not bodies with souls. It’s an important differentiation.

G-d - This is how some Jewish people write the name of the divine. Writing it this way is a small expression of respect and a reminder that words are powerful.

‘Meine Sheynkeit’ - A Yiddish expression most closely meaning ‘my beauty’ or ‘my darling one’.

“This is the way the world ends
not with a bang but a whimper.”

-T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

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For two years, Fiona Sutherland’s mother had been seeing dead people in the yard.

They came at night, standing barefoot at the edge of the property in wet grass; their skin the gray, translucent quality of something kept too long underwater.

“They showed up again last night,” she said that Wednesday morning - as she did every single morning - stirring sugar into her coffee.

“Oh yeah, Ma?” Fiona already knew how this would go, but denying her mother would end worse for both of them.

“Yeah, they told me about the door.”

Fiona breathed quietly through her nose, nodding. Her mother had described it so many times that she could picture it almost as clearly as if she’d seen it herself: a tall, black door standing upright on its own; nothing but the dark woods that backed their home stretching on either side. The people she saw gathered around it in a crowd.

“They told you that again, huh?” Fiona asked half-heartedly, sorting through yesterday’s mail on the counter.

Her mother nodded solemnly, gazing out the windows. She’d never explained much else about the mysterious door in the woods, only that it had supposedly first appeared to The Dead Ones after the water rose two years ago, when the floods from the hurricane swept away nearly everything on the mountains that laced Canton.

She’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia when Fiona was 27 and first came home after serving in the military. But the storm that had torn through western North Carolina had only further complicated things. Symptoms got worse in the months that followed, the people she saw in the yard becoming a fixture of their daily lives.

The inevitable trauma of the disaster. The disrupted routines it caused. The loss of whatever sense of security the house had once offered her had all played a role, her medical team explained during the appointments. They adjusted medications and encouraged Fiona to respond to her mother’s experiences without arguing over what was real.

There were bills to pay, tax returns to finish, contractors waiting on figures, and a house that still needed so much work it was dizzying. Now 34, Fiona was a part-time freelance accountant; piecing together contracts with local businesses struggling to rebuild their corner of rural America. The rest of her working hours went to caring for her mother — keeping track of appointments and prescriptions, managing the household, and making sure neither of them missed a meal all the meanwhile. The work never stretched neatly into halves. The money stretched even less neatly.

Her disability payments from the VA gave them some breathing room; more stability than many of their neighbors could count on, at least. Recovery was being measured in things like blue tarps on roofs, and most in the community were still waiting on assistance they’d applied for months ago. The ones lucky enough to receive checks got amounts barely enough to cover a fraction of what they’d lost. Contractors were booked out and supplies were getting more and more expensive. Everyone seemed to be waiting on someone else to make good on a promise.

The income from her part-time work helped fill in some gaps, though between large-scale repairs, the rising cost of groceries, and her mother’s intensive care, there never seemed to be enough when it was all said and done. Still, Fiona helped where she could, sometimes straightening out a business’s books for free or lending out tools needed for a job when she wasn’t using them on her own four walls.

Fiona had become good at making do, though she never imagined a life after the Marine Corps that would bring her back to her home state. When she’d pictured civilian life a few years ago, she thought of somehow staying in Southern California; the palm trees swaying along sun-bleached streets with the Pacific glittering at the rim of every main highway. She’d wanted the kind of quiet that came from choosing where to be for once.

But it became clear that her mother needed her. So Fiona had done what she always did when someone she loved was in trouble: she showed up. She expected to be more bitter about that at first, more resentful of the life she’d built and had to leave behind. Instead, she found something softer waiting for her — a tenderness for the mountains and people who called them home that she hadn’t realized she still carried. And somewhere along the way, she stopped thinking of her stay as temporary.

She broke from these thoughts and looked down at piles of tax paperwork before glancing out the window, itching for time away from the ledgers and in some fresh air instead.

She grabbed her keys.

. . .

The truck rattled along a two-lane road. Mountains rolled past in shades of deep green and rain-darkened blue. Two years after the hurricane, wreckage still littered the landscape. Riverbanks remained choked with burn piles of snapped trees. Abandoned cars sat on the side of roads and in the surrounding forest; the glass of their windshields scattered in dizzy piles around them.

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America had watched the floodwater rise on television and social media. They offered prayers and hashtags before promptly moving on. But no one ever gave a shit about those in ‘flyover country’. No one built [or rebuilt] for them. So the people of Canton did what they always had: they rescued themselves. And afterward, they’d gone straight back to work. They had to.

Fiona turned up the radio and rolled the tuning dial through a wash of static. Voices flickered in and out beneath the hiss, surfacing from the noise only to be swallowed again as she moved off-frequency. Then a station locked in, suddenly crisp, as an Evangelical preacher spoke in a solemn and practiced cadence:

“The Scripture is clear: some doors are not meant to be opened. Yet man, in his pride, believes he can stare into the darkest corners of creation and emerge untouched. But the Lord has asked us a question, one that every soul must reckon with sooner or later:

‘Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death—’”

She turned it off.

The quiet brought her mother’s voice back into her head: They told me about the door.

Fiona shuddered, whisking the thought to the back of her mind.

Benchmarks signaling the entrance and exits of other towns appeared gradually on either side of her windows: gas stations, aging storefronts, a dentist office with a new sign and an old parking lot. Many businesses had closed for good; their Chapter 11 filings among the piles of forms Fiona had helped prepare. She knew their stories. Most involved children and a mortgage that had eventually been forced to walk away from. The fading commercial husks now in the rearview were a reminder so bleak it stung.

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Ahead, a row of mobile homes appeared between a stand of pine trees, their aluminum siding dulled by weather. A tricycle lay near a patch of grass. Someone had strung a line of laundry up, shirts and towels snapping in the wind.

Fiona glanced at the homes, then back at the road. Then she remembered Daniel: her shitty ex-boyfriend from a few years back.

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They’d only been dating for a couple of weeks when she’d driven him to a mechanic to pick up his car. He was in her passenger seat, arm resting along the open window. They’d passed trailer parks on a few occasions, and every time, he had something to say about it.

He’d leaned forward to get a better look at the homes sliding past them as they drove by that day. “God, look at that place,” he’d scoffed. “I don’t understand how people live like that.”

Fiona eyed him, annoyed. “Like what?”

He gestured vaguely at the trailers. “Like that. All crammed together. No upkeep. Trash everywhere.”

She glanced over, looking more closely. “It’s some lawn chairs and furniture in a yard, Daniel.”

“So?”

“So people live there.”

He laughed. “That’s not the point. If you can’t afford to live somewhere decent, you should move. Find somewhere else. Don’t make everyone else look at that. Ya know what I mean?”

She didn’t know what he meant. “What do you mean, move?”

He turned to her, that cocky smile falling from his lips. “What?”

“You keep saying they should move. Where exactly are they’re supposed to go?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Somewhere better. Get a job. Save up. Do something about it.”

“So you’re assuming they don’t already have jobs, then? That they don’t already probably work something like forty hours a week? Have you ever considered that maybe they do and can’t afford to leave? Even then! Where do you expect them to go? LA? New York City? Places so expensive people already established there can’t afford to stay?”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Fiona. You don’t have to make this into a whole thing. You do that a lot.”

“No; this is bullshit. I’m asking you a question—”

“And I’m telling you, people have to take responsibility for themselves. They could invest in an education, for a start.”

Fiona’s grip tightened around the steering wheel as she gritted her teeth. “Yeah, well, it’s not everyone’s path and shouldn’t be. You know I couldn’t have done it without my GI Bill, and even then—”

“Fiona, I’m just saying that they should go do something better is all.”

She looked at him then, completely disgusted, and felt something inside her settle into place. “Oh, I get it: you think they’re dirty,” she said finally, shaking her head. “You think they’re gross. And because you don’t like looking at them, you think they should disappear so they’re not your problem anymore. Does that about sum it up?”

“That’s not what I said—”

“It’s exactly what you goddamn said.”

“Oh come on, Fi.” He reached over to rub her shoulder.

She swatted him away as they drove the rest of the route in silence. When they pulled into the mechanic’s lot a few minutes later, she told him to get the fuck out of her car, saving herself from someone who showed their entire pretentious ass to her — not to mention another lousy lay.

He called her ridiculous. Told her she was making the biggest mistake of her life. That she’d regret throwing away a perfectly good relationship over something ‘so stupid’.

Yeah, good fucking riddance, she’d thought.

She hadn’t regretted it once.

Now passing those same mobile homes, Fiona felt the old irritation rise and pass as it always did. One of the curtains in the nearest trailer shifted, and a small face appeared in the window. She lifted her hand from the steering wheel with her palm facing out in an uncertain wave. The curtain fell shut again.

The slope of the road narrowed beside a creek and wound through groupings of poplars and hemlocks. She slowed, turning onto the gravel access.

The reservoir was close enough to home that she could get there in under half an hour, and far enough away that it wasn’t likely to run into anyone. Sometimes she brought a book or a sandwich, though more often she wandered around until her legs grew tired.

Clusters of picnic tables were scattered just beyond the parking lot, warped by years of sun with legs sinking crookedly into the ground. To the right was a trash can overflowing with empty soda bottles. To the left: a trail winding toward the water.

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She walked down the path, the ground soft from the previous night’s rain. Completing the full two-mile loop, she returned a half hour later to the picnic area and climbed onto the nearest table with her boots resting on the bench below.

It wasn’t especially chilly out; not for October, anyway. But the wind coming off the water had a sharpness to it, and she found herself tucking her hands beneath her arms.

“I’m freezing.”

The words came to her mind so clearly. She looked back at the water.

They had been somewhere far from here, across an ocean and in a desert that was always too bright, even beneath a full cover of stars. Her friend Hernandez was lying in her arms that night, looking up at them.

“I’m freezing,” she’d whispered to Fiona.

Fiona had pressed against the wound and subconsciously took note of how much blood had already soaked through her gloves. Her TCCC training had already taken over as it always did; there was no shutting off that part of her brain. It recited the list of things to do with muscle memory: Apply pressure, keep the casualty warm, monitor breathing, stay calm, keep talking.

“You’re gonna be just fine.” She’d said to her friend with too much certainty.

“You always were a shitty liar, Sutherland,” Hernandez grinned, coughing up red that hung on her lips.

Fiona pulled her closer. “Stay with me a little longer. Doc’s already on the way.”

Hernandez tried to say something else then. Fiona lowered her head, bringing an ear close to her mouth.

“D-don’t look at its eyes, Corporal.”

“What?” Fiona didn’t understand.

“Don’t look a-a-at its eyes.” Hernandez’s breath brushed Fiona’s ear, so faint she could barely make out the words from the wind.

Fiona lifted her head and reassessed their surroundings. She brought the M4 to her shoulder as she swept the low ground through her sights, the rifle following each shift of her gaze.

Nothing; just the low rise of the terrain and broken shadows cast around their position. She’d looked for movement, for muzzle flashes, for anything that might explain what Hernandez was saying—

But there’d been absolutely nothing.

She looked back down, Hernandez glancing shakily just above Fiona’s shoulder behind her.

Then, she’d gone still.

Fiona remembered the weight first, the hard press of her plate carrier against her ribs. It all suddenly felt too heavy. She remembered calling out Hernandez’s name a couple times, pressing harder against the wound, refusing to accept what her logic already knew.

They’d been two poor kids from impoverished areas, neither of them particularly interested in growing up and dying for a country that had offered them so few alternatives. They enlisted because the future they’d been offered otherwise was small and uncertain. Because sometimes the only door out of a bad situation for families like theirs had a recruiter standing beside it.

They’d both learned to live with the contradictions. And they’d been young enough to believe that doing everything ‘right’ (whatever the fuck that meant) might land them in a feasible future eventually. One with less dire struggle. One with less uncertainty.

Hernandez had been doing everything right - actually right - for years. Every dollar she’d saved and every miserable day she’d endured had been for her younger brother, who was placed in foster care after their father died. She’d applied for base housing in San Onofre, and had plans to tour school districts as soon as they returned to the States. Fiona could still hear her voice in the motor pool back at Pendleton excitedly telling her all of the steps she was taking to get custody.

She had a whole life waiting for her. And then she died in the dirt, thousands of miles from anywhere she knew, with a little brother still waiting for someone to bring him home at the end of their rotation.

Fiona had spent years trying to understand what her friend had meant about the eyes. In the end, she’d settled on the simplest explanation: Hernandez had been dehydrated, bleeding out, and scared in those final moments. People said strange things when they were dying, and she’d been witness to it before. They saw shit that wasn’t there. The brain did what it could to make sense of the unimaginable.

A small ripple on the surface of the reservoir broke her from her thoughts. She blinked and leaned forward.

Across the water, something moved between the dense spread of trees.

Its limbs were long and jointed, a slender body hanging loosely between them. It passed behind a cluster of oaks, their trunks seeming to swallow it whole.

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She slid off the table and squinted. The distance across the water was considerable, but she had the sudden, irrational feeling that she was standing much closer to the thing than she should’ve been. Her stomach dropped. She took a step closer to the shoreline, spotted it again, its back toward her.

The thing started to turn—

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

Fiona spun around.

An elderly woman stood a few feet behind her, her hands resting on a shopping cart piled with plastic bags and other miscellaneous belongings. She wore an oversized hoodie with cargo pants, and her silver hair stuck out in wisps from beneath a knitted cap.

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“The weather,” the woman clarified, clearing her throat. “I mean, we can’t ask for much better than this, can we?” She smiled.

Fiona stared at her for a moment before finding her voice. “No. No, I guess not.” She glanced back across the reservoir. Whatever she’d seen was gone.

Shaking off the nerves, Fiona turned back to the woman. “You from around here?”

“Here and there. Been in the county a long time. Longer than some people would like, I suspect.” She chuckled, then held out her hand. “Name’s Rusk.”

“Rusk?”

“That’s what people call me.”

Fiona shook it. “That a first name?”

Rusk shrugged. “It’s the one I answer to.”

“I’m Fiona.”

The pair talked for a while. The weather, the state of the access road, the damage left behind by the hurricane. Already unhoused at the time, Rusk had lost most of her belongings when the flooding arrived, including a tin box of photographs she’d kept since childhood. It was the only possession she cared about.

“Funny thing about losin’ everythin’,” Rusk said. “People act like it tells ‘em somethin’ about you.”

Fiona sniffed. “I think people like to believe that it couldn’t ever happen to them.” She thought of the neighbors still waiting on assistance, the vets she knew who returned home to find that the country they’d served had very little use for them anymore. Of people who worked for decades only to lose everything to one medical bill, one divorce, one bad month, one poor decision. The reality was stark: they were all dangerously close to being on the streets themselves.

Rusk nodded, content someone seemed to understand. “You’re a good one, Fiona.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know about that. I’ve got a past.”

“Don’t we all?” Rusk replied.

They fell quiet and the wind picked back up, sending small waves rippling across the water in front of them from where they sat. Fiona kept her eyes on the far bank, though she tried not to stare at the spot where she’d seen the thing earlier. She started to wonder whether she’d imagined it.

“I’m a psychic, you know,” Rusk cut in. She said it so casually that Fiona almost laughed. “Palm reader, specifically.”

“Yeah? Fiona said.

“Yeah.” Rusk showed Fiona her hand, palm upward. The skin was pale and deeply creased, her fingers crooked with age. “Mind if I see yours?”

Fiona raised an eyebrow before glancing toward her truck. She should leave. She had errands to run, accounts to finish, a mother at home who would be watching the clock and wondering where she was soon.

Instead, she said something that surprised her: “Alright.”

Rusk smiled and took Fiona’s hand in both of hers, lightly tracing a finger. For several seconds, she said nothing. But then her expression shifted as she followed the lines, inhaling sharply. “Well,” she said. “That’s interesting.”

Fiona waited.

“You’ve got a long life line. Strong, too. You’ve survived things that ought to have finished you.” She continued tracing.

Fiona supposed that was true enough — for her and mostly everyone at some point in their experiences. Not exactly a revolutionary statement, which was what she expected.

“But there’s somethin’ else here—” Rusk interjected. “A crossing. Right there, where the head line meets the heart line.” She pressed her fingertip into the center of Fiona’s palm.

Fiona stiffened.

Rusk looked toward the opposite bank. Her gaze settled on the trees. “Two years ago when the floods came, somethin’ happened.”

Of course something happened, Fiona thought. The entirety of Haywood County was damn near swept away by them. “What do you mean?”

“The water tore up the earth. Took out our roads, houses, whole hillsides. We both know that. But it uncovered things, too. Things that had been buried a long time.”

Curiosity got the better of her. “Like what?”

Rusk looked up, meeting her gaze. “Like a door.”

For a moment, Fiona couldn’t hear anything but the blood rushing in her ears. She pulled her hand into her lap, staring at the woman.

Rusk furrowed her brow before continuing. “It doesn’t belong to this realm. It was here before the storm, before any livin’ thing in these mountains. The water uncovered its way in again. And you’re somehow connected to that. I don’t understand how, but—”

“The way in for what?”

Rusk looked toward the distant treeline again. “For things sleepin’ under the roots of the world.”

Something about Rusk’s expression made Fiona wish she’d never asked. Not because she looked angry, but because she looked almost sorry for her.

Fiona glanced behind them toward the parking lot. The sun had already slipped behind the slopes, leaving the western sky the dull purple of a dying fire. “Oh, shit.” She stood abruptly. “I’ve gotta go. I’m sorry. My mother—I…” she trailed off. “I’ve completely lost track of time.”

“I understand.”

“Take care of yourself, Rusk. I hope we run into each other again.”

“You too.” She smiled wearily.

She looked scared.

Fiona hurried to her truck. By the time she pulled onto the road, night had begun settling into its familiar patterns.

. . .

The house was dark when Fiona arrived twenty minutes later. She hurried inside shouting, “Ma? I’m home.”

The television hummed low in the living room as Fiona threw her keys on the counter. “Ma?”

No answer.

She checked the house, finding her mother’s slippers beside the bed and her phone face down on the nightstand.

A knot tightened in Fiona’s stomach. Her mother sometimes wandered into the yard, convinced the dead needed to tell her something again. But she never went far, and she always came back before dark.

She had always been so scared of the dark.

Fiona dashed to the backyard, the motion light flickering on as she slid the glass doors open—

And six people stood in its glow at the nearby tree line.

Fiona stopped, hand on her chest from the fright. “Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me!”

The people only stared back at her, emotionless. They looked tired, as though they’d traveled a long way.

Fiona looked down, realizing they were all barefoot.

Nobody answered. Then one little boy turned his head toward the woods. One by one, the others followed his gaze. He raised his hand and pointed.

Fiona knew she should’ve gone inside. Should’ve called the police.

Instead she stepped off the porch, telling herself she was looking for her mother, that she needed to be the one to find her. She repeated the sentiment as the house vanished behind her and as the trees grew thicker into the brush.

Ahead was something tall and looming. It was—

Holy shit, it was—

A black door.

Fiona stopped breathing.

Her mother had described it to a T. It stood in the middle of the clearing, a towering black slab that seemed to drink in the faint light of the moon filtering through the branches. No frame held it upright. No hinges broke its seamless edges. It looked centuries old, if not older.

It wasn't fathomable. It wasn't possible. But it was there all the same.

“Ma?” she croaked out.

A voice answered from somewhere close. “Oh, honey. There you are.”

Fiona nearly collapsed with relief, looking every direction and trying to follow the sound. “Ma! Are you hurt?”

“No, sweetheart.”

“Where are you? I can’t see you.”

A pause. “You have to let me out.”

Fiona stared at the door. It began creaking slowly open.

Then:

“You have to look into my eyes, Fiona.”

No, no, no, no—

It was the thing she saw from across the reservoir sneaking behind the trees standing in the threshold, its back to her again.

Don’t look at its eyes, Corporal.

It began slowly turning to face her.

Don’t look at its eyes.

Fiona squeezed her eyes shut.

“Fiona?” her mother called. “Why won’t you look at me?”

Something stepped through the doorway and into the woods.

The ground trembled beneath Fiona’s boots. She could hear the gathered dead whispering around her, their voices rising and falling like a sad melody. A cold finger touched her cheek.

“Look at me,” her mother’s voice said.

Fiona’s eyes were forced open.

“Oh, fuck,” she whispered.

Because suddenly, she understood. She understood that night in the desert, the warning whispered against her ear, every terrible thing that had ever happened in the world and every terrible thing that would happen long after the last human being alive would draw breath in a time very far from now. She saw all of it all at once: every cruelty. Every grief. Every small, private horror that had ever gone unseen. Every atrocity still waiting under the shadowy skirt of a future that didn’t exist yet, that wouldn’t exist for a long time.

There was no end to the knowing, no place left in her mind where she could hide from all she was being shown.

And then somewhere within that stream of endlessness, something sinister had noticed her noticing.

It looked back—

And Fiona screamed.

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Additional Insight, Inspiration, + References

Featured artwork as follows:

An Important Character Note: While I won’t specify my own affiliation with the Marine Corps, what I will say is that it continues to hold a deeply personal and lasting place in my heart. Fiona is a representation of these feelings — my own small way of honoring the many Marines and experiences that mean so much to me and hold a complexity in my life that’s hard to put to words. To my Corps family at Pendleton and beyond: I love you. I miss you. Rah, and all that shit.

To PFC Gutierrez, you Magnificent Bastard: This one’s for you and your home state — I think you would’ve liked it. ‘Til Valhalla.

Hurricane Helene Acknowledgement

It was the 2024 destruction of Hurricane Helene in eastern Kentucky and western North Carolina specifically that triggered a huge shift in my writing to focus on narratives that spotlight the continued absence of meaningful recovery and support for rural Appalachian communities. It was an event that changed everything in terms of my art and that made me want to start prioritizing the realities of populations repeatedly left without adequate care, infrastructure, or attention. It made me want to create space for people who live in rural Middle America and landscapes often deemed ‘flyover country’; the places that are continually undervalued at a societal level.

Like every piece of fiction I’ve published, Eyes reflects these attitudes and was created in this vein. Haywood County where Canton is located was one of many regions directly impacted by the floods, and it’s my hope that works like this will keep us focused on the places and people that are so easily forgotten once the headlines disappear. The continued suffering and hardship of these areas is real, and I want to continue to center that in a way that reinforces the dignity communities like this deserve.

And lastly: A Reference Glossary for some of the specific terminology used in this story. I strive to make this space as accessible as possible, and understand that some people may not be as familiar with certain things commonly used/taught/said in the military. Given this, I’ve provided some explanations below to bring context to several passages in Eyes. You’ll find these terms in the chronological order they appeared in the narrative:

TCCC (T Triple C) - This stands for Tactical Combat Casualty Care. It’s training that teaches Marines how to treat injured personnel, including stopping severe bleeding, treating life-threatening injuries, and keeping someone alive until they can receive advanced medical support in the field.

Corpsman/“Doc” - Corpsmen refer to Navy personnel who provide medical care to Marines. The Marine Corps is part of the Department of the Navy, and it’s the Navy that actually provides medical attention for the branch. Marines often call their corpsman “Doc” as a sign of trust and respect after building rapport.

Corporal - A junior noncommissioned officer in the Marine Corps who leads and supervises other Marines.

“I am a great admirer of mystery and magic. Look at this life — all mystery and magic.”

-Harry Houdini

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Jo Bernstein knew the exact moment when people noticed her arm; it was always their eyes that gave them away first. They’d flicker downward, pause, then make a hurried return to her face, as though they could erase what they’d seen by pretending they hadn’t. Then she would sigh, bracing for impact.

That was happening now, in the last seven minutes of her shift.

“G-d bless you, Jo,” the customer across the conveyor belt said, staring at her missing arm with an expression somewhere between pity and discomfort. They all always had that same, pathetic look. “I’ll pray for you.”

Jo almost laughed. She wasn’t sure which part was more insulting: the feigned sympathy for something there was no need to be sorry about or the assumption that she needed his G-d. She was 38 years old and born in rural Mississippi with a limb difference — her right arm ending just below the shoulder in a soft, rounded way she had long ago stopped thinking about.

She worked at the grocery store on Main Street, where she stocked shelves and sometimes ran the register. It wasn’t glamorous work, not by a long shot — but it mattered to her. Mattered a lot. Because people had to eat and Belmont was poor, tucked among foothills that seemed to roll on for hours and that America had seemingly forgotten. Some families there had enough. A lot more didn’t. So there was a certain dignity she felt in taking part of a business that helped feed people; in overriding an expired coupon for someone or rounding down the dollar amount on their bill and pulling some extra change from her own pocket to cover the rest. She believed in meeting others halfway when she could.

Lately, though, Jo had been tired. Not ordinary tired, either. Not ‘I just worked ten hours and my feet hurt’ tired. It was something deeper; something with teeth.

So on that October Friday after clocking out, she sat in the parking lot and stared at the steering wheel. Then she called her manager.

“I’m taking a couple of days to myself. I won’t be in until Monday.”

“You’re on the schedule all weekend.”

“I know.”

A pause.

“You okay, Jo?” Chet always asked the exact same question the exact same way every few months when she found herself back in this headspace and needing time away.

“No,” she answered honestly, emotion devoid on her lips as she did.

Another pause. Then a heavy sigh from the other end of the line, clearly hesitating. “All right. We’ll figure it out — always do. Take it.”

Jo hung up and drove beneath a cloud-streaked autumn sky, the lowering sun spilling gold across the fields and setting surrounding hardwoods ablaze in copper, rust, and fading red. She lived at the edge of town, where paved sidewalks gave way to near-dormant pasture and woods. Once inside, she changed into sweatpants and began preparing dinner.

She made tomato basil pasta with chopped spinach, an arugula salad tossed with pomegranate seeds and roasted chickpeas, and a little bowl of rosemary olives. A loaf of challah sat in the center of the table, braided and covered with a clean towel. For dessert: a fruit plate of sliced strawberries and apples with honey. The spread was enough to feed herself through the weekend and take some leftovers to work on Monday.

Then she made one last thing for her neighbor, Ms. Adler. It was the same meal Jo prepared for her every Friday the last three years: a meatless lasagna. She carefully covered it before adding a generous serving of the arugula salad in some separate Tupperware.

Jo knew she was lucky. It was obvious looking around places like Belmont especially. She always had enough to eat, even if she didn’t have much money to spare. But she knew that for millions of people, something as ordinary as dinner was - cruelly - not guaranteed. Food insecurity wasn’t always visible, either; it could look like a parent pretending to have no appetite so her children could eat. Or someone stretching a single sandwich and can of soup across a couple days. Jo couldn’t fix all of that for everybody. Hell, she could barely afford what little she had. But she’d always believed that having little wasn’t an excuse to give nothing, and that no one, no matter how old or young or alone or poor, deserved to go hungry. So every Friday, she did what she could to help someone who needed it.

She carried the food down the road and handed the containers over to the elderly woman, who answered the door in a robe. Jo made sure to give her a hug.

Then she returned home. It was officially sundown now, which meant it was officially Shabbat.

She trekked to the backyard, setting her favorite pair of glass votive holders and two white candles on her patio table. She lit them standing up, then covered her eyes with her left hand. The recited blessing was quiet and simple, as it always was.

Jo had never been particularly devout, but there was comfort in doing something those before her had done for thousands of years. It was a ritual that made the distance between the living and the dead feel a little less absolute each week, too; allowing the space and time between herself and her sister Evelyn to collapse closer together. The same two flames in front of her had burned in windows and at alters and on kitchen tables for hundreds of generations on Friday evenings, and Jo liked to imagine that somehow, somewhere, Evelyn could still see them in whatever darkness she was wandering in now.

Letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, Jo dropped her hand to her lap and leaned back in the wicker chair, staring skyward. Night had fully arrived, and the stars - cold, distant, and endlessly aware - began blinking through a blanket of ebony in slow descent. She thought again of Evelyn.

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Her sister had been just 21 when she died. Jo was 17.

They’d never gotten a proper explanation for her death. Evelyn had gone missing. Two days later, her body was found in a creek that converged into the Tennessee River a little ways north.

She had drowned. That was all anyone could say about the matter for certain.

Jo stared into the candlelight. She remembered her sister sitting next to her on the porch steps one summer evening, knees tucked beneath her chin. “There might come a day when I’ll protect you, you know — instead of the other way around,” she’d said.

Jo snorted, surprised at the comment and finding it had come out of left field. “What the hell are you talking about? Protect me from what?”

Evelyn softened a little, touching Jo’s right shoulder. “You know what I think?”

“Hmm?”

Her thumb brushed gently over the place where Jo’s arm ended. “I think you’re not missin’ anything.”

It wasn’t an answer to the question, but Jo remembered going completely still nonetheless. She’d spent seventeen years learning that the world considered her incomplete. The reminders were constant in school and dating (the lack thereof, really) and at jobs. And Evelyn was the first person who had ever made her feel like everyone had gotten it all wrong. All ass backwards.

Her sister continued. “None of us have to have an expected amount of anything to be whole, Jo. Money, access, privilege. Limbs, in your case.” She smiled a little. “I need you to remember that.”

And Jo had remembered. She remembered because those words were the last beautiful thing her sister had ever given her. The most beautiful thing her sister had given her, too. Because only a week after that day on the porch together, Evelyn went missing.

In those couple of days where no one could find her, Jo hadn’t slept. She’d been frightened and furious and certain the adults in the room were lying to her whenever they said everything was going to be fine. It wasn’t like Evelyn to run off and not check in, which they all knew. Why did no one take a missing young woman seriously? Something was so obviously, horrifically wrong from the jump. Anyone could’ve seen it. Evelyn could’ve been hurt — or worse.

And it was worse in the end.

It had been a span of humid summer nights before she’d been found. That Thursday, a bad storm was brewing. Jo snuck out to the backyard because she couldn’t breathe inside the house. It was just before 1 in the morning, the time on the kitchen microwave she passed still etched into her brain.

She slipped out to the porch, where the yellow bulb beside the door had drawn a restless cloud of moths. They battered themselves incessantly against the glass, appearing and disappearing in that halo of light, circling over and over. Jo stood and watched them for a long moment. There was something heartbreaking about the way they kept throwing themselves toward what they could never actually reach; completely blind to the fact that the light was never going to save them after all. Then she heard a twig snap and jerked her head up towards the woods that backed the yard.

That was when she saw it: a black bear.

Always labeled a smaller type of its kind, it was huge that close up. It was the first and only bear Jo had ever seen, and stood at the bottom of the hill, not twenty feet ahead on all fours.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

The bear was beautiful. It was terrifying. Because there are some things that are so beautiful they frighten us, and some things so frightening that they become beautiful. Jo would spend the rest of her life trying to understand which kind of thing she’d seen that night as it stood there, magnificent and seemingly unaware of its own power by comparison to her 5-foot frame. There was something sacred in it; a duality so intrinsic it nearly brought her to tears every time she pictured its face.

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Its eyes were tragically sad. They had a humanness to them; something Jo couldn’t place at the time but that made her heart skip a beat more than the initial surprise of spotting the creature. She stared into them and felt something inside herself go cold.

Then the bear turned and ran up the hill.

That was when Jo knew: her sister was dead. The certainty was indescribable and something she had never felt again since. She’d never told anyone about the encounter, because adults didn’t believe teenage girls when they said something was wrong. People didn’t believe women much, either. The police wouldn’t knock at the family’s door until later that morning, but Jo had broke down then and there in the yard, finally losing whatever thin thread had been holding her together. She sobbed and screamed until her head pounded with rage.

Back in the present, Jo glanced over at the lights of the votives, now nearly burned down to their bottom. A flurry of white moths circled above them in a mindless orbit, just as the ones around the porch light had the night Evelyn died; not understanding how little separated their delicate wings from the fire.

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An hour later after the candles had extinguished themselves, Jo’s eyes felt heavy in the plush cushion of the outdoor chair.

Then, almost without thinking, she began to sing under her breath. It was an old song; one she hadn’t chanted much since Evelyn died, given the circumstances. But it was Evelyn who’d taught it to her when they were kids:

River girl, river girl,
where’d you go?
Down where the dark water
runs so slow.

River girl, river girl,
don’t look back.
Something’s walkin’
on my track.

River girl, river girl,
the conjurer knows.
He waits in the banks
where the cold water flows.

River girl, river girl,
come when called.
Guard those who wander
where the dark things crawl.

Jo smiled at the ridiculous and spooky little melody. Evelyn had always insisted the last two lines were supposed to be sung twice. She was weirdly superstitious like that.

“Guard those who wander where the dark things crawl.” She let the words trail away. At some point and without meaning to, she dozed off without dreaming.

. . .

When she woke, her neck ached. She lumbered inside, ate more of the pasta standing at the kitchen counter and downed a glass of water. She felt restless. So she decided to lace up her running shoes.

Back outside, the night had sharpened. The moon was barely more than a thumbnail behind racing clouds that felt almost as aimless as she did.

Jo ran. And those first few miles of the route were exactly what they had always been: serenity. Her shoes struck asphalt in a steady rhythm. The road twisted through hills and hollows; past abandoned barns, piles of fallen leaves, and walls of maples and blackgums whose branches scraped together on either side of her.

She loved to run, and she was good at it. But speed had never been the thing that mattered most to Jo; what she really enjoyed was the endurance, that quiet satisfaction of knowing she could keep going long after her body begged her to stop. Running demanded more from her than it did from able-bodied people, too. Doing it with one arm meant prioritizing the same balance, stride, and body temperature regulation a lot of runners took for granted. And it was those added challenges that made every mile she logged feel more like something earned. When she ran, she felt invincible.

By the sixth mile, she had settled into her pace. It wasn’t long after when she saw a man.

He stood on the side of the road and came into view descending another slope. Jo slowed but didn’t stop as she approached.

He was dressed so strangely that, for a moment, she wondered if she was somehow hallucinating. It looked as if he’d just left a dinner party; sporting trousers, a crisp white dress shirt, and black hat with a narrow brim. The clothes were clean and formal, completely wrong for the muddy banks and tangled woods they each found themselves beside.

He smiled. “Would you like to see a trick?”

Jo’s instincts tightened. “No, thank you.”

She ran on, unnerved. She was so fucking tired of men making her feel unsafe. It didn’t matter where she was or what she was doing; being alone always invited these kinds of uncomfortable interactions, and worse. She was a disabled woman out for a jog, minding her own business and not asking anything of anybody — yet that still wasn’t enough to be left alone, apparently.

Lost in that web of thought, she heard a chuckle behind her. She looked back over her shoulder, still trekking a flat stretch.

The man was gone, nowhere to be seen.

Jo turned forward and increased her pace, determined to put some distance between them and trying to convince herself that there was a perfectly logical explanation for all of this.

But two miles later, she saw him again.

Impossible, she thought. What — did he have a getaway car or something? Was this some fucked up version of an early Halloween prank?

He stood on the other side of the road that she’d consciously crossed to a half-mile back, and was now also on.

Jo wasn’t going to stop this time. Whatever this was wasn’t funny to begin with but now, it was downright disturbing. She kicked into high gear and flew past him, refusing to give another glance his way. For a moment, her mind flashed back to the first half-marathon she competed in — the ache in her legs, the ragged pull of her chest, and that overwhelming realization that she’d actually done it. Crossing that finish line was the first immeasurable reward running ever gave her: a feeling of true autonomy that belonged entirely to her; something no one could take away or take credit for.

Seven minutes and one mile later, Jo had reached the top of another hill and was descending when she spotted the man yet again in the distance ahead. Every nerve in her body went rigid. She stopped abruptly, turned on her heel, and started back the way she’d come.

And somehow, impossibly, he was already there. Jo stopped cold.

Up close she could see more detail she hadn’t been able to before. The man was rosy-cheeked and smiling earnestly again as he stared at her now. “Beautiful place we have here, isn’t it?” he said cheerily.

Jo was caught so off-guard by his candor and friendly disposition. “Y-yeah,” was all she could manage to stammer out. Her left hand had already subconsciously formed into a fist at her side.

“What brings you here this time of night?”

Jo tensed, that awful feeling in the pit of her stomach returning full-throttle once more. It had never left. “I could ask you the same thing.”

The man laughed as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Then he took a step in her direction.

He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a black handkerchief. He unfolded it carefully and gave it a shake, showing her there was nothing contained inside. “You know what I like best about these woods, miss?” he asked.

Jo said nothing.

“They’re full of old things.” He refolded the handkerchief and pressed it against his mouth. For a moment he simply stood there, breathing through his nose. Then he removed the cloth and parted his lips.

A luna moth crawled out. Its wings unfurled slowly; they were large and pale green, delicate as pressed leaves and almost translucent in the light of the moon. It looked less like an insect than a living scrap of some mystical, strange world.

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The man was absolutely beaming watching it flap away. “The wanderers of this land before us say they were messengers, you know.” He pointed up.

Jo was perplexed. She had been feeling so fearful, so violated, so preyed-upon, so angry since seeing this asshole the first time earlier that night. But now, she was strangely calm. The fury that had carried her to this moment had suddenly evaporated, leaving behind a peculiar and almost childlike fascination with the moth. She couldn’t seem to look away as it fluttered gracefully upward. “Messengers for what?” she heard herself asking drearily.

His eyes settled on Jo. “For that which wanders between worlds.”

The moth circled once above the pair.

The man smirked. “Funny.”

Jo frowned. “What?”

“They told me you were different.”

Every muscle in her body tightened. “Who did?”

He smiled. “The ones who live underneath.”

Jo glanced around. Nothing and no one could be seen.

The man continued, not breaking his gaze. “They said you wouldn’t be alone, wouldn’t be afraid.” He looked around jovially. “Well that just isn’t correct, is it?”

“I’m not afraid,” she breathed, not selling it even somewhat believably — even to herself.

His smile widened. “I’m surprised because they’re never wrong. But I guess there’s a first time for everything.” He laughed heartily to himself.

Something in the horrible sound broke the spell.

Jo blinked. The woods on either side of them were suddenly too quiet. The luna moth had disappeared somewhere into the trees, and that strange fascination she’d felt with it only moments before drained away like a hypnotism lifted.

The man took another step forward. “You’re a long way from home, Jo. You’re a long way from everything out here, actually.”

“Who the hell are you and how do you know my name?” Jo growled, backing away.

“Oh, I’ve been called many things.” He glanced toward the woods. “Some were…kinder than others.” He turned back toward her, grinning. “I’m the magician.”

For several seconds, nothing happened.

Then the man’s smile fell. It was an odd expression to watch unfold: the corners of his mouth twitching violently and jerking upward then downward as though some invisible hand were trying to puppeteer his face. His eyes, almost jaundiced they were so yellow, went glassy. His head tilted. “You’ll be easier than your sister was.”

Jo stopped breathing.

The magician looked her up and down, roving over her body like a piece of meat. “One arm,” he said softly. “Less to hold on to. Less to fight back with.” He grinned. “I wonder if you’ll scream her name the same way she did yours.”

Jo turned and ran then. She ran faster than ever before, pumping her legs with every ounce of energy she had stored.

Not forty seconds later, the magician somehow appeared in front of her again. Before she could react, his hands closed around her neck with impossible strength.

She screamed and drove her fist into him with force. Once. Twice. She kicked, twisted, bit at his wrists. Nothing worked.

He began dragging her toward the trees.

“No!” she screamed. “LET ME GO, YOU BASTARD!”

He hauled her backward away from the road, down the embankment and in the trajectory of a creek. Leaves tore beneath her shoes and the rough brush of the woods began to scratch and scrape at her ankles.

Jo felt his hands close in tighter around her throat as her strength began to buckle. She clawed at him, but his grip only intensified. She kicked wildly, gasping for air.

He pulled her down under the surface as freezing water rushed over her face. She tried to twist away, but his hands remained locked around her throat, unfazed by her attempts.

The creek swallowed the sound of her screams. Jo opened her eyes, only to see through the wavy ripple of the water’s surface that the magician was no longer a man.

His skin stretched taut and pale across his figure, with a jaw that hung too far open. The white of his shirt floated around him like a ghost; something shimmery moving beneath the collar and opening and closing like gills. Open. Close. Open. Close. His eyes were black craters.

Jo’s lungs burned as she stared into them.

And suddenly: the song came back to her in that moment. She recited it in her head, making sure to think the last two lines twice.

River girl, river girl,
where’d you go?
Down where the dark water
runs so slow.

River girl, river girl,
don’t look back.
Something’s walkin’
on my track.

River girl, river girl,
the conjurer knows.
He waits in the banks
where the cold water flows.

River girl, river girl,
come when called.
Guard those who wander
where the dark things crawl.

Guard those who wander where the dark things crawl.

Black began creeping inward from the corners of Jo’s vision. She thought of Evelyn. That day on the porch, her thumb brushing the soft end of Jo’s arm.“You’re not missin’ anything,” she’d said. And she was right — because Jo didn’t know what that goddamn word meant until the day her sister died. Not really.

Her lungs convulsed as Evelyn’s face flashed a final time. I’ll see you soon, was the last thing she remembered thinking, her vision almost entirely swallowed in shadow.

Then—

Something enormous crashed through the trees.

The magician looked up, and a tremendous snarl split the air.

A black bear came barreling down the hill at full speed, teeth snared.

Ba-dump.

Ba-dump.

Ba-dump.

Ba-dump.

It slammed into him with unimaginable force, tearing his hands away from Jo’s throat the second it made contact. The impact sent both of them tumbling violently through the shallows.

Jo surfaced for the first time in minutes, choking. She pulled herself to the bank and collapsed onto her side, coughing water into the switchgrass.

Behind her came a sound she couldn’t describe if she tried. She finally gathered enough strength to turn and see the black bear standing over the magician’s mauled body, snorting. Even with its head lowered, she knew those eyes in an instant; that unmistakable feeling returning for the second time in her life.

“Ev-Evelyn?” Jo croaked, the pain searing in the hoarseness of the word as it left her throat.

The bear ambled forward a few steps closer, its massive chest rising and falling in quick succession. Then, without warning, it lifted its head—

And roared.

It roared so goddamn loud that it shook the entire creek, the entire stretch of woods they shared. Birds exploded from surrounding trees in a frantic gust, their wings beating in a tumultuous frenzy through tangled branches.

The following seconds belonged to some sacred moment — one of grief, and an ancient language no living thing ever needed to learn in order to understand.

Tears streamed down Jo’s face. “My river girl,” she managed to whisper, looking up at the incredible, terrifying creature with nothing but wonder and awe. “Thank you.”

Then she put her head in her palm, and wept.

. . .

Jo didn’t remember leaving the woods. But later, there would be hazy pieces that returned to her memory in fragments.

The road. The freezing asphalt. The taste of blood where she had bitten her tongue dragging herself there. A semi truck slowing beside where she lay with squeaking brakes and a man’s voice saying he was calling an ambulance.

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Then nothing before waking up in a hospital bed with tubes in her arm and bruises up and down her throat.

She survived.

. . .

Later that morning in the hour before sunrise, deep in the woods and where nobody had gone looking, a creek moved quietly beneath a blanket of forest settling into the slowing rhythms of autumn. Beside it, a magician’s body lay half-submerged in mud as something pale fluttered back through the growing light of dawn.

A luna moth.

It circled him once. Twice. Then landed gently upon his bloodied chest.

For a long moment, nothing happened—

Then the magician’s body jerked. He sucked in a ragged gasp, and opened his eyes.

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Additional Insight, Inspiration, + References

Featured artwork as follows:

An Actionable Note on Meal Assistance + Food Insecurity: Meal assistance and food insecurity are causes I’ve dedicated the last few years to and that are close to my heart. In merit of this story, I will be making a donation to Lasagna Love the day of its publication — a non-profit dedicated to connecting neighbors through the simple act of providing a homemade meal for someone who needs it. The needs of recipients range exponentially and are dependent case-by-case; it can be based on disability, financial stress, illness, mental health struggles, or something else entirely. A homemade meal can make someone feel cared for, supported, and less alone. As a volunteer of this organization since February 2023, I’ve had the honor of making more than 200 lasagnas (always vegetarian) for people in and near my rural Texas community on Fridays.

If you’re interested in getting involved with making and delivering food to people in your community, requesting a free meal for yourself or someone you know, or learning more about Lasagna Love* and its mission, please visit their website at: https://lasagnalove.org

_{*As of 2026, this organization operates in the United States (including all 50 states and Puerto Rico), Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom}

And lastly: A Reference Glossary for some of the specific terminology used in this story. I strive to make this space as accessible as possible, and understand that some people may not be as familiar with certain Jewish innuendos. Given this, I’ve provided some explanations below to bring context to several passages in River Girl. You’ll find everything in the chronological order it appeared in the narrative:

G-d - This is how some Jewish people write the name of the divine. Writing it this way is a small expression of respect and a reminder that words are powerful.

Challah - A rich, fluffy bread that’s usually braided and a little sweet. A traditional addition to a Shabbat table and for most chags/holidays.

Shabbat - A sacred day of rest that begins at sundown on Friday evening and ends an hour after sundown on Saturday evening. It’s a time to step away from the busyness of everyday life and make room for the simplicity of being present.

Covering Eyes With Hand(s) While Lighting Candles - A ritual practice to welcome Shabbat. Typically there are two candles to light, but some families have an observance where they will add a candle for each of their children or a candle on the week of a loved one’s death anniversary to symbolize their remembrance. In any case, it’s customary to cover your eyes while reciting the blessing after the wicks are lit. This allows us to return to an intentional and special moment as we mark entrance into a period of auspiciousness and reflection each week. By welcoming this light, we are reminded to pause from the demands of our lives, turn inward, and make space for rest, connection, and spiritual renewal.

Content and Trigger Warning: Addiction, Substance Abuse

“And nothing seems to break me,
no matter how far I fall.
Nothing can break me at all.
Not one for giving up,
though not invincible I know.

I’ve given everything I need,
I’d give you everything I own.
I’d give in if it could at least be ours alone.
I’ve given everything I could,
to blow it to hell and gone.
Burrow down in and blow up the outside.
Blow up the outside,
blow up the outside world.”

-Soundgarden, ‘Blow Up the Outside World’ (1996)

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By lunchtime on Wednesday afternoon, Aurora Lawson’s phone was at 19% battery. In her checking account was $263.81.

Rent was due Friday. It was an extension of an extension.

Aurora closed her eyes. “Okay, okay.” She said it aloud because doing so with these things made them somehow feel more manageable. “Okay,” she said again. “Figure it out, kid.”

Only seven years ago, ‘figuring it out’ had a myriad of entirely different meanings for Aurora. It had meant lying. Sleeping on park benches and waking up wondering how she’d gotten there. It had meant stealing from people; stealing from her brother—

Aurora opened her eyes.

She hated when her mind did that.

It was always the same: she could be thinking about something as mundane as groceries or mailing a letter or paying bills and suddenly start thinking about Hollis.

She turned the key as her ‘82 Chevrolet K10 engine coughed before starting. “Atta girl,” she said, and backed out of the apartment parking lot.

Fort Payne, Alabama was busy enough midweek, but not so busy that anyone was in a hurry. Traffic crawled along Gault Avenue beneath an anxious October sky. Beyond the buildings, the mountains rose red-orange and hazy, their ridges layered one behind another.

Aurora had lived in Fort Payne all her life. She knew where the good lookout points were. She knew which retailers let you use the bathroom without buying anything.

And she knew which businesses wouldn’t hire her.

The restaurant where she washed dishes the past several years had recently cut her hours down to just three shifts a week. “We gotta bump ya down to part time,” she could still hear her manager sitting down to tell her late last week. “I don’t have a choice, Aurora. Business is no good.”

He’d called it temporary. Everything in Aurora’s world since her recovery began was temporary; reliable work especially.

She’d been sober six years; six years, four months, and twenty-two days. But sometimes the world treated addiction like a stain that didn’t wash out — because employers saw her record before they saw Aurora. She’d learned that the moment she got out of rehab and started her life over. There were no violent charges and no long sentences. But it didn’t matter. To them, it was all wreckage left behind by a woman who’d spent the better part of her thirties making decisions she could barely register as her own anymore. She had made mistakes, and no matter how many years she’d worked toward redeeming herself in society, it always fell flat on paper.

She drove up to the hardware store, where a handwritten NOW HIRING ASSOCIATES sign hung in the window.

Aurora almost parked until she caught the smaller print underneath as her truck crawled closer:

^{MUST PASS BACKGROUND CHECK}

She sighed, and kept driving.

At the next light, she turned left. She wasn’t ready to go home yet, because home meant sitting at the dented kitchen table she’d picked up off a curb last year and crunching numbers that didn’t add up. The numbers never added up. A day late and a dollar short, as that old expression went.

Aurora kept driving until she found herself in front of a narrow brick storefront she’d passed hundreds of times but hadn’t allowed herself the enjoyment of entering for more than a decade.

NEEDLE & GROOVE RECORDS

Aurora smiled despite herself. Fuck it, she thought. What else do I have to lose today?

The bell over the door jingled when she stepped inside as the smell of incense - something piney and almost sweet - pervaded her senses. Music was playing somewhere behind the counter; Something I Can Never Have by Nine Inch Nails.

Aurora knew the song immediately. Not only because she was a huge fan of their Pretty Hate Machine album (a hell of a debut), but because it made her think of him—

Made her think of Hollis.

She wandered deeper into the store. Records filled wooden bins arranged beneath hand-painted labels.

_ROCK

_{PUNK / HARDCORE}

_METAL

_GRUNGE

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Aurora ran her fingers along the sleeves. She hadn’t bought vinyl in years — how many had it been, anyway? Twelve? Maybe more?

Music had been one of the few things addiction hadn’t taken from her. Before everything went to hell, she and Hollis used to trade CDs.

They both loved the 90s grunge scene exploding out of the PNW; Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, even the underground groups like Sleater-Kinney. They’d argued endlessly about the relevance of Nirvana; Hollis claimed Nevermind was criminally overrated, while Aurora had told him that was the dumbest shit she’d ever heard and that he needed to shut the fuck up.

He’d laughed — she remembered her brother’s laugh. And she hated that she remembered it.

“Looking for something?” The cashier was watching her curiously.

“Honestly?” Aurora said. “A job.”

He chuckled.

She didn’t.

His smile faltered. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” A beat passed before she added: “I mean, if you’re hiring. Or whatever.”

He shook his head apologetically. “Nah. Not right now. Sorry.”

Aurora smiled anyway. He seemed genuine, at least. “Figured.” She turned back toward the bins.

That’s when she saw it: the moody and gold-shadowed cover of four band members silhouetted. Soundgarden’s Down on the Upside album.

Aurora slid it out, the store around her fading away.

She was a teenager the first time she’d heard it. She’d been lying on the floor of Hollis’s room and staring at the ceiling while Blow Up the Outside World played on a cheap stereo they’d scrounged from a local Goodwill. Hollis sat on the edge of the bed, restringing his guitar. Out of all the bands they argued over, Soundgarden wasn’t one. Soundgarden was something sacred, and its lead singer - Chris Cornell - was otherworldly.

She remembered asking him what he thought the song meant.

Hollis had shrugged before saying: “Sounds like somebody who’s realized the thing destroying him is the same thing keeping him alive.”

Aurora laughed. “Well shit, that’s depressing.”

“Yeah. It is.”

“Why do you like it?”

He’d looked at her for a second before responding. “Because it doesn’t pretend that everything’s going to be okay.”

She had rolled her eyes then. Now, she wished she hadn’t. Because he was right. He was so, unequivocally right.

Holding the same album more than twenty years later, Aurora’s thumb traced the edge of its sleeve. She hadn’t realized she was crying until a tear landed on the plastic.

She wiped it away quickly with the cuff of her flannel. “Shit. Sorry,” she muttered.

The cashier pretended not to notice.

Aurora didn’t have the money. Not today, and probably not for a long time. She put the record back and started making her way toward the exit—

Which was when she noticed a bulletin board she hadn’t caught on her way in. Tucked beside the door, it was covered with flyers for local bands with names like Dead Before Breakfast, Cigarette Stop, Permanent Damage, and Youth in Ruins (Christ, these were all terrible). Listings for used amps, guitar lessons, and drummers looking for a group to join overlapped each other in a chaotic frenzy. Some were fresh, others faded and torn; all of them fighting for attention. At the bottom was a pinned sheet of yellow notebook paper. Written across it in thick black marker read:

Urgent! House sitter needed 14th of October

One night only. No children. No pets.

And, beneath that:

$600 cash payment provided on the 15th

Aurora stopped in her tracks, checking the date on her watch face.

It was the 14th.

She read the listing again.

Six hundred dollars.

Her first thought was that it had to be a mistake. Obviously. Her second thought was Hollis. Rory, don’t. Don’t do it. She could hear him as clearly as if he were standing next to her.

Aurora stared at the phone number at the bottom of the paper. There was one final line scribbled under it, this time in all caps:

TEXT ONLY. DO NOT CALL!

She laughed under her breath. “Yeah, that’s not weird at all.”

She should leave. She knew that. Knew it in her gut, and the way her head began to swirl uneasily at the thought of legitimately considering the offer. This was sketchy as hell. But she also knew exactly how much money she had in her checking account, that number flashing in her mind again. $263.81: the number separating her from another month with four walls around her or sleeping in her car.

She sighed and pulled out her phone. Her thumb hovered over the keypad. Then she hesitantly typed:

Is the house sitting job still available? Saw your note at Needle & Groove on Greenhill.

The response came almost immediately.

yes

Aurora looked back up at the bulletin board. Then through the record store window.

Outside, clouds were gathering over Lookout Mountain. Her phone buzzed and another message appeared:

can you be there by 4 ? i can leave the key under the mat

Aurora swallowed. She typed:

Sure.

The next message arrived.

good

A pause. Then:

dont go outside after dark

Aurora frowned. Then another message came in:

lock the doors if it rains

She stared at the screen. For several seconds, she considered deleting the conversation, blocking the number, and forgetting about the whole thing. Then she remembered the balance in her bank account. Her stomach churned.

She typed:

What’s the address?

. . .

The property was twelve miles outside town. The farmhouse that came into view as Aurora pulled up looked ordinary enough with white clapboard, a sagging covered porch, and acres of woods rising behind it. The owner had sent one final message on her way over:

make yourself at home

Aurora did.

For several hours, nothing happened. She walked in, making sure to lock the door behind her. Brewed coffee. Watched a court show on television — some case covering a landlord-tenant dispute, where the landlord had evicted an elderly boarder after she missed a single payment, telling the judge he, ‘wasn’t running a charity’.

“Goddamn capitalist pig,” Aurora scoffed at the man’s face repeatedly appearing on the screen. She grabbed the remote and turned it off.

Later, she picked up her copy of Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language that she checked out from the library. She stopped at the same line she always did — the one that never failed to move her, no matter how many times she’d read it:

I follow you into your dreams / your past, the places none of us can explain to anyone.

“The places none of us can explain to anyone,” she repeated aloud. She closed the book, her brother flashing in her mind. Hollis had always known those places, alright; the places Aurora had been, that she had also taken him for so long — that she could never fully explain to anyone else.

For a moment, she was 36 again and remembering life seven years ago. Strung out. Starving. Her head shaved from the constant matting and knots she couldn’t manage to brush out anymore, and sitting on the curb of a gas station somewhere near Summerville, Georgia with her knees pulled against her chest.

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She’d stolen Hollis’s wallet three days before. She remembered the weight of it in her pocket. The shame. The high. The desperate conviction that she needed the money more than he did, as if he wasn’t also struggling to pay his bills.

She’d expected him to be furious when he found her, like she knew he eventually would.

Instead, he just looked exhausted. He looked heartbroken.

He sat beside her on the pavement and pulled some cash from his pocket. “I don’t want you sleeping outside again.” He pushed the bills into her hand.

Aurora only stared at the money, surprised and even more guilt-ridden than she had been when she first saw him walk up. “I stole from you, Hol.”

“I know.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

He nodded absently, the pair of them knowing that wasn’t anything close to true. “I know.”

He looked down at his hands, flexing his fingers. He always did that when he was nervous. “I’ve been trying to help you for years, Rory. I don’t know what else to do. I—” he broke off, voice full of emotion. He paused and took another breath before continuing. “I’m struggling to understand how I can get you to a better place. You’re taking me down with you. And now you’ve crossed a line.”

She began crying. She was sorry — sorrier than she had ever been for anything in her entire life. She was so sorry it physically ached.

He took her hand, then after a moment or two, gently pulled away. “I love you, Ror.”

She could barely hear herself reply, the whisper was so quiet. “I love you, too.”

“I just can’t be in your life anymore.”

Aurora looked at him, eyes wide and the gravity of that statement hitting. “Hollis—”

He stood, tears on his face. “I can’t keep watching you disappear like this.”

She reached for him, but he stepped back. “I’m sorry. Really, I am. Goodbye, Rory.”

Then he walked away. It was the worst night of Aurora’s life.

A year later, she got sober. That moment had been the beginning of it. The thing that finally made her understand there wasn’t going to be anyone else coming to find her.

And she was right — because she never saw her brother again.

The places none of us can explain to anyone. She’d love her brother forever for those places they both could never explain to anyone. She’d love him no matter what, but she loved him the most for that.

Aurora opened her eyes, the pain of it all as fresh and raw as it was that night. She was back in the house now, atop the brown leather of the sofa. And tomorrow, she would be $600 richer. Tomorrow, all of this would be worth it.

She sat there for a moment longer, listening to the hum of the refrigerator. Her chest felt tight, and she needed some air to clear her head. So she buttoned up her flannel and stepped outside.

The woods behind the house were dense and twiggy, the last light of early evening filtering between seas of oak and red cedar. Aurora followed a narrow trail for several minutes, breathing slowly and trying to think about anything that wasn’t her brother, her money troubles, or the general stress pit that had been the only life she’d ever known.

That was when she saw an old woman up the path, standing with her palms clasped around a walking stick. Aurora’s heart raced, not expecting to see anyone on the quick jaunt. Had she been standing there before? There were no other houses in sight for at least a couple miles up the road.

“You.” The woman stared intensely at her.

Aurora stopped, her heart suddenly in her stomach. “Excuse me?”

The woman didn’t answer immediately. Then after a few moments, she straightened. “You think of him.”

Aurora felt something cold move through her, absorbing the shock. “I—”

The woman looked directly into her eyes. “When you fight what you don’t want to become again, that’s when you think about him. And you think about him a lot.”

Aurora turned away, tears stinging at her eyes. She was ashamed. She was sad. She was so, unexplainably fucking angry at this stranger, somehow reading her like a news station teleprompter. “I’m leaving now,” she muttered, turning the other direction back from where she came.

The woman caught her wrist. Her grip was surprisingly firm given her feeble appearance and small stature. “You need to leave.”

Aurora yanked her arm back. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

The old woman’s face had gone still — so still it was as if she’d seen some horrible vision. A ghost behind Aurora’s shoulder; something that couldn’t be taken back. Something godforsaken.

Something terrifying.

“When it rains,” the old woman whispered hoarsely, “the thing that walks on its hands comes back.”

Aurora stared as the woman released her. She backed slowly away, unable to decide whether she was frightened or still wholly and infuriatingly angry for the audacity of the entire interaction. Then she turned and hurried back toward the house, drops of rain getting heavier and falling in matted, indecisive blots.

She pulled the front door shut behind her and dashed to the kitchen. The sun was gone, its cloak of night sky descending over the surrounding slopes like a burial shroud.

Fuck the 600 dollars, she thought. Fuck all of this. I’ll take the eviction notice.

Thunder rolled somewhere beyond the mountains as she steadied her shaking hands enough to remember where she put her keys. The minute her fingers brushed the metal of the carabiner - worn from years of use - the lights went out.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” she snarled as she reached into her pocket for her phone, which was nearly dead and at 7% battery. She’d forgotten to plug it in earlier. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Outside, the storm raged. She briefly considered leaving anyway, but one look through the window killed that idea.

Trying not to panic, she reached into her other pocket and pulled out her Bic lighter, the neon green shell visible even in the dark of the room. She lit the Yankee Candle sitting on the counter, twisting its label in her palm. Autumn Woods. A little too on-brand for her liking.

Its flame flickered, thrashing around wildly before steadying. Aurora sat it back down and frantically texted the homeowner, her pulse in her ears:

Where’s the fuse box? The power just went out.

She waited a few minutes, anxious and subconsciously taking note of her foot tapping on the linoleum of the kitchen.

No response. She waited a few minutes more.

No change.

“Fuck,” Aurora said under her breath as she picked the candle back up and began searching the house, which seemed to be listening somehow. She stopped and listened, too.

Only the sound of rain ricocheted back, tapping the roof and window panes in an angry flurry.

She checked the hallway. A small closet. The rooms upstairs.

No dice.

Then, from somewhere below her, came three knocks as slow as they were harsh. They were more like thuds.

THUD.

“I love you, Ror,” she heard in her head.

THUD.

“I just can’t be in your life anymore.”

THUD.

Aurora looked toward the stairs; her voice stuck in her throat. She managed to croak out a sheepish “Hello?” into the ether, which wasn’t returned.

She kept moving and making her way back to the first floor, eyes darting around her. Lightning flashed as she passed a window at the bottom of the banister. For one brilliant instant, everything outside became completely visible. She froze, doing a double take—

Because hundreds of muddy handprints covered the ground beneath the window.

Not footprints—

Handprints. They looked frantic. Panicked. Somehow primal.

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In the microseconds of the flash that seemed to stretch in slow motion, Aurora could see that they traced from the woods toward the house. She thought of the strange interaction with the old woman.

“When it rains,” she’d whispered, “the thing that walks on its hands comes back.”

A shiver shot up Aurora’s spine. She craned her neck and held the flame up higher, trying to see what else she could make out in the mist.

Then her phone buzzed, nearly making her drop the candle.

dont let it know youre there

Aurora stopped breathing. She thought only of Hollis: how much she missed him. How much she regretted hurting him with every fiber of her being. How badly she wished she could tell him everything; everything that had happened in the six years since she’d gotten sober. In the six years of trying to do good by people. She wanted more than anything for him to see her someday, and know that she had made it. To know that she had done it for him. To know that she hadn’t disappeared.

Because for six years she had lived with the quiet hope that somewhere, somehow, Hollis might hear her name in some thread of his existence - maybe at a café, or on a job site, or through the radio - and wonder enough to unblock her number.

Rory’s okay, he’d think then, in a world where that happened. Rory made it.

But Aurora didn’t live in a world where that happened, and never would.

A wet sound came from the hallway. Aurora began to cry. Something was making its way toward her.

The thing clobbered awkwardly through the darkness, striking the floor with each long, heavy step and bashing into the walls as photo frames were knocked off and crashed loudly to the ground.

Aurora couldn’t move as it rounded the doorway. She shakily held the candle up, its figure approaching closer behind the flame and lumbering ungracefully forward. For a moment, the candle caught only its enormous white hands; fingers bent at odd angles as they slapped against the floor. Then its shoulders appeared, all skin (if that’s what it could even be called) and bone. Then its head, bald and almost shimmering with a dull sheen.

Aurora covered her mouth with her free hand as a gasp nearly escaped. She held her breath and didn’t flinch. In this fucked up game up Fight, Flight, or Freeze, she was coming up the latter.

The thing looked almost human, but its legs, so tall, long and slender that the flats of its feet nearly hit the ceiling as they lay upright, were bound together at the ankles with thick and rotted rope. It appeared as if the two appendages had somehow grown into each other like the trunks of two trees, twisted and fused over decades of slow, unnatural growth. A black cloth covered its eyes.

It ambled another step and stopped. For several seconds, neither of them moved.

Without warning, it slid its legs downward in one swift and fluid motion, dropping onto its belly. Then it began to drag itself toward her with those gaunt, white hands.

Both arms reached forward as it pulled its body closer again and again; torso scraping along the linoleum with those tied and twisted limbs curled grotesquely behind its head.

Closer.

Closer.

Aurora couldn’t move as the thing stopped only a few feet away.

A second later, its mouth opened with a hiss to reveal a dark tongue sliding between its blackened and very sharp teeth. It hung there, as if suspended, twitching in the candlelight.

Aurora screamed. She screamed for the years she lost to her addiction. The nights spent on the street, frozen and half-asleep as ecstasy coursed through her veins with bloodshot eyes. She screamed for the descent each hit inevitably put her on, the people who took advantage and stole from her, and her taking advantage and stealing from others. She screamed for doing that to Hollis — the one person she swore up and down she would never do that to, never resort to taking from. She screamed for him trying to rescue her over and over and over to no avail. She screamed for him walking away that final time, his head in his hands and shoulders shaking as he wept under the gritty light of the streetlamp. She screamed for being broke every single second of every single day, for going hungry and never giving up with the hope she may see him again. She screamed for the path that led her here, and for not locking the goddamn door coming back from her walk. She screamed for everything that wasn’t these things. And she screamed for everything that was.

The thing screeched.

And lunged.

. . .

Hollis Lawson awoke in the middle of the night, heart hammering against his ribs and drenched in sweat.

For a moment, he could still hear her screaming in his nightmare. Her. Aurora.

Something was very, very wrong.

He sat up, still breathing hard, and reached for his phone on the nightstand. He stared at the screen for several seconds before opening her contact information. His thumb hovered over the little symbol beside her name — the same one he’d left untouched the last seven years.

Then he unblocked her, and pressed call.

The phone rang.

And rang.

And rang.

Before finally going to voicemail.

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Dedication

I dedicate this work to my dear friend Nicholas Manuel Portillo (5 April 1995 - 21 June 2018), who lost his years-long battle to addiction.

Nick,

I wish I could say I didn’t know how much you were hurting, that I didn’t understand the rage and the reasons. But that simply isn’t true; I knew it all in the fabric woven together by my being and the terrible experiences that bonded us forever. I knew you better than myself in those days — we were just two West Valley kids who needed each other. I still need you and always will.

You were in your own category of people I loved for the reasons I did, especially after Meg died. We went through hell together losing her, you and I. By 14, we were no longer three. And the remaining two were never the same again. Yet the sunset of my youth is synonymous with memories of you next to me, watchful and protective amidst the pain we both carried. I think I knew, even then, that you carried the most. Sunset — that’s the best term I can use to describe how it’s felt to say goodbye; like the eye of the day is closing into an eternal sleep I don’t want to wake from alone.

Rest easy, Nicky. Your memory is a blessing. I’ll love you forever and the places we could never explain to anyone.

Addiction Support Resources
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse or addiction, help is available 24/7 via the SAMHSA** National Helpline, which provides free confidential support, information, and referrals to treatment services in English and Spanish. Call 1-800-662-HELP (4357)*

Veteran-Focused Support
Veterans experiencing substance abuse or mental health crises can contact the Veterans Crisis Line for confidential 24/7 support. Call 988 and press 1, or text 838255*

_{*The resources listed above are available in the United States and its territories}

_{**SAMHSA refers to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration}

It came from the woods. Most strange things do.

-Emily Carroll, Through the Woods

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The first time Quinn Ferrell saw the old woman, she thought she was waiting for the bus.

This wasn’t unusual. The route stopped running well before the sun went down, but people in Welch, West Virginia had been waiting for things that never arrived for as long as Quinn could remember.

The town sat down in the bottom of the mountains, tucked deep into a valley where Tug Fork and Elkhorn Creek came together and left barely enough flat surface for development. This was coal country, though the money had been leaving faster than the commodity for a long, long time. Old mine roads ran up into the hillsides - hollows where company camps had once stood - and patches of forest grew back over ground that had been worked and blasted and abandoned. Once surrounding businesses shut their lights off for the evening, there wasn’t much standing between rural suburbia and a rolling sweep of Appalachian woods. Because that was the thing about Welch: there was always something to conceal. And there was always something to wait for.

Quinn had been waiting on a few things herself for most of her adult life: a month when the books actually balanced, a knee that didn’t ache when it rained, or the good sense to stop expecting either. Her eight years in the Marine Corps had been responsible for her knees; the rest she’d managed to fuck up herself. At 36, she was broke in the particular way of people who owned things but didn’t own enough of them. The Wash-N-Go laundromat belonged to her, technically. So did the debt, the busted dryers, leaking roof, and [most] of the money that came through the change slots.

She could’ve stayed away from Welch, or in the least left in the time since she’d returned with a DD214 in-hand. Some nights she wished she had. But most nights, she was glad she hadn’t. For better or worse, Welch was her home. And the Southern California mountain scapes scattered across the backdrop of Camp Pendleton didn't hold the same mysticism as the ones here did. Here, the mountains felt like sacred witnesses more than scenery, keeping watch over the parts of her she thought had been left behind forever. Something in their energy was far more ancient. Far more wise.

They were also the only thing she cried over when she first left, riding a bus headed toward boot camp with the sharp, stupid certainty that getting out of West Virginia was the closest thing to a plan she had for her future. She’d spent years afterward trying to build a life that had nothing to do with where she was from. Active duty enlistment had taken her across oceans, through deserts, and into countries whose names she’d previously only seen on maps or in classroom textbooks. Quinn had learned how to leave, and had become very good at it. She had become even better at staying away.

Then when it came time to pack up her car and do something different with her life, she thought again of those impossible mountains — the same ones who watched her go. The same ones she wanted to see her come back. And the minute she crossed into county lines, the tears flowed. Because those mountains demanded nothing, holding the horizon the same way they always had. They carried the strange and solemn beauty of things that had outlived every version of her. She was grateful. She was so, goddamn grateful. And she surrendered completely to them.

Maybe that was why when the chance came to keep something of Welch from disappearing, she couldn’t quite walk away. She’d decided to buy the business when the previous owner was threatening to close shop. The bank called her undercapitalized. Her brother Elliott called her sentimental. People in town called her crazy; they called most women crazy when they really meant ‘stubborn’.

Quinn had also liked that there was a need for a graveyard shift. The building belonged to her a little more under the cover of night, and so did every problem that came with it. There was no employee hovering nearby if something failed; no man offering instructions or unsolicited advice she hadn’t asked for. She could simply roll up her sleeves and figure it out.

And she had figured out plenty.

One machine at a time, she’d replaced every worn bearing. She’d climbed onto the roof with a patching kit and painted the walls, choosing a purplish sort of color that reminded her of the sky just before it rained. And when the old locks started sticking, she replaced those too. She knew the bills by heart — how much detergent she could afford before the electric came due. Which repairs could wait, and which ones couldn’t.

Quinn helped customers in need, though she couldn’t afford to. Elliott liked to remind her of that because Elliott was an asshole. But Quinn had a rule about laundry, one she’d never bothered explaining because she didn’t think it needed any explanation: everybody had a right to clean clothes. Clean sheets too, if they were lucky enough in this country to have a bed to put them on. They were little things, maybe. But Quinn had always thought dignity was mostly made up of little things. If you couldn’t give somebody much, you could at least give them that.

She knew her patrons; who washed on Fridays because that was payday, and who brought their kids in after school during the winter months because their trailer didn’t have working heat. She’d learned not to ask questions either. People told you things in places like a laundromat without meaning to. They talked while they waited. They talked when they were tired. Sometimes they talked because, for an hour or so, they had nowhere else to be. And sometimes they talked because, for every other hour of the day, they had no one else to talk to.

It was a little after midnight when she saw the woman through the front windows of the business that Wednesday, standing at the far end of the strip mall parking lot where the asphalt broke apart into fields of weeds. She was working a crossword, grabbing the pencil previously tucked behind her ear.

To move quickly. 3 letters across, _ _ _.

Too easy, she thought, as she scribbled in the obvious answer:

RUN

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She watched the woman for a moment, contemplating again if she was there early and waiting out the 4 o’clock bus pickup. She was old with a head of white hair tied back into a single braid and wearing a long sleeve dress despite the August heat. Beside her stood an enormous black dog.

Quinn put down her pencil.

The dog looked toward the laundromat. Then the woman followed suit.

Quinn glanced down at the crossword. There was that word she’d just written again staring back up at her:

RUN

When she looked back up, they were gone.

She stood and looked out the fingerprinted glass, glancing around the rugged parking lot in desperate need of a resurfacing. The verdict was unsurprising: Nothing. Just Quinn and the idled, unattended machines behind her.

Hesitating, she walked back to the counter and went back to her crossword.

Out of view. 6 letters down, _ _ _ _ _ _.

She picked up the pencil again, hovering over the blank squares for a few seconds before filling them in:

HIDDEN

For some reason, the word bothered her. Maybe it was the hour. Maybe it was the old woman she’d just seen standing at the edge of the parking lot. Or maybe it was the hard-engrained habit of looking twice at anything that didn’t make sense.

She looked toward the windows one last time to see the empty parking lot — wondering how long the woman had been standing in the dark before Quinn noticed her.

. . .

She saw the woman again the next night.

Same spot. Same dog. This time it was sitting, its eyes reflecting the bluish hue of the laundromat sign. The woman didn’t move.

At first, Quinn only watched from behind the glass. She wasn’t sure when she decided to venture out to the pair, but before she knew it she was out the door and halfway across the lot. As she approached, she noticed the woman watching her with an intent patience that made her slow her step. “You doing alright?”

The woman only continued to look blankly at her. Her face was deeply lined but her eyes were bright — so bright they seemed strangely untouched by the late hour. “You own this place?” she finally asked.

Quinn glanced back at the building. “Yes.”

The woman nodded. “How long?”

“Six years.”

The dog stood, whining. It was a black hound of some sort but not a breed Quinn could easily identify. It was much larger than she had initially thought; its shoulders nearly level with her waist. It stared at her now, head tilted slightly to one side as though it recognized her.

“Six years,” the woman repeated with zero emotion. Almost like she’d been expecting that answer.

Quinn crossed her arms. “Do you need to wash something? I’ve got a few extra quarters behind the desk if you’re short. I don’t mind helping you out.”

The woman smiled. “No, thank you.” Then without another word, she turned around and the dog unhurriedly followed. They both walked into the darkness beyond the lot.

Quinn watched them go before heading back unceremoniously toward the neon letters spelling out Wash-N-Go, unable to shake the peculiar sensation that the woman reminded her of someone. She told herself she wasn’t unsettled as she stopped just short of the entrance to light up a Marlboro.

But she was unsettled.

Quinn didn’t scare easily. Nearly a decade in the Corps had taught her that fear was mostly a matter of what happened in the few seconds after you first felt it. You could feel anything you wanted in that short microburst of time — you just had to keep your hands steady while you did.

So she kept her hands steady, stomped out the cigarette with the heel of her sneaker after some satisfying drags, and went to make another cup of coffee.

. . .

The next night, Quinn told herself she was going to ignore the old woman should she return. It was something easier said than done.

At 12:30, she found herself looking out the windows. At 01:00, she walked up to them and scanned the parking lot. And at 01:30, she checked again.

Nothing.

She laughed at herself. “Jesus Christ, Ferrell. Get a damn grip.” She went back to her crossword.

At 01:47, the chime from the bell above the door sounded and the old woman walked in. The dog was nowhere in sight.

Quinn felt something cold move through her stomach. She hadn’t heard her approach, and that unnerved her more than she wanted to admit. “Evenin’,” she said, not dropping her gaze.

“It’s morning, actually” the old woman replied, her voice soft and uncondescending. She walked toward the front row of washers and stopped before looking back at Quinn.

“Anything I can help you with?” Quinn asked.

“No.” She smiled. “I just wanted to see it.”

“See what?”

“This.” She gestured toward the machines.

Quinn looked around. “The—the laundromat?”

“Yes.” The woman continued walking slowly up the row, running her fingers across the front of the doors. “These weren’t here before.”

Quinn was starting to lose patience. She wasn’t in the mood for riddles, or whatever charade this was seemingly turning into. “Do you live around here?” She said as evenly as she could manage, already trying to qualm her temper.

“Not anymore.”

“Where do you live?”

The woman beamed. “Up there.” She pointed towards the top of the windows where the mountains were visible beyond the strip mall, layered one behind another against the night sky.

Quinn chuckled. “That’s a long commute.”

The woman didn’t find it funny. “Not really. Not for me.”

Something in the way she said it made Quinn’s skin crawl.

“You’re from here,” the woman said. It wasn’t a question.

“Born and raised.”

“Your mother too.”

“Yes.”

“And your grandmother.”

Quinn felt her shoulders tighten. “Yes.”

The woman nodded. “She was a good woman, your grandmother.”

Quinn didn’t answer at first, realizing she was gripping the pencil so hard it had started to hurt. She placed it down gently. “You knew her?”

The woman held a puzzled expression. “Everybody knew her.”

Everyone, in fact, did know Quinn’s grandmother for the next three counties over. Her grandmother, who had raised her and Elliott when their mom skipped town. Her grandmother, who could read stars in any open space of sky and read weather patterns in trees. She looked back up at the woman. “That’s not an answer.”

The woman smiled coyly. “You ask a lot of questions.”

Quinn straightened. “Well, when strangers come into my business at two in the morning mentioning my family, I guess I get curious.”

The woman’s smile disappeared. “Your grandmother didn’t like the woods.”

Quinn stared out the windows. Her grandmother hated the woods indeed, and had always warned Quinn and her brother to stay away from them. She was surprised at the words that came from her mouth next. “What was her name?”

The woman looked confused. “Whose?”

“My grandmother.”

The woman blinked. “I can’t remember.”

Quinn crossed her arms. “You just said you knew her.”

“I did.”

“And you know she didn’t like the woods.”

“Yes.”

“—But you don’t remember her name?”

The woman looked at Quinn for a long time. “No.”

“That’s strange,” Quinn said, tense and seemingly holding in a breath she was only now conscious of.

“Yes.”

There was something almost relieved in the way the old woman said it. Quinn didn’t like that.

The woman stopped pacing up the row of machines and leaned against a washer. “You ever go up there?”

“Where?”

“To the woods.” She pointed towards the top of the windows again.

“No.”

The woman traced around the dials and buttons on the washer’s front, running her long sprawling fingers in circles over and over again. “You did once.”

Quinn was stunned. “When did I go?”

“When you were little.”

Quinn said nothing, her pulse quickening. Because she remembered now — remembered the woods. Remembered her grandmother finding her after hours alone in the brush. Remembered that long drive home, and her grandmother weeping to herself on the couch that night. She’d always assumed she’d just wandered into the treeline somehow and gotten lost — though now, oddly, she wasn’t so sure that was true. It felt camouflaged in dust on the shelf of her mind. Grainy. “What happened?” she finally asked.

“You tell me.” The old woman’s face was hard to read, but for a second, Quinn could have sworn she saw a smile puckering at the corners of her lips.

“I—I remember being lost.”

“Do you?” the old woman squinted, focusing hard on Quinn.

“Yes.”

“So you remember the house?”

Quinn felt faint. “What house?”

The woman spoke again — but this time, it wasn’t friendly. “You don’t remember.” Her register was low and almost a growl. She looked angry.

Something moved inside Quinn’s head — not a thought, but a door. Behind it, something was waiting.

Suddenly, she was a child again. And she was running.

Her little legs pumped beneath her, branches whipping her bare arms as pine needles slid their way into the tops of her socks. She was laughing because the dog she’d been chasing was ahead of her and she wanted to catch it. Its coat was so obsidian nose-to-tail that it seemed to swallow the sunlight around it — but they’d already been playing for awhile by then, and there was no way she was giving up now.

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She called after it. She believed it belonged to someone. After all, she had dogs at home. Everybody she knew had a dog. Surely, this one was no different; someone’s pet who’d gotten out and they would soon be looking for.

The dog led her deeper into the woods. She remembered that now. She remembered the exact moment she realized she couldn’t hear the road of the winding neighborhoods anymore; couldn’t hear cars or birds or—

—Anything.

She stopped. The dog was gone.

She turned around to see trees staggered in every direction; their tall, thin trunks casting late shadows to the east. The light of the afternoon had somehow become evening.

She screamed for her grandmother until her throat hurt. Nobody answered.

She’d stumbled around for what could have been minutes or could have been hours, there was no way of knowing, when she found something hidden at the edge of a clearing: a house.

Quinn’s eyes, rimmed with red and puffy from the crying, widened. Even at 6, she understood it was the kind of thing that couldn’t have been there. There were no power lines out there. No paved trails. No mailbox. Just acres and acres of woods and this house, looming eerily with peeling paint, lights that worked, and an old woman stepping out from behind a cut of linen that was hanging from a clothesline just off its porch. Her face was deeply-set with the brightest eyes Quinn had ever seen. Glowing so strikingly in the sudden dim of day.

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Back in the present, Quinn looked across the laundromat at the same woman now. “No,” she said simply.

The old woman smiled, those eyes glistening impossibly and brilliantly under the overhead fluorescents. “Oh, yes.”

The memories came churning faster. The old woman had told her she was safe. She’d called her by name somehow; not sweetheart and not little girl. “Quinn,” she’d said. And she’d said it so resolutely. So matter-of-fact. Quinn hadn’t even questioned it; hadn’t clocked the fact there was no way this stranger could have or should have known her name. She remembered that now. And she remembered stepping inside anyway.

And for a little while, everything had been normal. There had been a modest kitchen with a stove and kettle. Beside it a fire burned in the hearth. Quinn remembered sitting at a table with her feet dangling above the floor. She remembered the woman asking her questions. Where she lived. Where her grandmother lived. What school she went to. What her mother’s name was. Questions that seemed harmless then, though now Quinn understood how unusual they were. The woman already knew her name. She seemed to know everything else, too.

Then, slowly, things around her began to change.

At first, Quinn thought it was only a trick of the light. She noticed the wall: a dark stain had appeared beneath the rosy wallpaper. She watched it spread as it puckered and peeled away, revealing black, rotting wood beneath. Mold bloomed across the ceiling in large brown patches and the smell of wet earth and decay filled the room, burning her nostrils.

Quinn looked at the woman, whose skin had begun to sag. “W-what’s happening?”

The woman only grinned. A maggot crawled out from her front row of teeth. Had they been that black before? Quinn had thought to herself.

Quinn jumped from the chair and ran for the door. It wouldn’t open. She twisted the knob again and again, sobbing and pulling until her fingers hurt. Around her, the house seemed to come apart. Wood groaned. Plaster crumbled. The walls darkened and began to deteriorate, folding in every direction like wet clumps of paper.

The woman laughed manically.

Quinn turned. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen where they had sat together only moments before, her skin now hanging in loose, pale folds. One cheek had split completely open, exposing the bone underneath. Her mouth stretched impossibly wide as she laughed again and again louder and louder, tearing more skin every time she did and taking another step closer.

Quinn screamed and threw herself against the door. It flew open.

And she ran. She tore through the woods until her lungs burned, then spun around.

The house was gone, somehow hidden once more. There was only a clearing. In the middle of it: a pile of human bones.

She heard the woman’s laughter behind her — no, that wasn’t where it was coming from. It was above, somehow everywhere and nowhere all at once. Unable to register any more hesitation, Quinn bolted. She ran and ran and ran until she couldn’t run anymore. And it was her grandmother who would find her sitting against the trunk of a gnarled elm later that day, knees pulled to her chest and sobbing so hard she could barely speak.

Quinn had learned then what it meant to be lost. And she had spent the rest of her life making certain it would never happen again.

At 18 and in the midst of recruit training, she’d learned the fundamentals of land navigation. She’d taken every opportunity she could to get better at reading maps and compasses; practicing pace count, backstops, and dead reckoning, checking azimuths until finding her way became second nature.

And she had excelled. Not because she had any affinity for navigation — but because she was terrified of not understanding it. Terrified of standing somewhere unfamiliar and realizing she had no idea where she was for a second time. Terrified of turning around and finding the whole world had changed; that none of the rules she previously governed as truth and absolutes applied after all. Terrified of following something into the woods again.

The laundromat hummed as the old woman stood across the room, still watching. “You remember now.”

Quinn stared back, fists clenched at her side and ready for a fight. “What do you want?”

The woman considered the question. “Nothing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You didn’t then, either.” The woman stepped closer. “You followed the dog. Came into my house. You sat at my table and you answered my questions. I already got what I wanted. You gave me your trust and you gave me your truth.”

The woman turned to look back out the windows before continuing. “And in these parts, that constitutes a bargain.” She looked at Quinn. “You know that being from here. Your grandmother knew it too. It’s why she told you to stay away from the woods.”

Quinn stumbled at her words, nearly unable to form a coherent thought. “Why are you here now—?”

“You know what your trouble is?” the woman nearly cut her off.

Quinn was so taken aback by the question that she said nothing.

The woman continued. “You think leaving and being free are the same thing.”

Again Quinn said nothing, letting the words soak in.

The woman walked back to one of the washers. “You spent so much of your life trying to wash yourself clean of this place.”

Quinn looked down, ashamed. “I know.”

“No,” the woman began. “You don’t.”

Quinn looked toward the windows. The black dog stood outside, close enough that she could see the wet shine of its nose against the glass. It stared directly at her.

Then, suddenly, one of the washers clicked; lurching the machine to life. Quinn jumped, scanning the building.

The old woman was nowhere to be seen.

The drum of the washer began turning slowly as the overhead lights flickered faster and faster until finally the panel blew, submerging Quinn into complete darkness.

Scrambling for her phone, she reached into her pocket and clicked the flashlight on, making her way to the washer. Shining the small beam onto its front, she could see water filling the basin.

But then something else began unfurling; a blackish maroon that spread like mud stirred from the bottom of a deep creek.

Quinn staggered back as the drum turned faster. The deep red spread through the water until the entire load churned crimson. And then—

A little hand. Just for a second before vanishing back into the muck.

“What the fuck?” Quinn said as she swung the phone around, shining its light throughout the laundromat.

Nothing.

She turned back to the washer, her breath catching as the beam found the glass front again.

A child’s face stared back from inside the machine. Petite, young, and…

Hers.

Quinn froze.

The face smiled, and in Quinn’s own 6-year-old voice, it whispered: “Come on, Quinn. She’s waiting. She’s been waiting for so long.”

. . .

By 5 that morning, a fresh wave of customers began to roll in. They found the laundromat door unlocked — and were immediately greeted with blood on the floor beneath one of the washers, long streaks of red dripping down it’s front.

“Quinn?” one man called out.

No answer.

They checked the restroom. The back office. They called her name one after the other, their voices echoing and reverberating in a cascade across the empty building. But Quinn was nowhere to be found.

On the counter sat her daily crossword, unnoticed by the search party quickly forming.

To go back. 6 letters across, _ _ _ _ _ _.

And scrawled in red pen not of Quinn’s handwriting was the answer:

RETURN

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Additional Insight, Inspiration, + References

Featured artwork as follows:

An Important Character Note: While I won’t specify my own affiliation with the Marine Corps, what I will say is that it continues to hold a deeply personal and lasting place in my heart. Quinn is a representation of these feelings — my own small way of honoring the many Marines and experiences that mean so much to me and hold a complexity in my life that’s hard to put to words. To my Corps family at Pendleton and beyond: I love you. I miss you. Rah, and all that shit.

Content and Trigger Warning (Below): Suicide

Laundromat Tie-In: In 2013, I was 18 years old and living in Tucson, Arizona renting a room at a house with no working washer or dryer. Every Wednesday I’d throw my clothes into a giant canvas bag, get on my bike, and ride to a 24 hour laundromat a couple miles up the road. The place quickly became its own unique little world — over the course of that year I met some of the strangest, funniest, and genuinely profound people I’d ever encountered. One day I crossed paths with an older woman, who walked up and told me something that she had no possible way of knowing. It was specific enough that I still remember the feeling of hearing it. I wasn’t online in any official capacity at that time and knew a total of maybe five people (three of which were my roommates) in that city after moving two hours south from my hometown in Phoenix. The woman didn’t tell me her name, and I never saw her again. When I asked other regulars after this experience if they remembered her coming in, no one seemed to know who or what I was talking about.

Now you may be wondering: what mystical thing did she tell me? Interestingly it actually had to do with my grandmother, who lived 2000 miles away. She described in great detail a pair of crystals with green lace hanging from a window before saying that they were something I had ‘left behind’.

The context was chilling and eerily spot-on: She described to every detail something that had been gifted to my grandmother in the 70s by her best friend who tragically took her own life a couple of decades following. They’re comprised of two teardrop-shaped stones, tied together with olive green lace. A superstitious woman through and through, my grandmother gave them to me when I graduated high school, believing they would protect me as I ventured out into the world. I loved them but was terrified they’d get stolen where I was living (a good instinct as it turned out — because my house was broken into weeks before I moved out later that year). So I left them at my childhood home in Phoenix, hence the ‘left behind’ detail. I never told anyone about them.

To date, I still have the crystals and no logical explanation for the interaction. It remains one of the strangest encounters I’ve ever had.

And lastly: A Reference Glossary for some of the specific terminology used in this story. I strive to make this space as accessible as possible, and understand that some people may not be as familiar with certain things commonly used/taught/said in the military. Given this, I’ve provided some explanations below to bring context to several passages in Wash-N-Go. You’ll find these terms in the chronological order they appeared in the narrative:

DD214 - This refers to the official document a service member receives when they leave the U.S. military. It shows their service history, dates served, job (for someone like Quinn in the Marine Corps, that job would be referred to as an MOS; other branches like the Navy and Air Force use different terms for this), and how the service member was discharged.

Pace Count - Counting your steps to estimate how far you’ve traveled.

Backstops - A clear landmark or point that tells you when to stop or know you’ve gone far enough.

Dead Reckoning - This means navigating point to point by keeping track of:

• Direction — Using a compass/azimuth and map

• Distance — Estimating how far you’ve traveled, using your pace count

‘Checking Your Azimuth’ - Making sure your compass direction (azimuth) is correct as you move/travel.

My girl, my girl, where will you go?
I’m going where the cold wind blows.
In the pines, in the pines where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through…

-Lead Belly

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The first thing her mother said was, “We need gas.”

Thea looked at the dashboard. “We still have half a tank.”

Her mother shrugged. “I know.”

It was raining, but not hard. Just enough to make the windshield shine and turn the road silver beneath the Volkswagen’s headlights. Thea leaned her head against the passenger window, watching as dark shoulders of ridgelines unspooling from the mountains became veiled in mist. Layered upon them were droves of bare-limbed trees that stood like black lace against a bruised sky.

They were on their usual route: past the church with the white steeple. Past the Dollar General. Past the railroad crossing and old feed store.

“You’re going the wrong way,” Thea said.

“I know.”

“You said we needed gas.”

“We do.”

“We don’t. But you’re going the wrong way if you want to fill up.”

Her mother smiled. “So impatient.”

Thea rolled her eyes with a smirk. They drove on.

It felt like a normal day, and that was the strange part. She was hungry. No, that wasn’t quite right — she wanted coffee. Thea knew her mother sometimes liked to stop at a little diner outside of town; coffee on Sundays had become a weekly ritual of sorts after Thea was laid off and first returned to Harlan a few years ago. She’d since taken a job as a custodian at a local motel — one of the only jobs in the area that was hiring at the time. Not just a prospect but the prospect.

Thea had been so ashamed to take it at first. She’d spent years believing that how you made a living was something you were supposed to explain when someone asked. But she dreaded telling people she cleaned toilets, emptied trash, scrubbed bathtubs, and changed sheets five mornings a week. And she hated that she hated being honest about that.

But the shame didn’t last. The work was honest, and more than that, she found she liked the quiet of it. There was something so satisfying about taking a room that had been left a mess and giving it a fresh start again, knowing that someone would walk in and feel cared for, even if just for a moment and even if they never knew her name. She took pride in being a custodian; took pride in caring for her community in that way. And it didn’t take long for her to come to terms with the fact that it was best thing she’d ever decided to do.

Her mother had been the one who told her from the beginning that there was nothing to be ashamed of. “Your granddad worked in the mines,” she’d said one evening at the kitchen table after a particularly long shift. “Your grandmother cleaned houses. Your uncle spent three decades fixing roofs. You think any of them ever came home ashamed?” Thea had only stared down at her coffee, swirling grains from the Splenda packet she’d just thrown in floating around the surface as she stirred. Her mother reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “There’s no shame in making a place better than you found it. It’s who we are.”

Thea thought about that conversation from then on whenever she felt embarrassed. Her mother was right — they came from people who knew how to work with their hands, people who measured a good day by what they’d managed to get done before the sun went down. Where Thea came from, work was work. Rural Appalachians did what needed doing, period point blank. They took care of people when they could, kept going no matter what, and saved each other time and time again because they knew no one else was going to do it for them.

And she was damn proud of that.

Thea snapped out of her trance as they pulled up to the diner parking lot and her mother stepped out. “Be back in a jiff,” she quipped, lightly shutting the door behind her.

Watching her dart around the side of the building, Thea took in her surroundings. There were no other cars and the diner sat looking suspiciously dark inside, no sign in its window saying they were closed. She frowned, finding the combination odd.

But a few minutes later, her mother walked back out with two Styrofoam cups in-hand. She slipped back into the driver’s seat before handing Thea hers.

“They’re actually open?” she asked after a minute, taking a sip. Her mother kept both hands on the wheel after shifting back into drive.

“Lucky for you I’m very liked in this town.” She winked. “Besides, I know how you are when you haven’t had your coffee. I don’t want to put either of us through that torment.”

Thea chuckled. “What can I say? You know me.”

Her mother didn't know her.

Her mother beamed. “Of course I do.”

Thea looked at her. Really looked at her. Her mother seemed older than she remembered, and more beautiful somehow. Shimmery gray consumed most of her hair as the dull light of the gloom through the windows shone on it. Beside her smile were deep lines etched around her mouth.

They turned right onto the road and Thea furrowed her brow, downing more of her drink, which was watered down to begin with and already lukewarm.

A beat passed. Then two. Out her window, Thea could see piles of rusted farm equipment and twisted sheets of tin half-swallowed by weeds. “You just passed the junkyard,” she said.

Her mother didn’t answer.

“Mom.”

“What?”

“You passed the junkyard. You’re going away from town.”

“I know.”

Thea laughed. “Well…are you lost?”

“No.”

“Then where are we going?”

“Home. We’re just taking the long way.”

Thea looked through the windshield, re-beaded with rain that was falling heavier now. The road curled between the rolling hills of eastern Kentucky, wet and dark, as she watched the trees go by. Oaks, hickories, pines, red maples, blackgums. They crowded close to the asphalt, their branches knitted together overhead like the ribs of some enormous, ancient creature.

Something about the road suddenly made her uncomfortable, and she didn’t know why. She felt dizzy. Sick.

Then, Thea sat up straighter, eyes wide. “Mom.”

Her mother kept driving.

“Mom, stop.”

Nothing.

“Pull over, goddammit.”

Her mother’s hands tightened around the steering wheel.

Thea looked at her. “What…what are we doing?”

“I told you, we’re taking the long way home.”

Tears stung Thea’s eyes as the road went blurry. Why the hell was she feeling like this? “W-why are we going this way?” She felt so panicked she could hardly stand it, palms drenched in sweat and stomach in knots.

Her mother hesitated. “Because you like the drive.”

“No, I don’t!” she was surprised to find she was yelling now.

“You used to.”

Indecipherable images and sensations flashed through Thea’s mind then. Things so horrible she couldn’t make sense of it. So horrible that she nearly dropped her coffee before shakily placing it back in the cupholder. She gripped the side of the seat and looked at her mother in horror.

“When?”

“When, what?”

“Mom, please.” Thea couldn’t steady her voice. “When did it happen?”

Her mother didn’t answer at first. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A guardrail appeared ahead. The trees opened and the road narrowed. Still, her mother said nothing.

“I said, WHE—” Thea felt something cold move through her.

Because she knew this place.

She knew it.

And she remembered, suddenly, the falling of snow. Headlights being swallowed by swirls of wind painted white. The sound of metal folding, and glass. So much glass. Then: snow falling on her face instead of out the window. And her mother’s voice saying her name over and over and over again.

Then nothing.

Thea looked down at her hands. They were pale.

Too pale.

She looked back up at her mother. “M-mom?”

Her mother’s hands shook as tears rolled down her face.

Thea’s voice became very small. “W-where are we going? I don’t understand.”

Her mother slowly pulled the station wagon onto the shoulder. Its engine idled as rain ticked rhythmically against the windshield. Thump. Thump. Thump.

For a long time, neither of them spoke.

Finally, Thea said: “I died here, didn’t I?” The certainty was equally resolute and unbearable. She was dead.

Her mother nodded, tears streaming down her face.

Thea only stared at her. She’d always been so beautiful, her mother. Those deep lines beside her smile she studied earlier were the same ones she watched that terrible night as she held Thea in her arms. Her mother said her name again and again, over and over. She remembered it.

And in the terror of her dying moments, she thought how beautiful the name her mother gave her was. How beautiful the way her mother said it was. How much she took that for granted her whole life, how much she wanted to hear it again the next day, the next week, the next year — but wouldn't get to. And it was those lines around her mother’s mouth saying her name that were the last thing she saw in the illumination of the beams before it all went to black.

She wanted to scream.

“When?” Thea asked again, nearly hysteric.

“Three years ago.” She could barely make out the words between her mother’s sobs.

Thea only laughed. It came out wrong— it had to have been wrong. There was no fucking way.

“No,” was all she could manage in reply.

“Yes, Thea.”

“No, I—I didn’t.” Thea smiled, shaking her head and laughing until it hurt, until it turned to weeping. She couldn’t stop weeping suddenly, still shaking her head back and forth. “I had so much to live for. I finally had so much to live for.”

Her mother looked at her, touching her face. “I know.”

Except her mother didn’t know. She didn’t know the half of it. She didn’t know anything.

Because her mother didn’t know about Liv.

Thea had met her in those first few months after coming home and taking the job. Liv had already been staying at the motel for a couple of weeks when they initially crossed paths. Everything she owned sat in the trunk of her car, and when Thea asked if she had any family or friends nearby, Liv simply shrugged before telling her, “No one who would let me couch surf. I’m just between things right now, and down on my luck. I always bounce back.”

Thea knew what she meant. There were people in their neck of the woods who learned early on how to make a life out of whatever was available to them. A spare room. A borrowed car. A friend’s couch. A few months at a motel. Kindness when there was kindness. Kindness when there wasn’t.

Neither of them had been looking for anything. But Thea fell in love with her all the same — because Liv didn’t need rescuing. She didn’t ask Thea for anything, even with so little. Thea helped her anyway, bringing her coffee after shift or placing an extra breakfast sandwich she snagged from the lobby bar on the counter when cleaning her room.

And despite Liv having almost nothing to her name, she gave Thea everything. She gave her early mornings. Gave her somewhere she wanted to be. Gave her the strange, wonderful experience of being known by another person and not being afraid of what that meant.

There was something about two women loving each other in a place like Harlan that made the world feel impossibly small and worth knowing. The mountains there kept their secrets. And whenever they were together, they could both believe that maybe there was a life there for them, too.

After a year of seeing each other, Thea asked Liv where she planned to go now that she had found stable work as a carpenter and was leaving the motel.

Liv had only shrugged. “Somewhere close by.”

“With me?” Thea couldn’t believe she actually said the words. But Liv had only smiled back.

“I’d like that. A lot.”

It was the closest thing to a promise they ever made to each other.

Being back in Kentucky for Thea had felt, at first, like admitting she’d failed. When she had initially been forced to come home, all she could think about was how quickly she could leave again. But that certainty had slowly cracked open into an entirely different question:

What if she stayed?

What if the life she’d always been taught by the world to look down on wasn’t a lesser life at all? What if people here deserved beautiful things, too — good work, safe homes, and access to a future they didn’t have to leave somewhere like Harlan to find?

They found a little house outside of town and up the mountain, where the woods crowded close in a dark, tangled sweep. The property was more than a hundred years old with moss all along its foundation; not much more than creaking floorboards and a leaning chimney. It was a long way to get home each day if any of the main roads were closed, but Thea liked the drive.

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Her and Liv argued over what color curtains should be put up once deposits were accounted for — Thea wanted blue, of course, (her favorite color and the obvious option) while Liv insisted yellow would brighten the space on sad days. “How does that lyric from The 5th Dimension go?” she’d said. “Let the sunshine in.”

And let the sunshine in for each other they did. Every single day.

But here, now, the sun wasn’t out. Maybe it never would be for Thea again.

Thea never told her mother about any of it. Because she wasn’t out — not to her family, and not to anyone.

She’d spent years telling herself she was waiting for the right time, though part of her began to believe there never would be one. She wanted so badly to introduce her mother to Liv, to let her see the life her daughter had built. To know that it was real and good and hers. But at 41 and after a lifetime of learning what could be lost by telling the truth, there was no clean line between courage and fear, no simple ‘right’ time that could be cut evenly down the middle when everything Thea loved was straddled in such delicate balance.

So she kept Liv to herself. She kept so many things to herself. The hardest ones, and the most important ones too. And she never told a soul about their shared life together when she moved out of her mother’s house, never said Liv’s name over Sunday coffee or showed her mother the photos she’d gotten framed but hid whenever she invited her over and Liv wasn’t there.

Her mother had never known the truth of all truths: that for the first time, her daughter was happy. That for the first time, she found something that wanted to make her stay.

Back in the present, Thea glanced into the side mirror, where there was no reflection staring back. She looked at her mother helplessly.

Her mother nodded. “You’ve been dead three years, baby.”

“Then why am I here?”

Her mother looked out through the windshield, the wiper blades swishing back and forth and on and off. She was crying again, but it was different this time. It took a long while to build up to what she was about to say. “Because you keep getting in.”

The words broke Thea’s heart. No; they shattered it. “W-why don’t you tell me earlier? That I’m—that I’m dead?”

Her mother’s face crumpled and her voice was so small Thea could hardly hear her. “Because every time I do, you disappear again.”

Thea only stared out at the road. “And then?”

“Then I sleep, get back in the car, and drive some more until you come back.”

Thea didn’t want to know. But she asked what she had to anyway. “What happened that day?”

Her mother closed her eyes. Thea waited.

“It was snowing. Your car was in the shop, so I picked you up,” her mother finally said.

Yes. Thea remembered now: her radiator had cracked that season, dumping coolant all over the driveway and leaving the engine dangerously close to overheating. She was handy enough to replace it herself — and for that matter, so was Liv — but not with the mounting bolts and hose fittings so badly corroded that she couldn't get them loose without risking further damage. For once, she’d decided it was worth towing it to a mechanic to handle.

Her mother continued. “The main roads were under construction so the long way was our only option to get you back that night. I didn't want to do it in those conditions, and told you we should wait until morning. But you insisted.”

Thea listened, a single tear rolling down her cheek.

“You said we’d be fine. You always said we’d be fine — for everything.” Her mother smiled through her tears. “You just really wanted to get home.”

Thea looked down, Liv’s face in her mind. She was always so scared of snow storms. She hated being alone in them. “I think I remember now.”

Her mother nodded. “We hit ice coming around this bend.” She straightened, attempting to gather herself. “I tried to correct it. The car slid. And we went through the guardrail there.” She pointed out the window.

Thea closed her eyes.

“I was so worried about running out of gas…I wish it had only been that.” Her mother reached across the console and took Thea’s hand. “We went down the embankment. The car rolled once, maybe twice — I don’t know because it all happened so fast.”

Thea looked at their joined hands.

“I tried to get you out.” Her mother’s voice broke. “I tried so goddamn hard.”

Thea remembered the snow again. So beautiful and so, so cold. Beneath her body, a pool of red being absorbed by it. She remembered being held.

“I couldn’t get the door open all the way,” her mother whispered. “I’d always read about mothers who could lift cars off their children with the adrenaline from situations like that. But I tried and I tried and it was like all my strength had evaporated. You were quiet and hanging halfway out. I kept telling you to stay awake.”

Thea began to cry.

“I stayed with you.”

“Mom…”

“And I held you the whole time. I didn’t let you go.” She squeezed Thea’s hand weakly and looked at her daughter with a tenderness that could break the sky and every mountain and tree under it wide open.

For a moment neither of them said anything else. Then her mother smiled, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “I think you should go home now.”

Thea frowned, baffled at the statement. “What?”

“You’ve been trying to get home for a long time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s okay.” Her mother leaned over and kissed her forehead.

Thea felt something so warm and familiar and loving in the gesture. “Mom?”

Her mother pulled gently away. Thea blinked, and then she, her mother, and the Volkswagen were gone.

. . .

Liv Hensley parked beside the cemetery gates just before sunset with flowers in her arms. She waded slowly through the rows of gravestones before finding the one she’d driven up for right as tiny droplets of rain began to fall. She stopped and looked down, feeling the usual swirl of emotions she always did.

_{THEADORA LINDEN}

_{BELOVED DAUGHTER}

_1982-2023

Liv set the bouquet of hydrangeas — blue, as always — against the stone. Wind moved through the trees as she crouched and touched its cold surface, tracing her fingers over the T, then the H, E, and A. Those four letters somehow contained eternity.

“I love you, Thea.”

She stayed like that for a few minutes, not bothering to wipe her eyes.

Then, placing the second bundle of flowers down at the grave next door, another epitaph stared back:

_{MARGARET LINDEN}

_{BELOVED MOTHER}

_1961-2023

For a long moment, Liv simply stood there. But as she turned to start heading back to her truck, she heard a voice behind her. It was almost a whisper.

“Thank you.”

Liv spun around, heart racing as she felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise—

—But no one was there.

She slowly looked down at Margaret’s grave, and smiled softly. She understood. At least, understood enough. And in that moment she wished so badly she could have met her before the accident.

The breeze stirred, brushing gently against her cheek. And for an instant, Liv could have sworn she felt a cold hand rest against her shoulder. This time she didn’t turn around.

She only closed her eyes, feeling the exact moment she was alone again.

And somewhere far away, down a darkening mountain road, a Volkswagen’s headlights came on.

Two women sat inside.

One drove.

The other leaned against the passenger window.

And they took the long way home.

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Additional Insight, Inspiration, + References

Featured artwork by Jamie O’Neill as follows:

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We don’t believe in ghosts anymore.

At least, not in the way people before us did.

Existing in a time of CT scans and quantum physics, we have explanations for things. Thunderstorms, disease, solar eclipses, and the movement of stars are just some of the major strides forward we’ve undertaken the last several centuries. And it’s in these advancements that the supernatural has been pushed further into the margins of a world that prides itself on being able to measure countless metrics; that’s grown accustomed to believing everything has an answer, even if we haven’t found it.

And yet, we still tell ghost stories.

They show up around campfires, in books (see also: my entire personal library). They’re in video games and on TV, podcasts, and social media. We tell stories about possessed children, cursed objects, souls trapped inside photographs, dead people calling telephones (shoutout to Joe Hill), and strangers who appear in mirrors.

We might not believe in ghosts the way we used to. But we’ve never stopped needing them.

And the true irony of modern horror? That the supernatural has become less rationally plausible while becoming no less culturally prevalent. It remains despite the skepticism.

Why?

Because the ghost was never only about the dead. It was always about the living.

The Dead Have Always Been With Us

Long before horror cultivated into a tangible genre (the first wholehearted love of my life), the ghost existed as a way of explaining the unexplainable — which makes sense when we really think about it.

Something happened. Someone saw or experienced it. There had to be a reason. And when there wasn’t one, the narrative offered a pretty compelling possibility: maybe death wasn’t quite as final as we wanted to believe.

The ancient world generally imagined death as a threshold that could sometimes be crossed. The dead might hang around the living for all kinds of reasons; maybe they had unfinished business, didn’t like the way they were laid to rest, or just couldn’t be fully separated from what they’d left behind. Whatever the case, across civilizations and empires big and small, that boundary separating life and death was rarely understood as completely impermeable. In a lot of iterations, the dead could come back. And their return meant something.

A ghost could be the consequence of a burial-gone-wrong, or caused by someone murdered without justice. A lover unable to accept separation (bleak, I know). An ancestor demanding honorable remembrance. A broken ritual, perhaps, or various degrees of death rites not performed to their liking. Bad luck. Bad timing. A debt left unpaid.

Haunting wasn’t exactly random in these types of stories. The dead usually returned to the realm of the living because something remained undone — and this idea survives across many lenses of modern horror. And so, the modern ghost story has inherited one of folklore’s oldest central ideas: the past doesn’t disappear simply because the present wishes for it to.

We carry what came before us, even when we believe we’ve moved beyond it — a common thread stringing all of humanity’s tapestry together over the course of many millennia. History settles into memory, which in turn often becomes silence, particularly through systemic exclusion, denial of access, and erasure of marginalized voices. What we refuse to confront or acknowledge doesn’t cease to exist, though.

It leaves a mark. Because eventually, something always comes knockin’.

From Myth to Folklore to Horror

The transition from myth and legend into modern horror as we know it today wasn’t a…clean break by most definitions. I suppose we could make this argument for any post-modern genre of art and lit that’s still around.

In a nutshell: Mythology became folklore. Folklore became fairy tale. The forms changed, sure, but the groundwork remained remarkably stable. Stories didn’t just disappear as societies changed worldwide; they were retold and given new meanings as the cultures embodying them evolved. What once belonged strictly to oral tradition could later be preserved in written form, transliterated into other languages and dialects, and eventually transformed through means of technology. Common themes of ancient logic can still be found beneath the surface of most structures: Something violating the natural order of things, getting buried, being forgotten. Traditional folklore also repeatedly revolves around boundaries; between life and death, wilderness and civilization, adolescence and adulthood, or — my personal favorite — the sacred and profane.

The story of the golem is one example that’s stayed with me in my personal study of Jewish mythology and mysticism; something I’ve dedicated the past sixteen years to. By its most familiar telling in the Kabbalistic teachings, a golem is a figure fashioned from earth and given life through sacred knowledge, blurring the line between what’s created and what creates.

It’s compelling to me because the story isn’t just presenting the idea of a creature resurrected, but an unease that surrounds the actual act in and of itself. The golem exists in a space that resists any straightforward definition, and that same ambiguity is where its power comes from. It’s a story that precedes famous tellings like Frankenstein by 1500 years, and exhibits something we see throughout old world mythology again and again: fears that emerge at the outskirts of conformities society constructed to make sense of the world. Maybe even the same ones constructed to protect those in power and further oppress those always most impacted: the marginalized and impoverished.

The Ghost of Memory

So, yeah. Modernity has definitely changed what we mean by ‘ghost’. In days of old, it was likely a literal dead person. For us, the idea can be more metaphorical without losing its power. This is because we tend to reject the stereotypical apparition while still preserving the concept of haunting. It’s a distinction that matters.

Some things we’re all universally haunted by: memories. Trauma. Grief. Pain. Actions we did [or didn't] take. These dynamics reinforce how deeply the supernatural remains embedded in our psychology. For whatever my two cents are worth: I believe memory can behave like a ghost. It arrives without permission and takes up space in our existence long after those associated with it are gone. It can be triggered by a smell, a photo, a song, a room, a voice. I write about this in my own fiction often, which you’ll see. And sometimes the more desperately we try to suppress memory, the more forceful it becomes. Horror today understands this intuitively.

We don’t need ghosts to haunt us because we do it ourselves.

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We’ve Given the Ghost Tech

Pivoting back to traditional folklore for a sec: we in the West depicted ghosts moving through places of threshold (think hearths, bridges, doorways) and active landscapes (like battlefields, mills, and mines) for a long time. The setting mattered because it gave the ghost somewhere to exist — somewhere just familiar enough to feel real.

But modern horror has armed the ghost with - hold for dramatic pause - the internet (wait…is this post haunted?…).

This isn’t a rejection of folklore. At least, not to me. It’s folklore adapting. It’s evolving yet again, like we’ve seen through every major arc of society and culture.

Ghosts have always appeared through whatever advancement a culture fears or misunderstands or is trying to suppress. The object can change, but the fear remains. And the implication is profound because it reinforces that technology doesn’t eliminate supernatural imagination; it just provides new surfaces for it to appear.

Ghost stories have endured because they’re damn good at adapting. They don’t require many specifics (though, some details make for fascinating nuance). They just require uncertainty. And uncertainty is something current times have done anything but eliminate if you ask me. In fact, we’ve arguably just created more layers of it.

Ironic, I know — in a world chuck full of data, we’ve created more gray area; more uncertainty in spheres that didn’t exist five years ago, let alone ten. Go figure.

The Horror of Knowing Too Much

Alas, this brings us to another aspect at the center of the modern horror narrative, which is that we live in an age absolutely fucking obsessed with information.

Horror’s response? To continually conjure situations where information fails us.

This, from my perspective, is a contemporary interpretation of the taboo forbidden knowledge prevalent throughout folkloric tropes. Tales of old warn against the perils of seeing too much, knowing too much, entering the wrong place, opening the wrong door, speaking the wrong name, etc. Horror today tells much of the same story. In this way, the supernatural has transitioned into the infrastructure of modern life.

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Why Do We Keep Telling Stories That Scare Us?

Perhaps the simplest answer is that fear is useful. It’s one of humanity’s oldest survival mechanisms, and teaches us to recognize danger, anticipate threats, and pay attention to stuff that might otherwise go ignored. Scary stories were often used as tools of control to warn people (namely women and marginalized folks, let’s be real) about terrifying consequences for breaking the rules or challenging authority. They encouraged obedience by creating fear of punishment or social consequences in a way other stories couldn’t replicate.

But horror does something unique in that it lets us experience fear voluntarily. It lets us choose to be afraid.

And we enjoy it. (Well, okay. I enjoy it. If you somehow ended up here and have made it this far, I’m guessing you probably do, too.).

Anyway, why is this?

Because horror allows us to experience our fears in a controlled way. Real fear is chaotic and disorganized, and horror gives it shape. The story tells us what to fear, allowing us to confront something that, outside its bounds, has no clear form.

It’s a showcase not only for supernatural events, but existential ones too. Death. Loss. Isolation. Betrayal. Powerlessness. The unknown. And while the insights we harness from it are relatively limitless, I’d also argue that horror isn’t a celebration of fear; it’s a celebration of survival. A reminder that we have to experience the dark in order to value and appreciate the light.

Our Infinity: What We Leave Behind

There’s a reason ghosts have survived more successfully than other supernatural entities in our storytelling. Think about it: the vampire can be slayed. The werewolf can be subdued at the end of a full moon. The demon can [sometimes] be exorcised.

But the ghost is more complex — it represents something that can’t be ‘defeated’ in a sense because it’s already part of a non-linear reality. The past has no anecdote. And so, the ghost persists.

We build faster, communicate faster, and arguably forget faster (as a result of rampant consumerism) than ever before. The ghost asks us to stop. To look again and recall that something happened where we are. To remember.

We also can’t accept endings as easily as we pretend to. We naturally resist them, and always have — it’s intrinsic to every fiber in our being.

Death is an ending. Yet we keep photos of people we’ve lost. Take care of their belongings after they’re gone. Visit their graves. We remember things about them, and we say their names. (Quick but relevant sidebar: I’ve written a childhood friend’s name in the dirt every place I’ve ever lived. She died seventeen years ago, and I still light a candle for her every June on her death anniversary).

In doing things like this, we consciously create a strange kind of afterlife for our loved ones comprised of rituals not entirely different from those our predecessors practiced thousands of years ago.

The dead continue to exist because we continue to tell their stories. They’ll exist for as long as someone somewhere does that. Perhaps that’s the heart horror has always worn on its sleeve so well: the idea that a ghost is just a story that refuses to end.

I think we tell these stories for the same reason we’ve always told them: because some part of us believes that nothing disappears completely. We might not believe in ghosts the same way we did 700 or 7000 years ago — but we still understand what it means to grieve.

That’s why the ghost story remains: it gives endings somewhere to go. No amount of modernization will change the fundamental conditions of being human. We still lose those we love. We still fear death. We still harbor regrets. Guilt. Shame. But also: passion, empathy, and joy. These experiences have consumed us for eternity. And their truth has led us to sculpt, to paint, to write, to sew, and to wear the ways we make meaning from loss. To dance around fires and gather under skies that we share with the rest of the planet, that eventually turn to morning and morning into night again and again and again and again.

And — maybe most tragically or most beautifully, depending on how you look at it — we still remember it all. Humanity continues to turn its face toward the darkness and ask the same, ancient question:

What if what we thought was gone never really was?

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Additional Reading + References

Bruce, S. (2023, March 15). Hope in the dark: History and ghost stories. American Historical Association. https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/hope-in-the-dark-history-and-ghost-stories-march-2023

Fleming, B. E. (2017, February 19). The Ojibwe who slew the wiindigo. Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education. https://tribalcollegejournal.org/ojibwe-slew-wiindigo

Gerakiti, E. (2025, November 5). Yūrei-Zu: Japanese horror in art. DailyArt Magazine. https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/yurei-zu-japanese-horror-in-art

Lüdicke, M. (2016). Golem magic: Exhibition catalogue. Jewish Museum Berlin. https://www.jmberlin.de/en/golem-magic

Mark, J. J. (2026, April 13). Burial in Ancient Mesopotamia: Respect for the Living, Honoring the Dead. World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2182/burial-in-ancient-mesopotamia

Ortner S (2016) Dark anthropology and its others: theory since the eighties. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1): 47–73.

Robbins J (2013) Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 447–462.

Summerour, R. and Madden, O., “Exploring Origins: The Technical Analysis of Two Yoruba Masquerade Costumes at the National Museum of African Art.” (2016). Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings. 997. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf