She eyes my three brands of mustard and a moldy tin of tomato paste. I pretend these are suitable foods. She wanders from room to room, tapping on shelves and doorjambs, running her hands over the pink and black tiles in the bathroom. Oil paintings of ballerinas I inherited from my grandmother. Cheap chiffon dresses in my closet that swallow me now, that cannot be taken in any more. The tailor at the dry cleaners clucks his tongue at me when I try. The woman lingers over my hamper which stinks of discharge and cat piss even though the cat isn’t mine and hasn’t come around in months, the tabby from across the street I used to call Oliver. I never had anything to give him.

It doesn’t want to leave.

I ask the woman what it looks like—the thing in my house—as if I don’t know. What it sounds like to her. Like I am as scared as she wants me to be, but all she can do is shake her head and roll her shoulders like it’s sitting there with her, living in her body, sharing her organs and tongue. She stops at my bed, kneels, and looks underneath it. I say it’s ironic, isn’t it? Monsters under the bed? Funny, ha, ha. She feels bad, she says, that I’ve lived like this for so long.

‘It doesn’t want to leave.’ The woman hovers shaky hands over my mattress. 

‘Can’t you force it?’

‘I don’t operate that way,’ she says, scoffing. ‘If it wants to go, then it goes.’

‘So why did you come?’

raised in the muck of it

She pauses and closes her eyes—oily lids fluttering, irises rolling—until they’re just slits of white. I think she is going to faint, that this thing will kill her. By extension, I will have killed her, and I’ll have to deal with both of our bodies at once. I wonder if Oliver will come back, if he might find our flesh suitable enough to nibble on. She returns to lucidity as if she hadn’t missed a beat.

‘You made a move,’ she says. ‘Sometimes that’s all it takes.’

When I told my mother about it, she said she grew up in a haunted house in Mississippi, raised in the muck of it, and that I wouldn’t just think I had a ghost, I would know. She said I should see a shrink instead of a medium.

When the woman in black leaves, everything feels the same. I keep my back turned to the kitchen for the rest of the day. I walk along the walls and avert my line of vision from the ceiling. Away from corners and billowing curtains. At night, I lie on the floor, rolling the ridge of my skull back and forth over the hardwoods. Selective migraine strikes depending on location, pounding in the foyer and quieting in the living room. Lamplight flickering on and off, the switch somewhere between my spinal cord and frontal lobe. I plan to call another woman tomorrow, someone sage and wary. The house doesn’t trust men. Fingers I can’t see run through my hair, and small palms press down hard on top of my ribs. I flinch but the truth is that it likes to be there, resting with me. Forcing me down on my back, open. I don’t fight as much anymore. Sometimes I try to thank it. 

In the morning, my chest will be red-pocked, tight and waxy, like a bad sunburn. The white paint on the mantel will peel, blackened wood bubbling underneath. Nobody else will notice, even if they stare. My wrists are thin, my heart races like I’m on Adderall. My nails have gone white and brittle, lunulae razed. We will carry on this way—me and the house—until one of us has had enough.

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