Riding

Miss Odell says the reason we paint our porch ceilings blue is on account of the haint can't cross water, and blue is close enough to fool it.

"They come in through the ceiling if you let 'em," she says, snapping beans into a bowl balanced on her knee, "come down through the rafters like smoke, and if the ceiling ain't blue they'll set right down on your chest and ride you till mornin'."

I ask her what riding means.

"Means you wake up and cain't move. Cain't holler. Cain't do nothin' but lay there feelin' the weight of somethin' that ain't got no weight." She doesn't look up from the beans. "Happened to my sister three times 'fore she died. Said it felt like an old woman settin' on her, breathin' in her face."

*****

I found the jar of salt behind the back door of the house we're renting, half-full, gone hard and gray at the bottom like it had wept and then forgotten how. Nobody living there now believes in it. I poured a new line across the threshold anyway, at night, when nobody was home to see me do it, and told myself it was for ants.

The old woman who lived here before us left other things too. A broom hung bristle-up by the door, which Miss Odell says you do to make the hag stop and count every straw before she can get in, and by the time she's finished counting, the sun's come up and she has to go find her skin and climb back into it before anybody sees her raw.

I asked what happens if somebody does see her.

"Then you gotta git salt on that skin 'fore she gits back in it," Miss Odell said. "Skin won't fit right no more. Burns her something terrible. She'll go on and die a while after that, all shriveled up, lookin' like she done somethin' to herself."

She said it the way she says everything, like she's already told you twice before and you're only now catching up.

*****

Three nights running I woke at the same hour with my arms pinned under nothing, my own breath loud in my ears, unable to turn my head toward the door I was certain had opened. The clock said 3:14 every time, which Miss Odell later informed me, without my asking, is the dead hour, the one hour the church bells never ring for, on account of it belonging to something else.

I didn't tell her about the door. I told her I'd been sleeping wrong, on my back, which everybody knows brings the weight down easier.

She nodded like she believed I believed that.

*****

There's a cat that comes around the property line, orange going to rust at the edges, one ear notched from some fight it lost and lived through anyway. It sits on the fence post at dusk and doesn't move for an hour, watching the house the way you'd watch a pot you didn't trust not to boil over.

Miss Odell won't feed it. Says a cat that watches a house like that is watching for the hag to leave her skin behind, so it can eat what's left of the woman inside it before she gets back.

"Cats can see the skin when we cain't," she said. "That's why they hate 'em so. A cat'll hiss at an empty chair if that's where she folded herself up."

I told her that sounded like something to protect us, then, a cat sitting guard on the fence post every night.

She shook her head slow, the way she does when she thinks I've got the whole thing backward. "Ain't protectin' nothin'. He's just hungry. Difference between a guard and a scavenger is only what's left when they're done."

*****

It's October now, the walnuts gone black and split open on the ground, and the porch ceiling above me has faded to a blue so pale it could pass for sky if you didn't know to look twice. I painted over it myself in August, two coats, standing on a chair Miss Odell wouldn't let me borrow from her kitchen on account of chairs holding memory, she said, and you don't want a haint's memory sitting under you while you work.

The cat still comes at dusk. Some nights I leave a saucer out anyway, milk gone warm by the time anything touches it, and in the morning it's always empty, licked clean down to the shine of the dish, and I never once see what came to empty it.

I sleep on my side now. Every night, on purpose.

I still wake at 3:14 sometimes, arms fine, chest fine, just the clock glowing red in the dark like it's the only thing awake to keep me company, and some nights that's a comfort, and some nights it isn't, and I've stopped trying to work out which one it's supposed to be.

Writer’s Bio

Esse Coleman (they/them) is a poet and writer of imaginative fiction, and a professional roller derby player. They are based in San Francisco and have appeared in The Iris Review, Redrosethorns, Tar River Review among others.