On Sundays She Picked Flowers
Author: Yah-Yah Scholfield
Date: 2020-10-18 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Fantasy; Historical; Adult
Description: “A ferociously talented writer. Scholfield writes with insight, beauty, and the wildness of real art.” —Victor LaValle In this sinister and surreal Southern Gothic debut, a woman escapes into the uncanny woods of southern Georgia and must contend with ghosts, haints, and most dangerous of all, the truth about herself. When Judith Rice fled her childhood home, she thought she’d severed her abusive mother’s hold on her. She didn’t have a plan or destination, just a desperate need to escape. Drawn to the forests of southern Georgia, Jude finds shelter in a house as haunted by its violent history
Publisher: S&S/Saga Press

On Sundays, She Picked Flowers
by

Yah Yah Scholfield

Copyright 2020 Yah Yah Scholfield

Unauthorized printing and sharing of this work is a violation of copyright laws and as well hurts the author.

Be mindful.

All rights reserved.

Published first in 2020 by Oni House Press

Scholfield, Yah Yah

On Sunday’s, She Picked Flowers

ISBN: 978-1-7330472-3-4 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-7330472-5-8 (ebook)

Scary things not always outside

Most scary things is inside

Toni Morrison, Paradise

Contents

Summer
one . . . 2
two . . . 14
three . . . 23

Autumn
one . . . 31
two . . . 49
three . . . 61
four . . . 68
five . . . 83

Interlude
one . . . 90

Winter
one . . . 102
two . . . 115
three . . . 125
four . . . 133
five . . . 141
six . . . 147

Spring
one . . . 153

SUMMER

1

One.

It took Judith Rice thirty-four years of hard, black-and-blue beatdown living to realize that if she wanted to be free of her mother, she was going to have to do the freeing herself. Already, she was at a loss; she wasted precious time waiting for others to do it for her. As a child, she wished on shooting stars and fairy godmothers, blindly faithful, the way that the young and hopeless are. She turned to Moses when she was older, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, Jesus, and God himself. Jude didn’t know what she wanted when she got on her knees and prayed. Patience? Thicker skin? A stronger back? Deliverance, maybe, if she believed in that sort of thing.
There was never any blood spilled in her prayers. Even in her wildest dreams, there was room for reconciliation. She didn’t want to be away from her mother forever. She always imagined a fabulous homecoming, tears and hugs and kisses where all past unpleasantness was forgotten, their future the only focus.
Jude had set her prayers and dreams aside by her thirtieth year. Her arms and legs were molted with bruises, her face scarred by her mother’s rage. Finally, she accepted what she knew to be the truth all along; if Judith wanted her freedom, she’d have to kill for it.
At first, just the thought of killing disgusted Jude. She didn’t think herself capable of such violence, of beholding it, all that blood and hurt caused purposefully. And anyway, she wasn’t that person—bloody-minded. Violent. At least, she didn’t think she was. Though, the longer she thought, the more attractive the idea became. Jude started to see sense in it. It wasn’t frivolous, a killing for the sake of killing, and it wasn’t ugly either. It was protection, defense, necessary, and desperate. If Jude could reason with her mother, she would, but Ma’am was a gruesome lady, the sort of creature that understood fists better than words. She had a debt to settle, her Ma’am did. All those whuppings, lashings, slaps, all of that screaming and shouting, cursing at, spitting at, beating on, beating down, stony words, and even colder feelings had to be paid back. Tally up the costs, thought Jude. Let Ma’am have a taste of her own medicine. Let her have it twofold.
It wasn’t as if she were killing anything real. Long ago, Ma’am destroyed the image of a mother. All that remained —the terrific physical form, the birthing body which resisted and resented—was the afterbirth. Like the placenta, it had to be removed lest it poisoned the body. It was up to Jude now to decide what to do with it. Wrap it in the day’s newspaper and discard it, burn it, bury it in the garden or, perhaps, keep it as a keepsake. Eat it.
Some might argue that matricide was unnatural, but it wasn’t so. Jude knew of several species of arachnids that ate their mothers directly after birth. Ingenious creatures, spiders, what other creature would burst from the sac and search hungrily for the thing that gave them life and, finding her prone and weak from labor, devour her. Nothing more natural to spiders, to Jude, to repay the first and only kindness given with a killing.
Her mother’s murder—imminent now, bright red over the horizon like a setting sun—might’ve been more challenging to think on if there was more than blood binding she and Ma’am to each other. Supposedly she came from the woman, but with no pictures of her as an infant, no birth certificate, or a story fondly told, it was as if she came from nowhere. A mistake, a little hiccup. Poof! And there was Jude in her too-small bassinet, in the arms of a relative, a large and unwieldy baby who despised touch and shied from the sound. Poof! And there she was at her mother’s side, unsmiling, a bonnet on her head and hard, white shoes on her feet. Poof! And there Jude was, appeared from some dark, quiet place, flesh, and blood but decidedly un-human.
Relatives, a perfumed aunt or good-humored uncle, would reach into her bassinet to hold her, kiss her cheeks, or to press the flesh, still pliant from birth, into pleasing shapes. Always they’d stop short, chuckle nervously and step away from baby Jude. Have you checked her diaper? They’d say, and I don’t think she’s quite ready to be held. Those that swallowed their discomfort soon regretted it. Funny little, Judith never laughed, never cooed, or smiled. She didn’t cry, not even when wet, and nothing could be done to amuse her. She was still as woody and just as silent; she watched, sloe-eyed and serious, seeing through, past and over, whoever held her attention.
Still, whether she liked it or not, Jude was, really, her mother’s child. Ma’am was always there, an imposing shadow. No one else could hurt her as Ma’am hurt her. It was a singular sort of hatred, focused; intent. Jude was curious as a child until Ma’am decided it was nosiness. Her silence was taken for surliness, her watchful eyes disrespectful. Jude never knew she was slow, stupid, listless and lazy, too big, and too damn ugly until her mother said so.
She aged. As a young woman, she learned to make herself useful. She taught herself to sew after accidentally ruining a blouse and learned to cook for herself after being accused of being a glutton. Friendless, Jude absorbed books, caring more for Jane Eyre and Eleanor Vance than her unreadable agemates. Alone, she flourished, mind and body and soul wild with imagination. Around her mother, she clipped her inquisitive nature, dulled the diamond-cut of her eyes. Another compromise supposed Jude; the very marrow of her being for the roof over her head, the clothes on her back.
Jude knew nothing of Ma’am; she knew everything of Ma’am. She heard others call her mother by her first name, Ernestine, but it was clear to Jude that Ernestine and her Ma’am were two very different people. Ernestine was cheerful and beloved by her sisters, the church, and the community. Ma’am was nameless and feared. Any other woman could look Ernestine in the eye. Jude stared at her mother sometimes, wondered about her mind and heart, and Ma’am glared back until Jude bent her head. Smacked Jude, still, for having the gall to defy her, the nerve to look her dead in the eye.
Nasty as Ma’am was, small acts of kindness balanced her moments of cruelty. Jude didn’t know what to make of them any more than she knew how to handle her mother’s viciousness. They were just as sudden and inexplicable, random as lightning strikes and just as rare. She never apologized, never said outright that Ma’am was wrong for anything she did, but she did invite Jude along to run errands, hold the butcher’s ticket or pick out the fruit. Her memories of her childhood were dotted with hands roughly shaking her shoulders or water being splashed on her face, of sitting at tables laden with sweets and gifts, nauseous and dizzy from a concussion. Blood was balanced by dolls, broken skin, and bones sweetened by her favorite meals and trips to stores and whatever bright, new, and shiny material things she wanted.
What to do about her contradictory mother? The thought of spilling Ma’am’s blood saddened and satisfied Judith in equal turn. She wasn’t unfeeling; she loved her mother deeply, the way a starving man loves the taste of gruel. Loved her, worshipped her, even as she knew the woman never once shared the feeling. What a sick thing love was! If Jude could cut the emotion from her chest and be rid of it, she would, for what good had it ever done her?
No more. If it was to be like this, red and terrible and full of violence, so be it. Thirty-four years was long enough.
For freedom, for her life, Jude’s mother would have to die.

§

It happened in the kitchen. Very germane—butchery in the cooking place, butcher knives and carving knives and roasting forks crowding in. The tile was quite receptive to the killing; it expected bloodiness.
Jude loved the kitchen in her mother’s house. It was beautiful indeed, a medium-sized square with black-and-white checkerboard tile flooring. You either came in from the hall or through the dining room, through an arch or a door, respectively. At some point, maybe when Ma’am was young, there was wallpaper up to compliment that pea-green backsplash, but it was removed soon after Ma’am inherited the house. The walls were now eggshell white, only two shades lighter than the cream-colored cabinets and counters. There was a deep farmhouse sink, an avocado-colored fridge, and stove (matching, her mother loved her matching colors), and yolk yellow curtains hung in the window over the sink, which looked out to a trim lawn and a flowerbox planted with crocus and cowslip.
The kitchen was littered with tchotchkes. Ma’am had a passion for them, and there were scores of them scattered on the countertops, the shelves, the small wooden table at the center of the room. Some of them she bought for herself at thrift stores or from the fancy department stores that but rarely allowed her in. Others came from her sisters, folks at church, as gifts. It was angels, mostly, ceramic cherubim and porcelain putti, all of them brown-faced and beatific, praying and singing, heads bowed, on their knees, coupled together with harps and halos, or set apart to smile their glazed smiles on their lonesome.
Ma’am rarely came into the kitchen. Cooking was Jude’s realm, and unless her mother had her mouth fixed with a particular taste, it was Jude’s job to make their meals. She didn’t mind it. When she had the kitchen to herself, she got to work how she wanted, listen to what she wanted, be how she wanted. Jude propped the window open and let in the sounds of the neighborhood, music from nearby radios, and the children loose in the street ‘til they were called in for supper.
It was hot in the kitchen; sweat gathered on Jude’s upper lip as she chopped vegetables for their beef stew. The biscuits were on the table, cooling, and the meat was simmering in the pot, the smell of fat and butter and herbs tickling her nose. Jude pushed the window open a little further. Somebody was playing Nina Simone. Somebody else had their TV turned up loud, the antics of Gilligan and his crew drowning out Nina’s piano. I’m just a soul whose intentions are good…Upstairs, Ma’am called for her.
Jude felt—well, if she were honest with herself, Jude would say she felt akin to the knife she held. It was a simple kitchen knife, one of a set, but it had a honed sharpness that Jude liked and a clean steel blade. The wood fit perfectly into the curve of her hand, and when she used it, it felt like an extension of her arm. When she sharpened it, she was sharpening her own self. Back and forth, back and forth, grinding down on the whetstone until they were both sharp enough to cleave and cut and slice.
Like the blade, she’d been ground down the whole week long. Something was itching Ma’am, so Ma’am turned all her bad feeling onto Jude. Every day there was something new to pick at how she talked, how she walked, and the way she ate her food. Only last night did her mother dress her down in front of her church friends, ruthlessly pointing out the blemishes on Jude’s cheeks, her joyless face, how her clothes hung off her body. She was nothing, less than nothing. Later in the evening, when they were alone together and when Jude was wound tight as a wire, Ma’am tore her up, again, after Jude dropped and broke one of the cherubim. Stupid Jude, clumsy Jude, Jude with butterfingers and a buttery face, thoughtless, worthless—Jude bit down on her tongue. Gnawed her cheeks ‘til all she tasted was copper.
Ma’am called. Judith? Judith! Judy, Jude, on and on and on.
She licked her lips and said, “Ma’am?”
From upstairs, muffled by walls and carpet, “You got dinner ready?”
Not yet, Jude said inwardly. Aloud, she said, “Not just yet, Ma’am. Soon.”
Jude slid the vegetables off the cutting board and into the pot with the meat. Took a deep breath of the cooking parts, the smells married, and exhaled steam.
“Girl! You hear me?”
“Yes’m!” She pushed the meat and vegetables around the pot with a spoon and took another breath. “I said it’s almost done!”
There was thumping from upstairs, her mother coming down. When she went into the kitchen, she was dressed for bed, quilted robe, and a pair of house shoes, hair brushed back from her face. Jude was the spitting image of her mother—the woman would deny it if told, but they shared a mouth, the round cheeks, the dimpled chin. They were about the same height and weight as well, stocky and big-boned with a good amount of padding around the waist, tummy, and thighs.
Jude didn’t know how old her Ma’am was. Fifty-something? Sixty? She said she worked on her pappy’s farm when she was a girl, but there was little of that strength left in her. Time and age and soft living softened her back and belly. Sickness tired her, dulled her senses. She hobbled when she walked, and her hands, once graceful and refined as Jude’s, were stiff, gnarled.
Ma’am came around the table and stood at Jude’s shoulder, looking down into the cooking pot. She had a bad smell to her, peppermint and camphor with shit underneath. She smelled old and sick, something dying awash in perfume. Jude held her breath as her mother stepped back and sat down at the table. Watched. Sometimes when Ma’am was bored or aggravated, she sat around waiting for Jude to make mistakes. Last week it was one of the guest bathrooms. A speck of dirt on the mirror, a little grime behind the faucet—Ma’am held her nape and shook her like a puppy, forced her head into the toilet while shouting incoherently about sloth and filth of slovenliness.
“You handled them, errands?” asked Ma’am.
“Yes’m.”
“And the living room? You vacuumed the living room?”
They could go on like that for hours, Ma’am listing chores, and Jude checking them off. Yes’m, yes ma’am, of course not ma’am. Jude said, “I got everything done, Ma’am.”
“Your room?” Jude paused. Outside Nina Simone sang Don’t let me be misunderstood, all sorrowful. “My room?”
She pretended not to hear her mother’s question and brought the heat down under the pot. When Ma’am asked again, Jude nodded her head and said she had.
“Yeah,” said Ma’am. “You must’ve. Seemed awful empty, bag packed up, and everything. You going somewhere?”
Jude couldn’t help the note of fear that colored her voice. “You went into my room?”
“Your room?” Ma’am laughed and rose from her seat. “You ain’t got a room in this house, girl. I own this place and everything in it, including your sneaky ass. Where was you planning to go with that bag? Huh?”
There was the right thing to say at the moment and the wrong thing. If Jude was sensible, she’d shut up and say nothing, maybe tell a little fib about going to visit one of her aunties. Getting caught in a lie was nothing; Jude, experienced from wriggling out from under her mother, knew how to get herself out of just about anything. The truth, however, —that being in the house made her feel like a wild thing trapped, that she could take no more of the beating, that each and every second under her mother’s roof was crushing her body and spirit to dust—she didn’t dare say aloud.
“I can’t be here no more, Ma’am.” The words fell out of her, loose as water. Silence spread across the space, the tension palpable. Jude picked the knife back up to distract her hands, gently scraping the blade against the cutting board. “It ain’t no good. Not for me, not for either of us, I reckon.”
“Not good for you?”
Ma’am stood in front of Jude with her arms folded over her chest. This close, she looked as mean as she did when Jude was a child when all that flesh was looming over her. Jude shrunk back against the counter.
“No good for you? Girl, you something else! I birthed you, feed you, put clothes on your back, keep a roof over your lazy behind and this place ain’t no good for you?” Her mother laughed, boisterous, then put out a large hand to touch Jude’s arm. “Go ‘head and finish cooking so you can lay yourself down. You obviously sick.”
“I ain’t sick,” said Jude. She didn’t mean to say it so curtly, but it was out now. She moved out of Ma’am’s reach, pulling back cautiously. When Ma’am reached for her again, Jude yanked away with more force.

“Don’t—don’t touch me.”

“Don’t touch you?” Ma’am repeated, voice rising. “Don’t touch you?”
Jude held tight onto the knife, held tight to her lurching belly. She knew how this went. Ma’am got worked up, took that anger out on Jude, and punished her for this, that, or something else. But Jude was a rack for rage to be thrown on like a coat. She was her own person, her own thing. She didn’t have to take it anymore, not if she didn’t want to.
In a small voice, better suited for a child than a grown woman, Jude told her mother she was leaving. She had the money for it—five months of tailoring suits and mending sleeves and fussing over hems saved up and tucked away in her bedroom. Jude didn’t know where she’d go yet. Maybe Auntie Phyllis would take her in if she asked nice enough. She’d be fine without Ma’am, and Ma’am would be fine without her. Better this than the blood. Better this than the rending of flesh.
She saw it before she felt it; Ma’am’s hand in the air, the gold band flashing in the dim light. The ache of the slap, the sting of the cut from her mother’s ring, the blood dribbling down her cheek, then shame. To be full-grown, to be so tall and just as big as Ma’am and to be slapped across the face like a woman and child both! To be slapped as if it was what she deserved as if all she was worth was a calloused open palm and a wedding ring.
Jude staggered, the knife and cutting board and vegetable scraps skating across the floor. First, blood spilled. Ma’am brought them here, not Jude. And she was still standing there, fists balled up, nothing in her eyes, not even hatred. The apathy struck harder than the slap.
Body burning with anger, with disgust and a bloodiness bucking in her caged dogs, Jude slapped back. She thought it would be harder, fighting her mother. As a child and even now, as a grown woman, striking back was on par with murder and warranted a heavier hand, a weapon that promised more damage. But Jude was the weapon now: the whistling switch, the leather belt, the wire hanger and phone cord all in one, swinging wildly, catching without prejudice the breasts and genitalia, tearing the back and buttons, lashing the belly and face. She beat her nastily, ruthlessly. With one hand, she scratched her mother’s face, and with the other, she pulled out clumps of fragile hair. Ma’am got her licks in. However, they were returned to her as soon as Jude caught her breath, found her balance. Old anger exhumed, past violence remembered; the taste smacked out of her mouth, the air whupped from her lungs. Jude gritted her teeth; she did not stop.
Somehow the pair of them ended up on the floor. The house shook as they landed, a bodily shudder that grounded cherubs, porcelain wings hissing across the tile, disappearing beneath the stove. Ma’am groaned at the loss of her angels, at landing on her hip. They sat apart for a moment, each of them trying to find their breath. Jude’s hand was still clutching her heart when Ma’am rose up, knocked Jude flat on her back with a powerful slap to the chest, clambered on top of her, and wrapped her hands around Jude’s neck.
It was slow going and quiet. The only noise was Jude’s sounds, her grunting, and whimpering. She scratched Ma’am’s arms and tried to pry the hands away from her throat, but it was futile. Her mother’s grip was too tight. She glared down at Jude, cold and unrelenting, eyes empty as the husks of insects. She looked at Jude as one might look at a perfect stranger, nameless passerby instead of her own flesh and blood. Jude wheezed up at Ma’am. A drop of bloody drool landed wetly on her face.
Jude was afraid, so afraid of death and of her mother, but she was relieved too. Finally, they were through with these games. Yet, there would be no more pretension between them. Eyes bulging out of her head, Jude thought again of those matricidal arachnids. There must’ve been a moment for them too when the spider-mothers fought back against their brood. But then also, those were insects. They only had a matter of weeks to get hungry; Jude had had her entire life.
Her mind was loosening. Brain lacking for oxygen, her vision swam, and the air glowed white. She felt each of her violent, hateful thoughts as flames in her chest, burning like forest fires. She hurt her head and her chest. Jude wanted to die to be finished with this whole messy business, but her body wouldn’t let her fall into it. She burned, glowed. Jude’s eyes darted from side to side, searching the kitchen floor until she saw the gleaming, grimacing blade of her knife. She threw out her hand, long fingers skidding gracelessly across the tile, and grabbed for the handle. The blade sliced her palm as she grabbed for it, virgin blood like crushed cherries against the steel. She took it in hand, and the world fuzzed over, everything staticky and dim and too close. The lights of the kitchen flashed above her like beacons, headachingly bright in the otherwise grainy landscape.
She gripped the knife and raised it high as she could. Stuck it into her mother’s face.
The knife lodged itself into Ma’am’s temple and sank down half an inch before Jude was able to tighten her grip on the knife and drag it deeper. Her hand moved purposefully, though not steadily. The blade cut through the eyelid, the cornea, split the iris, stuttered across the nose, and sliced the lips into four distinct sections. Ma’am’s face, halved on the diagonal, divided in two, covering both she and Jude in a hot gush of blood.
A moment of confusion—her mother broke her grip on Jude and fell backward, unharmed eye blinking wildly. She felt along her face then rose to her feet. Ma’am found her reflection in the stewpot, distorted in the metal. However, what was clear was the extent of trauma, the oozing eye and torn lips, the nose damaged beyond all repair. Jude remained on the floor, shocked, as her mother’s good eye widened, as the broken mouth fell open. Ma’am looked from the pot then to Jude, vomited, then fell stiffly onto her back. The house shook on impact, the last of the cherubim falling, fragile things tinkling and quaking in place.
Jude shook. She put her hand to her throat and massaged it. Swallowing was a Herculean effort and the right sight of her body like a limb falling asleep. Her head burned still; the lights were too bright, and in her ear, she heard buzzing, crashing, roaring. Her eyes rolled back as she wheezed and sputtered. Jude crawled to Ma’am on her hands and knees. Her mother made pitiful little noises, choking on her vomit, twitching, and grunting. Her eyes rolled over Jude’s face, pleading.
For what? What did she want? For Jude to save her? For Jude to be merciful? Shakily, Jude rose to her knees to see Ma’am better. There was no way the woman could survive it. Either she’d die then, quick and painless, or late in the evening, still gagging on her rancid sick and bleeding out. A bitter portion of Jude wanted Ma’am to lie there as long as possible, for her to suffer for hours with no one but Jude to watch her die. A side sickened by the carnage, the ugly necessity of the murder, tore at the sight of her Ma’am. She went with her second mind. She took up her blade and slit her mother’s throat.
The blood that soaked Jude didn’t cleanse; it seared. Jude remained on her knees with the knife in hand, her hands and clothes awash with red. Her mind was still thoughtless. She moved on feeling—the slickness of the blood, the taste of bile on her tongue, the way her body trembled, and rattled even as she commanded it to be calm. What was this? Only days ago, she thought herself incapable of this very act, and now she felt animal. Tameless.
Jude stood carefully so as not to slip in the blood and washed her hands in the sink. She cleaned her mother the best she could, swabbing away the worst of the gore and babying the corpse, stripping off the soiled clothes and rinsing vomit from her hair, the formless chunks and stringy saliva caught in the pressed tresses. Unable to look at it—at her—any longer, Jude covered Ma’am’s face with a dishtowel. Afterward, she got back down on her knees and held her mother’s hand in her own. She was dry-faced and silent, trembling still as she kissed the cruel knuckles, the palm which broke and punished. Jude forgave the golden band for the part it played, slipped it off her mother’s finger, cleaned it, then put it on her own finger.
Jude held her hand up to the light. The ring smiled, and Jude smiled back.

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13

Two.

Now that Ma’am was dead, the house was hers. All of it—the kitchen, the plastic-wrapped parlor, and living area, the seldom-used guest bedrooms, even her mother’s private suite of rooms—was hers, and if Jude so wished, she could run through the house, her house, and destroy it all.
But Jude was not so violent, nor was she destructive. Though her blood raced hot and excited through her veins, she could not—would not—bring herself to ruin the house. Jude instead used her newfound freedom to explore, the rooms kept secret, the places forbidden unto her. With a delicacy reserved for holy items, she peeled back the crinkly plastic covers off of chaises, lampshades, and overstuffed armchairs and pressed her skin to the never-before-felt brocade and damask. Jude ran her hands along with the glass faces of photographs, smudged mirrors, streaked red across the bleach white carpeting, and left her fingerprints on carefully polished wood, gleaming gilded picture frames.
Untouchable this, untouchable that—Jude felt it all with her grubby, dirty hands which, she supposed, were no longer grubby or dirty or unworthy. They were good hands, hands that owned the fine house on the fine street, and all that resided within.
Good feed, too. And feet that owned the fine house were allowed to go wherever they pleased, even into the master bedroom. Jude entered her mother’s bathroom, marveled, for a moment, at all of Ma’am’s perfumes and lotions and serums, then started a shower. The water rained hot on her skin, flowed red, then clear as she sluiced off her blood and Ma’ams. She applied the lotion, the perfume, the hand cream and face cream, and special oils her mother dabbed on her wrists and neck. She hissed as she patted her cuts with antiseptic and bandaged the worst of her wounds, all the while avoiding her reflection.
Clean now and outfitted in one of her mother’s dresses, Jude went to her own room. Ma’am had been there before her, had gone through her things. Jude’s green suitcase sat on her bed like an accusation, the clothes mussed and tossed about. No matter, no problem. Jude packed again, her clothes, her headscarves, and books (faithful “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights,” “The Haunting of Hill House”), a first aid kit, and her cookie tin full of sewing materials. She found her money hidden beneath a loose floorboard, three hundred and fifty dollars in total. Jude stuffed the money into her pocket, slipped on a black coat, and left.

Because Ma’am was nothing but dead meat cooling on the kitchen floor, Jude didn’t think she’d mind all that much if she took the car. The car waited for her out on the driveway, a canary yellow ‘65 Pontiac. It was a sleek metal beast, the kind that guzzled gas and required frequent polishing to keep the steel skin attractive. Ma’am rarely used it, and when she did, she treated it like a baby buggy instead of the fire-breathing dragon it was. After years of doing little more than rusting and transporting soft produce, softer bottoms, Jude knew the car would kill for a chance to live up to its potential.
Jude threw the suitcase into the back of the car and drove. Ma’am’s house shrank smaller and smaller until it was nothing more than a speck in the rearview mirror, then only an image in her mind. She drove aimlessly, recklessly, car weaving in and out of traffic. She let the dragon-car lead her, let it drive until it stopped. She wanted to lose herself in the glare of the street lights, the high beams, drown in the sea of cars that raced at her. Wanted to be taken in and changed and be led astray by the hum of so many bodies and machines on the highways, byways, and little towns in between.
Cities passed. She crossed county line after county line. The hours stretched, and Jude fell into them; the sky was pitch-black and was within the pulse of the universe, burning bright as the stars above her. Her vision swam. Black spots danced before her, and her body shook with adrenaline, with fear, with the exhilaration of death narrowly escaped. Where was she, anyway? Where was her body, mind, fingers, and toes, and who did it belong to? Did it matter? Bound by nothing, held by no one, Jude came and went as she pleased, stopping only to piss, eat or take short, terrified naps off the shoulders of dark roads. Somewhere along the way, Jude choked down thick, tarry coffee under the watchful eyes of truckers. A waitress with a closed-off face pitied the bruises wringing her neck and offered her tea for her throat, but asked no other questions and said little else to Jude as she refilled her coffee mug. Jude drank ‘til she was jittery, body moving double time, her brain zipping from this thing to that.
Egged on by the caffeine, mind burning with a violent luminescence, Jude speed down the highway. It was as if the world had opened up for her and her alone. She saw its colorful insides, the blur of trees and houses in her peripheral as lovely as paintings. Jude crossed new county lines, and the radio stations scrambled. Soft, twangy country songs of wheat and big, blue skies blurred into ear-splitting rock music, electric guitar, and acoustic battling it out over the airways. Enraged Baptist preachers warned good folks against corrupting influences, the evils of man and the world; their tinny voices fought to be heard over the sound of disco music, bass and brass just about drowning out scripture. I go out walkin’ after midnight, out in the moonlight…I see a red door, and I want it painted black!... Fee-fi, fo-fum lookin’ down the barrel of the devil’s gun…And He will rain his wrath upon these heaths, these murderers, adulterers, and strange women, these depraved beasts of the night!
By the time the car gave out, Jude was way up in northern Georgia, on the very edges of the Chattahoochee-Oconee forest. All at once and without so much as a beep to warn her, the Pontiac sputtered, slowed down, and stopped. Jude sat in stunned silence, breathing out through her nose, unsure of whether to scream or laugh or cry. It was far past midnight, the sky black and splotched with stars, and fate—or an under-gassed Pontiac, depending on how she looked at it—brought her to the middle of nowhere.
This couldn’t be where she was meant to be, was it? Jude’s eyes strained to make sense of the shadows and twisted shapes of the trees. The noises, too, were foreign. A city girl, born and raised amongst houses, high rises, and factories, she was unnerved by the hoots and calls of nightbirds, the croaking of frogs, all that skittering and rushing through the leaves. Something crackled, another thing screeched. Up ahead, a sign warned her that she was encroaching on government-protected territory. Right below that sign was another one that read, “Whitney, A Mile Ahead.”
Jude took her suitcase and the emergency flashlight hidden beneath the passenger’s seat, locked the car doors then started toward the town. When she reached Whitney, she was relieved to find it wasn’t anything like the backwater shantytown she’d been dreading. It was a small but proud-looking town, obviously and unabashedly stuck in its antebellum days. She thought as she walked past the town’s sign—a flat piece of wood painted white, the name lovingly handprinted—that it might’ve been one of those places where the ladies wore hoopskirts and the men all looked like Clark Gable. A whole village of good ole’ boys, she thought, and the idea proved itself right once she caught sight of the cotton plants painted onto the sign along with dozens of lily-white faces, baskets of yellow corn and sugarcane.
Besides some cosmetic wear and tear, Whitney looked to be a beautiful place to live. Unlit gas lamps gazed down at her, long necks craned to watch her walk through the empty streets. The houses were painted in pastel colors, delicious white porches with swings and charming weathervanes, neat gardens, and flowerboxes. A general store with crystal clear windows advertised fresh strawberries, and the church next door had a marquee out front that declared that the good Lord was always watching. There was a post office, a haberdashery, a baker’s and a butcher’s, perfect little buildings with painted window frames and clean storefronts.
There was an inn in town, further down the main street. Jude, unfamiliar and uncomfortable with strange places such as these, found the concept of paying to stay outside of her home foreign. When she and Ma’am traveled, it was only to the houses of family members; they bunked down with cousins or in small guest bedrooms, free of charge, and with breakfast waiting for them in the morning. It was the safest way—otherwise, they might find themselves on the wrong end of a gun, holed up in barns and comfortless motels, two obvious Black women roaming in the night.
Still, it was a pretty thought, staying at a hotel, waking up somewhere new. What a world it would be if Jude could go wherever she liked without the threat of violence! If the world was really open to her, made for her…She wondered how it might be if she permitted to stroll down the street aimlessly, to wear her hair how she liked, to speak how she wanted, to ask a white stranger for a sip of cool water knowing no harm would come unto her. Fearful but more tired than anything, Jude went into the inn and hoped for the best.
The inn’s exterior was like the rest of the town, clean and white and kempt. Inside was another story. The wallpaper peeled, and the carpet was dingy with a lack of vacuuming. Jude could smell the years of tobacco and must, wet shoes, and mildew. All of the furniture was grey-brown with dust. Jude’s much-abused throat ached as she breathed in the closed off-air of the lobby.
Wheezing, she dinged the bell, and on the third ring, a woman appeared from a backroom dressed in her bedclothes. Her eyes were bleary with sleep. She frowned at the sight of Jude.
“Yes?” said the woman.
Jude wet her lips and said, “Food?”
The woman led Jude to a kitchen no bigger than the lobby, all wood paneling, and hot, musty air. Jude slipped out of her coat and laid it across her lap before taking a seat in one of the rickety wooden chairs scattered around the kitchen. She stretched her legs as the innkeeper poured her a glass of tap water, then sat a plate of food down in front of her. It was meager fare, leftovers most likely—a couple of stale dinner rolls, a gray piece of meat and water string beans—but Jude ate, the silence is broken only by her sporadic coughing and hard swallowing. Occasionally, the woman muttered for Jude to slow down.
After Jude’s second plate of food, the innkeeper asked her if she had any place to stay for the night.
Jude tore into a hard roll with her teeth and shook her head. “No. You got a room?”
“None,” said the innkeeper. “At least, none you can stay in.”
“Any other places’ round here, then? A motel? Somebody’s house?”
“There’s no other towns for at least a couple hundred miles, and I’m awfully sorry to say it darling, but with that color of yours and all them bruises, I don’t think anybody’ll let you into their home.”
“There’s gotta be something you can do. I can’t go back to where I came from. I just…I just can’t.” The thought alone of returning to Ma’am’s house was enough to make Jude’s words catch in her throat. She let out a choked sob as she remembered the blood, the sight of Ma’am’s face covered with a dishtowel, waiting to be found. Jude buried her face in her hands and wept.
There was a moment of awkward silence—Jude weeping and the innkeeper watching her weep. Jude felt the woman put a hand on her shoulder, and when she spoke to Jude, she spoke softly, like how one spoke to a child, saying, “Come now, come on now, girl. Calm down.” She rubbed Jude’s back in soothing circles. “Here now, take a drink of this.”
Jude was handed a second glass of water, and Jude sipped from it slowly, hot tears rolling down her cheeks. When she was calm enough, the innkeeper said, “I can’t...you stay for long. An hour, tops, just so you can rest your eyes.”
It was a small grace, but Jude was grateful for it. She carried her suitcase with both hands as the innkeeper brought her to the second floor and showed her a closet-sized room with a narrow bed, a nightstand, and a small, square window high on the wall.
“I don’t usually rent this room out. It’s for housekeeping, mostly.” She looked good up and down, taking in her height and girth. “Might be a bit small for you.”
“That’s alright,” replied Jude softly. She took a seat on the bed without removing her shoes, not wanting to get too comfortable. “Thanks for this. You didn’t have to.”
“I know,” huffed the innkeeper. She stuffed her hands down into her pockets and looked at the floor. “Get some rest. I’ll come wake you in an hour.”
She closed the door then, leaving Jude alone in the small room. Jude pulled her feet onto the bed and stared at the ceiling, speckled and lined with hairline fractures. She stared until she couldn’t, eyelids finally closing in the wee hours of the night.

Out of guilt or kindness, the innkeeper gave Jude two hours to sleep instead of one. When she knocked on the door, it was almost three in the morning, the sky still black, and the moon still high. Again, Jude was hurried down the halls and brought down the backstairs. The innkeeper brought her to a storage closet on the first floor, flicked on the light, and launching into speaking all before Jude had a chance to take in her surroundings.
“You gotta be out of here. Fast,” The innkeeper said.
“But, I don’t got any place to go.”
The innkeeper waved her off. “Don’t you think I thought of that already? Now listen. It’s a little ways from here, and I don’t know if you’ll find it all that comfortable, but there’s a cabin out in the woods.”
Jude blinked. “A cabin?”
“A cottage, a house. It’s ‘bout as big as this place is. Nobody’s lived there for a while ‘cause of the stories.”
Parrot-like, Jude repeated, “Stories? What stories?”
The innkeeper sighed exasperatedly. She looked Jude over, considering her for a second, then told her the stories she knew. “It’s stupid stuff, really. ‘Bout ghost and spooks and the like haunting the woods. Gives me the willies for even thinking about it, though. Lots of folks raised around here were brought up believing that house is haunted, that all sorts of bad things live in the trees.”
“You don’t believe really believe them stories, do you?” asked Jude.
“Yes. Well, no. Oh! I don’t know! People see all sorts when they’re stuck out there on their own. It don’t do the mind any good, loneliness. Being on your lonesome for so long, especially with all them wicked stories rattling around in your head…” The innkeeper trailed off. “I imagine you start to believe in ghost stories once you’re in one.”
The idea of living in this supposed haint infested should’ve frightened Jude. Ghosts and ghouls, things in the shadows…It should’ve turned her hair white, raised goosebumps on her skin, but she was thrilled at it. Solitude, haunted or not, was all Jude dreamt of since she was a little girl, just learning of worlds hidden and kept apart. She would be Jane at Thornfield, Eleanor going into Hill House, only she wouldn’t be frightened away by ghosts (maybe) or mad wives.
“How much is it?” asked Jude.
“A hundred. You want it?”
She did! Haints and stories be damned, Jude wanted the strange house, the quiet. She gave the innkeeper her money then stood aside as the woman popped open Jude’s suitcase and stuffed it full of supplies. Jude’s possessions being few, it was easy for the woman to add a wool blanket, some canned goods, packets of vegetable and fruit seeds, matches, batteries, a little canister of kerosene, and a hardy oil lamp. Before leaving the closet, the innkeeper handed Jude a rusty ring of keys.
“One for the front door, one for the attic, and one for the shed outback. Let’s see what else, what else…” The innkeeper walked as she talked, casually throwing out tidbits about the house over her shoulder while Jude followed behind. “There’s electric lights out there, I think, so need to worry about that. Rest of the house runs on gas, but last time I checked the heating was a little finicky.”
“Is there plumbing?”
The innkeeper shrugged. “Maybe. I think it’s got toilets, but I don’t know about hot water.” Once they reached the lobby and stood at the front door, the woman asked Jude what happened to her neck. “’ Less you don’t wanna talk about it.”
Jude touched her fingers to the blue-black necklace around her throat, the flesh there tender and painful. She had half a mind to tell the woman the truth—she wouldn’t see her again anyway, and so what if a complete stranger knew the sort of violence she was capable of? Then again, thought Jude, she only just got the house. It didn’t make sense to risk it all now, not when she was so close.
“I got into a fight with my mother.”
The innkeeper hummed. “Makes sense then that you can’t go back.” She looked at Jude’s throat, squinting. “Had a hell of a grip, looks like.”
Jude shrugged, then brought her coat close to her body to hide her neck. If the innkeeper noticed, she said nothing as led Jude outside and pointed out the short path into the woods. She promised to have one of “the boys” bring her car around and up the service road, and gasoline, just in case.
“It’s just across the street now. It’s a straight walk all the way through. So long as you stay on that main path, you’ll be fine.”
Jude nodded her head, shifted her suitcase to her free hand, and flicked on her flashlight. The innkeeper gave her a parting gift—a slip of paper with a crude drawing of a map detailing how to get to the house, the path through the woods sketched sloppily from memory. Jude thanked her again, crossed the street, and went into the woods.

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22

Three.

Before entering the woods, nature was, to Jude, nothing more than the wall of trees that separated the highways from the houses and the tiny clusters of skinny black alder and American sweetgum planted in concrete to add pops of color in otherwise bleak cityscapes. Nature was poinsettia wrapped in red foil at Christmastime, pinecones scented with cinnamon and dusted with glitter, rose bushes planted proudly, resplendent in the springtime, and sweet-smelling magnolias at the height of summer. The woods were forbidden. It was the dirt she wasn’t supposed to play in, the bugs she shouldn’t handle, the grass she couldn’t roll in, the rain she was forced to avoid as a little girl lest she tracked in mud or ruined her clothes or, God forbid, ruined her hair, recently pressed, that took hours to perfect.
But now Jude stood in nature, as much a part of it as the fronds and flowers. She was at the cusp of it, stomach clenched with fear, with excitement. Was this it? Was this what she was kept from all these years? It seemed so magical yet straightforward, the weeping willow and wisteria wailing onto satiny blue pillows of clouds, heads drooped mournfully against a blanket of stars. The oak and ash and beech were sadder up close, gloomy in the night. Jude craned her head to see the tops of the trees, neck, and chest straining. She took a step in. Stepped right into the mouth of the monster, right into its verdant maw, through its dewy throat, down, down, down into its mossy belly, dark and full of vines, wildlife. Mosquitoes swarmed around her head and lightning bugs. To her tired eyes, they looked like a thousand pupils gazing back at her, winking, flashing, teasing her deeper in.
Pupils dilated, Jude panted as she walked through the woods. Her flashlight shone small patches of white on rustling bushes and dead grass. There was a palpable nervousness in the air, an anxiety so thick you could mold it with your hands. The trees held their breath, regarded Jude, this bipedal stranger with her mouth agape, passing through terra incognita noiselessly. She touched nothing, and yet she was touched, felt, held. The insects followed her, brilliant bulbs providing as much light, if not more, than her flashlight. Tiny winged things danced around the light of her torch while others danced across her skin. Cobwebs curled into her hair and streamed over her face like bridal veils. Each breath she took brought in spiders and spores, the freshest air she’d ever breathed.
She went in deep. Deeper. So entranced was she by the procession of insects that Jude was scarcely aware when she strayed from the path until she was far from it. She walked down winding dirt paths and narrow stone roads that branched off and broke at odd junctures. She went into clearings littered with the dead stumps of trees, many-ringed with age, to closets of jasmine and myrrh, sweet with that earthy perfume, peppered with fungi and hanging mosses. Jude was lost for the second time that day. Only this time, she was surrounded by black, birch trees and bugs, haints, and other creatures invisible. Her heart was beating like a rabbit’s, cold sweat on her neck. Jude stared into the darkness, and the dark stared back.
It came soon after. Jude heard its low growling, felt the sound of it reverberating through the trees. The growl was deep enough to have come from the earth itself, from the core even. Jude spun and tried to catch it moving. Her flashlight flickered, the white light dimming. Again, the thing growled, closer this time, near enough to make her skin prickle with gooseflesh and raise the hairs on the back of her neck.
Then the flashlight went out. Jude and the woods plunged into pure darkness. She screamed, whined low and desperate, then clapped a hand over her mouth.
Once upon a time, nature was distant. Now, it was right at her back, incomprehensibly large, big enough to take the air out of her lungs. Jude couldn’t see what stalked her. She could only feel its coarse fur through the fabric of her clothes, its hot breath panting against her cheek, all rank and reeking of death, of flowers. The stillness stretched on, and Jude panted, hand clammy and over warm against her mouth.
The thing stepped in close. Footsteps were eerily quiet against the underbrush. Jude heard leaves and twigs crunching, the creature’s breathing, then she felt its wet nose prodding the back of her neck, sniffing, snuffling, trying to sus out her scent.
Jude could take no more. She gasped, good sense, and motion returning to her as quickly as she lost them. She dropped everything, her suitcase, and flashlight, and ran. She told herself she’d come back for them, but all that mattered then was running and running fast, even as the branches scratched her skin, and the roots tripped her. The woods rushed past her as a smear of color, wet like watercolors. Her skin was torn, gnarls and thorns nipping at her sensitive flesh, but still, she didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, not until she reached the edge of the woods and faced a vast field of wild grass and flowers.
Across the field, Jude saw the roofline of the cottage and the dark silhouette of the chimney. She glanced behind herself and saw the line of trees, then ahead, the field and house. Primally, in the way that prey knew the scent of its predators, she understood that the area was her only barrier, a fence of flowers against what lived in the woods.
Dazed, body throbbing from the hours of pain impressed upon it, Jude limped onto her land. The moon, bright and silvery, guided her through the field, through the tall grasses and calamint, bluet and iris, up a stone path overgrown with moss, and onto a creaky porch. Even in the limited light, Jude saw the house was alive with the high buzzing of summer insects, the cicadas crickets, the suffocatingly clean smell of the outdoors. “A supernatural summer,” thought Jude. This gorgeous house, a fine thing, all yellow wood and stone, and ivy; still, it was strange. There was an energy to it, a sort of bad vibration that twisted Jude’s sensitive tummy and dampened her underarms with nervous sweat. A malaise, fog green and ferny, hung over the house as heavy as a caul over a newborn’s face.
She dug the house key out of her pocket, unlocked the front door, and—from the moment Jude stepped into her new home, she knew that the stories about it were true. She knew that there were monsters in the attic and ghosts in the cellar. There were haints in the cupboards, ghouls, and goblins behind the wallpaper and under the floorboards. This was a haunted house, and the sickness inside it was ingrained, learned. It was bad land, unholy and toxic and devilish, polluted water, or a blackened body somewhere beneath the foundations. Someone died here, Jude was sure of it, or many somebodies. Jude wouldn’t be surprised to learn that past tenants complained of nausea or migraines; she felt lightheaded herself and sick enough to vomit, off-kilter as a spun penny slammed down, stopped suddenly.
Elsewhere in the house, on one of the floors just above her head, a door slammed closed. Footsteps walked overhead, slowly, as if creeping through the halls, curious about who came in. Jude followed the sound with her eyes, watching and listening until the footsteps stopped at the top of the stairs. Nothing came down. Jude didn’t know what she’d do anyway if something did come down.
The house was hers, all hers, and Jude could do with it what she pleased. If she liked, she could destroy it, run through it like a hurricane, flipping over the dusty furniture and knocking down the plaster walls with her bare hands. She could, but she wouldn’t. Despite everything, Jude liked the house. She respected the queasy feeling it left her with, the layers of dust and must, how the stale air of a home could weaken even the strongest of constitutions.
The house was much like many of the homes Jude had seen. If you started from the front door, there was a small entrance hall with two arches and a door; the arch to the left led to the parlor, the arch to the right led to a sunroom, and then the door led to the kitchen. The sunroom was bare, empty save for a wicker chaise lounge. The parlor was small but charming. There was a brick wood-burning fireplace, a couple of sofas, chairs draped with dingy white sheets, and a discreet door that connected the parlor to the dining room. She flicked on the lights as she went from room to room, kicked the wobbly baseboards, and sifted through the drawers of the dining room’s oversized hutch filled with dirty silverware.
Nearly all of the rooms on the first story were connected to each other somehow. Jude found her way to the kitchen via the dining room through a door that blended in with the wallpaper. When she crossed over, she stopped short. She was in her mother’s kitchen again. There was the round table with lopsided chairs, the farmhouse sink with the dark ring of rust around the drain. The pale-yellow walls were almost sickly beside the pea-green backsplash and checkerboard tiles. Jude stood at the threshold and looked unblinkingly at the floor, which was covered in a mess of dead leaves. She could see her mother’s silhouette among the leaves, red splotches on the white tiles where the fatal wound was. Jude fiddled with the drawer handles, the doors of the cupboards, checked the icebox, then, finally, opened the door that led back to the hall that led to the foyer. Once more, she looked over her shoulder at the shape in the leaves; from where she stood, from how the dull light fell on it, it looked like it was breathing, slowly and pained, but still alive.
The house—her house—was, as the innkeeper said it would be, decently sized and not all that extravagant. In the second story, Jude found four bedrooms of similar size and shape, though only one of the four was furnished. It was sparse furnishing—a wooden bed frame, a thick woven rug, and an imposing and solid armoire. Two of the other three rooms were inaccessible, locked from the inside, and had no key to open them. The last of the rooms were smaller than the others, more like a storage closet than a full-sized bedroom. Down the hall was a half-bath outfitted with just a sink and a toilet. A full bathroom stayed on the opposite side of the stairs with a deep porcelain tub and a vanity. As warned, the lights worked, but the hot water didn’t.
Jude found her way up to the attic accidentally. She expected a hatch, a ladder descending from the ceiling. There was instead a slim white door with a broken glass knob. Jude slid the key—black, rusted, solid weight in her hand—into the lock, turned it, and the knob carefully (she didn’t want to cut herself on the jagged edges), then looked up into the dark of the staircase to the attic. It was steep and narrow, with no banisters. A cold gust of wind blew down the steps. Leaves and empty insect shells swirled around her ankles, murmuring and whispering against the hardwood. Skss-skss, come up, come up!
So up Jude went, ever so slowly, her mind filled with a low hum-like buzzing. There were wasps in her chest, cicadas, and crickets in her belly; her body thrummed with a nervous excitement she couldn’t quite rationalize. There were veils of webs and beetles legs over her face, flies and mouse droppings, and the great, black-brown wings of water bugs.
When she reached the top of the stairs, Jude saw that the attic was nothing more than an attic. It was massive, sure, about the kitchen and dining room’s size combined but no bigger than any other attic she’d seen. The most impressive feature was the large circular window that looked out of the back of the house, the woods, and untamed plants. There were no electric lights in the attic; all was illuminated by big white beams of moonlight.
Walking through the attic, Jude was keenly uncomfortable. It was much too cluttered, the room too full of the detritus of other people’s pasts. It had the feeling of an antiques store, a graveyard of things set aside, the pale ghosts of furniture haunting the corners in bedsheets and tarps. Jude lifted the sheets off one by one, unmasking them, and found among the pieces, a wingback chair, a mattress which she decided she’d beat clean, a curved tin tub, and a huge chest stuffed to the brim with clothing and linens.
Yes, she decided then. She did not like the attic. Often she stood in places that gave her the strongest sense of deja-vu, and often, that feeling of a memoryless nostalgia was pleasant, peaceful, even. But as she stood in the attic of the cottage in the woods, eyes scanning the too wide yet too cluttered space, Jude, she’d been there before some other-other time, and she much disliked the feeling of knowing her body remembered something her mind could not.
As Jude left the attic, locking the door behind her, exhaustion hit her full force. It all fell on her at once—the horror of her mother’s murder, the electric trip up there, the breathless walk through the woods. She kept her eyes open for as long as it took to make a pallet out of her coat and a few of the parlor’s dusty pillows. Jude yawned once, then fell onto her makeshift bed. She fell asleep almost immediately.
Her first night’s sleep in her new home was the most restful sleep Jude ever had. Deep in dreamless slumber, she didn’t bear witness to the wilderness of her house, the sights, and sounds fearsome. The windows slammed open and close, the glass and fragile wood clattering. Door handles rattled, the shingles of the roof shook and fell like hail. Above her, invisible no-ones pounding up and down the halls like petulant children, banging on the walls, slamming the doors loud enough to make the house quake. Something shapeless walked throughout the house that night, stopping in the living room ever so often to watch Jude sleep, her dark face peaceful even as the cottage raged.
Even her body, her own body, became traitorous and bizarre within nature. It rose in the dead of night without cloak nor shoe and wandered out into the field. Her eyes, open but unseeing, stared ahead to the trees. She stood in the field, groaning and creaking. Grass grew on her arms. Her legs and eyes and mouth were filled with wild mushrooms, redcaps, and toadstools, with jasmine and lavender and the long stalks of cattail. Her hair bristled with acorn and sweet gum seeds, with spiky musk thistle and the sweet, delicate stems of honeysuckle. Within her was a wilderness, and her body, hollow at the torso like an aged oak, hosted screech owls, foxes, opossums, and raccoons.
Come morning, Jude was where she last left herself, well-rested but freezing and soaked to the bone with dew. As she washed her face in the frosty tap water, she marveled at the sunrise, at the woods waking. No one called her name. No cars honked and squealed by. The only breathing she heard was her own. The only noise made was hers. She laid on the couch and thought to herself that the house was kinder than people said. That all it needed was time and attention, a loving hand, and someone to understand its moods.
Even so, there were rumblings in the attic and strands of dry grass stuck in her hair.

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Autumn

30

One.

On Sundays, she picked flowers. This woman, our fine and strange Jude, was a creature of habit, and though free of humanity, she was not free from her very human need for routine. She liked her traditions: they were reassuring, and anything done long enough, mindlessly enough, could be counted on to help Jude forget where she made her home and why.
Time and time again, week after week, Jude went into the woods that surrounded her cottage. She and the woods were not friends, but they were friendly with one another. It was an uneasy peace they’d made, a sort of respectful mistrust with both parties agreeing to keep their peace lest any violence be enacted upon them. Come dark, the woods and Jude parted ways, and not even Sundays, a day full of exceptions, changed this. She went early in the summer, around noon in the colder months, right when the sun was at its peak. The trees were better managed then, their secrets being few and their shadows merely fleeting.
Before Jude’s descent into the natural, there was nowhere past, present, or even in the brilliant futures, she imagined for herself, where a woman such as herself could simply be. Be, of course, in the sense of existing for her own sake, of being and belonging in the world without purpose, without being or belonging to or for someone else. To be just Jude, Jude, without a chorus of voices commentating on her every mood, Jude, without an invisible audience, dissecting her every move. When she was with her mother, there was this constant fear of age, of being useless; the sword of Damocles swung lower and lower with each passing year. The sword itched her scalp and spoke to her in Ma’am’s terse voice—back straight, Judith. Be this, Judith, and not that. Marry now before you’re too old, and no one wants you, and who, really, would ever want you? Children, quickly, before you become dry and pointless, but who really wants you in that way, who really needs you? Deny yourself everything. Deny yourself hunger and greed, rage and lust and want and rest. Hate your reflection. Destroy your body. Wilt. Wait, be strong. Hurry, hurry! Time’s running out, time’s running out.
If too many voices and eyes were the sickness, then solitude was the elixir. For seventeen years, Jude languished away from noise and people. She lived in the woods, with the woods, and in that time, the voice became a whisper then silence. Jude took the wood into her hands and turned it against her fears. So what if she aged! Hadn’t time made her a wise and fabulous crone with a bounty of secrets? And so what if she was alone! She loved silence, how silence had wizened her and attuned her to the inner machinations of her body and soul.
Jude was in her thirties when she went into nature—she was an older woman now, fifty-one, and all of who she was was her own invention. Tall and solid, she was sturdy as an oak, bark resistant to the axe and impossible to fell. Her skin, dark and rich and polished, had the look of wood carved from some ancient tree, some nameless wood planted by God. A tender handcrafted the moon of her face, her round cheeks, and broad nose. A jeweler was called in to set her dark eyes to align her cat-like gaze. Jude picked her mouth herself, a magnolia leaf plucked from the forest floor and turned on its back, all deep brown and curved. Silent, womanish, she seldom smiled, but oft she laughed.
She went into the woods alone, her basket, and cloak her only companions. She walked along an old path trod flat by many years of journeying. The sights and sounds were familiar. Here were the thrasher and shrike and northern mockingbird flitting from tree to tree, chirping and mimicking one another’s shrill calls. Here were the big, waxy leaves of peperomia, heart-shaped and striped like watermelon, whispering soothingly against her clothes. A twisted tupelo tree, hunched over and sticky with its sap, bent further to let Jude lean against it as she negotiated the forest floor, the high and gnarled roots.
Jude loved the woods in all its seasons, from ice coating the branches in winter to the newly bloomed flowers of springtime, but summer was by far her favorite. There was a place she liked to go to when the weather was warm—a private place, clean and dressed in emerald. It was a shallow basin, smooth on all sides and a hair under three feet deep. Poplar and cottonwood trees hid it from plain view, but those who knew their way, like Jude, found it easily enough. There were trees within the basin, and they stood up to their knees in green water, their roots swollen, and their trunks stained. Mossy and oppressively hot, the summertime swamp invited mosquitoes and fat dragonflies to dance on its surface. Only a large, flat rock remained untouched by the bath, and it sat far from the water, cool and shaded by the canopy of trees.
The pool was temporary, a sure sign and side effect of spring’s heavy rains. Jude, having long ago abandoned clocks, used nature as her watch. Each spring, the basin filled and emptied again by the end of summer. Happiest in the in-between times, Jude loved the ephemeral nature of her forest tub. Soon it would be gone, dried up again in the late summer heat. The only proof it ever existed would be the small trickling streams throughout the forest and the green stains on the trees’ trunks, an overabundance of high weeds and reeds. The flowers, however—they lasted for as long as Jude pleased.
Sitting her basket down on the rock, Jude slipped out of her shoes and approached the edge of the water. She held up her skirt and waded in, cool water lapping at her ankles. Her hands, gentle but strong from use, plucked loosestrife and wild rice flower. She picked white daisies and bright yellow dandelions, milkweed and scarlet calamint, bundles, and bundles of jasmine, which she dearly and deeply loved. She picked and picked until her arms were overfull with green and red and purple and yellow until her skin and the flesh beneath it was suffused with the baby pink smell of summer.
Arms laden, Jude joined her shoes and basket out on dry land. She laid the flowers out to dry in the sun before doing the same with herself. She laid on her flat rock, open-legged, warm, and thoughtless as a housecat. It was a good morning, thought Jude. One of those rare mornings when one could fall into the very fabric of the universe, be caught in the folds, and tangled up in its threads. Only breathing, only smelling the lovely flowers and feeling the breeze off the water against her skin.
She rested for a while then had a lunch of blackberry jam on rye. Afterward, Jude removed her journal from her basket and decorated a few pages with new observations and drawings. To an outsider’s eyes, the notebook was nothing but the ramblings of a madwoman. She spoke extensively of haints and ghouls, black-eyed creatures, and beasts that howled outside her walls. The margins were cramped with cherubim and ivy, angels tangled up in their long hair and eyes of every size and shape.
There was one drawing—she remembered the night she drew it, hand trembling as she struggled to put into ink the horror she’d just experienced. It was some time after she moved into the cottage, and by then, she had found a routine. It was an icy winter’s night, frost over the windows, and a gas heater pouring warmth out into her bedroom. She was tired, lulled into bed by the heat. Jude might’ve fallen asleep on her feet if it wasn’t for the sound: the growl. It’d been so long since she heard that sound, but she knew it still. All the air was sucked from the room, the comfortable heat replaced by a muggy humidity thick enough to smother. Another growl came from outside, then another right after, low and thirsty.
Her stomach fell over itself like she was standing on the ledge of a tall building, looking down from the great height and feeling herself about to tumble. Though there was no way it could’ve gotten into her home, Jude felt its fur against her skin, smelled its foul yet floral breath. Then it roared in her ear, louder than anything she’d ever heard before; it shook the house, every glass and metal piece quaking from the power of it. The sound of the roar stabbed Jude right in the belly button, flayed her, and pinned her to her place like a butterfly with its wings speared by tacks. It was worse than the meeting in the woods. This was her home, where she slept, where she thought she was safe. Jude walked stiffly to her bed, refusing to turn around lest she meets the beast face to face. She pulled the covers over her head and prayed silently, a little psalm her mother taught her for when she was afraid.
The beast left soon after, but it returned many times. There was no planning for these visits. Her records of it were as inconsistent and sporadic as the creature’s appearances—sometimes it came back to back, day after day, and sometimes it wouldn’t be around for weeks. Jude found herself missing the beast when it was away for long stretches, longed for it like she might long for a dear friend. She knew the beast well at this point. She’d never seen it directly, but she associated it with the ferocity of nature, the vicious bend, snap, and whip of the trees during a windstorm. The beast—her beast, for no one else knew of it or cared for it, save for Jude—was death too, and sustenance. In the first few years, when she was skinny with hunger and nervousness of hunting, it left bloody gifts at Jude’s door, the torn remains of animals it had ravaged, slit down the belly with the innards spilling out like a cornucopia of meat. Occasionally, the beast left her colorful stones and bits of metal, flashy candy wrappers blown in from town, but mostly it brought death.
Maybe it saw her as incompetent; perhaps it wanted her fattened up before it devoured her. Either way, it brought her what she desperately needed; fat turkeys and grouse, pheasant, chicken and hogs (presumably snatched from the town, they looked owned), deer, rabbit, and other animals Jude couldn’t name but were delicious, gamey, and savory, some almost honey-sweet in flavor. There was a patch of wood on her porch that was forever stained, irreparably changed by the beast’s gifts and Jude’s acceptance of them.
More common than the beast’s visits were her dreams. They came and changed as the seasons did, sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter, and usually all falling into one of three categories—dreams of Ma’am, dreams where she walked and dreams about the door.
The dreams of Ma’am were innumerable. Few were illustrated in her diary, but the handful of drawings Jude made of them were dark, both in color and content. When she dreamt of her mother, she saw her as a giantess, a shadow, a wild dog, or as she really was, a frail and vile old woman with hands stronger than they first appeared. The nightmares went on forever, seemingly all night though she knew, logically, it was only minutes. Whether Ma’am was choking her, tearing at her leg (as the dog), or stalking her window (as the shadow), Jude woke breathlessly, kicking and clawing at the air, shadowboxing with ghosts. Most times when waking, Jude found that she’d injured herself in the night, little flakes of dried blood beneath her fingernails and angry welts on her arms.
Her sleepwalking dreams were mostly harmless. Her somnambulism came as no surprise to Jude—her youth was peppered with memories of waking in strange places. Once, she awoke and found herself up a tree, teeth chattering and lips blue, halfway through climbing and far enough from the ground to make her head spin. Another time, when Jude was fifteen, she woke in a neighbor’s garden up to her elbows in dirt. There were rose petals in her mouth and thorns embedded in the flesh of her arms. Jude’s hands were in her mouth, the taste of plants, all earthy and raw. Now when she sleepwalked, Jude found herself in the field or in the woods, guarded by trees, cushioned by grass, tongue tinged green from her grazing.
Then there was the door. This sect of the dream was fairly new, only three or four months old. Sometimes they took place in Ma’am’s house and sometimes at the cottage, but other than that small discrepancy, the dreams remained the same. As always, they began with Jude in the middle of some menial task—sewing, cooking, or cleaning—then there was a knock at the door. Jude would set down whatever she held and went to the door, drifting as if on air. As she floated down the halls, long and strange and distorted through the flawed eye of dreams, the knocking became louder and louder until all Jude heard was the pounding of fists on wood. The knocking was never frantic, never panicked, just persistent, a stranger insistent on entrance knocking in rounds of three. So Jude went, and always she approached the door with the queerest sense of calm like she knew exactly who waited on the other side like she’d been waiting her whole life for them to come to her, come for her. Oh God, how ready she was and how excited, needful, and afraid. Though Jude couldn’t remember the face or the name of whoever waited at the door, she remembered how it was to see them, to need them, to…
To what? Every time, just as Jude reached for the knob, she woke drenched in sweat with her out outstretched. It haunted her, this lack of knowing. Who was at the door? Who was she waiting to see? Beneath the curiosity laid something else—heartbreak, maybe, and a longing so sweet it brought tears to her eyes just to think of it. Where had her body been? What were these experiences she’d never had, these feelings she’d never felt, not even once? So many times, Jude felt as though she were merely borrowing her body. Somewhere else was another Jude missing her hands and feet, saddled by an overabundance of emotion, of memory. And here she was, saddled with the body, the eyes and mouth, and bleeding heart, but without the soul to match it.
Frustrated and unnerved, Jude brushed off her dreams and settled into reality. She drew the insects she saw, the long line of ants marching over her legs with their loads of bread crumbs. She tore out the pages once she finished, set them into her basket, then curled up in the long grass and slept, lulled into a nap by the water and the heat and hum of the forest. When she woke hours later, the sky was a soft pink sunset. Her skin was covered in bright green shoots, and there were colored stones on her lap, weighing her down. Jude checked her surroundings—a great many of her flowers were missing as well as her drawings of the ants from the basket. In their stead were two cuts of meat, hot with blood and apology.
A whole day could be lost in the woods with the flower-picking and observation and napping. Still, Jude knew that once exchanges were made, it was time for her to leave. Time to go back to where she came from, back to the comfort of the cottage where things, at least, listened when she spoke to them. Jude rose, stones raining off her lap, and repacked her basket. She wrapped the cuts of meat (neck and liver, it looked like, though from what animal she didn’t know) in the brown wax paper of her lunch and put them into the basket alongside her notebook, pencils, and shears. She slipped her shoes back on, picked the basket up by its handles, then the few flowers she had left, which she held protectively, lovingly, in the crook of her arm.
Into the woods, out of the woods—the way out was the same as the way in, only reversed and darkened and made treacherous by the threat of nightfall. Even in summer, when the days were long, the woods were not so friendly. The mask of civility dropped; the trees held no secrets. They were honest as they’d ever seen, whispering amongst themselves, grunting and groaning. Jude fought through her drowsiness, ear perked and chatoyant eyes flitting to and fro. It was best, she learned, to stay vigilant in the woods. Wild things could and would hurt her, given the chance.
As much as she loved her Sunday morning visits, returning home was a beloved part of the day. There was always that moment when she was almost there, everything bright and familiar as she left it. Jude stood at the midway point between home and forest. The trees were at her back and a wild field in front of her. Through the shadows, she saw her cottage, its strange silhouette, the chimney, and crooked roofline, the lamps burning in the windows.
Jude crossed the field, the grass rising to brush her legs and greet her. She sighed deeply as she entered the cottage, allowed herself to be exhausted, and a little hungry. The door slammed shut behind her. In the attic, something toppled over.
Evenings in the house were much like the woods in the morning; predictable, nervous, not exactly safe, but at least all the dangers were hidden from view. The house took her back in, coated her in its smell and noise, washing her over until she was one with it once again. She’d long gotten used to the malaise, the odd sounds. It was bad land she stood on, but it was her bad land. Only she knew how to tame it, how to make it heed her word and heel. Jude took a quick tour, looking for things gone astray while she was out. The cottage, usually self-sufficient, showed little disarray, a broken vase there, a raised floorboard here, and the rusting nails exposed. She swept up the glass and nailed down the wood, soothed the hutch, and murmured sweet nothings into the stair-railing until it settled back into place.
When everything was at rest, Jude undressed, loosened her hair from its scarf, then went into the kitchen to cook herself dinner. She unwrapped the meat from the forest, examining the magenta-colored flesh. Its smell was sharp and bloody like that of a very recent kill. A bit of its blood rolled down her arm, and Jude’s mouth watered as she lit two burners. She set a pot on the first burner and filled it with collard greens, a handful of sugar and herbs, spices, peppers, a few slivers of carrot, and most of the neck meat. On the second burner, she cooked down the fatty cut of the liver with butter, thin slices of onion, and a thick gravy made from the meat’s juices.
As the gravy bubbled and the greens softened, Jude sang. There was never any room in Ma’am’s house for singing, or, if there was, there wasn’t space enough for Jude’s voice. Some of her fondest memories of her youth were the times she listened to her mother singing, her voice tremulous, spilling over Jude like egg yolk. To be sang to, even to be sung around, was to be loved. To be wrapped up in somebody’s smooth voice and soothed for a while by whatever sung laid on their heart.
No specific song rested on Jude’s heart that night. She vocalized without structure, humming and whistling, and ever so often singing a verse or two from some of the popular songs she’d heard in the town. She liked the hymns. Felt good taking something from her past and making it lovely again, new and gentle as rain washing away all the hurt from the yesteryears.
It felt like everything she had nowadays was something ugly made beautiful. Singing, keeping house, keeping herself, cooking, sewing—all these things used to bring a hurt too hurtful to voice, and now she could do them joyfully. But then again, if she didn’t do these things for herself, who would’ve? Who else on earth loved her so deeply and kept her so well as herself? Jude hummed a little louder at the thought. The sound that rose from her throat was hers and hers alone.

The only thing Jude liked better than making dinner was eating it. Ceremonious as a pastor preparing communion, Jude set the dining room table with a plate, a drinking glass, and cutlery from the hutch. She placed the day’s flowers in a soft blue vase, found and lit a bronze three-prong candelabra, sat at the table, bowed her head for a brief grace, then dug into her meal. Alone, she ate dinner, without noise or company. She sucked the grease from her fingers and gracelessly wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, groaning at the taste of the liver, the spice in the collards. Alone, she washed and dried the dishes. Alone she curled up in the sunroom, feet drawn beneath herself, stitching quilting squares as she digested her food.
By the time her stomach was settled, there were twelve or so quilting squares at her feet. Jude gathered them up and put them aside before heading back into the kitchen. There, she opened the drawer nearest to the stove and rummaged through receipts, miscellany, until she alighted upon her goal—a box of matches. The packaging wasn’t remarkable. It was plain cardboard, flat and red, and featureless save for the small white magnolia tree printed on the front. Its loveliness came from repeated use, from Jude’s loving handling of it. She treated it like it was holy; therefore, it was. She held the box in hand, and the magic of the night began, left arm numbing, dead limb sensation tingling from the tip of her fingers all the way up to her shoulder. Her right arm, her dominant arm, burned and throbbed with anticipation.
Jude held with haints, held with beasts and goblins, and now, a shrew in the woods kept secret by trees and herby potions, she held with magic. This was the right sort of magic, the genuine kind passed through blood, from ear to ear, from aunties and cousins and grandmothers ageless. Black magic, Negro magic; if the people of Whitney guessed what sort of business Jude got into on Sundays, they might grow bold enough to storm the woods and cottage, set it ablaze, and string her up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Luckily for Jude, they were cowards, cowed by her dark color and aura. Better for her, really. She wasn’t really running naked in the woods, writhing and dancing, howling at the moon, flying on broomsticks, or making black pacts with red devils. No, Lord, not ever; Jude was only lighting lights.

Jude’s Sunday evening ceremonies started after a year of living in the woods. Up until then, nature had been patient, watching from a distance, waiting for her to make the first move. Jude paid it no mind; she worried more about the cottage, which despised her as much as she loved it. The cottage fought her, tooth and nail, as Jude tried to make it livable. There was no reasoning with it—attempts to clean windows and mend doorframes ended with broken fingers. The house’s temperature fluctuated as its moods did, hell-hot one minute and polar in the next.
Her ghosts—all poltergeists, noisy and petulant as toddlers—had a penchant for destruction. Twice daily (and more, if the house was miffed), objects were flung, broken, overturned, moved or removed, smashed, crashed, shattered, fractured, and ruined. Her first winter, she learned to be extra delicate with the stove. It had a habit of turning on of its own volition and filling the house up with gas and knocking her out cold. After her third time being poisoned, Jude learned to listen for the burners’ near-silent hissing and clicked them off before bad air became bad fire. The floorboards bucked, her bed resisted her; the hutch spat up cutlery, the hearth coughed out ash, smoke, and fire, and the taps regularly gushed brackish water.
There was no questioning that the house was sick. Learning to tame it, heal it, was a matter of trial and error. Jude experimented broadly; prayers to different gods, prayers to her mother’s God, exorcisms, seances, planchets, and solid, wooden Ouija boards, holy water, vodun, reasoning with the house, scolding the house, indulging it, and ignoring it. In a moment of desperation, Jude pried a fork from her shoulder, got down on her knees, and pleaded with the walls to let her rest. The walls, stubborn, said nothing in return, but a fire started up in the attic not long after.
In the end, the house showed her the cure for its troubles. It happened in spring, the sweet smell of crocuses beside the rot of the house. All through the night and even into the small hours of the morning, the cottage had been on its worst behavior. Disembodied hands skittered down the walls like spiders, grabbing Jude’s skin, tearing at her hair and clothes. Footsteps thumped and bumped overhead, bodies dragging themselves across the wood. And the noise! Hundreds of voices layered on top of one another, cacophonous and absurd, shrieked and wailed and howled. It rang in Jude’s ears like a church bell, each one louder and more maddening than the next. They called her by name, mocked her. They came from the pots, pans, drawers, and cabinets. They came from beneath the bed, over the stove, under the floorboards and wallpaper, the very foundation of the house calling Jude! Jude! Jude!
What a wicked house it was! Jude stood in the entrance hall and pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes. She saw behind her eyelids, bright splotches of red light, white and pulsating energy. She felt raw, like all of her nerves were exposed. Was this penance? Punishment for the blood on her hands? It couldn’t have been—shouldn’t have been. The love she put into the house should’ve been returned to her tenfold. Hadn’t she bought the house with her hard-won money? Hadn’t she mended the broken windows and sealed the cracks? Hadn’t she scrubbed its floors, cleaned the chimney, and loved the cottage, even as the townspeople shunned it? It wasn’t fair for something she cared for to treat her so nastily. It wasn’t right when Ma’am did it, and it wasn’t no better coming from this inanimate this, this building, which could just as quickly be burned.
Red heat morphed into a white, blinding rage. The edges of Jude’s world were going dark, darker. Jude shook, trembled, and then she opened her mouth and screamed.
Of all the emotions forbidden to Jude, rage was the most delicious. As a young girl, she stewed in her anger and turned it towards herself; scratches on her arm, belly, and legs, tugging the hair out of her head one by one. When she was a young woman, she took to stabbing herself with her sewing needle, pricking the skin and letting the blood bubble up, the red flowing down a relief from the pressure in her brain. Now she was grown, really grown, and way out here, far from the eyes of Ma’am and society, she could scream as much as she liked. Her voice, usually mild and soft, took on a guttural quality, low in the throat and gritty. She pulled anger from the bottom of her belly, dredged up past transgressions from her toes.
Jude was hysterical. In her fevered state, she understood the hissing of cats, dog bites, wasp stings, and the frenzied drone of hornets. She sympathized with squalling newborns, with ornery old women, with women who fought and cussed and scratched, hit back and screamed ‘til their voices were hoarse. Intimately, she knew the anger of wild horses caged, wild things branded, of violence repaid with violence, and rage without an end. At peace and in good company with Bertha Mason, Jude gnashed her teeth and rolled her eyes, tore her clothes and hair, and clawed her skin. Screamed and screamed until her screams became hysterical laughter. Laughed hysterically until her laughter morphed back into screaming.
When she was empty, the house went still. The furniture righted itself, the footsteps above stilled. The hands disappeared into the walls, and the voices were gone, quieted by Jude, the strongest and fullest voice of them all. Hot, skin flushed and wet with sweat, Jude grabbed her coat and ran out into the field.
It was a cold spring’s night, and Jude gasped as a cool breeze whipped across her exposed legs and damp face. She walked far into the field, arms crossed, chest aching from the strain of her anger, and face hot with the need to cry. Jude staggered fell. She buried her face in the grass and wept. Were they tears of relief? Of rage? Sorrow? Jude didn’t know. All she knew was that there were small things on her skin and pain in her heart so big it could crush her. She cried for the house, for Ma’am, for being too young and too old all at once, for being Black, for being strange, for not having a place to belong. Like a tall child, overgrown girl, she wailed, watering the grass with decades of hurt. Each tear sprouted a flower, widow’s tears, and bluebonnets.
After a while, Jude sat up in the grass and wiped her face. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy as she wrapped her arms around her knees and looked off into the night. At this distance, Jude could see the cottage like a stranger—the windows lit with lights, a safe port in a storm. The rage in her chest unfurled, the sorrow settled. Jude could not name the emotion that settled over her. It was blue and yellow at the edges, like a memory of a memory half-remembered, softened with age but made lovelier by nostalgia.
For how long she sat there, Jude didn’t know, but by the time she finally rose and returned to her home, she and it were one and the same.

Sundays were a holy day made holier by tradition. Her mother went to church and prayed; Jude picked her flowers in the morning and, come evening, lit her lights. It was, Jude supposed, a sort of prayer, reverent and quiet, the act of tending to something carefully. She started in the attic, pushing back the curtains from the wide, round window and setting a spirit lamp there. There was a designated light for each window, oil lamps and spirit lamps, and the rare electric lamp, delicate glass-blown bulbs placed over even more delicate flames, candles, and candelabras. Jude went from room to room, window to window until all corners of the cottage were ablaze with yellow-orange light.
As was her way, Jude went out into the field, put her back to the trees, and looked up at her house. The light was good, and she made it. She gave herself a moment to appreciate her handiwork, then went back inside and replaced the box of matches. Satisfied and safe, Jude slipped into bed, wrapped herself in her blankets, and promptly fell asleep.

§

The next morning, Monday, Jude woke to the sound of crows. There were too many to count, all of them cawing and squawking, beating their wings against the heavy, gray clouds. Jude smelled rain in the air, saw and felt the powerful gales of wind even as she slowly became aware. It was a cool morning, lethargic, yet Jude was oddly well-rested.
Maybe it was her dream? She never had anything like it before, and as she began her day—washing in the bathroom sink, brushing her teeth, preparing a small breakfast—she replayed the parts she could remember.
The dream had gone like this: the woods were an ocean, the shrubbery, and rocks bobbing in the grasses like unmoored boats, tall waves of zoysia, and Chinese silver grass forming and breaking on the shore of her vegetable garden. Her house burned like a lighthouse during a storm. Long strands of black hair covered her face, slipped into her mouth, and caught in her teeth. Jude smelled jasmine and rotted wood, something coppery beneath it, and saw long hands reach across the tumultuous waters and ease open her bedroom window, light pouring out into the darkness. A cold wind swept in, green as the forest at the height of summertime. The hands caressed her cheek. Caressed her neck.
Throat tingling and nose still twitching at the scent of rotten wood, Jude went on with her day. She tended to her garden and wrote in her journal, sketched up fanciful quilting patterns in the books’ margins. She found her copy of “The Haunting of Hill House” while the sunroom abandoned the task and spent the next couple of hours in Eleanor’s rabidly unraveling mind. At noon, Jude folded in the page she left off on, pulled on a sweater, and walked up to her sewing room.
The sewing room was, without a doubt, Jude’s favorite place in her house. It was small and cluttered, fabrics and spools of colorful thread thrown all helter-skelter, muslin, and sewing patterns strewed on every flat surface. A much-loved easy chair sat beneath the window with a basket of quilting squares beside it. Years ago, Jude went into town and paid too much for a sewing table, which she nervously towed to the woods strapped onto the roof of the Pontiac. On the table was a yellow Singer sewing machine, rulers, and a sachet of needles. A felt tomato pincushion sat close by it along with a sketchpad, some pencils, and several pairs of sheers. Scattered around the room in painted tins and empty cookie containers were pins, needles, beads, buttons, bobbins, and ribbons. A highboy held fabrics of different colors and types, yarn and wool and cotton. Against the eastern wall was a mannequin dressed in a pair of muslin slacks and a loom. On the opposite side of the room, a chintz lamp, a standing mirror, a wingback chair, and Jude’s quilt chest.
There was nothing Jude loved so much as quilting. It was one of the many things she rescued from Ma’am and made good again. Jude spent countless nights in her easy chair on in the sunroom, fire at her feet, a mug of cocoa at her elbow, stitching her squares, and making little scenes from memory, dreams, and the black pit of her belly. She had now sixteen quilts in all, one for each year in solitude. The earliest ones were primitive, bleak and blue, and violent. They depicted Ma’am’s disfigured face, throats with black hands wrapped around them, Ma’am’s kitchen awash with blood. The newer quilts were kinder, greener, lush with reserved colors. Jude kept the bloody ones in the chest; she hung the ones she found lovely around the house as decoration. A massive twenty-four-by-thirty of her field in the throes of a summer storm was pinned above her bed and another one, a green and blue variation of a star pattern, covered her while she slept.
The quilt she was working on now was her seventeenth-year project. It was a Tree of Paradise, an intricate quilting pattern that she’d only attempted once before. Jude already had the pieces of the trunk cut and assembled and set aside a delicate bit of scarf she wanted to add to the heart of the tree for a variation of texture. Jude heard of other seamstresses who did their quilting on machines, but she preferred to hand-stitch. Better to feel the fabric in her hand, the energy of each of the small, tight stitches she made. She tucked her feet beneath her. Tucked the needle into the fabric.
The work was familiar. She hardly needed to think as she led the thread in and out of the patches. She thought of other things, more important things, like how she had to prepare the garden for winter and if she’d need to take the car into the shop before the first freeze. Her hands moved of their own accord—stab in, pull through, stab in, pull through, weave a little, tug a little, bite the thread to make the edges neat. She went on like this for a while, unthinking, and in her thoughtlessness, Jude jabbed herself hard with the needle. She yelped. The needle was jammed deep into the pad of her thumb. It jutted out from the flesh, wobbling gently. Quickly, Jude forgave the needle, removed it from her thumb, and examined her finger. She gave it a squeeze, and from the pinprick, a bead-sized drop of blood blossomed.
Jude raised her thumb to her mouth. Red stained the place where her lips met, and she sucked the blood from the finger. The taste was like pennies, new copper rolling around in her mouth without the clink of metal against her teeth. She lapped at the wound for a moment, thirstily, hungrily, and kept the finger in her mouth as she went into the bathroom to rinse it clean.
She passed the stairs on her way back from the bathroom. A rush of air blew up the steps and danced around her ankles, the hardwood creaking beneath her feet and her skin talking low against her skin. Skss-skss, skss-skss, it called. Come here, come down here. From where Jude stood, she saw the front door was wide open, saw the swirl of dried leaves swishing across the porch. She clicked her tongue at the house, at the door, and started down the steps. She stopped half a step later, foot hovering over the next stair. Another breeze cut through the house, this one heavy with the smell of the woods. The house swayed on its foundations; far in the distance, the trees swayed along with it, like dancers. A light fixture swung above her head in slow, lazy circles, yellow falling on her shoulders like split yolk.
Hadn’t she been there before? Didn’t she dream this once? She felt, again, the sensation of a borrowed body, a body without context nor memory. Whatever she was missing felt close at hand, close enough to touch. It was like she was standing in it, and it was too big for her to see it all. Jude searched her memory for even the tiniest sliver of the mysterious something she kept waiting for, but there was nothing there save for fronds and flower petals and a darkness rich as velvet. Sucking in a breath, Jude shook off the moment, closed the front door, and locked it.
There was a stone in her belly as she returned to her sewing. Anxiety had her heart going double-time. She’d have to do a little magic that night if she wanted any rest, just three candles in the living room and two in her bedroom to ward off the gut-tight sensation that held her. With plans made, Jude’s stomach settled. She threw herself into the tree trunk’s structuring, letting the sewing fill her up, so there was no room in her mind for bodiless remembrance. She stitched the wood. Stitched herself calm.
The day went on. Midday became evening and then night. Jude lit a lamp and sewed by the oily light until her head ached. She set the pieces of the trunk aside, resolving to finish it in the morning, and made for the bed. Before she slept, she lit her candles, humming hymns like spells of protection over the house. Be there no nightmares, be there no beasts, no there no memories that choked her and rid her mind of thoughts, of feelings that were no longer hers to hold.

Jude slept, and the body rose. In the dead of night, she slipped from her bed and drifted down the stairs. Awash with moonlight, thick grass sprouted on her skin, and her body rung out as if a tuning fork struck; she vibrated, her figure atremble at a pitch so low that only she and the house could hear. The house, a desolate thing, responded to her. The floors and walls and windows shook, shivered, opened noisily, clambering to be heard over the bells and chimes that pealed within Jude. What walked over her grave? Her mind was flatter than paper. The only things that flitted through it were nonsense, incomprehensible in their complexity, profound in their simplicity.
Almost there, nearly there, almost here, nearly here! Coming! Coming! Coming!
Quickly as the noise began, it ended. The house took a breath, braced itself, and for a long while, there was silence in the cottage. Sleeping Jude held still as well, air caught in her lungs, and fingers twitching ever so slightly.
Then came the footsteps. Jude heard them right outside the door, creaking up the steps and onto the porch. The stranger stopped, perhaps to notice the bloody half-circle of red where the dead animals were left. Another step—the wood creaked deeper, the stranger stood on the bloody spot now, shoes making an impression of the sagging, soggy wood. Then a knock, two knocks. Three.
Though Jude’s mind was still, her body was riotous. It knew the steps to this dance; it came to the door, the door pounded closer and closer still. The entrance hall shrank to the size of a shoebox, then smaller until there wasn’t any room for breathing, never mind a body. Every knock threatened to knock the door down, to raze the house flat. Jude reached for the knob and turned it.
There was nothing there. Sightless eyes looked out over the field, the woods, and the trees but saw nothing but grass and stone. She looked to the left, to the right and, just in case, down at her feet.
Jude’s body called out, “Hello? Is anyone there?”
Nothing answered back, not even the wind. Jude closed the door. Her mind, relieved, exhaled. Her body carried itself back upstairs.

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Two.

First came the fog, the rain, the terrible flashing lightning and claps of thunder, the howling wind, and then, finally, the woman. She looked like she came far, poor thing, probably all the way from Whitney, maybe even further. The woman-stranger was soaked, dripping with rainwater and chattering her teeth. Her hands trembled as she told Jude her story, how she got lost walking through the woods, cold and tired, and how all she needed was a place to rest her head for the night.
Jude was no fool. The woman could’ve stopped in Whitney, and as vile as the town was, they were still decent enough to give a miserable thing such as her a place to keep dry. Maybe the innkeeper, kindhearted as she was to Jude all those years ago, would’ve lent her that closet-sized room for a night before sending her off in the morning with a basket full of goods and a map. There wasn’t any need to have crossed miles and miles of woods, to bargain with high roots, the mud-slick paths, and the wild animals that roamed at night.
She started to close the door and tell the woman she couldn’t do a thing for her but stopped before the words were out of her mouth. She met the woman’s eyes, and her stomach flopped. The eyes were black, dark and lightless, glossy somehow, like stones run over with water. There was something familiar about the woman too; something in the way she held herself, how her eyes found Jude’s gaze and held it, observed her just as closely as Jude observed the woman. It was an old sensation, one she hadn’t felt in many years—not since the deer.
Jude rarely thought of the deer. It was ages ago when it happened, closer to her first use of the lights to the present time. She’d gone into the forest to forage and stumbled upon the deer while examining a cluster of berry bushes. It was near death, breathing unevenly, its body heaving as it fought for air. Upon seeing the creature, Jude recoiled as if stung. She felt its pain, poor beast, felt its panic as acutely as her own. She whimpered as she inched closer to the deer, horrified but amazed until she was right by its side. Jude felt its skin; warm still and impossibly soft. Her heart ached at the sight of this thing she preyed upon, fed on regularly, fighting for its life. And yet it was so oddly comforting to watch it struggle. As gory the matted fur, as vile the viscera, the steady blood pumping from its throat, it was beautiful too, divine in its own terrible way. What different was there between herself and the deer? They both felt and fed, fled, and feared, the air in its lungs as pricey and priceless as her own. Only the deer hadn’t been so lucky in its fight against the woods, the beast; in the end, Jude might not be so lucky either.
To kill a wounded animal was no great feat. Something stronger felled it already—to lift the stone, to flash the clever blade, and end its life was nothing more than a mercy. Jude found the largest rock she could carry comfortably, lifted it high above her head, and brought it down—crack! —on the deer’s skull. She grunted. Hot blood splashed on her legs. The deer stopped, all at once, breathing and fighting. Jude stood a moment, eyes caught on the undersides of the trees, the leaves, heart racing and blood cooling on her skin. She looked down at what she’d done at the crushed skull of the animal. Her heart leaped up into her throat, and she quivered, trying to comprehend why she did such a thing, what within her commanded her to dispense such violent mercy. She put a hand to her mouth.
“Oh!” Her stomach kicked hard enough for her to double over. “Oh!”
And then she was gone, body in the forest but mind someplace else entirely. Determined, she used her shears to open the deer, gut, and skin it. Maybe Ma’am taught it to her, years of farm work passed down to Jude, or maybe her granddaddy. Either way, the skill existed, laid in wait inside of Jude, and as she sliced her way through the deer’s body, she felt a sense of calm overtake her. This was how it was done, wasn’t it? You came into the woods and removed those silly human hang-ups, removed the nervous stomach and trembling hand. Her mind supplied her with strange tidbits of information, like how she preferred the liver and the heart the most, how she should salvage what she could of the tongue to simmer in lard.
When Jude had finished, she went home with the organs and the pelt. She cleaned her hands and rinsed the blood from off her legs, then she looked over her spoilers, the flesh, and insides of the deer. Her stomach lurched again, but that time, it was only hunger.
That was what Jude felt looking at the woman-stranger. Hunger, profound and gnawing though Jude couldn’t imagine what for. Her flesh? Her dark eyes? Jude held the door ajar, inviting the woman in.
“You’ll let me stay then?” The woman asked. Her voice was soft and brittle like a thousand gossamer wings beating.
“For the night,” replied Jude. “Just for the night. Come on, come in.”
She saw the woman better once she was inside and lit by the yellow lights of the foyer. She was a wretch alright, all odd angles and bones poking through the skin. Her eyes were wild in their sockets, and she snapped her head around and around to see all that she could of Jude’s home. She parted her mouth to speak, closed it, then smiled at Jude, teeth exposed, her gums a meaty shade of pink-brown. She took up space, every little movement of hers filling the foyer with the woman’s wet black cloak and cloying scent. She reeked, Jude, realized after a moment, of sweat and body odor, oak and jasmine, and of something staler beneath it. The woman was tall and a little awkward with herself, limbs flying this way and that, like she was new to her skin.
“What’s your name?” asked Jude.
So long in silence, Jude was surprised to hear herself aloud, the grit in her voice. The woman didn’t seem to mind or notice. She only stared at Jude, blinking slowly, traces of confusion on her face. She battled with the beginning of many sentences before settling on “Nemoira.” After a second of silence, shuffling on her feet, the woman said, “What’s yours?”
“It’s Judith, but you can call me Jude.”
“Judith. Jude,” the woman—Nemoira, now—said, considering the name. She nodded once, approving of it, then removed her cloak and hung it on the hook beside Jude’s. She took off her boots and let them fall to the floor like weights. Then Nemoira lifted her hands—long fingers, palms flat and featureless—and pulled her scarf from her head, releasing her hair and letting it flow down her broad shoulders like so much spilled ink. She rolled her head, creaking and cracking, and looked this way and that. Then, as if sensing the heat rising from the living room, she brushed past Jude and settled herself in front of the hearth to warm her feet by the fire.
Jude might’ve been annoyed by the strange woman if she weren’t so intrigued. Her lack of social graces reminded Jude much of herself. She was as Jude was, this Nemoira, strange and plain, simple but not simpleminded, with a bluntness many read as rudeness. Jude followed her to the living room, wringing her hands. She didn’t know how to talk to people anymore. In the woods, in her house, she did away with all those little graces, pleases, and ‘thank yous.’ She spoke to herself mostly, to the walls (stubborn but decent listeners), and to the furniture that hurt her shins and toes. Inanimate things didn’t have feelings like she did. She didn’t expect conversation or stimulation.
Lacking for words, Jude said, “There ain’t much I can do to help you.” She waited for the woman to respond, but she remained with her back to Jude, facing the fire. After a moment, she canted her face so that one black eye could be seen over her shoulder. Nemoira was listening in her own way, and Jude relaxed once she knew she wasn’t being ignored.

“People don’t come up usually.”
“Shame. It’s a pretty place.” Nemoira turned to face Jude fully.

“Solid.”
Jude’s tongue swelled in her mouth, too large to speak with, so Jude excused herself into the kitchen, flustered. For a brief moment, she considered to cut the hot embarrassed feeling out of her but decided against it. She couldn’t imagine going back into the living room wincing, holding her sliced palm tight to staunch the flow of blood, the woman’s eyes on her. Jude cooked instead. She tucked aside her feelings for later reflection. She sat them in the cabinet along with the spices and prepared the woman a late dinner of ham steak in brown sugar and mustard, jammy soft-boiled eggs, and thick slices of rye fried in butter. Wary of the woman’s opinions on tea versus coffee, she served hot milk with cinnamon and cream in one of her most excellent china cups, slide the food onto a plate, and took the meal to her guest.
She sat the plate and cup down in front of Nemoira and tipped her head to it. “Gon’ head,” Jude said, already settling down in the armchair near the woman.
Nemoira glanced at the food, sniffed it, then dug into it. She went at the food hungrily, as if starved, snarling some as she sucked the ham’s syrup from her fingers and lapped at her lips, coated with the cinnamon and sugar congealed at the bottom of the mug. When she was through, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, burped shamelessly.
It warmed Jude to see the woman enjoy her cooking. She was grateful, too, that it distracted her so. It gave Jude a reprieve from her eyes, so deep and close. They were too honest, Nemoira’s eyes, and it unsettled her to be watched by them, cleaned out and organized, turned over like a jewel. Jude wondered where she fit into the beautiful woman’s mind.
Jude paused. Beautiful? She looked Nemoira over from head to toe, and she decided she was wrong. She was not beautiful; the word in and of itself much was much too plain. There were many women that were beautiful to Jude. Stunning, even. Nemoira was enigmatic. She dazzled, not so much like diamonds but a softer, steadier glow like moonlight or the yellow bulbs of fireflies. If Jude was carved from a sacred wood, Nemoira was chipped from onyx. Her skin was smooth and unmarked save for faint lines around her wide, calla-lily colored lips. Her widely-spaced eyes were deep and hooded. Her hair was just as dark as her eyes, and it pooled around her sitting form like a pelt.
Her aura was, in a word, all-consuming. She sucked up space in the room, took up all the air. Even when she finished her meal and turned her eyes onto Jude, Jude didn’t stop looking. Those big eyes fastened onto her, unbothered by Jude’s staring, maybe even a little amused by it. Others would’ve turned away, but Nemoira held her gaze, stared back like a hawk having seen a juicy worm wriggling in the dirt.
“You liked it?”
“The food?” Nemoira looked to her empty plate and smiled. “Very much so, yes.”
“And you feelin’ warm now?”
Nemoira nodded. “A little warmer, yes. Though I reckon a bath might help. Would you mind, Miss Jude, running me a bath?”
She would mind. It took time to set up a bath. Jude would have to heat the water on the stove, then lug it up the stairs in huge pots, pour it into the tub, and repeat until the tub was full. The porcelain was deep, frustratingly so. Nothing in her wanted to run a bath for the stranger, but Jude nodded anyway. Jude got to her feet with a bit of grunting and bade the woman to follow her to the bathroom.
The bathroom was chaotic. Jude kept it as clean as she could, but clean rarely accounted for the oils and soaps scattered across the vanity, the countless bits and baubles strewed about like a crow’s hoard. Quietly, she apologized for the mess before pulling out a short stool for the woman to sit on while Jude ran her bath.
“It’s gonna take a while,” said Jude, turning the tap and letting the cold water flow in. “You mind waiting?”
Nemoira shook her head and offered no help. She sat, legs splayed wide, and spun her head around to fawn over Jude’s many soaps and candles and little vials of perfume. Jude carried pot after pot up the stairs, sweating, straining, but she felt no annoyance towards Nemoira nor the bath. In fact, she hummed as she worked, whistling over the stove and growing excited to see the woman again as she went back into the bathroom. When she was finally through, the tub filled, and a thin, scummy layer of oil lay on the surface of the water, Jude peered through the stim and told Nemoira to check the water.
Nemoira dipped her hand in the water, swished it around. “It’s fine, thank you.”
Jude nodded, started to turn around to give Nemoira a modicum of privacy, but found herself totally unable to move. Lightheaded and dry-mouthed, Jude watched as the woman peeled off her clothes. The smooth, animal hair went down and down, tumbling past the hips and thick thighs and the soft pouch of belly. Jude’s stomach clenched, hopelessly intrigued by the black, curling mass of pubic hair, the ant-hill breasts. Nemoira turned, tying her hair on itself to expose her nape and graceful back. She glanced over her shoulder.
“Is it very deep?” Then, after a beat, “Will you help me in?”
She tried to speak but couldn’t. Jude shook her head, snatched up an empty pot, and rushed out of the bathroom. Once outside, she leaned against a wall, her heart beating wildly, palms sweating. Jude tried to form clear thoughts, but her mind was empty save for the sight of Nemoira, her shoulders and back, and long legs and tummy. Jude ran down the steps, threw the pots into the sink to cool, then just stood there, breathing in the remains of dinner, flexing her hands against the countertops. This time she did reach for a blade, slicing the palm of her left hand shallowly, only a fine line of blood trickling down her arm. As the heat in her face subsided, Jude made her way back upstairs and waited in the linen closet. She grabbed the towels, staining them with red splotches, and begged the ash and lye smell of clean laundry to sear Nemoira’s scent from her nose.
When she felt steady, Jude grabbed a clean towel and cloth for Nemoira. She returned to the bathroom, pausing for a moment to compose herself, then reentered with a knock. It was like stepping into a greenhouse, the heat tropical and the air green, almost dizzying with the scents of rose oil, jasmine, and grass battling against one another. Jude let the steam fill her lungs, film over her eyes lest she be tempted to look at the woman’s nude body. She weakened, just a hair, and that quick glance was enough for her to lose all her will. She took it all in, the dark face wet with steam, the breasts, the dip of her belly, skin, and flesh and—
Jude ripped her eyes away, aware of Nemoira watching as she did so. Unfazed by her nudity, Nemoira leaned forward to take the washcloth from Jude. Accidentally, entirely on purpose, Jude’s hand slipped, and they touched skin brushing. Thumb against the index finger, pinkie against the wet expanse of palm. Jude’s body was set alight—Sunday candles burning like votives in her chest, smoke filling up her mind, and puffing out her open mouth. Her head was empty. She could only focus on the feel of the woman’s skin, her smell. Her unlined palm, the careful way she watched Jude for a reaction.
It was too much. Far too much. Jude pulled her hand away, started, and swallowed several apologies before leaving the bathroom, door slamming shut behind her.

§

All through the night and into the wee hours of the morning, Jude fidgeted. She thought of the body beneath her in the sunroom. She thought of all that dead skin and dandruff and long strands of hair collecting on the mattress. It was hard to sleep when imagining Nemoira curled in her housetop quilt, snoring and drooling only the blankets, the rarely used sheets. She waited and waited, and at sunrise, she leaped out of bed and put her restlessness to use. She made a large breakfast: fried fish and grits, buttery and greasy, a pot of tea, another pot of coffee, and a small jug of fresh-squeezed orange juice in case the woman wanted neither tea nor coffee. She set the table in pink and white, a blush-colored vase of gillyflowers at the center of the spread, and all the charming serving dishes fanned out around it. Jude dragged in the other chair from the kitchen and sat it across from her own, inwardly giddy at the thought of having someone to entertain.
She appreciated the break in her solitude. Jude did her shopping in Whitney, knowing she wasn’t wanted just to watch the people go about their days. They ignored her, naturally, but she never went with the intention of making friends, only to take in the people’s little gestures and moods and fleeting conversations. Even as a girl, Jude liked to break from her silence, the forced cheerfulness of her bedroom, and sit with Ma’am, even though she knew idle children got swatted or set to chores. The joy was in those in-between spaces before somebody noticed her sitting there, before she was sent away or mocked, when she was in the background of human activity, soaking up their energy like a flower taking sunlight.
From the moment Nemoira stepped foot in Jude’s house, she’d drawn Jude to her. She was enamored with her, repulsed by her; those dark eyes unnerved her, but they warmed her too, and Jude didn’t know if she felt safe or preyed upon when Nemoira looked her way. Without warning, she was tossed in with Nemoira, kicking wildly just to stay afloat in her aura, her smell, the way she moved. Jude wanted, but she didn’t know what. To get rid of Nemoira? To keep her there beside her?
How odd. Jude wanted to give Nemoira everything, her house, herself, the beauty of the fields and woods, and all that was within it. She also wanted Nemoira as far from her as possible, as she were certain that the woman could, and would, ruin everything Jude had built.
The table was gorgeous by the time Jude finished setting it. Nothing, Jude thought, that she’d make for herself. Her meals, decorated and finely prepared as they were, were never quite so grand. She ate from good plates, drank from good cups, but never before did she think to set herself a table of china and crystal, polished silverware and a lace cloth.
“I’m being kind,” Jude said aloud. The cupboards shook, glasses tinkling, giggling like school children.
Through the noise, she heard feet pattering against the floor, approaching the dining room. Jude took her seat and flexed her hands against the table cloth. She shot a glare at the food, daring it to go cold. The food, intimidated by Jude or, at least, Jude’s control over their very fragile vessels, remained piping hot until Nemoira appeared at the threshold.
She looked well. Seemingly well-rested, her eyes only a little puffy, Nemoira swayed into the dining room wrapped in a robe Jude lent her. Her hair was pulled away from her face by a blood-red scarf. Nemoira glanced at the table, the spread, then at Jude. Jude rose and pulled out Nemoira’s chair, faltering for a moment once she was up, and tucked Nemoira under before retaking her seat. Two pairs of eyes, ink, and pitch black, darted from the serving plates to one another, smiling, blushing, and turning away. The mood was lighthearted and feathery, the women cheery as babes.
Nemoira was the one to break the spell. She nodded her head to the table and said, “This is a pretty table you set,” and Jude found her senses long enough to thank her.
They walked over breakfast, quietly and without words. Jude communicated through the scrape of her spoon against the bottom of her bowl, the click of her teeth against the lip of her cup. Nemoira, breathier, more lungs than metal, hummed and sighed and crunched the fragile fish bones with her molars.
Once the meal was through, Nemoira took up the dirty dishes. Jude grabbed her wrist, realized what she’d done, and snatched it back immediately. She shook her head. “Don’t do that. Please.”
“Why not?”
“You’re a guest. Sit, let me handle them.”
Jude started to stand, but Nemoira guided her back down, a firm hand on her shoulder as she smiled down at Jude and said, “You made the meal. Let me clean.”
Before Jude could protest any further, Nemoira disappeared into the kitchen, the door swinging behind her. Subdued and made uneasy at the thought of a stranger cleaning up after her, Jude twitched, crossed and uncrossed her legs. She had an ear perked for disaster. She wanted something to go wrong for a mug to break or a fork to bend, so she had a reason to swoop in and take charge. Jude hoped the cabinets shook and spit up dishes, but impudently, they stayed still.
How long was she planning to stay? Again? She didn’t say anything last night about having somewhere to go, not even a hint to where she came from. The South was a dangerous place for a Black woman to go wandering. Wasn’t smart for Nemoira to go about on foot, picking up rides from strangers, relying on kindness, and nothing else. She thought of the woman armed with nothing but her boots and coat walking through the night. And then there was the matter of the beast. Jude grimaced. Just her luck! Just her luck that she send the woman off, a basket full of food and a hand-knitted scarf wrapped around her graceful neck, only for Jude to find the poor creature in the woods torn to shreds. She could just about imagine it, her walking through the woods some distant Sunday and coming across Nemoira’s bones. They’d be clean of meat and long, bleached white by the sun—her borrowed clothes strewn across the ground, spattered with dried blood. Maybe there’d be a clump of her hair coughed up by the beast, the lovely hair stiff with saliva and the bile of the beast’s belly.
Jude blew her breath out noisily. Steady now, steady, she told herself. She pictured a knife in her hand, a needle, her palm pricked, and striped for each horrible picture.
“She’ll stay,” Jude said. The hutch wobbled and spat out knives and a couple of soup spoons. Jude gave it a hard, annoyed look, and it settled against the wall, the cutlery sliding across the floor and back to their drawers. Jude still had her eyes trained menacingly on the hutch when Nemoira came through the kitchen door, drying her hands.
Amused, she asked, “You chastise the furniture a lot?”
“Only when they misbehave.”
The women shared a knowing look at the hutch’s expense, then a laugh. Nemoira sat down and played with the bright green stems of the gillyflowers.
Ask, ask, ask, the silverware tinkled. “You got someplace to go?”
“Go?” Nemoira furrowed her brows, considered the words, then shook her head. “No. Why? You want me to go?”
“No, no, it’s only…Whitney ain’t exactly the sort of place a black lady can stay. You gonna need roots. Some place permanent.”
“Some place permanent.” Nemoira repeated Jude’s words slowly. She talked carefully as if picking her words, studying them before she said them aloud. Jude wondered if Nemoira was alone like Jude was quiet, with no reason to use her voice or make sense of English, facial expressions, or of people’s rapidly oscillating moods.
“There’s an inn in town…”
“Should I go there?”
Jude shook her head, empathically. “No! It’s just that—” She swallowed. There was time, still, to change her mind and plenty of good reasons to send the woman away. First off, she was better on her own, smarter. Second, the delicate balance of wilderness and civility might be thrown out of whack by the addition of another. And then the house, which was dangerous and unpredictable, the woods, which were even worse. Jude fought to keep control over the furniture; she’d never manage the house, the woods, and the woman all at once.
Still, Jude was curious to try. Who was to say that two pairs of hands holding back the night wouldn’t be more effective? Four eyes to watch, two mouths to scream, two pairs of feet to trod the dirt paths. The woman would be safer with her, and she’d be safer with the woman. And what would it hurt, thought Jude, to put her solitude aside for a while?
“You can keep the sunroom,” said Jude.
The hutch rattled, but this time Jude let it shake. Later, as she scooped up serving forks and spoons and pried the points of knives from the floor, Nemoira settled into her room, humming a song Jude had never heard. The house groaned, settling too.

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Three.

Everything in Jude’s home, in her life, had a name and a place and a purpose, but there was no place for Nemoira. She was without form, hovering nebulously between the amoral actions of furniture, the immoral behavior of human beings, and the deliberate choices of the elements. She came in through a thunderstorm, escorted by lightning, but Jude was reluctant to put her in the same category as water or fire, which helped and hurt with purpose. She was more than the countertops and the sofas and the cotton-stuffed throw pillow, less pliant, and though her will and ways were mysterious to Jude, there was, somewhere, a thoughtfulness behind them.
Nemoira existed with and without Jude, not temporary, and for that, Jude gave Nemoira her own name and place. A place just for creatures like Nemoira, above the plants and metal but beneath the flame. A breathing thing, thoughtful and thoughtless. Nemoira was like cogongrass, dry and green, and hungry. She sucked up Jude’s air, the sun, uprooted roots, and siphoned off nutrients. She wrapped herself around Jude’s legs, her torso, and throat. She squeezed with all her might and left Jude nowhere to go, nowhere to be alone. Even when she was away and out of sight, Nemoira was always on her mind, hovering, just waiting for Jude to want her.
And she did! She wanted Nemoira, truly, deeply. It was bizarre, wanting someone that was entirely unknowable, as unruly as the wind. More bizarre was that Nemoira was beginning to understand Jude. When she was young and made to be surrounded by others, Jude prided herself on being a wispy, shadowy girl-child. She enjoyed being difficult, a true she-beast, crouched down in the dirt, catching and crushing bugs with her bare hands, running, skinning her knees before Ma’am could snatch her by the collar and throw her back into the house.
There was no room for shadows with Nemoira. Nemoira asked Jude about herself, and Jude, startled by her bluntness, gutted herself, her private pieces falling into Nemoira’s hands like dead leaves. She was bottomless, begging to be filled: Jude upended herself and poured. Slowly, through anecdotes and through memories more bitter than sweet, Jude was known. No more mystery, no more mystique.
There were, still, some parts of her Jude would not share. Nemoira, precious as she was to Jude after the handful of weeks they’d spent together, was not privy to her darkest corners. Beneath their dinners, companionable silences, and hazy autumnal naps were portions of Jude rubbed raw, indecent in their violent, ugly, vicious, and cruel. Even after seventeen years, the memories were too pink, too new. She was afraid that if she picked at them now, the scab would fall apart, and she’d bleed anew, all that old violence bubbling up to the surface, glowing white and pulsing blood. For Nemoira, there was Jude’s sleepwalking and cutting, stabbing, her angry thrashing and screaming whenever she dreamed of Ma’am. For Nemoira, there were murmured apologies and locked doors, sorry smiles and promises to maybe later, maybe never, explain why she was the way she was.
Nemoira was patient, obliging. What she knew, she took good care of. If she did not know the reason for Jude’s nighttime walks, she did know to leave her to them and to bring Jude mug after mug of too-sweet tea to warm her once she returned. Nemoira could not feel the excruciating pain Jude felt when she woke in the dead of night, shrieking, wailing, and clawing at her face and throat, but she felt Jude’s hand in her own, her palm against Jude’s forehead, and the wheezy, quiet breathing that came after an especially violent attack. Hell, if she ever understood the blood plaid pattern on Jude’s left palm, but she understood how to rewrap the gauze, to tease and lighten the strange moods that overtook her friend on Sundays or after upsetting trips into town. Ignorant, numb, and blind, Nemoira knew, felt, and understood.

§

“Ain’t you ever afraid out here? Of being alone, I mean?”
Jude lifted her head from her book and looked at Nemoira. She couldn’t begin to fathom where the question came from or what prompted it. The women were out on the porch enjoying the afternoon, the unseasonably hot weather. A pitcher, a sweet tea sat between them along with a tray of shortbread cookies.
“Alone? What I need to be afraid of being alone for?”
Nemoira shrugged. “You don’t see nobody, don’t hear nobody World could be ending out there, whole thing come crashing down and you wouldn’t know a thing. Don’t that scare you?”
Smoothly and without missing a beat, Jude told Nemoira she didn’t care for the world. The trees swayed and groaned. A fat bumblebee buzzed around her ear, and she waved it away. “Everything’s got their place. Mine is out here.”
“Not originally, though. You’re still a person. Fine lady like yourself, I bet you grew up some place pretty. Soft blankets, a pretty garden, a white house. There were rosebushes and pies. Your mama and daddy love you, I bet.”
Jude stiffened in her seat. The bee landed on her arm, and she watched it dance in the hair, dusting pollen along her forearm. “Nope.”
“Tell me then,” said Nemoira. “Tell me what it was like.”
Jude told Nemoira no. She touched Nemoira’s hand then removed it. “Not yet, at least. Anyways, this is where I am now.” She took a long sip of her tea, set it down, then gestured to the field, the woods.

“I’m better out here on my own. I can be my most natural self.”
“Was it really so bad then? With others?”
“Bad enough for me, I guess. People weren’t any good for me. Mean and cold. Cruel.” Jude snorted. “Hell, people ain’t good right here next to you either.”
“Oh, stop it, Judy, you are good. Real good!”
Jude looked at Nemoira, then back at the field. Tears pricked her eyes, and her face was hot. “I’m not. Not really.”
Nemoira reached over the table and took Jude’s hand in hers. Her palms were smooth against Jude’s, free of scars and soft as dandelion tufts. “Don’t say that. You took me in, didn’t you? You fed me up, made me warm. You didn’t have to let me stay with you all this time, but you did. You keep me in your house, feed me, bathe me, make me laugh and smile. What about you ain’t good. Tell me. Let me fix.”
“Giving ain’t the same as loving. Lots of people will feed you, keep you and hate you still.”
Nemoira went quiet. When she spoke next, she asked, “Do you hate me, Judy?”
Jude shook her head. She lifted Nemoira’s hand to her mouth and kissed her unlined knuckles. “How could I hate you?”
“Nobody ever said I was good. Who’s to say I’m not as bad as you think you are?”
“Me,” replied Jude. “I say you’re good.”
“Even with me being a stranger?” Nemoira said, lifting a brow. “You think just because you found me low means I can’t do you no harm? You don’t know a thing about me, Judy, just like I don’t know a thing about you. I could be dangerous. Only thing that knows where I’m from is me, and ‘less I choose to tell you, you’ll never know it. Who knows? I could be a wily fox, plotting on you. Who says I didn’t sense it in you, your goodness, and come slinking out of them woods, sniffing you out?” Nemoira’s eyes flashed. She smiled. “Who says I won’t eat you up?”
Jude scoffed, took her hand out of Nemoira’s, and waved it. Waved the idea away. “You won’t. I feel it. I was there when you needed me, and you’re too good to hurt a friend.”
“The snake bit the man even after he healed it.”
“Then don’t bite me.”

Later, at the dinner table, Jude and Nemoira discussed their plans for the coming week. Winter was coming, and they’d have to prepare for it, a long list of chores that needed doing before the frost came. Nemoira hummed boredly at the list but perked up at the mention of Sunday.
“Where do you go on Sundays?”
“Sundays? I go into the woods.”
“What for?” Nemoira shifted in her seat and leaned forward on her elbows. “What do you do in there?”
Jude hummed, unsure of how to answer. She’d never had to explain her Sunday routine to anyone, the things she did there to pass the time. “Depends. Sometimes I write or draw, or I sew if I bring my kit with me. Why do you ask?”
“Can I come with you next Sunday?” Nemoira sked, visibly excited.
Jude supposed there was only a matter of time before Nemoira asked her about the trips into the woods and to be invited. The only surprise was that it took her so long, considering Nemoira had seen her coming and going for three Sundays without so much as a sideways glance. But Sundays was her days, and she was well within her rights to tell Nemoira to stay back. What Jude did in there, skin sprouting buds, swaying along with the trees, was none of Nemoira’s business. Even as she thought these things, Jude thought it silly to try to deny Nemoira. She wanted her friend to come along, to see the woods as she saw it.
She said yes, and the following Sunday, Jude and Nemoira went into the woods. Jude showed her the birds, the peperomia, and the split in the woods where the water kissed the trees and stained the trunks with green. She spread out a blanket, and they sat together, shoulder to shoulder, sun filtering in through the leaves as the women ate their lunches and talked about nothing in particular.
“This is…”
“It is.”
“It’s so…”
“I know, and…”
All of their half-said sentences, thoughts thought and unspoken but heard, settled over them like warm summer rain. Jude laid in the grass, and Nemoira nestled beside her, head on her shoulder, leg pressed against her legs. They breathed together, closer than sisters. Nemoira wove Jude a crown of daisies, golden yellow against her dark, coiled hair. Jude sighed, curled closer into Nemoira, and the woods sighed along with her, content.

Inspired by the success of their trip in the woods that Sunday, Jude invited Nemoira up to her sewing room. The sacred place, again sanctified by Jude’s loving hands, opened itself unto them, light pouring through the window and bathing them in the yellow-pink rays of midmorning. Giddy as little girls, Jude gave Nemoira a tour of the room, showing off her vast array of squares and patterns, clothes half-finished, and blankets completed. She’d never shown anyone her handicrafts before, so Nemoira was the first person outside of herself to run her hands over the embroidery hoops, to feel the motley of textures of her elaborate quilts. Nemoira sat at Jude’s loom and ran her long, dark fingers along its warp strings. The lightest touches sent shivers down Jude’s spine like somebody was plucking her strings, lovingly observing her bobbins and thread.
Did she like them, Jude wondered? Did she think they were well-crafted, well-made? She knew Nemoira saw the pieces hung around the house, the housetop quilt and knitted blanket down in the sunroom, but it was different from being in the crucible to see where the art began. Jude gnawed at her bottom lip anxiously as Nemoira crisscrossed the space, curiously fingering a dress left on a mannequin, then the bright stretches of yellow cotton on the cutting table.
Nemoira turned and, having caught sight of a tapestry hung on the north wall, gasped, hand over her heart. She went to the wall and touched the grey-green fabric gently. Some of the fibers came off in her hand, bits of woven yarn falling away. The tapestry was not beautiful, at least not in the traditional sense. The colors were dark and foreboding, the bleakness alleviated only by brief spots of blue and red. Most dark of all was the subject matter—a fox with a black rabbit caught in its teeth.
“Oh, Miss Jude!” For a while, those were the only words Nemoira said. She repeated them again and again, four times in total as she felt along the tapestry, her dark eyes locked with the eyes of the animals. She turned to face Jude and said, “It’s perfect! Just perfect! Look at this, the texture, the colors!”
Jude’s face warmed. She dipped her head. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing! Look at the rabbit, its teeth. You caught life in the yarn and the wool.”
“Life?” Jude raised her head and smiled. “But it’s dead. No more life in it.”
“Isn’t there? Look at the fox’s eyes; they’re not empty yet, and neither are the rabbit’s. What’s in them if not life?”
Jude looked over the tapestry. She tried to put herself in the mindset she was in when she first made it but found herself unable to. Too happy, cheeks too warm and spirit too light to even imagine the grim woman that wove the gore into the fox’s fur, the necklace of red around the rabbit’s ripped throat. She touched the rabbit with her fingertips and felt its labored breathing as her own. Red fiber fell into Jude’s hand, slick and viscous as new blood.
“Savagery?” suggested Jude.
“In both of them?”
“Why not? Everyday animals kill and are killed. Everything knows where it belongs. Everything knows this is the way things are. Survival of the fittest. Of the meanest.” She canted her head in Nemoira’s direction. “It’s ingrained in us, deeper than deep. Even the smallest things know that if they ain’t clever enough, fast enough, they’re up for dinner.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Judy. I don’t think the world was always so mean. First time a man saw a wolf he felt a compulsive need to pet it.”
“And the first time a wolf saw a man?”
“A compulsive need to be pet.”
Jude threw her head back and laughed. It shocked her, her laughter and Nemoira’s light voice dancing over the words trippingly, but it was a good shock. “Then maybe this ain’t savagery at all. Maybe it’s just nature.” She smiled at Nemoira. “Hunger.”
“No. This is brutal,” said Nemoira. She smiled back at Jude, eyes flashing. “Some things are just vicious.”

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67

Four.

Autumn passed, uneventful and hot, muggy, and airless until it wasn’t. Without warning or so much as a cool breeze to prepare the way, the cold came. It slipped through the windows, the doorjambs, sills, sashes, and weak spots in the wood, down through the chimney and under the blankets, freezing the toes and aching the joints. A thin sheet of frost coated the windowpanes, and the once fertile land began to freeze over.
Winter was fast approaching. Nothing remained in the woods save for Jude, Nemoira, and the most stubborn of birds, everything else having flown further south. The women kept to the house, bundled in their scarves and pants and woolen underthings. All-day long the fireplace roared; at night, they settled by ceramic heaters and shoved bedwarmers under the comforters, bodies almost unbearably hot beneath the piles of thick blanketing.
In the years past, Jude faced the cold alone. The preparations, the insulating, the chopping and stockpiling of wood, the mothering of the pipes, and the squirrel-like hoarding of food were independent work, hard and dreary but necessary. Now that Nemoira was with her, the work felt lighter, both physically and emotionally. The jobs that ached Jude’s bones could be passed on or shared, two pairs of shoulders, and two pairs of hands mending in unison. Harvesting the remains of the garden used to be a slog, a job that took all day, but the time flew by with Nemoira at her side. They sang to each other, for each other, real songs and made-up ones, as they picked gourds, potatoes, beans, onions, cabbages, and carrots.
It was a lush pull, bigger than Jude ever imagined. Her fingers were throbbing painfully from working the icy ground, but she was happy, a bone-deep satisfaction that radiated from her. Side by side, Jude and Nemoira counted and cataloged each bit of produce pulled. They, side by side, canned and preserved, then prepared for themselves a grand meal to celebrate a job well done. They treated themselves to sweet summer wine and second helpings of spiced collard greens, corn on and off the cob, turkey, pheasant, the fat legs of rabbit, buttery pound cakes. Nemoira and Jude ate like queens, sucking the grease from their fingers, belching, sighing, then falling asleep on one another. Jude, a garden too long neglected, bloomed beside Nemoira, snakeroot and aster and pink veronica.
There was a new feeling in her chest, indescribably warm and comforting, but terrifying as well. Jude had already given Nemoira everything of hers, but she wanted to give more. Her seventeenth-year quilt, the Tree of Paradise, was slowly morphing into Nemoira’s quilt. She took bits of Nemoira’s clothes, loose threads from her cloak, and pieces of her scarves and incorporated them into the leaves of the tree. She didn’t mind Nemoira seeing her at work anymore. In fact, it was rather nice, sitting in Nemoira’s room as she sewed her girl, resting while rested on her bed.
How long was a guest a guest before they became a permanent fixture? Nemoira filled her mind and house. The cottage trembled, roiled, and fought, but it was easier to manage with someone beside her, scolding the sideboard and soothing the hutch. Jude was never so peaceful, so wanted, so watched over. How was it possible that this woman from the woods, from nowhere, came to her house and took her over, changing her in ways she didn’t think possible? How did she open all the doors and windows, let in light, and love her better than a sister? Was this love? She’d only known Nemoira for the two months they shared a house, and yet it felt like they’d done this all before—the feelings, the tender glances exchanged, the easy laughter and camaraderie.
Jude took some time for herself to think. Nemoira, somewhere in the house, Jude sat out on the porch wrapped in a shawl, Nemoira’s quilt in her lap. It was nearly done, only the surrounding space and border left to finish. She stitched as she took in the golden landscape, the field in autumn. She adored the fall. The leaves took their sweet time in changing color that year, but they were lovely now, all eggplant purple and reds and oranges, as beautiful as her first month in the woods.
Jude snapped a piece of thread with her teeth. Seemed like she was hardly ever alone nowadays. It wasn’t all bad—Nemoira broke the monotony, the vast stretches of silence. Still, Jude was, at her core, a solitary creature who enjoyed her quiet and the option to think on all the foul thoughts that plagued her. Thoughts she didn’t dare think around Nemoira.
It was too soon to share Ma’am with Nemoira. The woman was decent, attentive, and kind to Jude without expecting anything but kindness in return. Sometimes Jude thought of her as the wretch in the rain, sodden and sullen, begging for a place to sleep. She didn’t dare burden that woman with the blood of her past. It wouldn’t be fair to smear her in, to cover her in Jude’s grime, her fetid truths.
Jude wondered if Ma’am’s house was still standings. Others loved her mother, and her aunts, Lillian and Phyllis, might be taking care of it now that she was gone. Jude imagined that it was the same as the day she left, if not cleaner, brighter. If Jude closed her eyes, she could see it perfectly, time nor spotty memory able to dilute the image of her mother’s house. She knew the layout like the palm of her hand, the windows’ height and the feel of the plastic-covered furniture, the smell of incense and bleach, everything buffed and waxed, and too shiny to touch. Jude supposed she would always know the shape of it, just as she figured she would never be able to erase the darker memories she had of the house. Just as there would always be lacy curtains hanging in the windows, there would always be a little girl in a closet, begging for mercy.
She scoffed. Wiped the tears from her eyes before they had a chance to fall. At least, Jude knew what sort of person she was in the woods. At least all her harms were self-inflicted. What was a striped hand to a striped back? A few drops of blood were nothing compared to the gallons she spilled of Ma’am’s, the sea of red staining the green checkerboard, running into the grout in rivulets.
A noise at the door pulled Jude from her reverie. She composed herself, straightened the quilt on her lap, and flashed Nemoira a smile as she stepped onto the porch.
“You still working on that thing?”
“Mmmhmm,” said Jude. “It’s gonna take a while, what with them long legs of yours.”
Nemoira snorted. “You’ll find a way to handle it, I’m sure. You mind having some company?” She waited until Jude shook her head before easing into the other chair, stretching out her legs. She watched Jude through her peripheral and Jude, conscious of being watched, straightened her back, and tried to erase all traces of Ma’am from her face and mind.
“Pie’s cool now, if you’re interested,” Nemoira said casually.
“It can wait.” Jude rolled her shoulders. “Smells good though. I’m starting to think you make a better pie than me.”
The women laughing, firewood, and flies buzzing in their throats. When they settled down, they fell into a comfortable silence, Jude looking off into the woods and thinking, and Nemoira watching her think. After a while, Nemoira cleared her throat and said, “I did come out here to ask you something. Not quite sure you’re gonna like what I got to say.”
Jude looked at Nemoira, pressing her to continue with a short nod.
“I know it’s late, and I know you got your superstitions, but I was wondering if, maybe, you’d like to come take a walk with me.”
“A walk? It’s almost night.”
“I know, I know, but we got a few hours of sunlight left. Enough for us to take our dinners and make a little picnic of it. What do you say?”
Jude couldn’t stave off the wave of anxiety that washed over her. She didn’t know how to tell Nemoira that her superstitions were less superstitious than she thought, that she was cautious with the woods because she knew what sort of nastiness waited in it. Where she made her home was tameless, but there were means of controls, little ways to balance the woods, field, and cottage.
Inside, the hutch toppled over, and a chair fell to pieces. Both women heard the chips fall, but only Jude flinched. She glanced at the house and saw a few of the windows were aglow. She never let Nemoira break her tradition of flowers and lights, only added her to them. Jude didn’t see fit to tell Nemoira the reasons for her rituals, but indeed she felt the importance of them in how Jude lit the house from top to bottom in a trance-like state.
What was she thinking, asking Jude to go out so late? Didn’t she hear the owls, the twitchy songs of crickets?
And the beast! Oh, Jude hadn’t even considered Nemoira encountering the beast! It’d been gone for as long as Nemoira lived with her, but maybe them chancing this evening trip would push it to reveal itself. What would happen to the two of them if they were caught in the woods past dark, the beast closing in on them, licking its chops and panting its hot breath? Would they be mauled? Would Jude become another angry ghost in the house, another haint caught in the rafters knocking over vases?
She didn’t want to dwell on it. Jude took in a deep breath and laughed to relieve some of the pressure on her chest. There was no mirth to it, only noise. “No, I can’t. I won’t.” Jude shook her head and not-laughed again. “Absolutely not, no.”
Nemoira canted her head. “Are you scared?”
Was she scared? What sort of stupid question was that? Jude snapped her head to Nemoira, clicked her tongue at the open and curious expression on her friend’s face, then snapped her head back to the line of trees that was getting darker and darker by the second. She fidgeted in her seat, chest burning.
She was quiet, angry, and insulted when Nemoira slipped from her chair and sat at Jude’s knee. She looked up at Jude with her dark, serious eyes and said, “It’s alright to be afraid.”
“I ain’t worried about being scared,” Jude huffed. “What if something happens out there? What if I can’t protect you if something happens?”
“If something happens!” Nemoira laughed, gently squeezing Jude’s knee. A part of Jude reared back, nervous and tetchy about being mocked, but it settled once she saw Nemoira’s face, the genuine warmth in her eyes, and her smile. “Judy, I wouldn’t take you no place that was dangerous. Who says you have to protect me? I’ll protect me, and you too.”
Jude put her hand over Nemoira’s. “I just don’t want you to be hurt.”
“Nothing’s gonna hurt me, woman. And nothing’s gonna hurt you either. I know I haven’t known you long, but I know you, and I know how to look after you. I want to take you into the woods to show you what it’s like at night, how pretty it is.”
“You’ve seen it?” Jude asked quietly.
Nemoira sat back on her haunches and nodded. “There’s this place I want to take you. There’s so much I want to show you.”
“It gets dark so early…”
“Then we’ll bring lights. Judith? Please?”
There were countless reasons to tell Nemoira no. If she wanted, she could send Nemoira away, damn her to hell for crossing lines and overstepping boundaries. What did Nemoira know? She never saw the woods as Jude saw it, too close and full of noise, beasts breathing down her neck. And yes, damnit, she was scared! Only the dumb and dead had the luxury of being foolhardy, and Jude didn’t escape the necklace of heavy hands around her throat only to be mauled by creatures big enough to blot out the moon.
Oh, but Nemoira’s eyes! She was so earnest, so open. It wasn’t fair to keep denying her these things. Jude would go because she loved her and was in love with her, but she would be careful as well. Careful not to share what rested beneath her skin, the uglier sides of herself that Nemoira was too good to have sprung on her. Jude sighed.
“Let me get my coat.”

They left the house not long afterward. A basket full of dinner, armed with oil lamps and a blanket, Nemoira led Jude into the forest. Jude went into the woods often but never so late and never without completing the rituals that might’ve assured her safe passage. She insisted on lighting a few candles before they left, and as they crossed the field, Jude peeked over her shoulder to see them once more. The flames gave her knowing little winks, conspiratorial. Jude turned from them, breathing deeply and shakily, trying not to lose her nerve.
It took a lot of nerve to walk through the woods at night, even with Nemoira holding a lamb and leading the way. They were deep in the woods, deeper than Jude had ever gone before. They walked a close and narrow dirt bath, the trees on either side of them curving in and forming a dark green ceiling above them. No light came through; both oil lamps flickered in the darkness, greasy yellow light spilling over the women, the path ahead. The tunnel was lush and suffocatingly verdant. Gorgeous red cock’s comb and purple aster swept against their clothes, wrapped around their wrists and ankles, and pulled at their hair, plaited, held back from their brown faces with ribbons. Thistle tickled the lining of Jude’s throat; her phlegm was fragrant, like pine, like oak. The smell of the tunnel, petrichor, left her lightheaded. Jude closed her eyes and let Nemoira guide her. She felt congested, clear, throat and nose and mind stuffed with cotton, but her lungs expanding with the purest air she’d ever breathed.
At the end of the tunnel, the trees fell away to reveal a glade washed in golden light. Jude grimaced at the sudden change in lighting, shielding her eyes then gawking at the breathtaking sight before her. Acres upon acres of rolling green grass dotted with flowers of every color and species, great swaths of trees painted in autumn colors. It was sunset in the glade, the sky orange, and gold. Never was there flora so vibrant, trees so lush. Jude slipped out of her coat and felt the cool air on her skin.
Jude walked through the field in a daze, quietly taking in the sights, the bounty. This was a fantastical place, unlike anything Jude had ever seen before. She stepped through yellow and red ornamental peppers, croton, and long stretches of purple fountain grass that reached up to her waist. There were no seasons in the glade; the trees sported wisteria, fuchsia and bleeding heart poppies, apple blossoms and cherry blossoms growing up beside one another. The glade’s center was a gigantic weeping willow, its leaves yellow and green and white. It drew Jude to it like a mouth unto flame; she went to it slowly and sat at its base. She felt her two selves merge—body and memory—and she rang out, spirit humming a song for her ears only. Jude laid her head against the trunk of the tree, and her eyes fell closed.
Nemoira joined her there not long after, settling in beside Jude and resting her head on Jude’s shoulder. All of it, the glade, the tree, every emotion that weighed on Jude’s chest, felt unreal. Nemoira teased her braids, teased the hair growing on Jude’s arms. Jude glanced up at the canopy of the weeping willow. She thought of cold picnics and hot baths, hands leading and healing, of needing and being needed by someone. No, Jude thought. She wanted better. She wanted to be desired, not just for what she gave but for what she could take as well, for all the love that could be poured into her. Jude sighed contentedly and brought Nemoira nearer to her.
They had their dinner under the weeping willow, cold cut sandwiches and thermoses of tea and thick slices of Nemoira’s sweet potato pie. Afterward, they took a digestive walk around the glade. At first, the women walked apart, conscious of their thoughts and hands, brushing arms only occasionally. Then came the brief touches of their hands, their fingers, coy looks, and heated faces. Finally, Jude linked her arm with Nemoira, and they walked together.
Jude was young, careless! She and Nemoira chased one another, screamed and teased, pushed and pulled, and played like children. They hid behind trees and laughed when they found each other, fell into the grass, and rolled until they were covered in green.
They laid there in the grass, Jude and Nemoira, and stared up into the golden sky that covered them. Breathless, cheeks flushed, Jude could’ve cried for all the joy she felt. She’d never felt so happy, so childlike, not even as a girl. Was she ever a child, then? Was she ever small and delicate in the eyes of others? Was there ever a time when she laid in the dirt like this and felt the warmth of the earth, the ants and earthworms wriggling beneath her? And what about her Nemoira? Was she loved as a child? Was she loved now, in the glade beside Jude?
Jude hoped she was. She hoped the world was good to Nemoira, that life was fabulous, that everything she touched glowed with that magic reserved for the innocent. In her heart, Jude wished that Nemoira’s childhood was sweet, that the cottage and good and kind for her, that even if her past life was dreary, she was happy now with Jude caring for her.
Her mood took a sudden dive then. It infuriated Jude to think of herself as a broken girl, to believe that there was even the smallest chance that youth was anything short of bliss for her dearest friend. They were children, they were only girls; peace should’ve been a given. It didn’t seem fair to Jude that life would put such sorrow and anger on their plates. Seemed hateful that Jude was raised with poison, her spirit rotted away by the worm of her mother.
Face hot with emotion, Jude turned to Nemoira and said, “I think I want to tell you about the ring. Will you listen?”
Nemoira tilted her face to Jude. “Please.”
“It’s hard to talk about,” Jude started. She lifted her right hand in the air so that they both could look at Ma’am’s wedding band. It was as it always had been, round and golden, a little too tight on her thick fingers, and clean. She held the shock of being slapped against her cheek, the memory of blood oozing down that pushed her into killing her mother. There was a dent high on her cheekbone, a scar long healed but never faded. “It belonged to my Ma’am.”
“Your ma’am?”
“My mother,” Jude corrected. “Coldest woman there ever was. She never once said a loving word to me, never held me, never loved me.” She quieted, sensing she was slipping into dangerous waters. “It’s all over now. All in the past.”
“Is your mother dead?”
The flatness of Nemoira’s tone startled Jude. She blinked and responded in her stiff, halting way, “Yeah. Yeah, she is. I took the ring off her the moment she stopped breathing. When she slapped me…” Jude touched her fingers to the cut on her cheek. “I don’t know. It was ugly, like I wasn’t even a part of her, like I was just some girl on the street.” Jude laid flat on her back, eyes tracing the underside of the willow, pressure on her chest, and a painful lump in her throat. A tear rolled down her round cheek towards her ear. “I just wanted to leave, and she was gonna kill me for it. Her own daughter.” Jude shook her head, gasped tearfully. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” asked Nemoira, but Jude couldn’t answer, could only cry. Nemoira let Jude cry for a while, and when she was a little calmer, she used the end of her shirt to dry Jude’s face. She held Jude in her arms, not speaking, not even making gentle shushing sounds. Nemoira just let Jude weep, and when she was through, Nemoira helped her to her feet and took her for another slow walk through the glade.
The sky darkened, late afternoon bleeding into night. Armed with an oil lamp each, the women started home. Nemoira led the way again, always ten paces ahead, the light of her lamp bobbing in the dark, green tunnel. Jude drifted along as if in a trance. Her eyelids drooped the warmth of the tunnel so much like the warmth of her bed. She felt like Alice before Wonderland, asleep beneath the trees and tall flowers, insects dancing across her skin.
They walked. Walked further. Nemoira was far ahead of her now, her lamp barely visible. Jude tried to catch up to her, but each step forward was several steps for Nemoira. She called for her to slow down, but it was no use. After a while, she couldn’t see Nemoira’s light at all, and Jude was alone in the unfamiliar bit of the woods, only a weakening oil lamp to guide her. Jude started to call for Nemoira but thought better of it. Who knew what was in the woods this late? Jude walked on, hyperconscious of the tiny noises all around her, the minute changes in temperature and smell. A twig snapped ahead of her. She paused and raised her lamp higher.
Something was close. Trembling, Jude held the lamp up to light the path before her. Then she saw the massive pawprints, the snuffed oil lamp tossed carelessly aside. Fear clamped ‘round her heart like a vise, and Jude forced herself to breathe. She was no good to herself or Nemoira if she panicked now. She took a step forward, and her foot in the footprint of the beast was like a speck of sand in the desert—insignificant, fleeting.
“Nemoira?” Jude whispered. “Nemoira!”
No response came from the trees that surrounded her. Jude felt nauseous, lightheaded, and frightened beyond all belief. Her stomach bubbled, and vomit rose in her throat. She smelled…Jude sniffed the air, eyes widening. She knew that smell well, the odor of the cottage and the woods, like rotting flesh and blood, like overripe fruit and flowers at their peak; fragrant, potent, headier than summer wine. It coated her throat like phlegm, mucus dripping down the nasal passage. Her saliva was foul; she wanted to spit, but she swallowed instead, her belly boiling.
Jude saw it then, the beast. In the dark, illuminated only by an oily orange flame, Jude could just about make out its shape, the long, humped back and slow, lumbering walk. It was huge, ghastly, all meat and muscle yet somehow graceful. Its black shoulders were smooth, and its large paws made little noise against the forest floor. Jude couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. How could she? When right in front of her was the beast that plagued her dreams. That very beast that haunted the woods?
Jude kept her place, arm raised, dumbstruck as the beast walked ahead. Her mind raced. What happened to Nemoira? Did the beast kill her? Eat her?
The beast stopped walking. It growled then looked over its shoulder at Jude. She couldn’t suppress the gasp that left her. It was a bear’s face, grotesque and strange as if it’d been attacked many, many times. The face was marred with unhealed scars, with wounds never closed. Ugly and fearsome, the grizzly bear looked at her with dark, intelligent eyes, glossy like black stones underwater. It held its mouth open, revealing dark gums and sharp teeth wet with flower-and-blood sweet spit.
Jude and the bear regarded one another. Jude lowered her lamp and brought it near the animal, the light of the lamp, reflecting brightly in the bear’s ears. Terrified, she touched its coarse black fur, petting its hump and dark head, and it nipped at her hand, growling lowly.
Jude knew its eyes, the curious cant of the bear’s head. She called it by its name.
“Nemoira?”

§

Back inside the cottage, the bear shed its skin. Jude stood flush to the wall and watched as it rose to its full height of eight feet, head brushing the high ceiling. Its shadow was long as it swayed slowly as if dancing. The coarse black fur fell away, the animal hide changing into a river of coiled black hair tangled with twigs and leaves. Its mangled face softened, snarling maw transformed into human lips and nose and cheeks and chin. The eyes, Jude noticed, remained the same.
Of all the improbable things presented to Jude, the transformation was the most impossible. She held away from Nemoira, mind flashing first to the sagging, blood-stained wood on her porch then to their first true meeting in the woods.
Nemoira frowned down at her. “Are you asked of me, Judy?”
Jude began to shake her head, stopped, then nodded. She was not a child, but she felt childlike in Nemoira’s presence, this stranger, stranger than she ever thought. Who was this woman in her parlor? What did she know of her, really? She thought about what Nemoira said to her a while back, about how she could be the danger all along, and Jude chided herself for not believing her then. Still, Jude was in awe. Was it possible that the same beast that plagued her all these years was the same woman she read to, sang to? The woman she loved?
“Is there anything else?”
Nemoira narrowed her eyes. “Anything else?”
“Any more secrets?” asked Jude, lifting her head to meet Nemoira’s gaze.
“No. No more secrets.”
“Do you promise?”
Nemoira lowered her gaze, quiet for a moment, then said, “I promise, no more secrets.”
Jude didn’t realize how tense she was, how raised her shoulders were, and how clenched her jaw was until Nemoira came to her and hugged her. She tightened up; her heart pounded. Jude kept her arms loose to her side as Nemoira held her, unable to shake the image of the bear prowling the woods, its roars following her into her dreams.
There was a wild animal in her house. A grizzly bear more gruesome and grislier than most with terrible claws and teeth that maimed and mauled. She’d seen bears before, but they were all brown and black bears, relatively harmless to the grizzly that held her. Some small part of her knew she was heading into dangerous territory with Nemoira, but she didn’t care. She gave Nemoira a part of herself by telling her about Ma’am, and now Nemoira had done the same. Nemoira squeezed Jude to her, and Jude squeezed her back, her senses alight.
What good would it do to kick Nemoira out anyway? A fed animal always returned.

Nemoira led Jude upstairs to the bathroom, sat her down on the lid of the toilet, and told her to wait there while she heated the bathwater. Jude was too tired to protest. She only slipped out of her clothes and watched as Nemoira filled the tub. When it was full, Jude let Nemoira guide her into the tub, hyper-aware of her nakedness, the woman’s eyes on her form. Was she beautiful to Nemoira, she wondered? She sank into the water, hissing at the heat.
Jude laid her head on the rim of the tub. The room was hazy with steam and the smell of the soap. Sounds came to her as if she were underwater. She heard Nemoira lathering up the washcloth then felt it against her skin, the fabric soft against her back. She let herself be taken care of, let herself be cleaned. Each rush of water over her sent shivers down her spine and a pulsing heat to her stomach. She closed her eyes and sank into sensation.
“We’ve known each other for a long time, haven’t we? Sixteen, almost seventeen years,” Nemoira said. She smoothed a wet hand over Jude’s face and kept it there on her scarred cheek. “I used to come to the edge of your field and see your lights in the dark. It was strange…part of me thought you were stupid, another ignorant human taking up space where they didn’t belong. Then I thought you were brave. Coming into the woods where you had no protection, no safety. You made your home here in spite of the dangers, these things that live in your house. You amazed me. You do, still, amaze me.”
Jude hummed. “Did you love me?”
“Hm?”
She shifted in the bath, rising to sit up in the water. “When you saw my lights and saw me walking in the woods, did you love me?”
Nemoira quieted. Ran her hands along the film of oil that lay atop the bathwater. “The first time I brought you food it was a rabbit I found out near a crick. I’ve seen other humans—usually, they hunt, lay traps for food and fur. You never hunted, never brought any weapon more dangerous than your shears. When I saw the rabbit, I thought of you hungry. The whole way through the woods, my stomach growling, mouth salivating, holding the rabbit in my teeth, I thought of you hungry. I thought of you, this strange human, when I put it down on your doorstep. I went away from the rabbit, still hungry, but I left it there.”
Tears flowed down Jude’s face, but she didn’t try to stop them. She let them run, let herself sit in the feelings of pure love that rushed over her like water. Her body ached with sorrow, with want. She couldn’t read Nemoira’s mind or her eyes, but there was fear in her own, a gut-deep terror that fought to ignore. Her heart racing, mind aglow with red and Sunday lights, Jude leaned forward and pressed her lips to Nemoira’s.
With one kiss, Jude was set alight from the top of her head all the way down to her toes. Nemoira made no move to reciprocate, and for a moment, Jude pulled away, worried she misread the mood. She shouldn’t have worried; Nemoira pulled her back in, kissing her with a passion that could only be described as hunger. She held Jude’s face, devouring her, consuming her, hands traversing untouched land.
Nemoira came away from Jude panting. Her hands wet against Jude’s cheeks, warm breathing puffing against her skin, she asked, “Is this what you want? Tell me this is what you want.”
Jude was starving. She knew for years the hunger in her belly but never named it. She ignored it, fasted, but now, presented with a feast, her mouth watered, and her stomach roared in anticipation. “Touch me. Right now, touch me, please, or I’ll die.”
Nemoira was merciful; her hand on Jude’s skin, her collarbone was a relief beyond all reliefs, as if every lake and river poured into the forest, soaked the soil, and nourished the thirsty roots. She soared, body bursting into spring with thousands of newly budded and bloomed flowers. Rose and jasmine and hyacinth, her mind was muddled with spring. Jude wanted and wanted, and now she received, her cup runneth over with a love she’d only dreamt of. When she was released in the black hours before dawn, she was full but gutted, like her flowers post picking when they were still wet from the river and laid out in the sun to dry. She felt like she’d been ravaged like she’d been taken entirely.
Jude wrapped an arm around Nemoira’s waist and hooked a leg over Nemoira’s leg. A gentle hand settled on her stomach, a kiss placed on her forehead. They laid there silent as flowers, breath passing between them until they were one inhale, one exhale, one body.

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Five.

Several weeks passed, and in that time, Jude managed to forget the rapidly approaching anniversary of her mother’s death. Never the matter; the body remembered what the mind forgot, and Jude began the morning of the fateful day stricken by an illness, paralyzed in bed. Caught between sleep and wakefulness, Ma’am sat on Jude’s chest and choked the air out of her, mean little eyes glaring down at Jude. She forced her hand down Jude’s throat, rummaged around in her stomach, and pulled up slices of carrots, sharpened shards of beef bone, and slivers of onion. The room was hot and cold all at once, airless, and Jude could smell camphor, peppermint, and tuberose.
Ma’am reached down further, grabbed hold of Jude’s stomach, and yanked. Jude threw herself to the side of the bed, head-spinning, and dry-heaved until she was sore. Quaking, face as white as her sheets, she dropped back onto her pillow. She squeezed her eyes shut and saw behind her lids her mother’s kitchen washed in blood, hands, and feet and face smeared with red. And though the room was still, she heard cherubs raining down from their shelves, porcelain wings shattering against the tile.
“Jude?”
She opened her eyes. Nemoira stood in the doorway, cautiously peering into the room. “Are you alright? I thought I heard vomiting.”
Weakly, Jude nodded. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. Just a little weak.”
Nemoira clicked her tongue, took a seat on the edge of the bed near Jude, and put her hand to Jude’s forehead, her neck. “You’re burning up…”
“I feel fine,” Jude lied.
“You’re not. You’re going to rest today, like it or not.” Her voice was soft but stern as she drew back the bed covers and gestured for Jude to get inside. Jude caught her gaze, hoping to make her realize how silly this was but saw there’d be no arguing with Nemoira. She sighed, crawled back between the sheets, pulled the quilt up to her chin, and closed her eyes.
She didn’t hear Nemoira leave. Jude was fast asleep the moment she closed her eyes. She dreamt, the dreams vivid enough to frighten Jude into thinking they were real. She dreamt of bears pacing the floor outside her bedroom, dreamt of lions in the attic. Ma’am and her aunts came in through the window and watched silently as Jude writhed, occasionally commenting between themselves on how weak Jude was, how pathetic.
Was this hell? Jude laid in bed wide-eyed, shivering with cold yet overwhelmed with heat. She saw the haints that lived in her home, clearly, and illness rinsing the mud from her eyes. And revealing unto her the ghouls and gremlins she’d only heard before. They hung in the corners, sneering, snarling, faces split down the center and haphazardly sewn together. Some had ceramic wings; others had animal eyes that shone brightly and knowingly. They all watched, stared at Jude with accusatory eyes.
Every once in a while, the bedroom door opened, and Jude cowered, not recognizing the cool, lineless hand that brushed her skin. She thought it was Ma’am at first; weren’t those callouses on her palm? Couldn’t she smell the jasmine on her wrist? She grabbed for Ma’am’s hand and held it, kissed the knuckles as she kissed them on the day she killed her.
“Mommy?” Jude called, and when no answer came, she wept and wept, feeling forsaken once more.
When food was brought, Jude tried to take some in but found her couldn’t hold it down. The broth was too rich, the porridge to grainy on her tongue. She refused the spoon and laid her head down on the (blessedly) cool pillow and watched, waited, and wept.
There was no greater curse than to be trapped in one’s own mind. There was too much to think and too much time to think it in, and Jude’s thoughts, sauced in blood and seasoned with blood marrow, were often not so tasty. Each sweet thing was transformed into something bitter, deformed. She tried to make herself imagine Nemoira as the bear, walking through the woods to see her lights. Instead, she saw herself that first night in the woods, running through the darkness without her flashlight, too frightened to scream. Tried to imagine the graceful roll of the bear’s shoulders, Nemoira’s long hands detangling her hair. Jude imagined, instead, her own shoulders pulled in, her voice high and pitiful as she begged Ma’am for mercy; Ma’am’s hand yanking at her hair, wielding a weapon.
Jude whimpered. She wanted to leave her body. Just drop the physical form, become air and spirit, and go out walking through the field. She wanted to breathe; she wanted relief. Nemoira—if there was a Nemoira in the overwhelming heat of her nightmares—brought in one of the ceramic heaters, another quilt. She felt closely cocooned, but she was still cold, shivering though she knew her skin was fiery to the touch.
Hours passed, then days. Jude sensed them only vaguely, measuring the shift of light on the wall and the times that the bedroom door opened. Nemoira came with food that Jude refused or with a cool cloth to wash her with. Occasionally, Jude broke through her fog and saw Nemoira as the bear curled up at the foot of her bed, a protective paw over Jude’s leg. She leaned forward and stroked the bear’s head. The animal growled low in its throat, lapped Jude’s hand then turned its head away.
Jude slept. When she woke next, the room was dark, the orange light of her bedside lamp casting strange shadows on her bedspread. She looked up, overhead, and saw a gleaming half-moon through the curtains. How strange it was to think that the moon here in the woods was the same moon she gazed at through her bedroom window as a child. Nothing changed, not really. No matter where she went, no matter what she did, she always took herself, her memory, and the moon. The thought was comforting, familiar like a song half-remembered.
The house swayed. She felt it moved, even curled up in her bed, but she made no move nor sound to put it to rest. Let it rock, she thought. Let the light fixtures dance, let the hutch vomit cutlery, let the sofas overturn. Elsewhere, something clattered. Elsewhere, something fell and broke.
Jude was conscious again when Nemoira came into the room to check on her. There was sweat on Jude’s forehead, and she was ravenous after several days with little food. Nemoira laid a hand on Jude’s cheek, dabbed away the sweat, and made a small noise of approval.
She helped Jude sit up and asked, “How are you feeling?”
“Achy. Tired.” Jude’s voice was hoarse and dry. “But better. Is there any dinner?”
Nemoira smiled and said there as. She brought up a tray so they could eat together on Jude’s bed. Jude recognized it as the broth Nemoira made a few days before, reheated and served with soda crackers. She ate it slowly, nibbling at the crackers and taking the soup in small sips.
“You were in here,” started Jude. “As the bear.”
Nemoira nodded. “You petted my head like I was a dog.” She frowned and said, “You know…you were talking in your sleep.”
“I was?” Jude couldn’t help the alarm in her voice. She searched Nemoira’s face for clues, trying to see how much she said and how much Nemoira took in. Her face was blank. Jude lowered her gaze to her bowl and said, “Did I say thing in particular?”
“Not really. You kept calling for me.” A beat of silence. “And for your mother.”
“I called for my mother?”
Again, Nemoira nodded. Jude licked her lips nervously and said, “The day I got sick was the anniversary of her death. Usually I’m prepared for it, and I do a little something for her. It came up on me so suddenly this time.” She groaned, covered her face with her hands. “I kept seeing her out the corner of my eye, watching me. Felt like she’d finally come to take me back to the house.”
“The house?”
Jude looked at Nemoira and realized how much she hadn’t told her. To be an enigma was exhausting. It was too much to hold all alone, Ma’am’s death, and her part in it, the years of isolation. Hadn’t Nemoira shown Jude her most genuine self? It seemed unfair that Jude should keep her past to herself to avoid being condemned.
Not, not judged, Jude told herself. Seen. Understood. She worried that if Nemoira knew what sort of person Jude really was, she wouldn’t want her anymore. Even animals had morals. Jude, mother-killer, murderer, was less than human, less than an animal. She was smoke, amoral fire, and metal, a weapon that cut without prejudice.
She caught Nemoira’s gaze. Quickly, right hand digging into the sliced palm of her left hand, Jude said, “I killed my mother.”
For years she knew it, for years she carried it, but to say it aloud—it was horrible, unforgivable. She thought there would be rolling thunder, a bolt of lightning to strike her where she stood, but there was only silence. Tears sprung to her eyes. Her chest pulled painfully, her heart a wild thing trying to break from its cage. The house knew, and now Nemoira knew, the woods and the field as well. She repeated it, found it just as ugly the second time, but still didn’t break her hold of Nemoira’s gaze.
“Did she deserve it?” Nemoira asked, her voice emotionless.
Jude nodded, a tear rolling down her cheek.
“I might’ve known,” said Nemoira. She put a hand to Jude’s cut cheek and frowned. “The scars on your legs and back…She gave those to you, didn’t she?”
“Yes.” She realized, just as she never told a soul what she did to Ma’am, she never told a soul what Ma’am did to her. “She hurt me. More than anybody in the world, more than myself, though you can see I’ve tried.” She showed Nemoira, finally, the scars on her left hand. Nemoira ran her index finger along the deep cuts, the grooves and pits of her hand from where she dug into her palm with the tip of a blade or a needle, and the recent, more shallow cuts that were still pink and sensitive.
“I don’t think she ever loved me. I was always too much. Too big, too ugly. Too quiet, too strange. I stared. I never talked, I knew too much or too little. She wanted something else, something like her, but she got me instead.” Jude watched Nemoira run her hand along the scars on her shoulders as she peeled back the blanket and felt the cuts on her leg. “She tried beating me into the child she wanted and I was, for a while, what she wanted but people ain’t supposed to be what they not. Every time she straightened me out, I curled back up, like a fiddlehead. Went back to being Jude instead of Judith.”
“Will you tell me about it?” asked Nemoira. “About killing her?” Her eyes were wide and glossy, not with tears but with something else, Jude couldn’t quite place. She looked hungry and focused, not disgusted like Jude worried she’d be, and her voice was low, serious, and gritty.
So, Jude told her. Told Nemoira about the thirty-four years of whuppings, beatings, of violence, of blood and tears and words held back to save her skin. She told Nemoira about being slapped, for the first time, when she was five years old, how her face was puffed black and blue for weeks. People, good people with good intentions, asked if she was being hurt at home, and Jude, unable to picture a life without her mother, lied and protected her. It didn’t matter if it was a busted lip or a bloodied nose, a broken arm or leg or a beating so brutal she couldn’t speak, never mind walk. She kept Ma’am and her secrets. And she gave Nemoira the murder too, how the cherubs fell that day and how the blood soaked into the grout. How she led the blade across her mother’s throat, ending her reign of terror once and for all.
“Do you wanna know why I came into the woods?”
Nemoira nodded.
“There was nothing green where I grew up. Just concrete and steel and polished wood. Flowers in the yard that I wasn’t supposed to touch. She cussed me out for getting grass stains on my clothes, for coming home with mud on my face and leaves in my hair. That ain’t right, is it? Beating a child for being a child? For loving the world?”
Jude laughed mirthlessly, her tears pouring in earnest now. “You know what the worst part is? After all these years, she still won. Don’t matter if she’s dead and buried, rotted away to nothing, she still got a hold on me. When I’m sleeping or just resting around the house, there she is. Choking me out, beating me bloody, calling me stupid and lazy and useless. Seventeen years dead and she got me slicing up my hands just so I know they mine.”
Nemoira, silent throughout, grabbed Jude’s hands, kissed them, the knuckles, the gold band, the wounded palm. She kissed the pads of Jude’s fingers, the tips.
“Am I still good to you?” asked Jude. “Am I still decent?”
“Does it matter? Good or bad…What does it matter out here? An animal bigger than you, meaner than you, attacked and you retaliated. You killed to survive. I would’ve done the same.”
“I know,” said Jude. She took her hands from Nemoira’s and curled into her side, resting her head on Nemoira’s shoulder. That’s what scares me.”

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INTERLUDE /

Elsewhere, as Jude spilled the secrets of her past into Nemoira’s ear, a woman walked into a laundromat. She was an older woman, prim; she wore polished shoes and a matching pocketbook. Fearfully modest, her head was covered by a plain black scarf which she knotted securely beneath her chin. Her face was round, fat, but joyless, her eyes sunken in, and her mouth was drawn tight. Between the thin press of her lips and the formless quilted she wore, she was entirely impenetrable. A bell sounded as she entered; she hoisted her laundry basket higher on her hip and scanned the rows of washers and dryers, the people already inside.
The laundromat was near empty that night. The few people she saw, she knew, having lived in the city for most of her life. Phyllis gave her greetings before dipping into her pocketbook and pulling out a slim stack of money. She counted out four dollars and dropped them onto the counter. The clerk-slash-owner, Mr. Paul, flashed her a smile she didn’t return. She didn’t like how overfamiliar he was with her, shared childhood be damned. Phyllis’s sister, Lillian, hated the way he looked at ladies’ legs, how he felt the need to comment on every little passing thing without care or discretion. If her sister were there with her, she’d stage-whisper to Phyllis that she should keep very close watch over that money. Phyllis, her sister’s acolyte, and devotee, counted out the change as Mr. Paul counted out the change. When he was through, he smiled again and wished her a good evening. Phyllis took the money from off the counter, thanked the man curtly, and left to find her set.
Phyllis was in luck. Her favorite set—an unbroken row of three washers at the back of the laundromat—was open. She emptied the laundry basket out onto the metal tabletop provided and started sorting through the items. Alone, Phyllis sorted the clothes into darks, lights, and coloreds. Alone, she separated the regular wash items from the delicate scarves and underthings, then her sister’s clothes from her own.
Laundry was an easy job ever since Phyllis started bringing it to the laundromat. She remembered a time when doing the laundry meant dragging hot pots of water out to the yard and scrubbing clothes on the washboard, wringing them out with the mangle. Her hands throbbed at the memory of turning the crank, of lye and ash, the feel of the slick, yellow soap her mother used to make out of animal fat. Phyllis and her sisters used to make a game of it, the three of them singing made-up songs and tossing the clothes around. They stopped all that nonsense once their mama came out of the house and told them to stop messing around, to shut up so their daddy could sleep.
Feeding clothes into a machine didn’t take much time or thought. As Phyllis slammed the door closed on the last set of delicates, she caught sight of something and pulled it out to get a better look. It was a hair scarf, dark red, and patterned with red roses. It’d been years since Phyllis had seen it, but she knew who it belonged to, whose dark hair it covered. She ran her hand along the lining and felt what she was looking for in the bottom right corner; a name, hand-stitched in canary yellow thread—Ernestine Rice.
Phyllis brought the scar to her nose. If she breathed deeply enough, she could find traces of tuberose and calamine lotion hidden beneath the odor of age. She held it for a while longer, breathing and smelling, then tucked the scarf into the pocket of her coat.
As the machines began to fill with water, Phyllis settled into one of the squat plastic chairs that lined the wall. A young woman glanced at a seat next to Phyllis, saw the barricade she made of her basket and pocketbook and cat, sucked her teeth, and moved on. Phyllis, oblivious or uncaring, pulled a slim, metal nail file from her purse and started filing down the nails of her right hand.
Phyllis was a Rice, which meant she was private and solemn. It also meant she was like her sisters, Lillian and Ernestine, and that she had a patch of viciousness in her, handsewn in and tampered down. She was softer than sisters, less cold. They were of the mindset that tenderness as a luxury, that joy was short-lived and hard-earned. Life was meant to be prayed through, toiled through, and at the end, which would be, God willing, painless, heaven was the relief from all the suffering done on earth.
Suffering and toiling had their benefits. Without the black-and-blue beatings she got as a girl, she might’ve turned out fragile, delicate. If her mother didn’t break her collarbone in a fit of rage, she might’ve not been able to stand the sight of her sister’s corpse. If her daddy didn’t whip the back of Lillian’s legs until they ran down with blood, how could either of them stand the look of Ernestine’s body laid out on the kitchen tile, familiar body cold with death?
The washing machines clattered, swished. Phyllis dragged the nail file back and forth, back and forth. The way she and Lillian were raised taught them that God only gave somebody as much as they could handle. No load would be too heavy, no trial insurmountable. Their backs might bend, but never would they break. Phyllis wondered if that were totally true. The blood of her youth was nothing like the blood in Ernestine’s house. The rooms bogged down with death. Flies and maggots were worming their way through Ernestine’s dead flesh, eating her away. And her face! Good God, her sister’s face cleaved in two, disfigured and strange and scarcely a face at all.
Her stomach clenched. Phyllis took a sharp breath, curled her hand tight around the nail file, and squeezed until she felt her blood start to flow. Red dripped down her forearm, down to her elbow. She waited until the thoughts of Ernestine’s corpse subsided, then dabbed away the blood with a napkin from her purse.
Yes, some things were just too much. Too much. Phyllis had called Ernestine’s house for a week and got nothing but her voicemail. On the sixth day, she and Lillian went over there themselves to see what was going on. Phyllis’s whole body went slack when they found Ernestine. Her stomach dropped down into her shoes. The sick rose so fast she barely made it to the sink before vomiting. There was her sister, her dearest Ernestine, killed like an animal, throat slashed like she was nothing more than a lamb. Head swimming, her knees weak, Phyllis wondered aloud how an ugly thing could happen in a beautiful house. She was still bent over the sink when Lillian asked, “Where’s the girl?”
The girl in question was Judith, Ernestine’s only child. Together, the sisters searched the house but found neither hide nor hair of the girl. Only when Lillian checked Judith’s bedroom and saw the empty drawers, the dresser cleared of personal effects, did they begin to understand what happened. They went to the rest of the town then, the sisters splitting up and asking anyone they could find about what happened to Judith. It had always been a good neighborhood; people were more than willing to help. Mrs. Walker from three houses down said she saw the girl speeding Ernestine’s yellow car down the road. Titus, from a block, oversaw the girl pumping gas at a station just outside of town with a bruised-up face. Some kids thought they heard fighting coming from the house around dinnertime, but none of them could be certain, most of them having been called in to supper soon after the supposed fight began.
The sisters learned the most from a woman called Hazel. She lived across the street from Ernestine and knew her well enough, having shared a church pew and a quilting circle with the sisters. She was also an infamous snoop. The sisters invited her over to Ernestine’s place, poured her a tall glass of sweet tea, and pressed her for answers. Loose lips loosened further by tea and shortbread, Hazel told Lillian and Phyllis that she saw Judith leave a week ago in the Pontiac; she had a suitcase with her when she left.
“She looked real bad off,” said Hazel, craning her neck. She hadn’t been invited in and kept trying to sneak peeks inside the house. Lillian blocked her line of sight, arms crossed over her chest.
“Bad off? What do you mean?” asked Lillian.
“Mind you, I couldn’t see all that well. I live across the street, you know, but I saw a little of her. She had all sorts of scratches on her face and arms, nasty ones too. Looked like she’d been choked out too, from all that purple ‘round her neck. I tried to get her to come on over, but she didn’t say nothing to me! Not even a ‘good evening’ or a ‘hello ma’am’!” Hazel scoffed. “I don’t mean anything rude by saying it, especially not by Ernestine, Lord knows, I adore Ernestine, but that child of hers! She’s not right!”
“Ernestine’s dead,” said Lillian, then she sent Lillian away with the pitcher of sweet tea and the last of the shortbread cookies. She refused to answer any of the woman’s prying questions, which did more harm than good in Phyllis’s mind. People dropped in at all hours of the day, poking and prodding, insinuating. After a couple of weeks of nosy well-wishers, Lillian and Phyllis closed the house up, drew the curtains, shuttered the windows, and locked all the doors.
“Always knew there was something off about that girl,” Lillian said. She sat in the parlor, scratching at her stockinged legs, face cut strange by the lamplight. “Always knew it. Always!”
“What do you make of what Hazel said? About the bruises on the girl’s neck?”
Lillian quieted. Though she spoke no words, Phyllis knew the thoughts that ran through her mind. What happened that night? What did Judith do? What did Ernestine do?
If there were patches of violence sewn into each of the Rice sisters, then Ernestine was a cloth cut from bloodiness. Phyllis adored her sister, but she remembered her as she was—a cold and bitter woman who showed little mercy, not even to herself.
“It don’t matter,” said Lillian after a while. “Doesn’t matter what she did or didn’t do. That girl killed her mother, our sister! That ain’t right, Phil. It just ain’t.”
Phyllis wasn’t saying it was right; she was just saying that nothing happened without reason. There were plenty of people in the world who were cruel without purpose, but she thought she knew enough of Judith to know her niece wasn’t like that. It was true that she wasn’t a normal child. Even from her first time meeting her, Phyllis was unnerved by the girl. It didn’t seem right for a baby never to laugh or smile or even cry. Jude only stared, her big brown eyes curious and questioning. Nothing amused her, but she found everything fascinating. The only thing to do with her, this great and ungainly baby girl, was to hold her carefully in your arms, let her grip onto your finger and make soothing noises until she let you go.
Nobody ever really knew the girl. Ernestine never took her anywhere when she was young, preferring to keep the child at home all hours of the day. When Judith was brought around, she was unobtrusive and quiet, almost terrifyingly so. She spoke only when spoken to and stared until she was snapped at or slapped. The few times Phyllis watched the girl were eventless. Judith would come over, slip off her shoes, and sit down in Phyllis’s living room, her hands folded in her lap. For the longest time, Phyllis tried to get Judith to warm up to her by buying her gifts and treats, but Judith wasn’t like any other children Phyllis knew. She couldn’t be bought with dolls or won over with cakes. Come night, Jude slept in the guest bedroom, blankets were drawn up to her chin, her newest porcelain doll seated on the dresser lest it be broken during the night.
According to Ernestine, this play at innocence was a ploy. According to her, Judith was unruly, disrespectful, a callous child who scorned her elders. Judith, much like a wild cur, could only be tamed by violence. Nothing else worked, said Ernestine, and she admitted to Phyllis, once, that she feared there was something deeply, intrinsically wrong with her daughter—something she couldn’t fix. For a moment, Ernestine looked fearful, but then she hardened again and delved into another tirade on Jude’s mindless, her slovenliness, how the girl bucked back at her, raised her head, her voice, talked back to her, talked too little, insulted and embarrassed her.
The girl was quiet, and she did stare too much and had too many questions, but Phyllis never saw this tameless animal Ernestine went on about. Lillian claimed to see some of her when Judith stayed at her place, little signs that she wasn’t all there. Phyllis supposed no one ever truly knew the people they were related to. Maybe it was true that the girl who asked permission before stepping foot in her parlor was the same girl who willfully destroyed the beautiful clothes bought for her. Maybe the baby that laid watchfully in her bassinet grew into the quiet, moody woman that slaughtered Ernestine in cold blood.
And maybe, just maybe, she and Lillian didn’t know Ernestine as well as they thought. Phyllis shifted in her chair, uncomfortable with her new train of thought but unable to stop it. The anger it took to hurt someone like how Judith hurt Ernestine…That was primal, that visceral sort of rage that had to be built up year after year. If Judith’s patches were bloody as her mother’s, as her aunts’, then her quilt would be too. Fabric was what fabric was twisted to be. If Judith was stitched together by threads of violence, by blood, then surely the finished product would be ugly and not at all gentle. Murderous, even.
Then again, it could be that neither Ernestine nor Judith were to blame for what happened that day. There was another party involved, and he was as much a part of the girl as her mother was. Phyllis never met the man. She saw a picture of him once, right after Ernestine returned from Chicago. She said she met him while in Illinois, visiting on their relatives from their father’s side. The man in the photograph was very tall and very sturdy-looking, a handsome Black man with dark cat-like eyes and no smile. Ernestine said that he was strange too, that he dazzled her with talk of money and success. They courted only for a month and eloped soon after—the only proof of this marriage was a letter from Chicago, and a photograph of Ernestine and the man outside of a courthouse, neither of them smiling, both dressed in church clothes. The sisters and their mother were still dizzy with the news of the marriage when Ernestine popped back up in Atlanta a year later with nothing but a ratty suitcase, a wad of cash, a newborn baby, and a golden wedding band.
They tried and tried to get Ernestine to say something about her time in Chicago, but she gave them nothing but silence. She wouldn’t say what happened to the man in the photograph, nor would she say why she was back home. She bought the beautiful house on Eggleston Street, found a job working as a seamstress, and stopped talking about it.
The washing machines buzzed, one after another, pulling Phyllis from her thoughts. She changed them out, stuffing the wet clothes into the dryers before sitting back down. She crossed her arms and thought about how weird Ernestine was after Chicago. She was icier, changed again into that lifeless child who took abuse without noise. She rarely touched her daughter, but when she did, she did so at arm’s length as if disgusted by her. She retreated from Judith, from her sisters and mother, leaving the house only to work, run errands and attend church. As the child grew, so too did the chasm between mother and daughter. Ernestine touched Jude only to punish her, spoke to her only when she wanted to set her low.
Loveless, Phyllis realized. Her poor, late sister was loveless. A memory came to her then, a conversation she had with Ernestine when Jude was about ten, maybe eleven years old. Judith had just been sent out of the room for “snooping.” She went away without complaint, head bowed, a nasty black-eye, and swollen lip deforming her childish face.
“She acted up again?” asked Phyllis.
“Mmmhmm. She ain’t right, Phil. Not at all.”
“Oh? What did she do?”
And there her sister fixed her with strange looked, surprised and a little bit annoyed, as if she didn’t think she’d be questioned on the validity of her discipline. She waved her hand and gave some weak response about disrespectfully, acting too grown in her house.
“But what did she do?” pressed Phyllis. “Did she say somethin’ to you? Talk back? Raise her voice? Lie? What was it?”
“Does it matter?” Ernestine snapped. She glanced at her younger sister then looked away, focusing instead on the table that separated them. She ran a finger along the grain and scratched the varnish with her nail. “There’s always something with Jude. She either getting into something she got no business getting into or she’s snooping or spying, talking back or meeting me in my damn eyes. Don’t make one lick of sense for a girl to look no grown person in the eyes like that.” Ernestine shook her head and sucked her teeth. She met Phyllis’s eyes, saw the frown her sister wore. “I know what you’re thinking, Phil, and it ain’t like that. I don’t hate the child. Mammy and Pappy? Now, they hated us. No, please, don’t say nothing Phyllis, you know it’s true, just like I do. They ain’t have not one bit of care for any of us. The fact we left there and made something of ourselves is nothing short of a miracle.”
Ernestine sighed, put her head in her hands. “I don’t know what it is about Judith. Maybe it’s something I got from Mammy or her Ma’am. Maybe it’s something he put in me. All I know is I don’t love her and I don’t hate her. I don’t feel nothing for her. I used to look into her crib and wonder if that thing there was really mine. She looks like me, sometimes, but she never shows that she needs me, that she wants me. How you supposed to love something that don’t even smile at its own mother?”
“Ernestine…”
“Sometimes I look at her and I wish I never had her. Wish I killed her, when I had the chance.”
“Ernestine!” Phyllis pushed her chair away from the table, too weak to stand but indignant still. “Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that!”
“Why not?” I almost did once.” Her voice was flat, emotionless. She looked straight ahead, out the window, and to the flowers that bent their colorful heads in the breeze.
Phyllis’s stomach dropped. Dropped there in the laundromat too, her head aching at the memory. She gripped her nail file, willing more blood to come. “Nessie…”
“She’s alive, ain’t she! I couldn’t finish it but I tried. My God, I tried. Thought she’d be something gentle when I gave birth to her but when she was out, she was just there, all red and dark and screaming. Wonder if that’s why she don’t make much noise now; those first few weeks all she did was scream and scream. Nothing stopped her, not milk or burping or being changed. Got to the point where I heard her screaming in my dreams. She took so much of me. Never once made it up by looking at me sweetly, making none of them baby noises. Just screaming and staring.” Ernestine dug her fingernail into the wood. Phyllis dug the tip of the nail file into the palm of her hand, the blood flowing freely. “I put my hand around her little throat and choked her. Not for a long time, just enough to make her shut up for a little while.” She pressed her lips together, a short shard of wood stuck beneath her nail. “First time she was quiet since I birthed her. First time she stopped staring at me too.”
Phyllis wished Ernestine hadn’t told her. The memory was grim, grey, and bleaker than wintertime. She could hear the child wailing, calling for something it couldn’t name, but she could hear Ernestine too, begging for peace. A lump formed in Phyllis’s throat, too hard to swallow around. She puffed out through her nose and pulled the clothes out of the dryer. She wished she didn’t know, wished there was still some sort of plausible deniability that guarded her against feeling just the slightest bit of guilt at all the times she turned away from her niece, knowing just what sort of person her sister was.
But Phyllis did know, and the knowledge would sit heavy on her spirit until the day she met her maker. The corpse-shaped stain in the kitchen deepened. Sighed.

§

Did Lillian know? And if Lillian knew, was the turning away as hard for her as it was for Phyllis? Ernestine must’ve shared that same story with Lillian; there were few secrets between the Rice sisters. What one knew, all of them knew. It made sense for Phyllis and Lillian both to carry the weight of their betrayal. Better two shoulders than one, two minds to parse the ugly truth than one fighting it alone.
Lillian was waiting for her in the living room when Phyllis returned home. The TV set was at it again, rattling and resisting Lillian’s attempts to quell it. Her sister was praying under her breath, muttering Bible verses at the set. Phyllis set down the basket of laundry and helped her drape a tarp over it, hiding the screen and smoothing her hands over the wood siding.
“Has it been at it for a long time?”
Lillian shook her head. “Half an hour, maybe. It was the cabinets before that. Gonna need slippers if you go in the kitchen.”
“Might’ve been my fault,” Phyllis admitted. “Started thinking about Nessie. About the girl.”
Lillian’s shoulders tensed, raised. She was of the mindset that the less thought they put into the past, the easier it was to get the house to settle down. Bringing up things they couldn’t fix only served to worsen their situation. Lillian shot Phyllis a dark look and took the laundry into the parlor to fold.
After folding the laundry (batting away balls of socks hurled, ignoring the pillows shredding themselves to goose down and cotton), the sisters had dinner. Their relationship between the sisters and the kitchen was, at best, contentious. All the other rooms in the house could be convinced to allow them entrance, but the kitchen fought back, threw cherubs and rotten fruit, shattered plates, and flung cutlery. Once, a bout of sentimentality took Phyllis over, some memory of she and Ernestine as children, and she ended up with a knife plunged into her arm. Lillian tended to the wound with a flat face, off-handedly chastising her sister for letting her emotions consume her.
“Self-control is all we got over this house,” she said. “Use it.”
But the kitchen was not a cur, nor was it a child. It refused to be handled, talked down to, or dealt with. Just crossing the threshold sent waves of nausea through Phyllis’s body. It was vile air, the whole house tainted with dark memories. The spotless kitchen was marred by blood caught in the grout, blood caught under the cabinets, the corpse-shaped stain that wouldn’t budge for anything. In the past, the sisters tried to remove it with bleach and holy water, but it was wholly ineffective and only angered the house more. The shingles flew off the roof. Several steps in the grand staircase crumbled in on themselves.
They cooked and ate quietly, speaking little as they did so. When dinner was finished, the sisters washed and dried their dishes and put them away before stepping over the corpse stain and turning off the kitchen light, mindful not to give any attention to the glasses that rattled in the cabinets.
As the TV decided it wouldn’t be watched, the sisters went straight to bed. They slept in the living room, having long ago agreed not to step foot in the upstairs bedrooms unless it was to clean. The idea of Ernestine’s bed or, God forbid, Judith’s, sickened them. They made beds out of blankets and quilts and throw pillows from the couches. Phyllis wrapped herself tightly and tried to sleep.
The house wouldn’t have it. It was restless that night, all corners alive with shadows and noise. Faces disfigured hovered over the sisters, mocking them, shouting at them—the wails of children pierced through their dreams. A booming voice, their sister’s or their mother’s, they couldn’t tell, yelled and cussed. Though the words were impossible to understand, their sentiment behind them wasn’t. It was pure and uncut hatred. Lillian rolled over and covered her head with her pillow, prayed or sang, or yelled back. Phyllis laid on her back and stared up at the mean faces. She clutched her wounded hand to chest and spoke, almost too low to hear over the noise.
“It’s alright. I know, baby, I know.”
“Who are you speaking to? Who are you speaking to?” yelled Lillian, alarmed.
“Her. I’m talking to her.”
“Nessie?”
Phyllis shook her head. The house started to settle, the shadows and faces disappearing. When all was quiet, and Phyllis could hear her thoughts and her heart pounding, she let her hand fall to the side.
“Phyllis, you were talking to Nessie?”
“No,” said Phyllis. “Not Ernestine.”
“Then who?”
Ernestine’s house answered for her. Hundreds of voices rose from the walls, the floorboards, bleating, and cawing, squawking, and braying, each of them saying the same thing over and over again. Judith, Judith, Judy, Jude.

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Winter

One.

When Jude returned to her mother’s house seventeen years after she left it, she returned with new scars and company. How wicked she felt on the porch of Ma’am’s place, unbloodied, unfelled, stronger than when she left it. And how disappointed she was too! Seventeen years of anguish, angst, and nightmares so vivid they felt more real than reality, and the house was just a house. There was no howling wind, no green malaise, no foul energy that pushed her away. It was only a house, only a building with wood and brick, windows and doors, same as her very own cottage.
It changed in the time she was gone, no longer the jewel of Eggleston. It was slumped over, leaning to the right, drooping like a drunk man. Her memory painted Ma’am’s house as a palace; reality reminded her of its limitations. It sank into the ground surrounding it, the siding and foundation stained with rust, mud, and age. The brickwork was discolored to an ugly orange, the porch sagging and the roofline slopping unattractively. The flowerboxes were empty, the flowers there long dead, and her mother’s garden, once the envy of the street, was overgrown and overrun with weeds, the thick kudzu choking out the fabulous roses, the delicate hydrangeas.
Jude tsked at the disrepair, half pleased and half distressed. While she enjoyed the poetry of her mother’s wicked house being ruined, she hated it too, feeling sick to her stomach at the sight of the house Ma’am adored brought so low. She eased out of the Pontiac and went up to the side of the house and felt the weak wood.
Only her aunts could’ve let the house fall so low, which baffled Jude because she remembered them as fastidious women. Jude had half a mind to stomp up to the front door and demand answers. They had to be home, the lights on, and a car—a steel grey Buick—was parked in the driveway. She cut off the line of thinking quickly, reminding herself that grief was a beast and that she really had no right to press like that after what she’d done. The ruin of the house was as much her fault as her aunts’—better to let it rest than go unearthing subjects she hadn’t the heart to deal with.
She didn’t want to go in, not then at least. Jude only wanted to see the place and be sure that it was still standing. She had a dream the night before they left for Atlanta about the house being demolished, the house in ruins, all pieces of it strewn on the street. The very next morning, Jude sealed the house, packed she, and Nemoira into the car, and took off.
The trip down was calmer than her electric ride up to Whitney. Nemoira, a quiet but attentive passenger, sat alongside her as the highways wended out before them, county line scrambling the radio signal. They stopped at diners and truck stops to gorge themselves on burgers with grey meat and bags of chips, snatching maps at gas stations and looking them over while sipping on flat sodas. Unwilling to sleep on the side of roads, Nemoira pushed Jude to pull off at an inn outside of Athens.
Nemoira transformed into the bear as soon as it was safe to, disappearing into the copse of trees just on the other side of the median. Jude bought a room and waited there, unable to sleep, mind caught on Nemoira and the noise of the city, the cars and voices she heard through the paper-thin walls.
Try as she might to prove otherwise, seventeen years was an awfully long time to be away from society. Coming back to it was difficult—so much had changed from the clothes to the hairstyles, the way people talked, the way people moved. Jude felt like she landed on an alien planet, everything too loud and too close for her to make sense of. She went downstairs in search of dinner, and the innkeeper invited her to come to eat with his family. His voice was loud but friendly, and the smile he wore seemed genuine enough. Jude sat with them but realized soon after that she wasn’t suited for her. All that talking, all the jokes, and references she couldn’t parse, the facial expressions as foreign to her as another language—Jude ate her meal in silence, smiled tightly when prompted to and, when the meal was finally over, slipped away to the quiet of her room.
Standing in the black shadow of Ma’am’s house, she wasn’t sure the discomfort was worth it. She might’ve done better to ignore her dream, prophetic or not, and remain where she was comfortable, where she knew herself and the one other she cared for.
Behind her, the car door opened, Nemoira hopping out and coming to stand at her side.
“It’s…”
“Ugly?”
Nemoira pressed her lips together tightly, pressing back the smile. “I was gonna say something nice.”
“Don’t bother,” Jude said. “It used to be prettier. I’ll show you a picture later, if I can find one.” She stuffed her hands into the pocket of her jeans. “Thought it would stay the same until I came back.”
“Time waits for no one.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Jude turned on her heel and started back to the Pontiac. Nemoira called after her, asking if she wanted to go inside. Jude shook her head, and once they were both inside the car, she gave Nemoira her reasoning. It wasn’t right for her to drop by unannounced. Felt too much like an attack if she did it like that like she was looking for a fight. And even more, Jude hadn’t steeled herself against her aunts’ judgment. Her mother’s sisters, their amalgamous faces, would remind her too much of Ma’am, and she wasn’t quite ready to deal with that or their watchful eyes looking for the evil she imagined they thought existed in her. She couldn’t go then; she didn’t have anything good to say, and all roads would leave to violence if they brought up Ma’am.
A rose thorn of anger pressed beneath Jude’s breast, painful like a stitch in her side. Here she was, being decent to them when they were the same women, same blood, that turned away when she needed them most. They were grown women, old but still alive, and if they were strong enough to ignore the bruised little girl who frequented their houses, they were strong enough to meet the gaze of the woman she grew into.
Still, Jude hadn’t come all this way to start anything. She told Nemoira they’d find someplace close to stay for a few days or until was fortified enough to walk up to her mother’s house without fainting.
“I don’t want to go in there weak,” said Jude. “I left there weak. I don’t wanna go back the same way.”
In the end, Jude got them a room in a motel a couple of blocks over. A tiny part of her feared leaving the room and touring the city lest she meets with her Aunts Lillian and Phyllis, but she tamped the fear down as quickly as it rose in her. She might not have the right to go to her Ma’am’s place unannounced, but the streets of the West End were a No Man’s Land. Nervous as she was about the chance of a chance encounter, Jude wouldn’t let that fear keep her inside. She took Nemoira out just about every day they stayed in the motel, guiding her through the streets with the same care that Nemoira guided her through the glade.
Being in the city meant they couldn’t be so close to one another, something that frustrated Nemoira as much as it did Jude. Jude wanted to take her hand, to entwine their arms, but not at the risk of their safety. They kept their distance, peeked at each other from the corner of their eyes. They bumped each other lightly, fingers brushing for just a moment before stepping apart, the gap of space denoting them as close friends small but large enough to ache at Jude’s heart.
In the motel room, however, Nemoira was hers to take. She gorged herself on all the affection denied to her throughout the day and, sated, watched as Nemoira transformed into the bear and went hunting. Seeing her turn into the grizzly was just as fascinating and terrifying as it was to see her come out of it. She rose to her full height and swayed, then fell down to her paws, padding around the room and sniffing at the dirty motel furniture. Jude scratched behind her ears before she left, teasing her gently as if she were an overgrown dog, which she knew Nemoira hated but tolerated only because it made Jude laugh to see her put-upon expression.
Then she was gone, off into the night doing whatever the beast did when out on the prowl. When she came back, she returned empty-handed, mouth reeking of carrion and hands smeared with blood. Jude tended to her as gently as she could, filled the shallow bath with hot water (“Right from the tap!”), and washed her clean until the water was red and brown and full of twigs and leaves.
She felt most comfortable in those moments. It was as if they never left their cottage. It was like they were still cocooned by the trees, protected by the field of wild grass. Never was there a place safer in the whole city than in the cramped motel bathroom, a woman and her bear, two wild things at each other’s service.

But she worried too. It was in her nature to fret, and with Nemoira gone most nights to hunt, she couldn’t help but imagine all that could go wrong. It was easier to ignore the danger when they were in the woods. Nemoira had the upper hand in nature, knew the terrain, and could conceal herself better. The city wasn’t so safe for a wild animal, and though Jude had no doubt that Nemoira was a formidable opponent, she also knew that humans were just as territorial as any other beast, prone to lashing out when they felt their homes threatened. Just her luck Nemoira be seen at the wrong place by the wrong person. Just some luck, some overzealous sportsman caught the shine of her black eyes in the gloom of night and made a trophy of her love.
She’d already been shot once. Nemoira went out in search of dinner, bragging out the pheasant she’d bring home. Jude, cautious after having seen flyers around Whitney warning hunters about a bear, advised her to stay home, but Nemoira waved her off and went anyways. Only an hour had passed before the shot rang out, the sound reverberating through the trees like a pealing bell. Jude flew to the window and saw the plume of birds bursting up into the sky like clouds of black smoke, then heard the second shot, the third one. Reasonably Jude knew that Nemoira survived half a century without her help and that going after her would only get her in the middle of things. The part of her that was sick with love and worry pushed her out the door and into the woods, black coat trailing behind her like a banner.
When she found Nemoira, she was laid out on the ground in her human form. She’d been shot in the arm, wounded but breathing steadily. Jude’s stomach settled as she fell to her knees beside her, tore a strip of fabric from the end of her skirt, and pressed it to the wound.
Nemoira snapped and snarled, half-feral from the pain. Jude bit back the whimper of fear she felt and brought her wrist to Nemoira’s nose. After a few deep sniffs, the woman calmed, settling into the press of Jude’s hand.
“Jude.”
“I’m here, I’m here,” Jude soothed. “I heard three shots.”
“He only got me once.” Nemoira’s voice was breathy and light. She hissed as Jude applied more pressure to the shot. “Bastard thought I couldn’t see him sneaking up on me.”
Jude didn’t bother asking if the hunter was dead or not. She guided Nemoira’s free hand to the wound and commanded her to keep pressing on it, then she scooped the woman up in her arms and carried her home like a husband would a bride.
(She found the hunter a few days later. He was face down in the dirt, back, and throat ripped to shreds. She shuddered some at the thought of those gentle hands as fearsome claws, then got to her knees to strip the man down. As Jude removed his ruined clothes, she thought she saw bite marks here and there but discarded the thought soon after. She didn’t think bears ate human meat, and even if they did, Nemoira was more human than beast, wise enough not to lose herself in her anger. With the same cool precision with which Jude skinned and cleaned the deer, Jude cleaned the hunter, taking his coat, clothes, and gun. She burned the coat and clothes, gifted his boots to Nemoira, and saved the gun for herself, tossing it in the trunk of the Pontiac where it waited still.)
Each time Nemoira winced when moving her shoulder, Jude was reminded of the hunter. She let her go for the night, unable to stop her but unable to stop her mind from racing too. An hour passed and then two and then three. As the evening went on, Jude’s worry melted into anger. By the time Nemoira returned in the dark hours of morning, heaving, dripping with sweat, and licking her chops, Jude was near to bursting.
“What took so long?” Jude said, leaping to her feet. She reached for Nemoira, but the woman pulled away, grunted, and headed towards the bathroom.
Jude followed after and watched as Nemoira turned on the taps, the weak pipes struggling to fill the bathtub. Nemoira slipped out of her shoes and shirt. There was a cut on her torso, shallow to Jude’s eyes but deep enough to pulse out blood.
Jude couldn’t help the alarm in her voice as she asked Nemoira what happened.
“Got hurt.”
“No shit,” said Jude. She pushed in close to Nemoira, ignoring the growl she got as she pressed her fingers to her side. The wound wasn’t so bad, but it was nasty to look at. Jude groaned closed-mouth at the sight of it, grimacing at the dirt and blood packed together. She rooted around the bathroom for the first aid kit, then cleaned and bandaged Nemoira, hands gently as she could manage in her mood. Nemoira was patched up by the time the tub was full, so Jude stopped the taps and sat at the edge of the tub, glaring into the woman’s eyes.
Nemoira broke contact first, turning her head to the side and saying, “It’s not that bad.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s not that bad. You shouldn’t be hunting out here. It ain’t safe.”
“Still needs to be done,” said Nemoira.
“I could get you stuff from the grocery. Chicken, beef, pork, fish, deer. Ain’t no need for you to go risking your life.”
Nemoira wrinkled her nose as Jude listed the meats. “I have to catch it for myself. It’s not the same if I don’t catch it for myself.” She shifted on the lid of the toilet, cringing as she stretched the wound. “Besides, what do you care how I get it? Never mind it when we’re home.”
“Because we’re home then!” Jude shouted. She looked to the ceiling. Composed herself. “It’s different out here. There’s more people.”
“Nothing bad’s gonna happen to me, Judy.”
“You don’t know that! People ‘round here see a bear as big as you and they ain’t thinking about what you could do to them. They’re scared and the first thing they’re gonna do is start shooting. What’s out in these trees that’s worth it? Some squirrel? A deer?”
Infuriatingly unfazed, Nemoira shrugged her shoulders. “Other things.”
“What other things! There ain’t no ‘other’ things that are worth your life!” Jude made a high frustrated noise, sight blurred by angry tears. “You’d die for chickens? A bite of somebody’s mangy dog?”
For a while, Nemoira said nothing to Jude, only watched her heaving shoulders and the tears she fought to quell. She squatted on the floor in front of Jude and looked up into her eyes, took her face in her hands, and spoke softly. “There ain’t nothing in this whole world that can scare me. Not a city, not a gun and certainly not no scared little human.

I’m not saying this to brag; I’m saying it as a fact. Ain’t nothing that can take me down without a fight, and anything big, mean and bad enough to best me might as well have it because I’m just about the meanest, biggest, baddest thing around. You hear me?”
Jude sniffed, nodded weakly. “I’m just scared. I get scared of losing you.”
Nemoira smiled up at her, voice and face gentle like rain. “Losing me? Baby, there’s nothing on this earth that’ll keep me away.”

On the Sunday next, Jude and Nemoira went to church. It wasn’t her usual way to spend a Sunday, but it was the best place to confront her aunts. Public and neutral, the church kept them from lashing out at her or her from lashing out at them. She felt only a little deceptive as she dressed that morning, rolling on a pair of flesh-colored pantyhose and buttoning herself into the dress she purchased a couple of days back. Nemoira went along with her for her shopping trip, carding through the rows of modest clothes, the skirt suits, and heavily decorated hats. She mocked them, but Jude made her take home a blouse and a skirt and a pair of low heels, delicate clip-on earrings to match the shoes.
The night before church Nemoira sat Nemoira in front of her, undid her head of braids, and pressed out her hair. She’d already pressed her own hair a few days prior. It was kept under close wraps by a scarf lest any unseasonable humidity took her by surprise. Nemoira squirmed in her seat, cautious of the hot comb and the jars of grease Jude had scattered around them. Jude only burnt her twice, and both times were through no fault of her own, Nemoira wriggling too much for Jude to keep the comb steady. Jude chuckled at the woman’s pout after her neck, and the back of her ear felt the flash of heat of the comb.
She rubbed Nemoira’s ear and said, “Next time you’ll mind me when I tell you something.”
“Next time I’ll bite you before you put that thing in my head.”
In the end, they looked decent if not utterly foreign to themselves. Jude and Nemoira stood in the dirty full-length mirror, checking their reflections, ogling at their clean faces marked with soft blush and lipstick, their hair straightened and bumped at the ends. Jude, more at home in her loose-fitting frocks and jeans and flowy skirts, looked like a different person in her structured dress, and Nemoira’s fingertip length skirt was loose enough not to draw attention to her curves.
They drove to the church in near silence, the gospel station acting as the background music for the ride. Nemoira recognized some of the older songs as ones that Jude sang at home, humming along to the few she knew. When they pulled into the church’s parking lot, Jude looked for and found her aunts’ Buick, then parked a short walk away from it. She took in a deep breath, squeezed Nemoira’s arm gently, and went inside, heart racing in her chest.
Blessed Streams Baptist had been her mother’s church for as long as Jude remembered. Jude was christened there, baptized there. Jude imagined her mother’s homegoing service was hosted there, that the same pastor that dabbed Jude’s forehead with oil was the same one who prayed over her corpse. It was a little unnerving, the thought of everyone in the church had known her once, but as people filtered into the sanctuary, Jude found she couldn’t recognize most faces. She supposed they were all gone as well, her mother’s old friends, passed on or moved away. She recognized a few of the deaconess sat in the front row, a few people she grew up with.
It wasn’t an unusually large church, just three rows of pews and a small pulpit. Reasoning that she’d have no place to hide, no matter where she sat, Jude sat to the center of the left row, settling down next to a woman her age with a couple of kids. Few people spoke to her, coming by to welcome the strangers, but they moved on after squeezing her hand and wishing her a good morning. Jude was polite, still knowing how to play at socialness even if she didn’t quite understand all the rules. She crossed her legs. Looked down at the hymn book and bible, the white folded program.
The sanctuary was nearly full by the time Jude saw either of her aunts. They came in through one of the side doors, Lillian holding it open while Phyllis shuffled inside. Jude snapped her head up and watched them make their way down the aisles, stopping to talk to friends as they went along. Jude started to sweat. She fought the urge to grab Nemoira’s hand and dug her fingernails into her palm instead. Aunt Lillian, the taller of the two, broad as her mother with a face very similar to hers as well, looked over the pews, scanning for a place to sit. She looked to the center, to the right, then to the left, where Jude was sat. Jude knew she saw her, recognized her—her mouth drew in real tight, and she fell into the nearest pew she could find. Jude watched as Lillian leaned over to Phyllis and whispered something in her ear, the barely visible twitch as Phyllis started to look behind her but stopped.
They had to know she was in town. There weren’t many canary yellow Pontiacs in the West End. Not many that would park in front of their house and come to their church, anyway. It took all Jude had not to stand up and go to them then and there. She kept still, steadying herself, and watched them discreetly throughout the service. When everyone else’s head was bowed in prayer, Jude kept her eyes on her aunts, the heads obscured with pillbox hats and scarves.
At the end of service, after the benediction, Jude crossed over to her aunts’ pew, shuffling through brothers and sisters, apologizing and smiling contritely until she stood in front of them.
“Auntie Phyllis, Auntie Lillian,” started Jude.
They raised their heads in unison, Phyllis blinking, and Lillian grimacing. Lillian turned away, suddenly very taken by the clasps of her pocketbook. One of the women sat beside them asked if Phyllis knew her, and she nodded stiffly.
“This is my niece,” said Phyllis hoarsely. She cleared her throat.

“Judith Rice. My late sister’s daughter.”
“This is Nessie’s girl?” The woman looked up to Jude, hot wobbling on her head. Hazel, her name was, Jude remembered. “The Judith? I thought she—”
“Why are you here?” interrupted Lillian.
“Just thought I’d come by, visit for a while.” Jude slipped her gaze from the lady, Hazel, to her Aunt Lillian, lips pulled into a benign smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Got the need to see my family is all and thought I might see my aunties.”
“That’s sweet of you!” said another woman, this one in gloves and a scarf. “Ain’t that sweet of her, Lillian?”
“Mhmm. Real sweet.” Her voice was low and cool, and she kept her eyes on Jude as the others exited the sanctuary. When the three of them were alone in the pew, Lillian rose to her feet, shaking her head.

“You got a lot of nerve coming here, girl.”
“Where? To church?”
She snapped her head to Jude, eyes blazing. “Don’t play stupid with me. I know just the sort of thing you are.”
The comment stung, but Jude did well not to show it. She squared her shoulders and told her aunts she was coming over to see Ma’am’s house after church. “I wanted to give y’all time to prepare. Didn’t want to drop by unexpected.”
The sisters shared a look, both of them at a loss. Lillian opened her mouth to say something, but Phyllis stepped between her and Jude and told her that she was more than welcome to come over.
“Phyllis!”
“Lillian, she’s family and the last bit of it we got. No matter what she did—” And here Phyllis took in a deep breath, closed her eyes and clenched and unclenched her hand. “No matter what she did, she’s still kin.” She turned to Jude sand, said, “Come by ‘round five for dinner.”
Surprised at how well it went and not wanting to chance anything changing her aunts’ minds, Jude swung by her pew to pick up Nemoira and clicked down the steps of the church, all but running to her car. She slipped into the driver’s seat, head-spinning, and laid her forehead against the steering wheel, breath coming out of her all fast and shaky. All the confidence and foolhardiness that hatched the plan was gone from her now, and Jude was dizzy and weak with regret, with excitement.

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Two.

If time was unkind to the exterior of Ma’am’s house, it was downright nasty to the interior. Jude saw that her aunts did what they could with Pine-sol and bleach, but it was no match for the sickness of the house, the overwhelming sensation of being buried alive. The fine craftsman details she remembered—the white crown molding, the baseboards—were grey-brown with grime. The windows were just as dirty from the inside as they were from the outside, streaked with fingerprints. Walls once heavy with kitschy art, photographs were now empty., The only sign that something was there was light paint and holes for the nails, the only sign that something was there. There were vases scattered around the room, but they were not the chinoiserie that her mother favored; they were plastic, fake, and filled with fake, fragrant flowers. And the smell of the room! It was overwhelming, the rot and the lingering scent of blood, the mint and medicine, and camphor backed in with the odor of age, death, and decay.
Her aunts didn’t seem to notice the look or the odor. They walked around the house, nonplussed. When Aunt Lillian let Jude and Nemoira in, she looked out of place in the house, washed and pressed, and awkward against the grimy background. She saw the suitcases they held in hand and pursed her thin lips before directing them into the formal parlor room. Nemoira thanked her then, when prompted by a gentle nudge, extended her hand and introduced herself to Lillian.
Lillian looked down at the hand. For a second, she was visibly disgusted, but she smoothed her face over and ignored the hand, waving in the general direction of the parlor.
Once there, Jude set down her case, slipped off her shoes, and took a seat on one of the floral couches, the sofa wheezing with dust and trapped farts. The parlor was just as congested as the foyer, as the living room, as any other room in the house.
Jude wrinkled her nose. “Ma’am woulda thrown a fit if she saw her house like this. We scrubbed this place down every Saturday, look at it now. Filthy.”
“Maybe they’re keeping it for her.”
Jude met Nemoira’s suggestion with a snort of derision. “My aunties ain’t the superstitious sort. It’s not like me and my lights.” She ran a finger along one of the side tables and pulled up a long stretch of dust. She grimaced and wiped it off on the couch. “It’s like they’re scared to touch it. Scared to change anything.”
Jude got to her feet and went to the wall nearest to the foyer to study the photographs hung there. There were dozens of them there, cramped together, hung in claustrophobic clusters. She asked Nemoira to come over, and they stood side by side, squinting at the pictures. Jude found a photograph of her mother propped up on the sideboard and tapped the glass.
“This is her,” Jude whispered. “Ernestine Lorraine Rice. My Ma’am.”
“She’s pretty.” Nemoira’s voice was light, almost surprised. She glanced at the picture, then at Jude. “You look just like her.”
“Do I really?” Jude turned her face this way and that.
“The spitting image,” said Nemoira. She tapped Jude’s scarred cheek with a finger. “But you’re different too. Your own person.”
Jude made a noncommittal noise as she returned to the photographs. She kept one ear open for her aunts’ footsteps and conversation, the sound from the kitchen nearly inaudible. Nemoira ‘hmmed, catching Jude’s attention.
“What is it?”
“None of these pictures are you.”
Jude furrowed her brows, dubious, but as she observed each of the framed pictures, she saw that Nemoira was right. There were pictures of uncles she never met, pictures of her aunts, of her grandmother and grandmother.

There was a photo in black-and-white of her grandparents standing on the front porch of their farmhouse, straight-faced and straight-back, squinting into the camera, and another picture in sepia tone featuring three dark-skinned black girls with pigtails and broad smiles that Jude recognized as Ma’am, Lillian, and Phyllis. There was not a single picture of Jude amongst them, and she drew back from the wall, unsurprised but hurt still.
Before either of them could say another word about the wall of photographs, Phyllis came to the parlor to tell them that dinner was ready. They sat in the dining room, the table wiped clean, and the chairs still damp with a fabric spray. Jude took her seat next to Nemoira, and Phyllis sat next to the Lillian, the four of them squared off.
It was an unbearably awkward dinner. Unsure of how to appease her aunts and herself, Jude limited their talk to the weather, where they stayed (“Up north, auntie, past Athens”), and what she thought of the, truthfully, bland meal served. Phyllis was civil, but Lillian was less so. She poked and prodded, almost like she was trying to bait Jude into anger. She commented on Jude’s posture, her table manners (admittedly lax, after so many years on her lonesome), her slow and methodical way of speaking. Phyllis jumped in once or twice to chide Lillian on her lack of couth but said nothing further to defend Jude, only grimaced apologetically and flexed her hands on the table.
After a particularly nasty jab on the state of Jude’s grooming in reference to her jeans and quickly shrinking hair, the tables started to judder violently. The silverware jangled, the plates smashed against the wood and scuffed the varnish. Her aunts shouted in unison, obviously accustomed to dealing with spiteful furniture; Lillian threw her hands over the table, cursing it before switching to prayer. Aunt Phyllis sat back in her chair, eyes closed and lips moving.
Nemoira and Jude shared a look, then Jude laid a hand on the table and stroked it gently as she’d stroke her own furniture, murmuring until the table stilled. Aunt Lillian, aghast, face void of color, got to her feet, and left the room.
With dinner ruined, Jude and Nemoira stayed behind to help Phyllis clean the mess. Jude joked offhandedly about her furniture doing the same thing, and Phyllis stiffened, broad shoulders tensing.
“Does it?”
“Oh, all the time,” said Jude. She swept green beans off the table and into her cupped hand, then dumped the soggy remains into a trashcan. “You have to talk sweet to it,” she advised. “Real kind like, like you’d talk to a baby.”
Once the dining room was clear, Jude stood at the threshold of the kitchen. She considered entering it only for a moment before turning around and going back to the parlor. Bit by bit, she’d chip away at the house. It wasn’t like her cottage, which she owned, which she could quell with a firm look and a snap of her fingers. This was old ground, poisonous with memory. She’d have to go at it slowly if she wanted to make it out with her sanity intact. Jude dug into her suitcase, pulled out “The Haunting of Hill House” —still only a handful of chapters in, she’d been distracted the past months—and read until her eyes drooped closed.
When she woke hours later, Hill House was folded on her chest, and a warm hand was shaking her shoulder. The house was dark, shadowed, a TV blared, and the noise of the streetlamps, the cars cruising the street was impossibly loud to Jude’s sensitive ears. Someone clicked on a lamp: Aunt Phyllis loomed above her dressed in her nightclothes bathed in the harsh light. Without Aunt Lillian at her shoulder and without the armor of her fine clothes, she looked smaller, eyes dark, and ringed with a lack of sleep; deflated.
“You want your old room?” Phyllis whispered.
Jude grunted confusedly. “My room?”
Without a word, Phyllis led her upstairs, the old steps groaning beneath their shared weight. Jude remembered the way to her old bedroom but let Phyllis lead her anyway and bade her a good night before the woman left. As Phyllis made her way back to the stairs, Jude said, “Aren’t you sleeping up here?”
Phyllis shook her head, the movement barely visible in the dark of the hallway. “We don’t come up usually. I just thought you might want to stay in your room, instead of the parlor.”

Perspective is a funny thing. While Aunt Phyllis no doubt offered Jude her old bedroom as kindness, the gesture came off as cruelty, another grim reminder of a life forever gone. From the second Jude stepped foot into her old bedroom, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep there. Beyond the disorder, the staleness of air, there was the sameness, the fact that nothing at all had changed.
Jude kept the door open as she walked through the wood. She was breathless, gasping at the sight of her high bed still rumpled from her last time sleeping in it, her light wood bedroom set, and the cheerily patterned curtains hanging at the window. Who was this woman? Was there really such a time when she pinned magazine clippings to her walls? When she slept with piles of pillows? Was there a time when she laid on the plush carpeting and wrote in the diaries hidden betwixt her mattress, the countless notebooks filled with fantasies and stories?
Jude didn’t bother putting down her suitcase. She gave the room one last look, flicked off the light, and closed the door.
She didn’t know where’d she sleep, then she did. She went to the end of the hall to Ma’am’s room, opened the door, and stepped inside. Jude tensed some; the last time she was there, she was dripping blood on the hardwood and showering, the water going red beneath her feet. It didn’t seem so bad then, time making the room less mystical and forbidden than it had been when she left.
Ma’am’s room was about the size of Jude’s bedroom at the cottage with a high four-poster bed, matching nightstands and a dresser, an ottoman, and a plush rug. The windows, large, looked out at a neighbor’s house and were decorated with moth-eaten lace curtains. Jude propped a window open to let in the fresh air. She opened a drawer still full of Ma’am’s folded clothes, emptied it, then put in her own before putting the suitcase beneath the bed. Jude crawled onto her mother’s bed and laid there on her back, a plume of musk and perfume swarming her face. She coughed, pressing her hand to her chest.
Jude was still on her back, lazing on the soft top cover, when she heard a knock at the door. She sat straight up, alert and nervous that one of her aunts might’ve caught her. When the knock came again with Nemoira’s voice attached, her shoulders `
“Come in, come in!” Jude whispered and gestured for Nemoira to come close and come quickly. “Where’ve you been?”
“Out,” said Nemoira as she entered. She kicked her suitcase under the bed to rest beside Jude’s. “Hunting. Your aunties told me you’d be in old room.”
“Couldn’t sleep there. It made me sick just looking at all the stuff, the things she bought me. Did they give you a room?”
“They tried.” Nemoira got onto the bed, dark hair framing her face. “I don’t think I’m gonna sleep there.”
“Is that right? Where you plan on sleeping then, Miss Nemoira?”
“ I was hoping a certain Judy would let me sleep with her. Do you think she would mind? Some people, they don’t like sharing their bed with grizzly bears.”
Jude laughed, hands on Nemoira before she could finish her sentence. She let herself be filled, be loved. Every inch of Ma’am’s house was filthy with blood and bad memory, but in that moment, none of it mattered. Nemoira lit Sunday lights with her hands and mouth, made the miserable beautiful and the beautiful resplendent. Jude used to cry in this house, whimper, and lick her wounds. Now she moaned, sighed, grasped at all available flesh, hiding the loudest of her orgasm in Nemoira’s shoulder. She rocked hard against her, sight blurring and body trembling like trees during a windstorm. She fell into Nemoira’s arms and fell fast asleep with a familiar pair of hands soothing her.

But a sick house was a sick house, and when the house reached fever pitch somewhere past midnight, Jude shot out of sleep like a shot, the shock of waking making her reel. She realized after a moment of panic where she was, the bed she was in. She smoothed a hand over her face and found it to be clammy with sweat.
Jude rolled out of bed quietly, padded down the long hall and steps, and went back to the kitchen. The light, harsh and glaring, made it more unattractive than it was, though Jude wondered if memory didn’t romanticize the kitchen. The fridge and stove were a hideous, puke green; the cabinets piss yellow in the bowl lighting. The tile, thick with dirt and grime caught in the grout, was taken up by a corpse-shaped stain where she left her mother’s body to cool. Jude spent down and pressed her fingers to it and felt Ma’am’s blood pulsing out of her, her labored breathing in her final moments before Jude dragged the knife across her throat.
“We tried to clean it.”
Jude yelped. Whipped around and saw Aunt Lillian at the door of the kitchen, her eyes on the corpse stain. Nighttime took the threat out of her. She no longer seemed so formidable; just a weak old woman made weaker by the loss of her sister, fragile as glass as she came to stand near Jude.
“We tried bleach, all sorts of cleaners. Hired some men to take care of it but nothing brought it up. Whole house is like that. Won’t keep clean for nothing like it hates being touched.”
Jude said nothing in response. Lillian took a dishtowel from off the handle of the stove and hid the worst of the stain. She flinched at the look of it, the covered “face” and the prone body. She looked to her aunt for an explanation, but all Lillian said was that the stain was quieter when covered up. Sick to her stomach, Jude bolted from the kitchen, vomited quickly and quietly in the downstairs bathroom, then dashed back upstairs to her mother’s room.
She was still breathing hard as she stood at the doorway of the room. She looked into the darkness and saw the shape of Nemoira in bed, her hair spilled out on the pillows like ink. Her heart calmed, and Jude eased in next to her. She laid her head on Nemoira’s chest and thought about the quiet of the woods, those peaceful moments in the motel bath until she finally fell asleep.

§

About a week into her stay at her mother’s house, Jude decided she could no longer live in squalor. The haints of her Ma’am’s place were too bold; her aunts feared them and let them run amok, so the house fell to pieces while they cowed under the sound of pieces falling, breaking and smashing. Jude, however, was afraid of no haint and cowed by no ghoul. She knew these creatures well enough, having long trained her house to mind her when she spoke to it.
Armed with a can of Lysol and a mop, a scarf tied around her mouth and nose, Jude went to work. She opened all the doors, all the windows. The plumbing, insulted at the sudden change, turned rusty. Jude waited it out and waited for it to turn clear to scrub down the floors, the kitchen and the bathrooms, and all the hardwood surfaces. She beat down rugs and aired out mattresses, washed the sheets and drapes by hand in the master bath until her hands were raw.
With Nemoira’s help, Jude cleared away the kudzu and ivy, cleaned the gutters, and swept the chimney. She uprooted and replanted the garden with winter produce, planted holly, and hellebore in the flowerboxes outside the kitchen window. Her aunts and neighbors came to watch as she made herself an impromptu laundry line and pinned the wet clothes there, the newly sodded grass watered with their drippings.
The house fought, but Jude expected nothing less from it. Hadn’t it hosted Ernestine all those years, bore witness to thousands of fights? Jude didn’t flinch at the broken dishes, the windowpanes cracked, or the hideous howling at all hours in the house. When the house trembled, she spoke to it softly, and when strange faces appeared in the corners, she paid them no mind. Eventually, after two weeks of broken fingers and sprained muscles, sore shins and headaches and nausea, the house gave up the ghost. The corpse-stain, still unremovable, writhed in place, and the kitchen rattled ever so often but never with the same violence as before.
On a calm afternoon while clearing out her closet and drawers, a pair of heavy feet came up behind Jude, steps barely audible against the thick carpet.
“Mind your step. Some of them things is going to Goodwill,” Jude called out.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Jude stiffened, hand clenched around a faded blouse. She’d been staying out of Lillian’s way ever since that night in the kitchen, totally at a loss for what to say to her. It annoyed her, too, that Lillian was barely helping with cleaning the house, leaving the heavier work to Phyllis and Jude, and Nemoira while she went out. Jude looked over her shoulder to Aunt Lillian, unnerved but mostly aggravated, then went back to tossing items into piles of donating and trash.
“That friend of yours asked for you.”
“Nemoira?” asked Jude.
“She don’t speak much, does she?”
Jude dumped an entire armful of dresses into the trash pile. “We got that in common.” She cleared a path in the clothes with her foot then turned, meeting her aunt’s eyes. “Where’s she at?”
Lillian told Jude Nemoira was in the parlor. Jude nodded and started to walk by, but Lillian took hold of her arm, stopping her. Something flared underneath Jude’s skin—insult at being grabbed so roughly, the sick feeling it gave her. She swallowed it down, squashing the urge to yank herself away.
“Don’t think I don’t know what kind of person Ernestine was. I did. Always did. Knew she could be a bitch when she felt like it.” Lillian glanced at Jude’s hand, the one with the golden band, and grimaced. “Thought it wasn’t right for me to meddle in her house. Thought it’d be better for you if you figured it out on your own.”
Heat rising, Jude slipped away from her aunt. “I was a little girl. Ain’t meddling to protect a girl.”
“Nobody protected us either,” sneered Lillian. “Way we was brought up, the only way to raise a child was with a belt and a switch. That’s how our pappy raised, how his pappy raised him too. It ain’t right but it’s what was done.”
Jude fixed Lillian with the coldest glare she could muster, gaze icy though her skin was hot to the touch, and there were splotches of red in her eyes. What she wanted to do was become the knife again, to attack, but she knew that was what Lillian wanted, a chance to prove that Jude was violent and prone to bloodiness. Jude left the room without responding. When she found Nemoira in the parlor, the woman was sprawled out on the sofa, flipping through photo albums.
“This is what you called me for?”
“Yes!” Nemoira was beaming as she turned to a page filled with pictures of Jude as a child. “I asked Phyllis for pictures of you and she gave these to me! Look! Baby Judy!”
The next hour was passed with the two women sat side by side, poring over the photo album. Jude was distracted, half her mind on her conversations with Aunt Lillian. She did enjoy seeing Nemoira so happy, laughing, and gleefully pointing out details in her face that followed her into adulthood.
Upon seeing a photo with Jude sat on her mother’s knee, Nemoira hummed thoughtfully and said, “Did baby Judy ever smile or was she was such a stoic girl?”
“Stoic wasn’t really the word they used for me,” Jude admitted.

“Most people thought I was stuck up and rude. My own auntie included.”
“Phyllis?”
“No, Lillian.”
“Did she say something to you?” Nemoira asked, flipping over another plastic page.
“Not really.” Jude told her then about Lillian’s non-apology and how she grabbed her arm.
Nemoira frowned. “Did she hurt you badly?”
“Worse has happened. It’s just a little sore is all.”
She touched the tender flesh of the forearm, then put her attention back to the photo album. Sensing the conversation about her aunt and her arm were over, Jude returned to the album as well, images of a past self overtaking the present.

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Three.

She came to slowly, inching at it, slipping into awareness. She realized her form, the legs, and toes, the arms and hands, and fingers. The skin she wore was strange but well-tailored, holding all parts of her inside. Her chest rose and fell, the animal heart thumping in the human chest. And her teeth, strangely smooth, her tongue smaller in the full mouth. She sat up, stretched, and rolled her neck, her soft black shoulders.
There was no real name for sort of thing Nemoira was. For the sake of simplicity, she called herself what she’d always been—the bear.
The bear felt the minute shifts in the mattress beside her, the human woman she slept next to. She remembered herself and laid back down, slowed her heartbeat to match the woman’s. The woman, Judith, who she called Jude, turned over and laid a hand on the bear’s chest.
“Morning.” Jude pushed close and wrapped her arms around the bear’s torso, limbs thick as tree trunks and just as steady. The bear buried her nose in the crook of Jude’s neck and sniffed. She could smell the soap Jude used her night sweat, her natural and earthy scent so much like green leaves, and beneath it all, the smell of hot blood and flesh. Her jaw ached. She knew if she started to bite, she wouldn’t be able to stop. She kissed the space instead, tender.
Jude chuckled. “So early! Brush your teeth, your breath is terrible!”
She laughed along with Jude, humor to hide what laid in wait. The bear could still taste the blood on her tongue, the flesh caught in her teeth. She should reek with it, should always be languishing in the bones crunched and the skin rendered to strips. But she didn’t. Wouldn’t because the bear knew Jude liked it when she playacted at humanity.
The bear slipped away to the bathroom, showered in the funny glass box, and brushed her teeth with the plastic stick and minty paste provided. Jude came and got clean beside her, humming while she washed and brushed and changed into new clothes. The bear played along, scratching at her neck and yawning, clicking her jaw nearly in sync with Jude.
It’d be easier if she were careless. Easier if she slipped the human form altogether if she bared her teeth and rose to her full, terrible height and swiped, slashed, and ruined without prejudice. The bear was never so patient before. The others, the other humans who came to the cottage, to her woods, she laid them out flat in a matter of days, of hours. She didn’t see why she hadn’t done it yet. What stopped her from ruining Jude.
“Nemoira?”
Who? Ah, yes! Her. Nemoira made a little nothing noise in response to let Jude know she was listening. She told her to follow her down to breakfast, and she did (trained cub, tricks and all), sat at the table with Jude and her Aunt Phyllis. The older woman was colorless, and tired-looking slumped over her cup of tea and the plate of eggs laid out in front of her. In a low and brittle voice, she said that the other aunt, Aunt Lillian, had been missing for two days, that she was thinking to involve the police.
“The police?” said Jude. “Auntie, I don’t know…”
“I don’t know what else to do!”
“Please, Auntie Phil, she’s probably with a friend. You said it yourself, she goes to stay at her friend’s places all the times, right?”
Phyllis nodded weakly. “Right. Right, she could still be alright.”
Jude reached for her aunt’s hand and squeezed it. “It’ll be fine, auntie. Give it another day. Tomorrow, we’ll call. Alright?”
Later, when they were alone and when the bear was looking at the window, eager to be out in nature once more, Jude stroked her leg and asked her not to stay out for late.
“I know you told me not the worry, that the bear can take care of itself but…” Jude exhaled sharply. She put her chin into her hand, dark eyes sorrowful and heavy with concern. “Just be careful when hunting. All sorts out there.”
Didn’t she know it? Jude feared the way of humans, the hunters with their guns and the others with their tongues and hands, fists and feet, and belts. She seemed unable to wrap herself around the fact that Nemoira and the bear were one and the same, the beast that prowled and the beast that laid her head on Jude’s tummy entwined. Nemoira speaking to the cruel aunt about grabbing Jude’s arm, the bear slashing her down on her way back from her nighttime church service; she didn’t see the difference. They were the same, one body, one mind.
But maybe it was better that way. Jude was a beast in her own right, though she separated and legitimized her past actions by attributing them to the scared girl she was then. Weren’t they the same? Scared Judy brandishing the knife, brave Judy in the woods—same woman, same mind. Same bloody instincts lying in wait.
Oh, but the bear loved her human woman! She didn’t think it possible on that first night, when Jude ran from her, that she’d feel such things, but the woman intrigued her. She watched Jude more and more, roaring throughout the night, sitting at the edge of the field to watch her flit around the house like a hummingbird. She left food outside Jude’s door, something she never did for the others, upset, somehow, at the idea of such a fine thing wandering through the woods alone. Jude surprised her even further by taking the food and cooking it, by turning the house beset by haints into something lovely and full of lights.
The others, she had them quickly. Ate them and was done with it, at rest until the next human dared to walk into the woods. But Jude was unique, a different thing altogether; a week in her house and the bear knew she’d gnaw off her own paw before taking a single bite out of the woman’s flesh. A month in her presence, and she’d starve herself before considering the flesh of her love.
Luckily for the bear, there are other ways to sate her hunger. When she was a cub, she ate the domesticated animals, the chicken and cows, and pigs, then she graduated to hunting, to wild boar and pheasant and turkey and rabbits and fish, berries and sweet herbs in the lean months. Then, when she was a full-grown beast, she learned the taste of human flesh, the blood and fat, and muscle, sweet and hardy like a pig, the bear hunted humans. The first human kill was the best of them all; he was a fur trapper, he shot her and tried to kill her for her pelt. She tore the skin off his back and ate him fully, and when she was back to her human form, she took his ruined clothes and went a-begging in them until she came across her next target.
The bear smiled at Jude, smooth teeth and soft lips. There were traces of Jude in her mouth, remnants of a kiss. She licked her lips and savored what she was given.
She went into the trees at nightfall. There, she didn’t have to wear the human skin, though she had to admit she was fond of the dark skin and features. Swaying, swinging her body back and forth as violently as a tree caught in a gale, she dropped the human form, stretched her legs and arms until she was at her full height. She shook and sprouted thick black fur, let her lips become a maw, let her hands become paws. She sniffed and smelled miles and miles of green and human interference. The bear resisted the urge to roar, settling instead for a low growl and her paws against the dirt.
She padded through the trees, letting her nose and black eyes lead her from place to place. She peeked in a backyard or so, nipped at a dog that got too close to her, and chewed the seeds of a particularly interesting garden. The bear pondered, for a moment, giving chase to a deer she smelled a little bit away but decided against it, wanting to respect Jude’s wishes as best she could.
Still, she was hungry. The bear walked away from Jude’s neighborhood to a smaller, sleepier part of the city. Smooth and slow and quiet, she returned to the human form, the hungry waif in need of a meal. The bear thought of Jude, the effect the woman had on her. What was it in her, really, that made her turn from the best meal she’d ever have, let it breathe when she could’ve gotten fat from the marrow of Jude’s bones? Was it all love? And if so, the human heart was a wicked thing to keep in the body, more dangerous than her claws and sharp teeth. Here she was, an impossible creature who could change forms at whim, and she was floored by this fragile thing that curled into her arm, that saw her as the animal she was and loved her. The bear couldn’t even entertain thoughts of Jude’s death; thinking of Jude as flesh made her nauseous, picturing her bones made her head spin.
Damn the woman. Damn her heart. And damn the bear too! Curse the face she wore that Jude called beautiful, curse her for showing Jude what she was, and curse Jude again for looking at the beast and adoring it. She named herself for Jude! Never before had anything laid claim to her like that. Others saw her and whispered her many names, but those were human descriptors, none of her concern. How was it possible that this woman with the hellion scream and black eyes could ask her a single question and have her caught in the palm of her hand?
Nemoira—that’s what she called herself when Jude asked her name. It was so human, but the bear claimed it regardless. It fit like a glove, like the fine clothes Jude made for her in the quiet of her sewing room. The name felt sacred somehow, so she never said it aloud when alone. Instead, she scratched it into the dirt, into the bark of the trees, in all the secret places known by beasts and bears only.
Nemoira, ancient enough to remember the first arrow, launched into her side and the first white man to use a gun on her. Nemoira who loved and was loved by an impossible human. Nemoira, who was becoming more and more hungry, and who was losing her restraint.
The bear turned her face to the sky. She wondered if pressed if she’d be able to give Jude up. What was she without her eyes, without her hands? What sort of thing was she without the smell of Jude’s skin, her voice when she sang and the way she laughed, bounced with excitement? The bear, hedonistic, a lover and savorer of food, knew the taste would be splendid. The supple flesh fattened through Nemoira’s gifts, the muscles toned from hard work and the strong bone, and then that red meat, the gushing blood, the eyes and entrails, and fine organs.
Her stomach growled, and she swallowed hungry bile. Each night she hunted in the city, she came back to Jude, waiting for her. She used to lick her paws clean. Now she lounged in hot baths while the woman cleaned the blood from her face, inspected her teeth. What sort of beast was this, the bear wondered, that could look into the mouth of a bear with no fear?
Hers, hers, all hers.
The bear hunted. As the waif, she wailed and begged at the houses of strangers, asking food and warmth from the people that let her in. Some are wise. They kept to their homes and locked their doors, untrusting of the strange woman dropped by in the dead of night.
Others, kind others, were not so clever. They invited her in. She sat at their fires and drank their tea, their coffee, their water. She ate their meals, their meats and fruits, and vegetables, the dinners they’ve prepared for their families, then she ate them. There was an absolute thrill in catching someone in one of her traps. The bear-like the moment when they turned away and turned back and were faced with the beast, her horrible claws slashing at their throats. She dug into their backs, ripped at the legs and arms, the tender flesh of the belly. She gnawed on the bones until they split, then she gorged herself on the marrow.
She left town sated, mollified at least until her next meal. The bear walked home to Jude’s neighborhood and changed back under cover of trees. All the neighbors would see was a woman alone, walking, burping, and tasting the remains of her dinner.
(There were some the bear spared; a lovely and lonely young lady in a house of her own, an old woman with walls hung with quilts, a kindly woman of Jude’s age with dark eyes and a clever smile. Hungry as she was in the moment, the bear couldn’t bring herself to eat them. They were too familiar. She looked into their eyes and saw Jude tucked in bed, Jude stretching, Jude singing, Jude turning the meat of her kills into lavish meals. She made it up to herself by mauling their pets, mercilessly and savagely rending the flesh while the beasts still lived.)
The bear came home, as told before dusk. As expected, Jude was waiting for her, hot water waiting in the tub by the time she went up the stairs. Jude helped her into the bath and said little as she dunked a washrag into the water and began to clean Nemoira’s skin. The bear hummed beneath the touch, the way Jude let the water trickle down her spine, how she wiped her face and hands, uncaring of the blood they shed.
“All better?” said Jude.
“All better,” said the bear, and she let Jude kiss her, the taste of human flesh still hot on her breath.

§

At breakfast and dinner and lunch, Jude’s aunt looked at her suspiciously, eyes narrowed, and mouth drawn tight. Nemoira paid her little mind, eating her meals, and thinking about the ones she’d have later. From the corner of her eye, she saw how Jude’s cheek twitched. When they were alone, Jude admitted that she was worried that her aunt thought Nemoira might’ve down something to Lillian.
“It’s just that she hears you coming in so late,” Jude said. “I can’t tell her you’re a bear, so I tell her nothing.” She turned to Nemoira, eyes big and black and nervous. “She thinks you killed her.”
“Do you think I killed her?” The bear watched Jude’s face for a reaction, and when she saw nothing but shock, she settled.
“Never, no! You’re not like that Nemoira. Not like I am. Angry, spiteful—you wouldn’t hurt someone just to hurt them.”
Jude said the words with such conviction that the bear almost believed them herself. She reminded herself, quickly, of the hunters she gored, the people she tore, and, of course, Jude’s aunt, who was settled in her belly.
A day passed and then two more. Men in uniforms came around to the house and asked questions of each of the women. Jude watched her Aunt Phyllis and eavesdropped on her conversation with the officers, trying to find out just what the woman was saying about the Nemoira. Later in the evening, Jude reported that her aunt said nothing to incriminate her, only that Lillian was out later than usual and didn’t return home from bible study when expected. Jude went (she said what time she went to bed, what her Aunt Phyllis said to her the morning after), and after that, it was Nemoira’s turn. She told them the truth, how she liked to walk in the evening and how she saw Lillian on her way home from church.
“Did you say anything to her?” one of the officers asked. He had pale skin and red cheeks, the sort of physique she gorged on in Whitney.
“No,” said the bear. “Not a word.”
The police left soon after with a promise to keep the women updated. Alone in the house, Phyllis kept her distance from Nemoira, wary of her as her sister was. When by herself in a room with the bear, she bolted, suddenly remembering something she needed to do elsewhere. It was almost funny how nervous she was, how right she was Nemoira but not quite.
After dinner, the night of the police’s visit, Jude came to bed later than usual. The bear sat up, wrapped her arms around her legs. She raised a brow—was something wrong?
“I just sent my auntie away.”
“You did?” The bear’s heart leaped to her throat, unlined palms sweating. “Why?”
“She said she thinks you killed Lillian, that the only reason she didn’t say anything to the police today was because you might kill her too. She told me I should be careful around you, that I don’t know what kind of thing you are.”
“And what did you day to her?”
“I told her to go.” Jude got onto the bed knee first, crawling until she was right in front of the bear, eye to eye. “I told her I knew exactly what sort of thing you were, that we were the same.”
“Killers?” offered Nemoira.
“Animals,” corrected Jude.
In the dark of the bedroom, close in the arms of her human beast, the bear didn’t have the heart to tell her those things were one and the same.

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Four.

With her aunts disappeared and the house in her possession once more, Jude felt free to do what she pleased. She’d already cleaned the house and mended it, tamed the spirits, and suppressed the haints. Jude took it a step further, transforming the house into an extension of the cottage. She removed the mirrors, the framed pictures, the cheap reproduction vases, and cherubim. Jude went thrifting, bought porcelain angels and real chinoiserie, new rugs and curtains, bedspreads untouched by flesh save for the ones who made them. At the end of each day, Jude sat out on the porch and looked over the street, the neighbors watching her cautiously as they would a feral dog.
Jude, never cowed by the eyes of others, let them take their fill.
It was just over a week since Aunt Phyllis came to Jude with accusations against Nemoira. She sent the woman packing soon after; affection turned to anger within minutes. Jude had no real allegiance to these people, her supposed family. The blood between them was diluted long ago, made weak and ineffective through little fault of her own. She knew nothing of her aunts and knew everything of Nemoira. Neither her bear nor her Nemoira was a feckless killer of people. She sent Aunt Phyllis on her way. Put Aunt Lillian out of mind.
She forgot what it was like to be in a quiet place. There was still the noise from the street, the people walking by, the immutable hum of the lights and electric grid, but there weren’t strange feet scuffing across the floor and voices drifting down the halls, the overwhelming sense that she didn’t belong. Jude wondered if it were possible to build a home for herself with other people, if possible, to be who she really was without the protection of a field and forest.
Appearance counted for a lot. As a child, she conformed because she had no other choice. She was grown now, unbound by opinion other than her own. She saw how people looked at her casual dress, her lack of pressed hair, and makeup. It was implied, heavily, that she was careless and ungroomed, slovenly though the house’s state should’ve proven otherwise. Jude let herself be seen in flared jeans and loose flowing shirts, inappropriate and scandalous for a woman of her age. But she did care about her appearance. Cared that she never felt at home in the dresses, she was stitched into as a child, the process of beating back her hair and making her natural body into what it was not. When Jude looked into the mirror and found she wanted more than what she saw, she did something about it.
She left Nemoira home and went out, first, to the local barbershop. Her experiences in men’s spaces were limited, more accustomed to the beauty salons with their steams and sprays. The men there stopped their conversation to watch her cross the area and take a seat in one of the plastic chairs on the side. Jude leaned back in her seat and waited.
“Miss?” One of the barbers came over with his hands in his pocket. “Miss, is you lost?”
Jude shook her head. “No, not lost. Can you cut my hair?”
“Cut your hair?” He looked at Jude’s mane of curls, already washed and neatened into an afro. “You sure about that?”
She kept her face stiff and impassive, aware of the eyes on her and the impression she was making on the men. “More than sure.” Jude gestured to one of the empty chairs near the center of the shop with her chin. “That seat empty?”
Jude made her way over, back straight and head straighter. The barber came soon after, awkwardly fiddling with his scissors and razors. Jude met his gaze in the splotchy mirror, brow raised in quiet challenge. She feared, inwardly, that he might send her out, after all, prove her weak, but he only asked her how short he wanted it cut.
“An inch.” She looked to the man beside her, an older gentleman trying not to look back. “About where he’s got it.”
Her haircut passed in silence. The men in the shop cautious and quiet until they realized Jude was no threat. She relaxed into the chair and listened to their chatter, their opinions, amused and sometimes disgusted but mostly in awe. When the final pieces of her hair were brushed off her shoulder and given a mirror to observe herself in, Jude closed her eyes, took a deep breath to steady herself, and then opened them.
She turned her head left and right, lifted her chin, and lowered it. Short hair accentuated the shape of her jaw and chin, nose and cheeks, and mouth. Even her eyes seemed different, more piercing. Her softer features mixed with the cut made her look dashing, handsome even, and she much liked the affect it had overall, androgynous and fine, someplace in between.
Next, she stopped by a men’s clothing store, the eyes on her there just as curious as the eyes in the barbershop. Jude came with a story prepared for the shopkeeper—she was shopping for her brother and needed a few pieces for his wardrobe. Her arms were loaded with fashionable slacks and shirts, a few simple button-ups, some blazers, and two pairs of loafers, one with attractive silver buckles. Jude paid for them, smiling in that way she knew strangers liked and took her haul home.
When Jude returned to the house, she showered again and blended her mother’s tuberose and sandalwood oils on her neck, wrists, and between her breasts. She matched one of the button-ups with a floral skirt she made and slipped into the silver buckle loafers. She rubbed her lips with grease, then dug in her mother’s jewelry box. Jude wasn’t shocked to find it mostly empty. Her aunts must’ve cleared out the pearls, the crystal earrings, the brooches, and bracelets, but there was a watch in there, a leather men’s watch which still ticked and fit well on her thick wrist. The overall effect, the silver, and leather, and gold band, made her gleam, not flashily but certainly very brightly.
She tried the mirror. Her reflection stared back at her, a fascinating stranger. Jude ran her hands over her head and felt the wooly texture of her hair, then the texture of her shirt, her skirt. She twisted Ma’am’s ring on her finger. She felt she waited fifty-odd years to meet the woman that stood in front of her. Now that they were acquainted, Jude smiled, honestly, earnestly, something of her own creation.

§

“Judy, I’m off.”
Jude looked up from Hill House, finger caught in between the pages so she wouldn’t lose her place. Nemoira stood by the front door draped in her coat, one hand on the doorknob as she prepared to go hunting. She rose to her feet, and adjusted Nemoira’s coat pressed a kiss to her cheek.
“Be home before two. Some people have been talking about seeing a bear around the neighborhood.”
“A bear?” said Nemoira, mock concerned. “How scary.”
Jude rolled her eyes at her, opened the door, and escorted Nemoira out. “I know you don’t need it but good luck,” she called after her. “And be careful.”
She kept watch as Nemoira walked down the street and disappeared into the trees. Once she was gone entirely from sight, Jude closed the door and went back to her book. Finally, after nearly three months of reading, she was nearing the end. She’d read “The Haunting of Hill House” before, got lost in Eleanor’s mind, and felt for her as she unraveled once when she was a teenager. Reading it as a woman, she thought of her cottage in the woods and if she’d ever return there if there was anything there that couldn’t be provided for her here.
Isolation? Jude was sure she outgrew the need for it. She was not yet completely comfortable in the presence of other people, but she could pretend, and there was always a house to return to, cleaned of memories, and renewed under her hand. Her new appearance was a helpful barrier, a tree line of short hair and masculine clothes, a watch, and a ring just as powerful as years of ghost stories. The world kept their distance when prompted, and Jude could keep hers if she wanted.
Above her, something fell.
Jude raised her eyes to the sound. She couldn’t tell what room it was in, but it sounded heavy. Sucking her teeth and grunting as she stretched, Jude saved her place in her book for a second time and went upstairs to check the damage.
She could hear the piece rattling as she came up the steps, and she went from room to room to see where it was. Both guest bedrooms were fine, and the guest bath, and the master bed and bath. Jude stopped outside her old bedroom, the sound of the rattling almost deafening this close. She pressed her ear to the door, listening. Something was hurled against the door from outside, and Jude flinched at the sudden sound of it, heart leaping into her throat. She reached for the knob. Turned it.
In her old bedroom, there was chaos. Her dresser was the offending piece, violently shaking and banging against the rug and hardwood underneath. The handles of the dresser slammed into the wood, clattering, making her ears ring. Little curios spread out on the chest’s surface flew this way and that, colliding with the wall or landing heavily on the floor. A lamp, presumably the item thrown at the door, laid on the carpet cracked, its lampshade crushed from the force.
Jude came to the dresser with her hands spread out, shushing it softly. She touched it, wobbling from the force of the shakes, and tried to calm it. It shook on and on, unmoved by her words. The drawers began to open and close, open and close, the sound getting louder and louder to the point where Jude couldn’t hear her own thoughts.
“Enough! That’s enough!”
The dresser responded, its feet thumping against the carpet beginning to sound like op-en, op-en, op-en.
Brows knit tight, Jude took her hands from the surface of the dresser and said aloud, “Open?”
The dresser went on, op-en, op-en, op-en. Jude reached for the nearest handle and pulled it, opening the drawer.
She didn’t know what she expected to find as she went through the drawers. She cleaned them all out when she shook down the house, every nook and cranny exhumed of its past contents. Jude felt a little foolish, listening to the thumps of a dresser, listening to furniture at all. Even so, her breathing before she opened each drawer, palms sweaty against the brass until she pulled it open and found it empty, embarrassment, and an inexplicable relief washing over her. One drawer, two drawers, three drawers—there were four left, and she went through them quickly, yanking them out, slamming them back in.
By the time she reached the last drawer, she was convinced the whole endeavor was in vain. She pulled the drawer open, nonplussed, expecting nothing but nothing. What she found made her gag. What she saw made her scream.
Jude put a hand over her mouth and breathed sharply through her nose. She steadied herself and looked again, needing to be sure that what she saw was real. There in the last drawer of her dresser were shredded clothes, shoes missing their pair, hats, human teeth, fragments of bone, and jewelry. So much jewelry! Rings and earrings, necklaces and bracelets, gold teeth and watches, brooches in various shapes and sizes, all with different stones and precious metals, and all of them smelling distinctly of copper; trophies.
She ran her hands through, digging in. Jude knew what she was looking for but didn’t want to admit it to herself until she saw for certain what she’d known from the moment Aunt Phyllis told her Lillian was missing. She dug in deeper and brought it out—Aunt Lillian’s scarf, the one she wore the night she went to bible study.
The dresser stilled. Jude eased herself onto the floor and sat there for a while with her back pressed to it. She thought of Nemoira hunting, the animal slashes across the back of the hunter, then of her aunt being mauled, being bitten. No matter how sorely she hated the woman and her actions, she’d never wish that open her, the claws and terrible teeth, the way she must’ve dug into her back as savagely as she tore into the hunter’s.
Jude closed her eyes and thought coolly of the only people Nemoira might’ve killed. Other hunters, other innocents in the woods. Then she returned to the idea of Nemoira hunting, the items collected in the drawer. Not one thing among them belonged to any animal. No dog’s teeth, no deer’s pelt, no hoof or trotter, beak, or antler. Only teeth and bone, scraps of clothing, and a scarf that still smelled of blood. And Jude let herself consider their meals in the woods, the meals they’ve eaten together, all the strange meats Nemoira brought home, the livers and kidney, lungs and fatty cuts of flesh from no animal Jude knew. Their taste was all the same, wasn’t it? Gamey and sweet, a little bit like pork but mellower.
Jude gagged, stumbled, and fell out of her bedroom and into the bathroom, where she promptly vomited. She went until her stomach was empty until her sides ached, and all she could do was dry heave. Sight blurry and splayed over the cool porcelain, Jude exhaled shakily. Her tongue was coated with it, stomach full up of it. She found a little more bile in her and spat it up, unable to swallow.
First, she cried, sobbing like a child, then the tears became giggles, wild laughter. Hysterically, she laughed, joyless and wild, wholly removed from herself. She couldn’t believe it, but she could. Couldn’t parse it, but she had no choice, not with it all spread out in front of her like this.
It was sickening, revolting, inhuman, and inhumane, and she ate it! Over and over, with relish, with glee, she ate Nemoira’s kills, this human flesh, and enjoyed it, savored it, longed for the meat, and chose it over pork, chicken, beef. Dear God, she craved it. How many times did she stand over a stewpot stirring someone’s remains, already imagining dipping her bread into their juices? How many times did she salivate at the prospect of Nemoira returning from her hunt, hands full of what she thought was some rare animal, never seen but in ready supply?
Jude came to her feet, still laughing. Her body ached, every bit of her screaming out in alarm. She’d been warned many times, been given plenty of chances to get away. Hadn’t Nemoira herself told her that she was not who she thought she was? Hadn’t Nemoira shown herself to be an animal, a grizzly before with no compunctions about shedding blood and doing what needed to survive, to eat?
She wiped her face and rinsed her mouth. She went to her bedroom and picked up Aunt Lillian’s scarf, and bundled inside of it teeth, a piece of bone, and a scrap of clothing. Afterward, Jude went back downstairs and waited for Nemoira to return. Finished reading, finally, “The Haunting of Hill House.”
When Nemoira returned, Jude greeted her with a kiss, a hug. She took Nemoira’s coat from her shoulders and helped her slip the boots off her feet. She held a little package.
“Liver!” Nemoira beamed. “I know how you like liver!”
Jude swallowed the bile in her throat and presented Nemoira with a gift of her own, the little scarf bundle of human remains. Nemoira’s smile fell as she took the package in hand. Her eyes changed, no longer warm but cold and calculating, more open than they’ve ever been in the months they’ve known each other. She tipped her head, appraising Jude, sizing her up.
“So,” drawled Nemoira. “What do we do now?”

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Five.

They sat in the dining room across from each other, Jude way on one side and Nemoira on the other. The room was quiet, the mood tense. Nemoira scratched a nail into the wood, the sound itching at Jude’s senses. Outside, Jude was calm, face impassive, but inside she was a riot, all senses screaming, mind brimming with questions. She knew what she wanted to say and how she wanted to say it. Knew saying the words aloud might get her killed.
“How long have you been feeding me people?”
“Since the first time I fed you.”
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
Nemoira shrugged. “Eventually. I wanted to wait ‘til I knew you’d be okay with it. I thought if you found out too soon, it might scare you off.”
Jude didn’t bother suppressing the incredulous look that crossed her face, the scoff that left her. “Imagine that, me not wanting you any more because I knew what you were.”
“What I am?” Nemoira leaned forward in her chair, hands spread across the table. “Judy, you’ve known what I am for months. What difference does this make? A little human flesh along with the other meat I bring you, a little violence on top of the rest of them. What does it matter?”
“What does it matter?” Jude repeated. “It matters because it’s not right! It’s revolting, it’s …” Jude grimaced at the thought of the liver tucked in the icebox, the glee with which Nemoira presented it to her. “It’s sick!”
“Is it? I showed you what sort of animal I was, Jude. You saw what kind of damage I did, the bites and scratches on the animals I brought you, on that hunter, and I know you’ve spent the entire evening imagining what I did to your aunt. What a meal! You can’t be upset with me for doing what an animal does. For killing, for eating what it kills. Would you rather me waste it? Let it rot?”
“That’s not what I mean!” Jude rose to her feet and pushed her hands over her shaved head. She was frustrated, tears beginning to spring to her eyes. “It’s not right to tell somebody you’re one thing and then be another. I knew you were an animal, knew you were different but this ain’t right. You killed her, you killed all them people, and for what? Hunger?”
“Better than your excuse, don’t you think?”
“My excuse?”
Nemoira stood to the side of her chair, keeping her distance from Jude but pinning her with her gaze. “You say you killed your mother to defend yourself. I believe you. I believe she was wicked and cold and cruel, but I also believe that you chose to kill her in the bloodiest way you knew how. A knife to the face? A knife to the throat?” Nemoira inched to Jude, sliding her hand over the table, a coy smile on her face. “No matter how much you mourned afterwards, how much you hemmed and hawed about it before, in the moment, in that sick little moment when you had your Ma’am on her back, bleeding, begging for her life, you slit her throat. Look at me, Judy, and tell me you didn’t like it. Look at me, and tell me you’re not the same sort of beast I am.”
Jude looked back at Nemoira, tears silently streaming down her face. Her tongue was glued in place, her heart beating rapidly. She found her words and said, “We are not the same. At all. I’m not like you.”
Jude left the room then. She went to the master bedroom, closed and locked the door after herself, then sat on the bed, arms wrapped around her knees. In the dark, she let herself breathe, let herself cry the tears that have been pressing down on her neck since Nemoira came home. Jude never felt weaker, more drained. She saw the shadows of the dark room, haints of the cottage, and the bear following her on her first night in the woods.
She wasn’t like Nemoira, was she? Jude was by no means a perfect person, but she wasn’t brutal, wasn’t heartless. She killed Ma’am out of necessity because if she hadn’t killed her, hadn’t finished her off, she would’ve killed Jude herself. Those hands around her throat and, before that, those hands beating her, bruising her, breaking her spirit throughout years. Wasn’t that cause enough? Hadn’t she earned the right to spill a little blood if it meant she had freedom and safety?
Nemoira killed out of necessity, too, her brain reminded her. Jude couldn’t deny it. The bear killed for food, the most natural thing of all, and she killed the hunters because they threatened her. And Aunt Lillian? Was it possible that the woman she loved, that claimed to love her back, killed in her defense? Jude put a hand on her arm, the one that Lillian grabbed when telling her about her mother. Was it enough to warrant a gruesome death?
She didn’t want to think about it anymore. Jude put her head down on the pillow and tried to sleep. Many times, all throughout the night, she heard Nemoira walking by the door and stopping, knocking, and calling her name. Jude covered her ears and closed Nemoira out, feeling more alone than she had in months.

The day that passed was thick with tension, the air foggy with nerves. Jude avoided Nemoira, and Nemoira avoided Jude, the two of them startling when they crossed paths in the halls, up and down the stairs. With nowhere safe in the house, Jude took to the street. She walked for hours, cold but unwilling to return home. The sights were not at all cathartic, not like her boxwood and oak, the field of grass she could lose herself in. The houses and apartments and telephone poles only worked to pen her in. She looked up at the sky and found it cluttered, looked down at the ground and found it littered.
Jude went to a park. She sat on a bench and pulled the string from her coat until she had enough to make cat’s cradles and nets with her fingers. She watched the people passing, the lovers with their arms entwined, and the older folks bent over canes and walkers. A stranger in strange lands, Jude felt ten thousand miles away from her body, away from who she thought she was and who she made herself into. She was far enough away from the house to admit that she fooled herself, made herself believe that she was worthy of a love that was clean and decent. What was clean and decent about her? These hands that played children’s games with string were bloody, and bloody hands sought bloody companionship. She rubbed her hands off on her jeans and fought the overwhelming urge to scream.
Still unable to go home, Jude toured more of her old neighborhood. The West End changed radically since she was there last. There were strange shops on the corner, and the grand houses were split into apartments, duplexes, and triplexes and on and on until they were no longer grand. There was a nervousness in the air, a sort of itching that couldn’t be explained away by the changing weather. After a while, Jude realized there were no children out even though it was winter break, and the streets felt dull without their laughter.
Near five in the evening, Jude went to one of the local food marts and shopped around for something to make for dinner. She wouldn’t starve without Nemoira’s bloody fare. She picked out onions, carrots, some celery. Halfway through shopping, Jude realized she was picking up the ingredients for beef stew. As she set the vegetables on the counter and waited for the cashier to ring them up, she considered the liver in the fridge then made a brief stop at the butcher for a beef chuck and fat for rendering.
There was no sign of Nemoira when Jude got home. Relieved, she went into the kitchen and started to cook. She walked over the corpse-stain, back and forth, as she fetched pots and pans. Jude found a knife near enough to the kitchen knife she was used to, chopped the beef, seasoned it heavily, and let it simmer in the pot before moving on to the vegetables. She hummed to herself, a little bit of Nina Simone, and propped open the window to permit a breeze. Somewhere further down the street, somebody was watching Gilligan’s Island.
Jude felt…Well, she thought to herself, if she were totally honest, she would say she felt akin to her knife like she’d been ground down, back and forth against the blade until she honed, sharpened. She knew what she was capable of, of the sort of damage she could do when pushed into a corner. She also knew she wasn’t safe—no one was, really, not with an animal in the house.
The stew was done by the time Nemoira came in. She called for Jude, and Jude told her where she was. Jude pulled down two bowls, and set them on the counter, found a ladle, and began to spoon healthy portions of the stew into the bowl.
“Hungry?” asked Jude. She pulled Nemoira’s chair out for her and sat the bowl down in front of her.
“Starving.”
“You didn’t hunt?”
“I thought I’d wait for a homecooked meal,” said Nemoira. She kept her eyes on Jude as she kicked her lips but broke the contact as she hung her nose over the stew. “Wow! What a smell!”
Jude took a seat across from her with her own bowl. They ate in silence, spoons scraping against their bowls, metal tapping against the glass. Jude flicked her eyes over to the knife, waiting on the counter, and

Nemoira followed her line of sight.
She laughed. “Surely you’re not planning on killing me tonight.”
“I thought about it,” Jude admitted. “There’s a gun in the trunk of the car, the one from the hunter. I thought I’d shoot you first. Skin you later.”
“You plan on winning?”
“Yep. I’m not gonna be an easy kill. You’re gonna have to chase me.” Jude scraped her chair against the tile as she pushed back from the table. She took her bowl and Nemoira’s and set them into the sink. The knife was at her elbow now, close enough to grab if she was fast enough.
“Chase you?” Nemoira teased. “After all these years, you’re still gonna make me run after you. You really are one of a kind; nobody’s ever lived this long. I’d hope that you’d go to bed. Barely any pain when I take of your pretty throat.”
“Good thing I’m awake then. I’m not going down without a fight.”
Nemoira smiled, gentle and warm but patronizing. “That’s my girl.”
Aware of Nemoira’s eyes on her, on the knife, on all her little movements, and hyperaware of her breath, her heart pounding and mind alight like a Sunday, Jude reached for the knife and lunged.

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Six.

The moment Jude grabbed the knife was the moment Nemoira transformed. It wasn’t graceful as the other times, not fluid or sensual, just bones cracking and muscles rearranging, a quick change from the human form to the animal. The bear down on its paws roared as Jude swiped at it with the knife, the blade barely glancing off its fur. Jude pushed forward and tried again, waiting until Nemoira stood on her hind legs and slashed down to jab at the belly. It distracted her enough to get Jude out of the way of the claws, and she dashed from the kitchen, knife clutched in hand.
The bear caught her in the dining room, slamming her hard with one of its paws. Jude was thrown into the table, wood splintering around her. She groaned, hissed at the pain of the scratch at her side. The bear rose up above her, full-height terrifying so close, all of that weight and power directed at her. Nemoira slashed at Jude again, this time close enough to tear Jude’s face. She screamed, the claw cutting her cheek and eye, ripping the skin, but there wasn’t time to linger. She dodged the next slash as best as she could and half-ran/half-limped up the stairs.
She heard Nemoira at her heels but didn’t check behind her. She looked at each of the five doors on the second story and decided on her mother’s room. Jude locked it, barricaded the vanity and dresser against it, then backed against the bed breathing hard. Blood was obscuring her vision, making everything red and hazy. She blinked the blood out of her eyes and panted, tried to plan.
What next? What next? She couldn’t reach the gun even if she wanted, the drop from the second floor sure to injure her enough that Nemoira could take her out then and there. Jude had to be smart, had to be fast. She flexed her hand around the handle of the knife. She’d go for the belly, sensitive and open when Nemoira was standing. She licked her lips and nodded. The belly it was.
Nemoira was on the second floor. Jude could hear her growling, her paws and sniffing outside the door. Jude slipped to the right of the door and kept her breathing quiet as Nemoira began to slam against the door. Bang! Bang! Bang! The sound was gunshots in her ears, fireworks, explosions booming all around her. The door was strong but not strong enough to withstand the slamming. Already the wood was splintering, caving in. Jude inched further from the door and primed herself to attack.
In retrospect, the barricade was useless. The door busted in, and the bear climbed over, sniffing the room for Jude. When she found her, Jude was prepared, knife at the ready. She baited Nemoira into clawing at her, this time taking a nasty blow to the torso. Still, it was worth it. She got Nemoira to stand high enough to reveal her belly. Jude thrust the knife in and yanked hard to the right, all but disemboweling the bear. The bear made a horrible noise, half scream, and half roar, and Jude, injured by breathing, made another run for it.
Nemoira wasn’t letting her get away so easily this time. They collided into each other at the top of the stairs, wrestling to the ground. Nemoira was above her, snarling, blood spattering on Jude. Jude grabbed the knife, plunged into the bear’s belly, and inched it deeper, gritting her teeth. The bear swiped, and Jude pulled the knife from its belly, reaching for the steps. The movement, already awkward in the position they were in, made it all the worse. Jude felt herself falling, sliding and tumbling down the steps with the bear right behind her, neither of them able to find their footing.
At the bottom of the stairs, Jude groaned. Winced. She hurt so much, but she couldn’t stop, not then. Next to her, Nemoira shook her bear form, but she looked just as deadly, eyes black and body painted red, an angry slash around her belly.
Eye twitching, Jude backed away, and Nemoira raced to her, the two of them slamming into walls and colliding with corners, slipping on the blood they left in their wake. Nemoira caught her again in the kitchen, grabbing Jude by the hem of her dress, pulling her down to the ground with enough force to make Jude slam her head against the tile.
Jude reached for her head, scream halfway out of her throat when Nemoira clambered on top of her, wrapped her hands around her throat, and began to choke her. Eyes wide, body in the shadow of her mother’s corpse print, Jude scratched and fought, kicked at Nemoira with all her strength. The lights were hazy and red. She wheezed and clawed at the hands around her neck. She darted her eyes around the floor and found nothing, no knife, no blade to free her.
Nemoira laughed above her. “No easy way out of this one, Judy,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Animal beats man every time.”
What she wanted to say was that she was no man, that humanity that shaken her loose years ago. She wanted to tell Nemoira that she divulged her humanness and allegiance to people the minute she decided her mother had to die. Wanted to tell Nemoira about the deer, the splash of blood against her legs, how she was right about them both being animals and killers, ruthless creatures without regret or restraint. What Jude did instead was use what little strength she had left to draw up her leg and kick Nemoira in her wounded stomach. The woman fell off of her, doubled over, crying out in pain. Jude swallowed thickly and rubbed her neck, stumbled to her feet, and went to the kitchen counter. Nemoira still on the floor, scrabbling, grabbing at her guts. Jude picked out the butcher knife. The handle fit perfectly in her hand, and she looked at her reflection in the blade, the crazed look in her eye, her body, washed down with blood.
Panting, she returned to Nemoira. The woman looked up at her now, breathless, shuddering. She kept her chin up, proud even as Jude loomed above her.
“Not gonna beg?”
Nemoira shook her head then raised it further, revealing her neck. Part of Jude ached at the sight of it, Nemoira giving herself over, submitting. She didn’t want it that easy, didn’t want Nemoira rolling over and giving up. That wasn’t her bear, that wasn’t her beast. The part of her that couldn’t see out of one eye, the part of her that limped and ached and was shredded growled.
Jude put the edge of the knife to Nemoira’s throat. “You ready for this?”
Nemoira met Jude’s eyes and told her yes. Jude dragged the knife across Nemoira’s throat, and for once, killing wasn’t mercy.

There was no love in her heart when she cleaned and skinned the deer. She felt nothing but love when she cleaned and skinned Nemoira. She was gracious enough, her love, to change forms a final time before she died in Jude’s arms. When the bear stopped breathing, Jude put her head on its chest and smelled the flowers and rotted wood beneath the blood, the smells she associated with Nemoira.
Her hands were reverent as she cut along her back and arms as she peeled the flesh away from the skin. When the pelt was laid out in front of her, meatless and fatless, Jude salted it down and sat it in the freezer until she finished her cleaning. She took the parts she was familiar with, the shoulder and stew meats, bigger hunks better for roasting. She took the liver and the heart, wrapping them in wax paper and sealing them tightly. When finished, Jude removed the pelt from the freezer and brought the rest of her prizes out to the Pontiac, mouth-watering at the thought of bear stew, bear roast and sausage, the liver with gravy and onions.

§

Later, when Jude had packed and thrown the bags into the trunk of the Pontiac when the blood had dried on her skin and the world was woozy with red and bright lights, she took a moment to mourn. There she was, the greatest love she ever had, killed, and at her hands. Jude caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror. A wild woman looked back, good eye twitching and haunted.
She didn’t stop on her way to Whitney this time. She went straight, no maps, no late dinners, no coffee to make her body burn. Jude was already electric, every single one of her nerves alive with emotions reserved for trees, for plants, for rare species of insects. She tore through the highways, through the smaller roads, down the service road so she wouldn’t have to see another soul. The world opened itself up to her; Jude closed it, turned away, and went back to what was familiar.
When she arrived at her cottage after weeks of being away, Jude stood out in the field and looked at what was hers. The white siding and porch, the mossy stone path that led to it; the crooked roofline, the chimney. She looked behind her to the woods, dark and full of impossible things, and then ahead to the cottage which was hers and hers alone, her domain, her kingdom.
The cottage swayed in greeting, all pieces rattling and thumping. Jude clicked her tongue, and the house went quiet. She slipped off her shoes and coat, set down her cases at the front door. She bathed, her bathwater turning red and brown around her, then she fixed her cuts, her wounds. The scratch on her face was the worst of them. She dabbed at it carefully, hissing at the burn of the alcohol, then moved onto the wound on her torso, smaller cuts on her legs and arms. Jude touched a hand to her throat, again jeweled with black and purple.
She didn’t have the strength to cry. There wasn’t enough in her to wail like she wanted to, to beat her chest and tear out her hair. Jude understood the widows who dressed in black, the stopped clocks and houses draped in misery, but she could barely lift her legs, never mind crawl on hands and knees. She fell into her bed, not bothering to get beneath the covers. She listened to the lack of noise around her, the woods with all of its nightlife, the minute shuffling in the attic from haunts uneasy.
Jude closed her eyes and slept. Her mind and body, entwined, finally in one form, memory and flesh, were at peace. She ached, but it was over.

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Spring

One

On Sundays, she picked flowers. In all her years of living in the woods—twenty-three, now, in total—she kept the tradition, separated from humanity but not her human need for routine. True, her steps were slower, and she was not as nimble when she leaped over roots. The tupelo tree bent further and further each year to help her negotiated them, but she made her way through the woods still, basket on her arm, and a little song on her heart.
It had been ten years since she killed Nemoira. Jude wasn’t lonely without the woman—she had spent seventeen years without her before she knew her—but she did miss her often. There were days when the cottage was cold, and she wanted an arm around her, days when she wanted a second voice to sing with her, and times when she needed the extra shoulder to take on the weight of gardening and mending. Jude split Nemoira’s fur in twain, most going to her winter cloak and the rest going into her Tree of Paradise, finished and embellished with elements of them both, Jude and Nemoira.
The cloak smelled, even after all the time passed, like jasmine and wood, and when Jude was in a sentimental mood, she could spend hours holding the cloak to her nose weeping for love and for loneliness.
Sometimes Jude found herself missing the taste of Nemoira’s kills. No other animal tasted like it, gamey yet fresh, somehow sweet. Oft times, Jude went into town and looked over the hunks of meat offered by the butcher and was bored by them, then somebody would walk by, all thighs and arms, and Jude’s mouth would water, wondering just what Nemoira would bring home from them. She swallowed her spit. Swallowed the indelible mark Nemoira made on her.
Some Sundays, Jude went to the glade, but she still had a place in her heart for her summer swamp. After picking her flowers, she sat by the water, sketched insects and birds and plants, black bears with eyes deeply human. She couldn’t sleep there anymore, knowing nothing would wake her with hot gifts of meat, steal her drawings and armfuls of flowers.
When she walked back through the woods in the evening, she did so slowly. She still mistrusted the woods, but there was not so much of a risk in it anymore. She knew all that waited within, all the unimaginative creatures, the mystical nature of it fascinating but known. A mosquito flew in dizzy circles around her, and Jude swatted it away, uninterested in its secrets.
As she came to the mouth of the woods, she saw the lights of her cottage, warm and bright, safe, and inviting as a lighthouse. She walked across, and as Jude got nearer, she spotted a figure on the porch. They were sat in one of the chairs, head hanging limply from their neck and something bundled up in their lap. The head raised once Jude came up the steps and stood over it, black stone eyes full of expectation, eagerness.
“Took you long enough,” said Jude.
“It’s harder to come back than you think And I was worried you might not like me like this, all ugly.”
Jude sucked her teeth. “You’re not ugly.”
“I’m not?”
Nemoira looked up into Jude’s face, and Jude let herself be observed. She let Nemoira see her hair turned grey, the limp in her walk, the hideous gash on the right side of her face that stiffened her talk and made sight difficult.
Nemoira smiled. “We match.”
Jude gestured to the package on her lap. “What’s that?”
“Dinner,” she said. “I was hoping you’d invite me in.”
“It’s not people, is it? Not really my cup of tea anymore.”
“It’s not.” Nemoira unwrapped the package and revealed a pink slab of meat marbled with fat. “Deer. I remember you liking venison.”
Jude told her that she did, in fact, like venison, then she invited Nemoira inside. She cooked dinner with an audience, and then with help, Nemoira jumping in to dice the vegetables and sprinkle seasonings onto the meat. Jude let her finish cooking the deer while setting the table, delicate lacy table cloth, good china and cups, silverware spat up from the hutch, and a vase full of purple hyacinth. Nemoira came out from the kitchen a moment after Jude was done holding the plates of food aloft.
“Another beautiful table,” said Nemoira. She set down the plates, then ran her fingers along the hyacinth. “Did you pick these this afternoon?”
“I did.” Jude took her seat. She looked down Nemoira’s seat and said, “Come eat. Don’t let the meat get cold.”
She hadn’t forgotten the comfort of eating a meal with someone, nor had she let herself erase the memory of Nemoira enjoying her food, smiling into bites of deer and onion, chunks of potato, and spicy collard greens. Jude finished first and watched as Nemoira ate her food, still pleased that her cooking could please somebody.
Nemoira wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, still graceless, and asked for Jude to run her a bath. Jude agreed, and together they heated up pots of boiling water and brought them to the upstairs bath until the tub was full. She didn’t bother turning away as Nemoira stripped, something Nemoira was all too happy to tease her about. She sucked her teeth, rolled her good eye then helped her into the bath.
“Look at us old women,” said Nemoira in her bath. Jude drew the cloth over her skin, over the ugly scars on her abdomen and back, the long scratches down her arms. “What ever will we do about each other?”
“Live, I guess. A truce?”
“No, not a truce. You beat me, fair and square, but we can call it that, if there’s no better name for what we are now.”
“What we are now?” Jude repeated, brow raised, “Assuming I’ll take you in again. Last time I let a wretch into my house, she was a monster. Had to kill her before she killed me.”
“Sounds scary. I promise I’m nothing like that. No tricks, no secrets.”
Jude made a doubtful noise in her throat and splashed Nemoira with water. “You said no secrets last time, and I found out my auntie was in your stomach.”
“A fresh start then.” Nemoira sat up in the bath, meeting Jude’s eye. “No more lies, really no more secrets. I’ll be real with you if you’re real with me. No masks, no games.” She put out her hand for Jude to shake. “Deal?”
Jude considered the hand and the woman attached. She took it and shook. “Deal.”

§

“Will you change for me?”
It was later in the evening, both women settled into their nightclothes. Jude hadn’t seen the bear in years, had all but forgotten the fine details of its face. Nemoira laid stretched on the like a cat. She looked Jude over, then nodded. Jude sat up to watch, wondering if her memory had been kind to Nemoira, if she would look the same as she did then, glossy fur and snarling mouth, after the damage, Jude had done.
“Is it very different?” asked Jude.
“Not very. The body resets itself, though as you can see” —here she showed Jude the scars on her belly, on her arms— “some elements are changed. The bear’s the same though. She never changes.”
Jude brought her brows together, the movement stretching the taut muscles of her face. “Does Nemoira change?”
She smiled, teeth and gums and black eyes glinting in the light of the parlor’s lamps. “Constantly.”
For Jude, Nemoira transformed. She stretched her fingers and toes wide apart, arms and legs and neck straining to their fullest extension, joints popping in and out of place. Her bones snapped noisily as they changed shaped beneath her flesh, the very musculature of her body breaking down and building itself anew. She fell to the floor, thrashing wildly, head thumping against the wood as she cried out in a voice that was a blend of bear and human. She roared, screamed. Her hair grew and grew until it covered her entire body until she was one mass of fur, black and coarse, and reeking of rot. She opened her terrible mouth, no longer the delicate flower, and revealed to Jude two rows of egg-yolk yellow teeth, incisors and molars and golden, curved canines.
Thrumming like a string pulled tautly, Jude stuck out her hand and asked, “May I?”
The bear blinked her eyes slowly before pushing her large body between the coffee table and the sofa, forcing both from their positions. Jude eased to her knees, shaking some, and ran her aged hands over the smooth planes of the bear’s body; the strong shoulders and hump, the ears and mouth, the nose and powerful hind legs. She pulled back the black lips to see the teeth glistening with spit. She looked deep into the black bead eyes and saw Nemoira in them, her tender voice, her humanity though she insisted she had none.
“Look at you,” Jude whispered. “Look at you, you’re gorgeous. Terrible, but gorgeous.”
The bear didn’t disagree. It only laid in Jude’s arms as she stroked it, hugged it. Jude tightened her hold.
All around them was light. All around them was warmth.

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