Thin Places

by Kay Chronister

  We were as dead silent married as we’d been courting. He left for the fields before sunup. I stayed inside the white house, shucked more beans and salted more pork than we could hope to eat, and when I had done with that, scrubbed everything twice. If he still wasn’t home by then, I’d go out to the porch, and smoke a cigarette and shut my eyes and listen to the longspurs sing so I could hear something besides quiet swelling in my head to noise.

  After he came home, we’d sit on the stoop and watch the sky arrange and rearrange all its layers of smoke-colored fleece while birds fussed in the dying trees. In November, when the dark came before dinner did, the last longspur flew away, and something collapsed inside me.

  “Wish they wouldn’t go,” I said, and that was the closest I’d gotten to wanting or not wanting anything since the ring went on my finger. “Too quiet up here.”

  “They don’t miss you,” he said. “Waste of time, missing them.”

  I nodded.

  “You’d feel better with a baby,” he said.

  We’d been trying for months already by then. I chewed raspberry leaves and slept underneath a quilt I’d sewn out of old clothes because that’s what Grammy used to say a woman should do, but nothing worked for me.

  “I know,” I said.

  He laced his fingers across my stomach so his arms contained me. I used to think in the middle of nowhere you couldn’t help but spread yourself out, but now I knew that really walls didn’t have to be wood or stone, they could be arms, they could be anything that held the world out and your body in.

  ◊

  They stared when we went to town, and I felt sick thinking what we looked like to them. Wasted witchery in my blood and muddy water in his. We both needed to account for something. He didn’t see their eyes or didn’t care. At the post office, he shuffled a stack of letters into my lap, then lifted a dappled coon hound into the truck bed and told me its name was Baby.

  I couldn’t figure out if the dog was a cruelty or a kindness, so I said thank you and kept my stinging eyes on the back of his envelopes. I didn’t recognize the names or cities on the return addresses. No one here was accustomed to getting much mail from outside town.

  He’d gotten the feed store to order a dress for me from a catalog, gliding silk colored like blood. I was a fountain inside it. I slipped it down over my underwear in the supply room and stepped out to show him. He smiled without showing his teeth, said, “You have to wear it for me,” and I heard myself say, “Of course.” When I pulled the dress back over my head, I found a broken old Confederate coin sewn into the neckline, stitched so tight I couldn’t yank it loose.

  “You have to wear it for me,” he said again, as we drove home through the nodding foothills darkness. “Make it your every day.”

  “I can’t wash it,” I said.

  “I don’t mind,” he said.

  When we came home, the white house felt so small inside the hills that I hated to close myself up inside. We’d been gone so many hours; I had the notion some other woman took up living there while I was away. I was trespassing on her property, resting my hand on her husband’s knee. She was what I was inside the walls, and if I opened the door she would be there waiting to become me. She pulled aside the curtain in the front window and I saw her: big scared eyes, thin hair yanked back from her forehead, everyday calico drab and heavy.

  I knew already that he couldn’t see the woman. Mr. Rishner had only one wife.

  “I don’t wanna go in.”

  He nodded his head. I had a feeling like he didn’t either. He put the key in the lock and turned it fast, getting the worst over with. Then he nudged the door open with the side of his boot. The house shuddered and creaked as the wind passed through. “Sometimes the crows break in,” he said. “We’ll send Baby.”

  “No,” I said. “Let him stay.” I had pictures in my head that I didn’t like of what might happen to the hound if he went inside alone.

  He shrugged. “Dog’s gotta earn his feed sometime.”

  “He doesn’t,” I said.

  The three of us sat on the stoop for a while, Baby’s head resting on his foot.

  “I want to see your dress,” he said.

  “You wanna see it now?” With the door open, I didn’t say, when she could see? I couldn’t see her face in the window anymore. Inside the house was dead dark. We were wasting warmth, holding the door open in the middle of December, but neither of us was going to say so to the other. She was still there; how could we shut the door until she went?

  I dropped my coat first, then my shoes, then the rest into a pile in the snow. He held the dress up against me like he was measuring the size, then I bent my neck and he slipped it over my head. When the coin brushed my back, I shivered.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said, so we did.

  ◊

  For a couple years after Grammy died, I saw more of them: the wives who shouldn’t have stayed, but did. One was Miss Angie, who received me in Grammy’s will at least partwise because she was the only other granny witch in town. Unlike Grammy, she had a husband who she had to hide everything from, making like all her patients were friends come to quilt or bake. She said he wouldn’t approve of what she did, but she wouldn’t say why. For the years I lived under her roof, she did nothing but ask me to show her our family Bible.

  “I think there’s something your grammy wanted me to see,” Miss Angie would say, and I’d say maybe so, but I never let her see the Bible, because that book wasn’t supposed to leave our household even if that household was only made up of me.

  Still she held me back from school, sat me down at her table while she mended sickness like I was a special charm that helped the healing. I watched what she did, when the TV wasn’t on something good. Folks came for snakebites and nightmares and something called female troubles but most often they came to get a love potion. Miss Angie sold glass vials with ash and ox-blood inside and no one ever came back complaining, but when we were alone she told me that no bottle of dirt ever made anyone fall in love.

  “Do you know how to really do it?” I said once, doubtless thinking on my prospects at some junior high school dance.

  “I wouldn’t do it if I could,” she said, looking insulted. “I wouldn’t wish that curse on anybody, and I hope you wouldn’t neither.”

  I was fourteen and had no notion of why anybody wouldn’t want to fall in love, except I knew Mrs. Miellon was getting so thin and so pale she looked like death with a smile on, and Annabelle Leahy never could come and cheer at football games anymore, and everyone whispered about Mrs. Donahue having some sort of nervous breakdown at the feed store, screaming that she wanted to go home and she did not mean to Mr. Donahue’s house.

  “Your grammy,” Miss Angie said, “she knew a way to undo it.”

  I had stubborn, unreasonable feelings about that Bible, and all Miss Angie’s asking only made those feelings stronger. I didn’t care what she was looking for and I didn’t care what Grammy’s witchery could have done for her, because thinking on the things Grammy had done just reminded me of all I couldn’t do. “Sorry,” I’d say, sure and even, like I didn’t know the word was crushing her slowly. “I don’t think so.”

  Around the time I turned fifteen, Miss Angie lost patience with me and said I shouldn’t come home anymore if I wasn’t going to help her out. I remember she was bruise-faced that day, and I felt sorry and I felt furious but mostly I felt a confused sort of uncomfortable, like I didn’t want to see so much of her. I got to feeling glad that Grammy had hid me from so much, and missing the days when anyone thought about what I should or shouldn’t see.

  ◊

  The baby sat inside of me for three months, and then died. I didn’t tell Mr. Rishner, but I told the other woman sometimes, catching her eye in the ice-covered pond or the dirty window to whisper what I couldn’t say at the dinner table. She had such mean eyes, and she never felt sorry for me, but she soaked up my words without argument. When he shut the front door and went o
ff with Baby at his heels, she stayed to scrape clean the breakfast plates and mop the floor, her movements tracing mine until we didn’t know the ends of each other.

  When we got dressed, she fought me tooth and limb to wear the dingy calico. Sometimes I won and we wore the red silk; sometimes I didn’t. Fact is, there wasn’t room for both of us to get what we wanted. There was hardly room for one. The white house was shrinking, squeezing tight until I was pulp and dead broken seeds. I felt my head bumping the ceiling sometimes, my feet pushing through the floorboards into the foundation. The hallway was a crawlspace; the bedroom was a snake hole. Deep in the folds of my quilt, I wished to hibernate the winter through. I scarcely slept at all.

  There was a dream that came whenever my eyes shut too long: her dream, not mine, but I dreamt it still because we shared everything. The bedroom walls were tree trunks, the sheets were wet black earth, my body was a thorn bush. Mr. Rishner would roll across the bed so he was far from me and then a cold damp arm would curl round my neck. If I turned my head I found the window open, a tree reaching inside with its trunk hunched over to wrap needle-covered branches around my shoulders, my waist, my thighs. Shame woke me quicker than fear and kept me awake, still and too hot beneath the covers, until she ran from me laughing and I dropped back into the dream again.

  I covered the window with curtains, then a couple of two-by-fours when the curtains started showing up in the dream. Mr. Rishner came home with the dog, traced the boards with his fingertips admiringly, said, “Nothing gets in or out here, does it?” I thought I believed him.

  I found a sprig of alder under my pillow one night and snuck out after he fell asleep to bury it beneath the porch. The night after, I found a whole branch dropping needles in the bedsheets. I said to myself: you can let your head get crowded and you can let your house cramp up, but you can’t lose control of your marriage bed. So I dug Grammy’s carpetbag out of the closet and set the family Bible on the table. Dust flumed out, cigarette smoke, years-old kitchen smells. Grammy wrote the rules of her world in tiny tight-packed cursive across the title pages of the Biblical books. Exodus said that if you break a coin and sew one half into your beloved’s clothes, they will have to love you back. Ezekiel said to kill a witch, carve a heart in a tree and hammer a nail in a little further each day for a week.

  ◊

  She fought me when I put on my boots and opened the front door. We both knew the black alder leaning sideways into the bedroom window. For six days I carved her heart in the bark and hammered my nail inside, then went to the outhouse and emptied my guts. The sicker I got, the less I saw of her and the happier Mr. Rishner was with me. He came home at night whistling, kissed my cheek when I met him at the door. He’d open a Farmer’s Almanac on the table and tell me how the stars aligned, and I’d simmer a pot of something I couldn’t keep down.

  He said one night, “You expecting again?”

  And I said, “I think so,” because I was, though not a child.

  After dinner we shared a cigarette and a bottle of gin and the sharp March air, and I thought I felt her go; in my head I was already hammering my nail into the center of her heart, but she came back when I took off my silk and put on my cotton nightdress. In her dreams, the tree came through the window to pull me out of the bed and out of the house and out of the hills. And I was scared, but I was light, I didn’t ever stop. She ran me down the state highway on my bare feet until Hell opened up and swallowed the white-washed house inside it. I knew then you’re never a witch until the day you got to be one, and when I came to, I went to the closet to cut the broken coin out of my dress.

  The love spell inside the dress fought me. I was weak; I had six days of hammering in my heart. But I fought too and at last the threads gave and the coin hit the floor. I lifted my nightgown over my head and put on the silk. In a fountain of blood I cooked breakfast, in a fountain of blood I went out to cut down the alder tree. When the tree came down, I took the back of a hammer and forced that nail out until my death was a crooked piece of iron with bark stuck in its end. Then I buried the nail deep in the dirt and filled the hole back in.

  Inside, Mr. Rishner scraped the dregs of his eggs from his plate, looked me over and said, “You think you’re running a fever?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I need you to come out and say something over the fields,” he told me. “Gotta earn your feed sometime.”

  We went, his fingers drumming a rhythm on the truck’s steering wheel. I sat with the family Bible in my lap and sang one of Grammy’s old songs. Mr. Rishner fussed with the fence line so long, he never saw me climb up into the driver’s seat and get the engine running, the tail of my silk dripping blood on the gas pedal beneath me. I took the truck down into the foothills, then stranded it in a pile of thorns and walked. He could look; he’d never find me.

  I figured the others might come with me. We’d make a V across the hill country as we flew north. Mrs. Miellon with her burns fading into scars, watching the town get smaller and smaller from the smudged window of a Greyhound. Annabelle Leahy going out at night, cutting her hair short. Mrs. Donahue sitting in a fancy restaurant booth, telling some eager young man how she opened up the chicken coop and ran her husband’s livelihood into a wood full of bobcats and lions. My Miss Angie reading tea leaves in a truck stop town under a false name.

  You have to keep a leash on that kind of hopefulness. No one goes halfway bewitched. When I left town, only Miss Angie followed me out. She pulled money from a sock to pay our cab fare, then fifty miles down the road said I was a long way from even deserving Grammy’s name and left me on the side of the road somewhere in hill country.

  In the hills I got comfortable, tilled my own fields of roots and grasses, slept on a bed of leaves with alder branches hanging over my head. At midwinter, I bore a child so dark and damp and forested, she might not have had a drop of her daddy’s blood inside her. I hear that’s how witches are born; I surely hope so. My child isn’t going to be the marrying kind.

  Roiling and Without Form

  The couple washes up in the Flamingo’s dimly-lit lobby way past sundown, heedless of the No Vacancy sign illuminated by a row of sputtering candles. Molly’s in the middle of laying down cards for solitaire when they come in.

  “Help you?” she says halfheartedly when the door bangs shut behind them. She catches a whiff of something sharp and chemical, unfamiliar, and looks up for the first time at her prospective guests. Her breath catches, but she manages to keep her mouth shut.

  “We’d like a room,” the woman says airily, patting her piled-up cylinder of pinkish-gold hair. “Scott, your wallet?”

  The man makes an agreeable sort of grunting sound and roots in his pockets, then lays a wad of wrinkled paper on the counter. Molly makes herself stop looking at their faces—so strange, like a mirror of her own, she’s never seen anyone so like herself—and start looking at their weird currency.

  “I don’t know,” she says haltingly, “if we can accept this.”

  “Aren’t you the manager, lovie?” says the woman.

  “Yes,” Molly says, “but. Just a moment.”

  She has the key to Mother’s room on a string around her neck so it doesn’t get lost. The master that unlocks the rest doesn’t work on that door. 1B locks from the outside, as all the rooms at the Flamingo do. If Molly locked the door and then lost the key, Mother could be stuck there forever, flies crawling across her skin and the melancholy soft glow of TV static shadowing her face. Molly twists the key between her thumb and index finger while she stands on the threadbare little doormat in front of Mother’s room. Then she knocks, to be polite, and twists the key in the lock. Mother sits resplendent in her recliner, a cooler parked on the floor to her left, a commercial for pantyhose flickering on the screen in front of her. The electricity doesn’t still work in the Flamingo besides in Mother’s room, and then only for the TV.

  “We have customers wanting to pay in dollar cash,” Molly tells her.


  “Cash, Molly, or dollars,” Mother says wearily. “You don’t say both words. Just one.” Her face is obscure and pale to blueness in the dark room, but she insists: no candles, not even a citronella one to discourage the mosquitoes that filter freely through the windows all hours of the day, bobbing dizzily into the bathroom and examining the toilet but somehow never lingering long enough to sip Mother’s blood.

  Molly smacks an insect from her wrist, suspecting she’s already been bitten. “Dollars, then,” she says. “Do I let ‘em?”

  “It’s good for nothing,” says Mother. “Not even fit for barter. Tell ‘em go, unless they look dangerous.”

  “They don’t,” Molly says quickly.

  “Edible?”

  “No,” Molly says, still quicker. “They’re like everyone who comes through here. Don’t know where they got that money.”

  She tries to get out the door, but Mother says first: “Girl! What do I tell you every day?”

  Molly has one foot in the moonlight and one foot on the coarse stinking carpet of 1B, so she says the words so quickly, so insincerely that she almost doesn’t believe them: “No one and nothing out there.”

  “Tattoo it on your goddamn skin!” Mother says, her voice splitting with laughter.

  Molly locks the door and tucks the key on its string beneath her shirt. She’s got a stack of mildewy paperback romance novels that all say a woman’s supposed to be swept off her feet by something called a billionaire tycoon before she’s twenty-four, but she’s forty-six now and no one’s ever appeared through the mangroves besides the kind of man who pays for his room in pool chemicals or canned cherry compote, stays a night, then vanishes back into the trees, a faint sulfurous odor lingering behind him. The couple at the counter isn’t like anything that Molly knows or has heard of, besides sort of, almost, herself.