Beside a jagged gravel driveway, a smudge in the shape of a girl floats over tangled ferns. She is translucent in the milky dawn, as if the sun is unsure she is really there. She watches a skinny doe pick acorns under a gap in the canopy where light foams into moss. These are the final acorns the black oak will give. Now, the tree knots and curls into the old house, its roots stretching sideways across the bottlebrush. A warbler feeds her hatchlings nestled in the crook between gnarl and shingle. A squirrel carries her kit through the hole in the roof, knocking loose a scrap of rotting wood that skitters and falls.
The not-girl does not know how she found her way here, only that she has been wandering a long while. Of all the places she has returned to, this is the one that catches in her throat.
She feels a tickle and looks down: the doe’s head has passed right through her, ducking to nibble a patch of bluestem. The deer stops grazing for a moment to shake a fly from her eyelashes, and the ghost-girl shivers. She reaches her barely-there fingers to stroke the deer’s back, and the creature bristles.
Sorry, the girl-thing tries to say, but there is no sound. The doe cocks her head stiffly toward the ghost hand, but her eyes do not focus. She is still for a beat before running off toward the highway. The girl-no-longer watches her disappear into a hickory thicket, and then she glides on.
All at once, the past comes crashing back—her scuffed red Keds, the wasp nests, and those unlucky, home-canned peaches.
She follows a trail of gently glowing blue over the gravel: a spectral procession of house centipedes. Many have bent or missing legs; others are half-smushed, marked by a bootprint or palm heel. The final centipede is cleaved neatly in two, its back legs lagging half an inch behind its front. All at once, the past comes crashing back—her scuffed red Keds, the wasp nests, and those unlucky home-canned peaches.
—
Lydie squeezes her eyes shut to pretend she is anywhere else.
“C’mon, Lyd,” Mom says.
“If I don’t open my eyes, it’s not real.”
Mom huffs a laugh and goes to help Dad unload the car. Lydie opens her eyes only when she hears her parents disappear up the creaky front steps. She inhales deeply and opens the door of the Chevy Kingswood.
The house is an ugly, lopsided thing tucked between the hickories and oaks. Its browns and greens blend right in, as if it grew up from the earth all on its own.
She grabs the box of 8-tracks that she held in her lap for the entire car ride, wanting to protect them from the twisted valley roads. Then, she follows after her parents, until—
She trips on a bent nail and skins her knees and palms on splintered wood. The box of tapes crashes into the banister, and Electric Ladyland goes flying. She blinks back the stinging in her eyes and wobbles to her feet.
From the doorway, Mom frowns at the welling red on her knees. “C’mon, kid, let’s get you cleaned up.”
The air inside clings to her skin. A faint smell of mildew suffuses the cramped foyer. Her eyes snag on the cobwebs in the corner before Mom tugs her into the bathroom.
A sickly tungsten light flickers on over beige tile. Lydie grabs the edges of the blue sink and then blanches. There is something horrible crawling from the sink drain. It has too many joints—a mess of legs contorted at foul angles. It moves all wrong. Its pincers twitch, and she jumps, yanking the edges of Mom’s ringer tee.
“It wants to eat me,” Lydie says, certain.
“Oh, it would take him years to eat you with a mouth so little.”
She fits a knuckle in her mouth to quell the rising bile. “Make him go away.”
“That wouldn’t be very nice, would it? He lived here first, you know.” But Lydie is already moving. She turns the knob and watches as silty water swallows the monster back down.
This is home now, kid.
The next morning, she wakes to Barry Manilow and the smell of gasoline. In the kitchen, Mom spreads strawberry jam and cream cheese on toast, and Dad holds a jar of gas over a small paper nest on the ceiling. Lydie watches as wasps fall away from their home, curling into each other, still.
“I wish you wouldn’t do it that way,” Mom sighs.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you wanted stinging insects to keep you company in your new kitchen.”
Mom clucks her tongue and turns up the radio. Dad tosses the jar’s contents out the open window, and Mom mutters something under her breath.
“Lydie, get some plates, please,” she says, gesturing to the corner cabinets.
Lydie opens one and startles—the black corners of the cabinet twitch and shiver. The shadows are made of thin legs, a cluster of daddy long-legs crawling over one another. Her stomach churns as she slams the cupboard door.
“The next one over, dear.”
She flinches instinctively as she opens it, but this one only contains a stack of pink dishes, which she hands to Mom. “We have to move back home.”
Mom passes her a plate of toast. “This is home now, kid.”
Lydie closes her eyes for the first bite of jam and cheese, and, for a moment, she imagines herself back in the old house. She can smell the poppies from the window planters and hear the neighborhood dogs barking at the lawn mowers. She remembers Patches, the old calico who would slip between the bars of the balcony to soak up the morning sun.
The daydream recedes as Dad tousles her hair. “Eat quick, kid. You’re gonna help me weed the garden.”
“I want to hang my posters now,” she complains.
“You can do that tonight. Sun’s a-wastin’.” Lydie groans.
“The old owners left us syrup peaches,” Mom says. “Isn’t that nice?”
“I don’t want peaches. I want to go back to Winston.”
“You’ll feel at home here before you know it. I promise.”
In the garden, Dad shows her how to pull the stems so that the roots slide free in one motion. She wriggles dandelions and chickweed from the topsoil, startling worms and roly-polies. She sees pearls of sweat roll off Dad’s forehead and smacks mosquitoes from her ankles, leaving smears of red behind. Slowly, they cull the thatch to a stumpy, colorless order. In the aftermath, she watches ants struggle to return to their scuffed hills.
—
Blinking, the not-girl sees the memory of the old garden transposed over the undergrowth that unfurls beside the house now. The two blur and tangle into one, and the ghosts of native grasses rise above the rest. Translucent sumac muddles into new buckeye saplings, and spectral clover weaves through the gaps. A thicket of milkweed mingles with its ancestors, ghostly blue kissing fresh pink. Phantom mushrooms sprout from the loam, releasing bone-bright spores that fizz into the sky. She kneels to touch one of the puffballs, and the spores foam around her finger, a twinkling froth. She feels, for the first time in a while, something like warmth.
Finally ready, the girl-thing crosses the threshold home. The humid air welcomes her. She is happy to know the house has not been alone in her absence—the foyer is thick with spiderwebs, and the walls buzz and purr. She runs a hand across lumpy drywall, and it splits open, spilling a storm of wasps, living and dead. They shiver as they fly through her, sensing the edges of her form. The swarm falters for a moment and then nuzzles into her.
She finds the fear she used to feel is a distant, foreign thing.
I’m glad you’re still here, she wants to say. She hopes they understand as they flutter into her ghost hair and slip through her fingers. She marvels at their tiny wings, the delicate antenna, the soft black of their eyes. They phase into her until she is a buzzing cloud of blue and yellow.
The wasp-girl drifts forward. The kitchen floor is sunken-through and blanketed in shifting masses of harvestmen, centipedes, and cockroaches. They writhe and pulse as one, a heartbeat. The ghost-bugs shimmer against the black, floating through each other. She finds that the fear she used to feel is a distant, foreign thing.
That is, until she sees a swollen can of peaches lodged in a broken floorboard by the pantry. An old dread echoes through her empty form, and the wasps undulate with her. She stares at the can for a while, before reaching down to touch it. On contact, it erupts into glowing blue murk, a fog of undead bacteria.
For a moment, the air flashes thick-white, fuzzed by billions of bacterial ghosts. The bacteria cloud right through her, and, for a moment, nothing else exists.
Then, her mind slips back in time.
—
The comb scrapes against her scalp. “Can’t you do it any softer?”
“We won’t get the nits out by going soft,” Mom says. She kneels over Lydie, who sits on a tarp in the living room.
“You know, I used to call you my little nit.”
“That is not cute,” Lydie insists.
Mom laughs, and Lydie smiles despite herself. “You came out all tangled.”
“You’ve told this story a billion times.”
“You were breech and all knotted in the umbilical cord. Your father wanted to go to the hospital, but the midwife said she could turn you. You were so stubborn. It was endless. But when I first heard you cry, it was worth—”
The comb falls to the ground.
“Mom?” Lydie turns around. Mom’s arm hangs, limp, and the left side of her face sags. She wilts to the floor. Lydie yells for Dad, and the next few minutes are a blur of tears and limbs and car doors. Lydie clutches her mom for the entire 40-minute ride to the hospital, trying to swallow back a tide of dread.
It's the house. The house made her sick, full of bugs and weeds and fever.
“It’s botulism,” a doctor says. Lydie watches spittle trail down her mom’s chin. “Foodborne.”
“The peaches,” Lydie mumbles. But she thinks to herself, It’s the house. The house made her sick, full of bugs and weeds and fever.
Mom’s hand is slimy with sweat, but Lydie holds on anyway. “You’re going to be okay,” she whispers. “You have to be okay because—” her voice breaks into a watery mess. “Because you can’t leave me, okay? I can’t live here without you.”
She watches for any sign that Mom understands her, but there is nothing in her mother’s eyes except the sterile white walls, reflected and warped.
The next night, Dad leaves Lydie at the house while he stays with Mom in the hospital. “You’re a brave kid,” he tells her—but as the house’s swollen joints creak and rattle, she doesn’t feel very brave. She feels infested. She needs to escape the crawling on her skin.
She takes rubber gloves and a bottle of isopropyl from the bathroom cabinet. She daubs the alcohol onto her skin and then begins swabbing her room. The fumes fuzz into her skull, clouding her thoughts as she scrubs to the rhythm of her rasping breaths. The fear of infection is a hard pit lodged in her stomach.
There is a soft whump under the bed. Below the wooden frame, a baby rat curls, barely more than a fetus. Lydie’s eyes swim into focus as she watches him quiver with the effort of his wheezing. His lungs, she thinks, must be no bigger than her thumbnail. A mother drops from the nest to nose her pup. Her eyes are twitchy and pink-rimmed as she tries to lift him back to the bed, but his breathing is already slowing. He falls limp in her mouth.
Something in Lydie cracks open. Her face contorts in the shape of a sob that does not come. There is only one stifled whimper, and then she crumples inward, knocking over the bottle of isopropyl, which soaks into her jeans and the hardwood beneath.
—
Lurching back to herself, the not-girl feels a resonance with the bacterial storm around her. Her ghost-skin hums in rhythm with the film that coats the kitchen walls—a frothing rot. She lays a hand on the wallpaper and feels the thrum of life and death. I know you weren’t trying to hurt us, she thinks. You were just living and breeding. The rot invites her in, purring.
The girl-no-longer becomes another infestation, another nest, insects and bacteria coursing through her.
The girl-thing glides into the wall. In the gaps between wood beams, she sees twisted layers of paper nests, waves of gray and brown curled into homes. Below, a ghost-pale rat plays with her litter. The runt crawls on her back, and she flips to catch him in a playful cuddle.
The girl-no-longer becomes another infestation, another nest, insects and bacteria coursing through her. She feels the house’s aches, how it longs to crumble back to the earth. She sighs as she meshes with the sagging wood frame. Finally, after all these years, she is home.
