Wild owls hit my window at night. I have a floodlight on, outside, because someone has followed me home, and between the owls and the nightly invasions, I can’t sleep. A door, slamming shut in my dream, wakes me up because it’s real. I steady myself, breathe deeply, and will myself to take a baseball bat to the kitchen, but no one is there. The kitchen door swings in the breeze. The floor is full of broken jars, cereal boxes gutted, and flour and sauce seeping, staining, mixing. I clean up and try to go back to sleep. I’ve heard of squatters, but this one leaves.
#
Mom gave me a photo album she didn’t want anymore, full of pictures of dead relatives. I don’t see how any of them look like me. I guess she’s hoping I can add to it someday. I most likely won’t. There are a lot of pictures of an aunt. Whose aunt, I don’t know—maybe my dad’s. I met her once when I was two years old, so I don’t remember her, but her eyes follow me. They’re wide and hollow. People in my family talked about her in hushed tones. She couldn’t hold a job, broke everything she touched, tried to be a nurse, but things didn’t work out—people died. They say her spirit still haunts the local hospital at night.
#
It’s 3 a.m., and I hear the jars crashing in the kitchen. I can’t take it anymore. I have to see who it is, so I run to the kitchen, where ketchup bottles spill their insides and rice grains prickle my feet. I didn’t catch him. Didn’t catch him in the act like I’d hoped. My flashlight doesn’t illuminate anyone, so I flick on the kitchen lights. The walls are dripping red, but not with ketchup. It’s thinner, darker, seeping through the walls—fresh drops forming every second.
#
My family believes in signs. When someone crosses over, you’ll see a sign. My grandma is an owl, so I get it, Grandma, you’re with me a million times over, warning me about the intruder in the kitchen. I’m on it. I’ll eventually catch him in the act. But Mom said she’d never seen a sign when Aunt Maddy died—this aunt from the photo album—but someone remembers her name—and how she kept red-and white-striped peppermints in her purse. How she’d savor them, the red dye staining her fingers, her mouth.
#
Now, when I come home from work, the kitchen door is wide open, all my food strewn about. It’s happening during the day now, but I can’t catch him. The police won’t come because he doesn’t stay. What’s the good in catching a squatter who won’t stay? What’s the good in prosecuting someone, when there aren’t any prosecutors in town?
#
I’m staying near the kitchen tonight, my eyes wide open, the lights off, my flashlight in hand. I hear a swish, swish, swish. The kitchen doorknob jiggles, a rush of air sweeps through. I turn on my flashlight, and I see them: those eyes—the sign we’ve all been waiting for, but not quite as my family had expected—not a rainbow, not an owl—something more desperate: those eyes, floating, disembodied. But I know they’re hers.
So this time, I close the door, and I leave, rushing to the all-night grocer’s to buy a bag of red-and-white-striped peppermints. I come back to the scene unfolding in the kitchen. Maddy has fully materialized. She’s wearing her nurse’s uniform, a syringe aimed at my throat,
but I tear open the bag of mints, scattering them on the floor. She gathers them hungrily, tearing off the wrappers as she fades. Her red handprint swipes, sticky from the mints remain, and this time, I leave the stains be—long enough to take a photo and add it to the album.
Bio:
Cecilia Kennedy (she/her) taught Spanish and English composition and literature in Ohio for 20 years before moving to Washington state in 2016. She has two short-story collections: Twenty-Four-Hour Shift: Dark Tales from on and off the Clock (DarkWinter Press) and The Places We Haunt (Baxter House Editions).