The Squatter in the Broken Home

“Is this really goodbye? After everything, you’re just gonna leave?” Tim Lincoln stands between Gwen and the camp’s exit. Gwen has her things packed. Her long brown hair tied back. She answers Lincoln by adjusting her shoulder bag and diverting her green eyes from his brown. “Even after all the towns we’ve saved from specters, all the haunting spirits in churches we’ve caught, all the souls we’ve saved from wander this hell, you’re just gonna leave me behind?” Lincoln is responding to her silence, trying to get Gwen to look up at him from her slender, pale frame.

Gwen does not want to leave. She would be fine spending the night like any other night, lying sleepless watching the night turn to dawn. But not tonight. She knows she needs to catch her own ghost. To face it.

“I can’t do this by myself. Not without your magic. Not without your book of spells. Are you really this selfish?” Lincoln jabs.

Then, with a twisted gaze, she meets his. “Yes, I am.”

Lincoln, taken aback, relaxes his shoulders.

“We’ve been helping others get rid of their ghosts. We’ve shown them that ghosts ain’t here because they want to be, but because the living hold them here. I see that now.” Gwen pulls out a pair of glasses from her skirt pocket. “I see that they’re trapped here because of us.”

Lincoln steps forward and puts his hand in hers, covering the glasses. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’ve learned what I needed on my travels. I’ve learned how to use the magic for the really dug-in ghosts. It’s time I let my ghost go.” Gwen looks up at his stubbled face. She watches his brown eyes turn from confusion to acceptance. She continues, “It’s time I go home.” She catches herself putting her hand behind his neck to kiss him. Before she does, she pushes him away and brushes her ponytail off her shoulder. “Goodbye, Lincoln.” She turns to leave.

“Wait.” Now, he catches himself trying to kiss her, but he knows better. It’s not what she needs right now, he realizes. “Here.” Lincoln needs to give her something. Anything, he thinks. “Take my lucky handkerchief…from the ghost of Sherman’s hill.”

Gwen lets a smile escape. She holds his white handkerchief, stained red from his blood when the barn exploded from her necromancy spell. “I am sorry about that,” she says, “And sorry about leaving now.”

Lincoln touches her face, “Just come back. I’ll be hanging around.” He pulls away from her and rubs the back of his neck.

Standing at the edge of the campfire light, her grin caught in the flickering amber. She looks at the handkerchief. Then stuffs it into her skirt pocket as she heads into the swamp.

She walks all night. Most people would not feel comfortable wandering the Dismal swamp and Blackland terrain at night, but Gwen grew up here. Her and Lincoln trekked all over the Southeast, from the brittle open spaces of the deserts to the blue, misty forest of the mountains. She preferred the sticky swamps of her home near New Salem. People minded their business there. Having to deal with alligators eating goats and black bears fighting the dogs, neighbors were not bothering with a witch next door.

Lincoln felt comfortable with the rolling foothills and the long corn rows. He liked the chatty town folk. He was good with people, which she both loved and envied. Gwen didn’t like their raised eyebrows. Their quick glances. They only tolerated her because they needed her services. Lincoln could find the work, but Gwen could do the work.

As she reaches the edge of the swamp, she lights a lantern of white sage and opossum oil and casts a protection spell. Farmers and prospectors have drained most of the swamp. Diverting the water with canals so they can strip the fertile land for cow-fattening corn. The new farmers probably won’t like a witch strolling through their corn fields. The smoke from her lantern produces thick, wide fog around her, with a gap in front of her to see. She walks this way through young corn fields, around barbed wire fences, and straight through sleepy little New Salem. Her destination is a bit outside of town.

Thin clouds block the rising sun, throwing smears of red across the sky. She gets to what used to be a swamp yet is now more farmland. There is a long dirt path with corn fields on the right and a wide canal on the left. At the end of a long dirt path, she sees the house. Leaving the lantern at the start of the path, she drudges on. The closer she gets, the more she pretends to need to watch the path pass under her feet or the cattails sway in the canal. Acknowledging the house would give it more power over her.

The house looks at her. The roof over the porch sagging like a frown. Boarded-up windows glare out against the long, black roof sloping towards her. White paint peeling like dead skin. Once she is at the bottom porch step and the upstairs windows can no longer see her, she looks up. Old vines have grown over the porch and creep up the door. Maybe the rogue plants are why the house feels alive, and not what lingers inside.

She tells herself, “It’s just a house.” She says it again even when something invisible pushes back against her first step onto the porch. She asserts herself by swinging her arm across her body. The gesture slashes the vines which wither away. The house creaked and popped at the display of magic.

Fearing nostalgia or that something else will take hold, she moves quickly from room to room, the two bedrooms, the kitchen, the hallway. She ignores her childhood toy chest, her height markers on the door frame, and her mother’s apron hanging in the kitchen.

She reaches the family room. A few love seats, a grandfather clock in the corner, an out of tune vertical piano as well. But despite her hurried pace, she stops at her father’s rocking chair. His rocking chair sits there by the fireplace. The chair is as still as it was since the day he left. Gwen moves her cold gaze to the side table. A layer of dust clouds the picture in the frame standing on the table. Her father was wearing the gray uniform of the confederacy and the glasses she still carried. Her hand unconsciously touches the pocket.

A fire lights in the fireplace.

She snaps to look. Not because of her, but the fire is out as soon as it started. Her face scowls. That settles it, she thought.

She starts her own fire in the fireplace. Sets a cast iron pot she found in the kitchen on the coals. Laying her spell book on the side table, she knocks her father’s picture to the floor. Another groan in the floorboards. Ignore that, she slides her index finger over the table of contents. Finds ‘Necromancy: Chapter 13.’ Flicks the wind and flips the pages to the spells she needs.

The pot is boiling over, and the fire hisses from the splashing mix of water, animal parts, and herbs. Steam creeps across the room. The glasses out of her pocket and in her hand, Gwen holds them out facing her, holding them towards the boiling potion and steam. A slight tremble in her hands. Eyes as wide as the glass frames. Sharp inhale. She lets go of the glasses.

They fall to the floor. The house is silent.

Her nose scrunches tight. She spits on the fire and douses it. Something else, she thinks.

A less conventional method, even for her, she drags the living room furniture out front. Sweat beads on her forehead, both from the roaring bonfire outside the house and from dragging that damn piano. Her childhood home furniture burning with intense heat. The last item from the house is the picture of her father in his uniform. She holds it, ready to burn it, but realizes it might be the last time she sees his face. She tears up. Feeling tears on her cheeks, she jolts herself, and punches the glass frame. Throws it into the fire. It grows a bit hotter.

Gwen stands before the bonfire. Feet shoulder width apart. Knees slightly bent. Eyes focused. Muttering the curse under her breath. She raises her arms slowly. The fire grows taller. She raises her arms over her head. The flames reaching higher. Then she feels a trickle down her arm.

“Shit!” she sliced her hand open on the glass frame. Blood leaked from the gash.

Before she could stop it, a sharp gust of wind blows. Once it chokes the fire out, it stops. Her spell broken.

“Shit!” She twists and looks for something on the ground that might stop her bleeding. She remembers Lincoln’s handkerchief. Yanks it out of her pocket. Wraps her hand in it to stop the bleeding. Her blood seeps through the stained fabric.

Shoulders sunk. She walks back inside. Her footsteps echo on the moldy walls and scratched floors. “Is that how it is gonna be,” she asks the house. “Then we’ll try the Sherman’s Hill method,” begins setting up candles and sprinkling ash from the fireplace.

Sitting on her feet. Hands on her knees. Centered in the ash pentagram, surrounded by lit black candles. Book of spells set just outside the circled star, and her father’s glasses on the floor behind the book. This had better work, she warns. Gwen silently mutters the curse six times. Then closes her eyes and repeats louder for the seventh time.

“Blood is thicker than the water

And the poor soldier’s daughter.

Broken home, you have a squatter,”

Gwen is screeching. The house begins cracking. The ceiling buckles. The candles spew grey smoke.

“Blood be damned, be rid of my father.”

She opens her eyes to see her father formed in the candle smoke. His glasses are no longer on the ground, but floating where the face should be. A billowing cloud of a man, floating outside of the pentagram.

The howling wind outside grows louder. Shingles pater on the roof as they fly loose.

“Come over, Dad. Come back,” Gwen reaches out. The smoke hovers, no response from behind the glasses. “Come on, Dad.” She has wanted to see him again ever since he left. Ever since he came back home in a casket to be immediately buried in the back yard. Her mother could not even afford a headstone.

Her arm outstretched, begging the cloud to cross the threshold. It backs away.

“I didn’t want you to go. You didn’t even have to go. And you fought for the south. We didn’t even have slaves. Why would you fight alongside them?” No answer.

“Why were you in such a hurry to leave? Even very young, I knew you always came back in the house to get your glasses. You never forgot them. So, when you were heading off to fight, I hid them. I thought if I hid them from you, you would never leave.”

No answer.

“And then you fucking leave. Didn’t even take a glance back. Blind as a bat, but you march on to war anyways.” Gwen heaves from the tears. “You couldn’t even chop wood without your glasses, how were you supposed to fight without them.”

No answer. The ceiling cracks. The tears turn hot and angry.

“I’ve carried this guilt long enough. You’re the one that left me and mom. You’re the one that fought on the wrong side. We were so lost. Mom had to sacrifice so much for me. You sacrificed yourself for nothing.”

The cloud floats lower to the ground. Is this an answer? she thinks.

“And I carried that guilt for so long, that maybe if I hadn’t stolen your glasses, you might’ve lived to come back home. That guilt was so strong I trapped you here.”

Debris and dust circle the scene, yet the candles sit like an anchor. The man of a cloud begins losing bits of ash and smoke. Huge cracks in the ceiling chase each other.

“I don’t want you back. We did fine without you. And I’m done letting this guilt haunt me. You’re done haunting this place. Do you hear me. You have nothing left. Nothing!”

The roof lifts off the house at Gwen’s words. She is standing now. Hands in fists at her side. She stands like the weight of the roof is on her shoulder, while the roof circles the house in a conjured tornado.

“Do you hear me? Say something! You have nothing left to haunt.”

The smoke of her father begins floating upward. The glasses looking down at her as they rise. Wisps of smoke in the wind above the glasses move like hair.

“I forgave you for leaving, but it’s time I forgive myself. It’s time we both moved on. I love you, Dad. But we are done here.”

She gets an answer. A column of cloud that must be an arm, takes the glasses from the no-face, and drops them. The lenses shatter when they hit the ground.

With great effort, Gwen raises her fist with the palm facing her. The handkerchief straining from the wind. She takes one more look up above. Studs and rafters and grey smoke funnel towards the sky. The clouded ghost getting thinner and thinner. Higher and higher. It’s time, she knows. Her fist opens to extend her fingers up. The handkerchief tears away. The ghost shoots up the center of the funnel like a comet. Shoots so high it escapes her view.

The tornado stops. The house pieces fall apart in a circle around the scene. Gwen falls to the ground and then to her knees.

She is calm. Quiet. She moves to sit cross legged, hunched over. The glasses frames bent before her.

Feeling nothing else but her within the frigged walls, she sighs.

A breeze blows toward her. She welcomes the comfort. Then a piece of fabric whips by her face. Knocking it away, Gwen sees it is Lincoln’s handkerchief. It continues with the wind. She turns and watches as it skips along the dirty floor. When it blows what used to be the front door, she follows it outside. The wind picks up and it blows towards the charred furniture pile. She does not hesitate to leave the porch to chase it. She follows it away from her broken home. When it starts down the long dirt path, she looks past it. To where her lantern still sat, and where Lincoln was waiting for her.