Chapter 1 #2
I turned around, one hand on the floral cotton of her dress, angling my eyes to peer into hers. There was so much torment in the shadows above her sunken cheeks, pain masking the truth. The truth of what, I didn’t know—still don’t—but I think she understood what was coming.
She realized our family was cursed.
My older brother Jed admitted it first—the family curse. Saying the words, over and over, like the call of a loon on a midsummer night.
I’m a curse, Mila. There’s something stuck inside me. Something I can’t just pull out. And I’m scared one day it’s gonna hurt somebody.
I’m a curse.
And I think, maybe I am too. Perhaps I can’t help people.
I can only do the opposite. Can only hurt them.
Especially the ones I love. Isn’t that why I’m coming home?
To make up for all the hurt I have caused?
To atone for running away when it all got too heavy, when I stared into the face of death and didn’t like my reflection?
My sister’s message beats like a tattoo in the back of my mind. I’m leaving for college at the end of July. Would be nice to see you before I leave. Unless you’re too busy…
Something cold and miserable spreads across my chest, and a laugh bubbles in the back of my throat like bile.
Right. Too busy. Too busy living a few towns over.
Too busy working a dead-end job at a gas station, just to scrape enough money together to pay rent to a man who smells like cheap cigarettes and cat piss.
Too busy pretending the past doesn’t exist.
So now, here I am, forcing myself home to make amends.
Or, at least, to try.
Not that this is home. Nowhere feels like home anymore.
My insides churn like tar in the hot sun, and I crank up the AC.
The cold blasts me in the face, waking me up.
The trees stretch taller the farther I drive down the old dirt road.
Outside grows chilly with air from the swamp.
I smell it—the muddy tang, the spicy-sweet of cedar and black earth.
When I roll my window down further, the breeze sweeps in and brushes yellow curls off my slick skin.
It’s hot, even for June. A sort of thick, chewy atmosphere settling around the bones and warning of coming rain. I swallow and the sides of my throat turn to glass.
Jed disappeared on a day like this.
The wet heat hung in the air, like cobwebs threatening to choke me, while I watched him walk deeper into the cedars and never come out.
He told me he was just going for a walk, but when he didn’t return for Grandma Ruby’s homemade ice cream and the chocolate birthday cake she promised, I knew he wasn’t coming back.
We searched the swamp for the next three days, my hands wrapped tightly around the wire handle of a Coleman lantern until my palms blistered. But there was no sign of him.
I caught our grandmother swirling her hands in the water on the last night, begging the bog to tell her where Jed was, but it gave nothing up, not even a voice.
And she screamed things at it. Things that made no sense.
When I asked her what she had been doing down at the bank, she lied, told me she needed peace and quiet to figure out her thoughts.
Lying must be an inherited trait in this family.
When I was little and my mom would bring us to church, people used to whisper, saying my grandmother was a witch.
Even the former Reverend Byron gossiped about her, bent over his pulpit like a frostbitten fern.
He wished she would come to church and save her soul.
And when I would tell Grandma Ruby this and wonder at why she didn’t just come with us, she would scoop my sun-kissed hair up into her calloused palms and whisper:
“The bog is my church, Mila-May, the water my god.”
And it was enough for her.
But it isn’t for me. The bog took Grandma Ruby three weeks after Jed went missing, and I’ve despised it ever since. Hated the way it can crawl into my brain and whisper things to me. The way it takes and takes and only gives death.
Sometimes, I block them out—the voices—if I catch them quick enough.
My therapist reminds me they aren’t real and can’t hurt me, but I think she says it more for her own benefit than for mine.
To help her feel like maybe, just maybe, the world can fit into the explainable, scientific bubble she wants it to.
But they’re real. I feel their pain.
A mailbox comes into view on the side of the road.
If not for the rust and lichen clinging to the metal, it might have once been white.
There is a single word scratched along it in peeling blue paint: Thomas.
I take a deep breath, hold it for a few seconds, just like my therapist taught me, and remind myself of all the things I can control.
Literally nothing.
Literally, absolutely fucking nothing.
I turn into the driveway, pine cones crunching beneath my tires. The family cabin winks through the branches: dark-stained logs, bubbled-glass windows, the screen door with butter-yellow curtains swinging in the breeze, an ancient grapevine spinning serpentine from the porch rafters.
I should feel happy to see the house. It’s where I grew up, where all my core memories took place. But it just sits there, staring at me with its dark-window eyes and whispers, You don’t belong here, Mila-May. You don’t belong anywhere.
Two bikes—one blue and one a rusted orange—lean against the uneven wooden stairs leading up to the door.
Agatha, my sister, must be home; her girlfriend, Camille, with her.
I let my nerves settle. Agatha will forgive me.
She is the only person who hasn’t totally written me off as a lost cause.
But the truth is, she might know about the voices, but I never told her about the body.
The memory of that voice whispers in my ear.
He had no eyes.
I park my truck and try to wash away the image of the corpse I pulled from the bog.
It wasn’t just his eyes that were missing—it was his whole goddamn chest. I picture the open gash, the way the blood had coagulated black around its ripped flesh, turning to tar in the water.
My palms dewy with sweat, and I wipe them on the worn denim of my shorts.
Roe trembled beside me in that moment, begging me to notify the cops, to tell anyone. Please, we have to tell someone. But I refused. I was scared of whatever my touch had done to reanimate the thing. Scared of who might have put that body in the bog and what the cops would do if they found them.
Terrified my brother was the one with blood on his hands. Worried his curse had made him a killer.
I swallow my guilt, the taste of it metallic on my tongue. Grandma Ruby used to say we were given the gift to help people, to bestow upon them peace and allow them to move on. That the gift wasn’t meant for us. But then she died, and so I told myself her words were just lies too.
My fingernails sink into the worn fabric of the bench seat while I look at the cabin through blurry eyes. My coworker at the gas station, Denise, told me it was stupid coming here. That I didn’t owe anyone shit. Her voice rings in my ears.
You don’t have to go, honey. You know that, right? You have nothing to prove.
But she’s wrong. I have everything to prove. I have to show my mind the lies I tell myself are true. That… The thought crumbles in my throat. Jed is alive, and he’s not a murderer. He is not the one putting bodies in the bog, only for me to find and put them right back.
I lean my head on the steering wheel, staring at my palms. My vision swims and bleeds with salt water.
Everything is a lie here in the bog. We bury our secrets in the mud and the water, keeping them submerged until we can go down to join the rest of the dead things.
People used to call my grandmother a witch. But me?
Well, they just call me a liar.