Chapter Eight
The pictures stayed on my phone all week.
I looked at them in bed at night, the floor in the harsh white of the flash, the burned line dark out of the pale wood, the knot at the center I still could not follow.
The crew came and went around the kitchen, and I rolled the drop cloth out over the circle and stayed off that part of the floor and said nothing.
On Wednesday night I sat at the table with my laptop and started typing.
Burned circle in floorboards. Symbols circle protection.
Binding circle home folk magic. The results came up in a familiar mess — Reddit threads, occult shop blogs, a few PDFs of old folklore studies, the same handful of woodcuts and grainy photographs cycling through.
I scrolled and read for an hour. The shapes the people wrote about were not quite my shape, but the family was close.
Circles burned or chalked into thresholds, into hearths, into the floors of root cellars and barns.
Containment. Keeping out. Keeping in. The word that came up most was old enough to feel small in my mouth when I read it. Binding.
I closed the laptop.
The kitchen was warm at my back. The smell of him was on the air, sugared and close, the way it had been for days now — patient, waiting, while I went around the burn and would not look at it.
My hands stayed flat on the table, and the house pressed against me, gentle, attentive, the way a person waits for an answer they already know.
Some country grandmother had drawn a ring around her hearth.
Some old wife had been afraid of something she could not name.
That was the long and short of it. The house I had bought, the house that came to me in the dark, did not feel like a thing that needed keeping in.
It felt like the first warm thing in years.
When the crew left Friday night, I rolled the drop cloth back.
The circle stared up at me, pale wood, black line, the strokes around the ring even and patient.
I knelt with the pry bar. The first plank lifted with a soft splintering sound, and the cold did not come.
The smell stayed. The house held still around me, watching.
The boards came up one by one. Each pry, a give, a crack, the burned wood splitting along the grain and coming loose in long pale lengths. I stacked them by the back door without looking at the knot too long, and the room stayed warm the whole time.
I sat on the subfloor when it was done. The hole was a ragged dark square in the middle of the kitchen, the burned line gone in pieces in the pile by the door, the knot broken apart between boards. My knees were screaming again. The scent had gone heavy and full.
“My husband left me three years ago,” I said.
The house seemed to press in closer. Attentive.
“He met somebody at work. He said he had been unhappy for a long time and I had not noticed, and that was probably true. I went on antidepressants for the first time in my life. I slept fourteen hours a day for a while. My sister came and stayed for a week and washed my hair in the sink because I would not get in the shower. Then I got better. Mostly. I came here.”
The warmth wrapped close.
“I haven’t told anyone any of that in a long time.”
The air grew thick and sweet, pressing in around me until I could almost feel the embrace. I glanced at the ruined floor and the stack of wood by the door and sighed. “Don’t worry. You’ll be beautiful when I’m done.”