​The Overlap of Things 

 

   I heard a man say, “It’s just one thing after another. I remember the way he said it. We were standing in line at Dollar General, talking about the weather and taxes, like life was a list the Lord crossed off item by item. At the time, I nodded and let it pass, but later, sitting on my porch with the frogs tuning up in the ditch, I realized it was not true.
   It is not one thing after another. It is things piled and tangled, old wrongs running under new ones, several happening at once like a choir that never quite finds harmony. I make my living writing about that discord. Around Madison County, I am the horror man, the one who drags whatever is hiding under ordinary days out into the light and nails it to the page.
   I was proud of that. Too proud. Pride likes a quiet house and a long stretch of time. Then it invites company.
   My house sits on a back road where the asphalt narrows, and the ditches widen. The driveway is red clay, crusher-run gravel, and ruts. The fence on either side has long been overtaken by invasive privet hedges and cedar trees. On hot evenings, the air smells of evergreen sap and dust baked thin. Inside, the box fan in my office window moves thick air around but does little to cool the humid air.
   I used to say that the land remembers more than we do. I said it at readings and over gas pumps, pleased with myself. People repeated it back as if I had said something wise, as if I knew the memories that lay under this soil.
   The clerk at the Golden Pantry, a woman with tobacco stains on her fingers, once told me, “You keep poking at old ghosts and monsters, they might poke back.” She said it lightly, but she did not smile with her eyes. I put the line in my notebook. Everything was material.
   The story I was working on then was about betrayal and retribution. A man who sold out his kin for money. He signed papers that a company used to steal family land, then found himself hunted by the spirits of those he wronged.
   I wanted to make this a tale of retribution. The retribution would not be justice in the gentle sense; it would be a force, heavy and impartial.
   I had heard people in the county gossip over the years about boundary disputes. They talked about a cousin who vanished and a family that used to live out near the river, then disappeared.
   I used that gossip to shape my story. I only changed names and dates and told myself it was enough. I told myself that stories did not hurt anyone, that art had the right to everything.
   At night, I wrote in a small room I call my office. A single lamp threw a circle of yellow over my desk. The window was a black mirror with my reflection floating in it. Outside, tree frogs whined in the trees, and there was an occasional whispered sound of a train passing in the distance.
   The room smelled of warm dust and lavender scented air freshener.
   I leaned hard into telling a Southern gothic story. The scenes where the dead rose from their unmarked places came from words I had stolen from tent revivals and radio sermons. The words felt grand in my mouth. I believed I was only playing, arranging sound and myth for effect.
   One night, as I typed a passage calling those spirits by name and tying them to the land, a cold draft brushed my ankles. The room was hot enough that sweat stuck my shirt to my back, yet a chill, like air rising from the depths of a hand-dug well, rose from the floor. The skin on my calves tightened. I looked under the desk, found nothing but tangled cords. I told myself it was imagination.
   After that, small things began to go wrong. A glass of water, I could have sworn was full when I set it to the right of my laptop, is now empty, even though I did not remember drinking it. Pens from my desk traveled from the study to the kitchen without me remembering having them in my hand. The house made new sounds. The sounds were not the casual click of the air conditioner engaging, but a slow thudding in the pantry.
   I listened, then argued with myself. I was tired, I drank too much coffee, I lived inside my head.
   Still, the disturbances favored the nights when I wrote the cruelest scenes. The nights when my betrayer ran through an imaginary forest with the dead chasing behind him.
   Wanting more weight, I turned to the library’s digital archive resources. Old newspapers, curled and yellow even on the screen, waited for me. I found mention of a land scandal almost a century ago. A man who signed away property that was not his, a family evicted, a death called unfortunate and not pursued. There was talk of a disappearance, but no one pressed too hard. I printed copies of what I had found and took them home to read.
   The pattern ran close to my plot. Too close. I had not known these details when I started. Or I thought I had not.
   After midnight, under that lamp, I read about those wrongs. As I read through accounts of unmarked graves and missing names, I heard something in the next room. Not words, but breaths shaped like speech. They rose and fell with the rhythm of sentences. When I reached one particular paragraph, the sound thickened.
   A soft scratching began in the wall by the office door, too slow and deliberate for mice.
   I did what I always do. I wrote it down. Of course I wrote that down. Habit is stronger than sense. I told myself that I gave my senses that smell and that sound. I turned my unease into detail. It did not occur to me that every line I added was another strand of rope.
   One Sunday night, the local writers group was holding its monthly meeting at the county library. It was a modest gathering. There were a few chairs around folding tables, and the air in the meeting room smelled of a fresh-brewed pot of coffee.
   They wanted me to read a part of my new story. I picked the most brutal scene just to see how their expressions would shift when things turned dark.
   When I reached the paragraph where the spirits speak as one, my throat tightened. The sentences slowed, and my words came out heavy. Under my own tone rode other tones, just out of sync, so the sound thickened without echo.
   The temperature dipped. A bead of condensation formed on the inside of the narrow window near the door. One of the men sitting at the table rubbed his arms and looked around as if the air conditioner had kicked too hard.
   Beyond the door in the entry vestibule of the library, I saw figures that were not patrons. They seemed surrounded by a vague darkness, more absence than presence. I looked back at my page and read to the end.
   After polite applause, people talked for a while, then drifted away when the meeting ended. I walked into the aisles inside the library to calm down. I stopped in the non-fiction section. The paper smell was strong between those tall shelves.
   That was where the voice came clear.
   “You wrote us,” a voice said.
   It was a blended, layered voice, young and old, male and female, all speaking together.
   “I wrote a story,” was all I could think to say.
   “You called what you do not understand and sold it as entertainment,” they answered.
   The books around me felt like faces turned in my direction. County histories. Church records. Genealogies of families whose names I had stolen and disguised.
   “You think retribution is just a literary device,” the voices went on. “You use it to create fear. You take real stories from the dead, then you call it imagination.”
   “I was not aware,” I answered
   “Now you are.” A reply that sounded like a judgment.
   My house no longer pretends. The fan in the window shut off whenever I opened the file of the story, then started up again when I stepped away. The lamp over the desk flickered while my fingers hovered over the keys. A thin smell of damp decay slipped from the vent beside my desk like a warning.
   At night, I could plainly hear footsteps on my bedroom floor. They went from the door to the foot of the bed, paused, turned, and went back, never hurrying, never stumbling. Once I woke to the soft rattle of keys. In the office, the laptop glowed. Words appeared on the screen without my having typed them. Words from a letter from a woman whose heartbreak I had used, almost word for word. The first line of a suicide note written by a man whose addiction had become a plot twist in one of my books.
   My name appeared on the screen. The spirits began to show me myself. They showed me the little betrayals I had filed under craft.
   In quick, hard flashes, I saw the past. A family’s furniture being loaded onto a wagon while a man in a clean shirt placed folded papers in his pocket. I saw my own hands spreading a victim’s letters across my desk, circling phrases to steal. I watched my fingers type a man’s worst night into a scene, then delete his name and call it fiction.
   “What did you pay for what you took,” the voices asked, “besides your pride?”
   I did not know how to answer that question. I did the only thing I thought I could do. I sat at the desk, opened the story, and tried to change it.
   I told myself I would give the betrayer an honest ending. No twist, no cleverness. He would confess in full, name every harm, accept whatever came, without being able to hide. I did not know if that would matter to what moved in my walls. I did it anyway.
   At first, my fingers were clumsy. Then the story on the screen quietly shifted from third person to first. The man in the story and the man at the keyboard folded over each other until I could not tell who was speaking. I wrote about stealing from the living, about enjoying the taste of other people’s fear when readers praised my work.
   I wrote about thinking that I was outside what I described.
   A hard rain started. The windows trembled. The footsteps in the hall returned, not one set but several. Cold pressed against my shoulders, then my chest, then the top of my head, as if unseen hands were weighing me.
   Shadows thickened along the walls. Figures swam through shadows that were never entirely clear. They did not need to come forward.
   “I can see you now, ” I answered softly. The words felt like I was signing something.
   I waited for their judgment. It came quietly.
   “Retribution is not always a spectacle. It is balance. And when you write, you are a part of it whether you admit it or not.”
   Something passed through me, soft and exact. For a moment, I could see the stories I told myself about myself, and how thin they were.
   The shadows did not kill me. That would have made a tidy ending, suitable for a man who writes about horror. They gave me something else.
   “You will still write,” they said. “That is what you do. But each time you write about suffering that is not yours to use, you will see us. You will hear us. You will remember.”
   Morning came. The rain had stopped, and the house seemed ordinary again. The shadows were gone. The fan obeyed the switch. The lamp lit steadily.
   On the screen, my document had grown. It read like a testimony wrapped in a ghost tale.
   I printed it. As the pages slid out, there was a faint scent of damp earth. I stacked them and put them in the bottom drawer of my desk. When I closed it, the smell faded.
   The drawer stays shut. Some nights, I am tempted to use a real person’s hurt because it would give a scene more bite. The house answers with cool air and the faint smell of soil seeping into the room.
   As I said before, it is not one thing after another. It is things piled and tangled, old wrongs running under new ones, several things happening at once.
   Betrayal, guilt, and the payback of retribution intertwined with my arrogance like roots in red clay. And when I tugged hard enough, something tugged back.
   With the skies darkening outside and the tree frogs starting their rough choir at dusk, I sit down to write. But now I know I am not alone. I know the dead are listening, and that what I take, I will be made to see.

<<<<<{}>>>>>