Papa had heard me and pulled me free. A moment later, Mama, sick as she was, was joining him and they were pulling Jesse out from under the house. She yelled and thrashed, and I barely got a glimpse of her, but she didn’t look like Jesse any more. Not like Jesse much at all.

They locked her in the workshed behind the house and then carried me to the doctor in town. I was in the hospital for two weeks, and when I got back, there was only a pile of ashes where the workshed had been. I asked them what happened, but they would only say that it had been taken care of.

A few months passed. I couldn’t walk good without a leg brace now, and the wound never seemed to fully heal, but otherwise I was doing all right. Then I started to have the strange dreams. I’d be wandering the swamps, my fingers long and pale to the point of almost being able to see the moonlight through them as I wound my way between twisted trees of stark white. I’d be at the dinner table when my head would begin to throb. I’d close my eyes at the pain, only to open them at the clinking sounds I was hearing in front of me. It was bloody teeth, my bloody teeth, tumbling from my mouth onto the plate below.

As the dreams got worse, they carried me to the doctor. When that didn’t help, they carried me to the old woman who had delivered me and my mama before me. She was the one who told us about the candles and how they could stop the bad dreams. Stop anything else bad from happening.

And they worked. They always have. I’ve always slept well, had a full life with a wonderful husband and two sweet children, and now a sweet granddaughter. But that…well, that’s what happened to my leg.

****

Looking back, I’m amazed I wasn’t more horrified at everything she had just told me, particularly when I felt sure she was telling me the truth, at least as she believed it to be. Instead, I just took it all in and then asked a single question.

“Why did you stay here if all that happened to you?”