All I want is to go home, but first I have to stop in Shadydale to pick up eggs and coffee. I duck into the grocery store, shaking the downpour out of my eyes as it drags my hair into a wet tangle, and grab my purchases as quickly as I can.

The cashier knows me, just as she would know anyone else who frequents this market, but she acts as if she doesn’t, politely handing me the receipt without looking directly at me. As soon as I step away, I hear her whispering with the next person in line.

I’m nearly back to the door, back out into the rain, when I stumble around two small children playing at the front of the store, waiting for their parents to finish shopping. The boy looks up at me and calls out, “Hey, Wakefield!”

I make the mistake of acknowledging him by stopping and looking down. I can feel eyes on my back from the woman who was behind me in line.

“I heard your mother’s a witch,” the boy says.

His sister nudges him and asks, “Who?”

“Agnes Wakefield.”

The girl’s eyes go wide. “Oh. I thought she was dead. But she still haunts the house.”

“No, she’s a witch. She put a curse on the house. And she eats children.”

The girl turns her eyes to me. “Is it true?”

I consider telling them to stop saying such things about my mother, who is frightening to them only because she never comes out of the house, but instead I pull my lips into a grin, though it is really more a baring of teeth. “Yes, that’s right. And if you get too close, she’ll eat you up.”

Their eyes bulge and they turn, dart away from me, behind their parents’ legs at the register. The parents glance up at me and then away again.

I pull the back of my sweater over my head and rush out into the rain, throw myself into my car, wet and dripping.

A witch. I shake my head, start the car. They are confusing the tales about Wakefield Manor with the legend of the swamp. My mother is not the Swamp Witch—that’s an old legend, passed down through the ages: a way of warning young ones to stop them from straying. Isn’t it funny how we humans have evolved? Animals seem to know instinctively, but we must tell each other stories to warn of danger. And for that reason, folktales live in the swamp, just like the water moccasins that slither through the wetlands and the bobcats that skulk in the log fern.

As the legend goes, since time immemorial, the witch has haunted the swamp, leading wanderers astray in the form of a hovering light that guides them to quicksand, where they sink into the underworld. She is always seen as a dancing flame, for the witch’s true form appears only in reflections, so terrible is it that it cannot be tolerated by the unshielded eye.