SMILE

Soon after moving into this apartment last summer, I started to suspect it was a smidge haunted.

It was nothing glaringly obvious at first. Whatever it was kept itself unseen, shuffling quietly aside to make room for us, pressing itself  thin along the corners of walls and flattening down beneath our feet as we assembled our furniture and began to unpack. 

Then the flood happened. 

Two days after turning in the U-Haul and with most of our belongings still in boxes,  it rained for more than 10 inches in a just a few hours. 

By the time the children waded home from a playdate on thankfully dry land, this place had about 4 inches of water sitting in it. I tried to make it seem a little fun and exciting for the girls, after all, this was a memory they would most likely have until they were old and thirty.

“Oh I’ll bet none of the other kids get to have water INSIDE their house- oh hey! There goes your school shoes floating under the table! And there’s a teeny frog swimming under the couch! Isn’t this neat? What? You want to play in the water? Dear god no- IT IS FILLED WITH DISEASE. Now everyone rub this hand sanitizer on all of your skin and we’ll have a picnic on the bed!”

Husband Face was justifiably on edge, so I had to walk the line between being lighthearted for the kid’s sake while managing all the adult things like damage assessment and days of cleanup. Then unpacking.  Oh, and just a few days later was the first day of school and all the chaos that comes with that.

I’ve heard it said that if you’re going through Hell, you should keep going. So, I put on my smile and that’s what I did.

The smile I wear when things are hard and beyond my control is a newer model. It’s not like the one I’d put on often during my years of customer service jobs where I had to deal with willfully, painfully ignorant or mean-spirited people on an almost daily basis.

That smile was toothier.

It’s different from the one I kept handy throughout my bartending years where I had to deal with those same sorts of people- only while they were drunk.

That smile was wider.

Nope, the smile I wear at home is flatter and tighter and somehow heavier, often harder to hold in place than the others. It’s not my favorite but it’s necessary.

I barely had time to notice the things when they started happening.

First, Other Cat was acting weird. He’s always been a strange fellow- I’ve long suspected he has some sort of kitty autism. We didn’t see him for two weeks. Eventually I followed the smell and found he had crawled through the lower lining of my mattress and had been hiding (and pooping) there. That’s a dramatic level of terror even for him, but I figured he was just having a bad reaction to the move.

Then the  door to the bedroom would slam itself shut at night while I was trying to sleep. It was kind of terrifying the first few times before it just got annoying. But one night I woke up after 3am and I wasn’t sure why. It took me a moment to recognize how silent it was.

I can’t sleep without a fan on and mine was off.  I flicked on the light and saw the fan had somehow been completely unplugged. That was unsettling, but I put it out of my mind. There were plenty more pressing matters to deal with in the light of day.  

We had an unexpected financial hit that was going to effect our income for months. Our new budget was more frightening than any possible ghostie. Living paycheck to paycheck when you’ve got small children that refuse to go work in the mines because they “don’t know what your even saying right now, what’s a mine?” is very uncomfortable.

The more uncomfortable things got,  the more confidant our invisible roommate grew. It seemed to take a liking to that smile of mine and unfurled itself longer, spreading into the daylight hours. 

Things seemed to be randomly knocked from my hands. Piles of paper, random toys, jars of sauce, paper towels meant to clean up broken jars of sauce -would all end up on the floor. And I didn’t have time for that. The house was still cluttered with boxes and I tried to focus on unpacking so I could just have one less thing to worry about.

But then my daughter began having trouble at school. Nothing that was of her doing, but situations required my intervening. Calls had to be made and emails had to be written. Mark worked longer hours now, so I had to deal with it alone and I constantly worried that I was either coming across as shrill or not doing enough.

Sometimes when I was alone writing one of those unexpectedly stressful emails, the lamp next to me would buzz and get brighter before dimming back down. One day after ending a very uncomfortable phone call to the school, an empty recycling can flipped completely upside down on its own. I  nearly jumped out of my skin.

Our unseen friend had upgraded to full on poltergeist.

 I wasn’t alarmed then, when Lily started talking to the walls. She said she was talking to “a ghost” and even started blaming it for things that she had done or said, but kinda jokingly?  (I’m holding off on the exorcism until her teen years.)

When something would fall in another room I’d announce, “POLTERGEIST!” and Mark would roll his eyes. Violet thought the “Poultry Ghost” idea was funny. I took to naming it ‘Henny Penny’ and aside from my proclamations, generally ignored it because I had bigger things to smile through. 

There was a trip to the ER when Violet, probably shoved by the Poultry Ghost, managed to slice her foot open on the coffee table. She ended up in a cast, but kids damage themselves all the time and it was going to be fine.  

A week later however, Mark would end up in ER. Twice. He had a terrible infection in his face. Eventually after finding a competent Doctor there were IV antibiotics, and morphine, and 3 bad teeth ripped out of his skull with the promise of more to come. That was scary. That was not fine.

My smile slipped. 

Henny Penny disapproved.

One night we came home and I found Mary sprawled broken on my bedroom floor. Mary was old when I got her 30 years ago. She’d been through countless moves, various storms, cats, and children and had never been damaged. I always took care where I put her, and this time was no different.

She had been  seated on my dresser between a vase and her friend Annie (pictured below). No part of her was near the edge, yet I found her in the middle of the room, several feet from the dresser.

Again, no one was home and even if our lardball cat decided he was feeling uncharacteristically athletic and attempted to jump up there, something around her would have been moved or fallen too.

Nothing else was touched.

That was it.

Henny Penny done pissed me off.

When a tangible or easily fixable source for troubles can’t be found, one can be created. Humans have done this throughout history, blaming some sort of devilry for its woes, often to shameful ends.

Did the knowledge of this phenomenon stop me from going and ritualistically cleansing the shit out of my house with some burning sage? It did NOT.

Have things improved since the cleansing? They HAVE.

Coincidence? HOW DARE YOU

You see now I can rest easy knowing that everything is going to be all right. Because sage.

All negativity has been vanquished from this house.  I defeated all the great evil aligning against us and lifted any hexes that seemed to be working over us. With sage.

I BEAT HENNY PENNY BACK TO THE SHADOWS AND SENT A MESSAGE TO ALL THE OTHER GHOSTIES THAT THEY HAD BETTER NOT COME AROUND HERE AND START BREAKING MY SHIT BECAUSE THEY WILL HAVE THEIR TRANSPARENT ASSES HANDED TO THEM BECAUSE I AM A POWERFUL WITCH GODDESS. With Sage*.

However.

Should things go awry again and for some reason sage fails me, I’ll just find another smile.

* also delightful on a pork loin with a nice raspberry reduction sauce