Jesse

It could have been its own skin hanging loose in folds.

I couldn't tell, and I didn't want to look long enough to figure it out.

I stood in the hall and stared at it through the window and it stared back.

Then Mama was beside me.

I hadn't heard her come out of her room but she was there, in her nightgown and her slippers, standing at my shoulder.

She looked through the window at the shape in the yard.

She said there it is.

She said it the way you'd say there's the mail truck, flat, resigned.

The voice of someone who'd been dealing with this for two weeks and had moved past fear into exhaustion.

i asked her what we should do she said nothing she said don't open the door don't talk to it don't look at it too long she said pearl's rule was never to look at it for more than a count of ten because looking at it was what it wanted she said looking at it fed it something

I looked away.

I looked at the floor, at Captain, at Mama's slippers, anywhere but the window.

Mama went to the kitchen.

I heard her open a cabinet.

She came back with a Bible and a box of table salt.

She poured salt across the threshold of the back door, then across the threshold of the front door.

She set the Bible on the kitchen table, open, face down.

Then she went back to bed.

She did all of this without urgency, like a routine.

I stood in the hall for another ten minutes.