This Average August Night

By Madison Shirley

On this average August night, Misty-Rae was not all right.

Thunder rumbled over the quaint dirt drag that dared to call itself Palmetto Street. The handful of Sears cottages lining the backwater promenade shook in the groaning wind, as if they knew it was fixin’ to rain. In the small bathroom of number 66, Misty-Rae stared at her reflection in the spotted mirror. Pulling one eyelid down, the bottle-blond woman inspected closely. Yellow.

Like the doctor warned.

She’d scoffed. Misty-Rae didn’t get sick. When her mama was alive, bless her soul, she would joke that her daughter had swapped her blood with the good Lord’s bourbon, which kept the demons at bay.

Well, the demons finally came knocking.

The shabby tin roof above her screeched and shrieked as branches dripping in moss scraped against it. Through the thin walls, she could hear the neighbor’s AC units struggling to keep out the muggy miasma folks jokingly called air. With a final rumble, the skies opened and rain drummed against the house, which rattled in the onslaught. Misty-Rae continued unbothered with her inspection. Storm’d be fairin’ off soon, anyways.

Absentmindedly, she picked at the peeling skin on her arm. Her neighbor, Ms. Tammy, blamed it on that - what’d she call it? - dermatitis. It came with the stomach pains, she said, giving Misty-Rae a variety of tinctures and remedies. For good measure, Misty-Rae chased this daily cocktail with a handful of sleeping pills - beauty sleep and all that. Ms. Tammy might not be a doctor, but she was older than sin. Good enough in Misty-Rae’s books. Her neighbor had never done her wrong, after all. Then again, Ms. Tammy also said Misty-Rae got haints in her house and that a smudging would fix everything. Can’t always be right.

Misty-Rae threw the tap, waited a beat until the brown water ran clear—not that it meant it was any cleaner—and lathered her arms with the clay and sassafras soap her uncle Henry made her. The gritty bar coated her with an unpleasant, chalky film, which he swore would cure any skin ailment. The doctor disagreed. What would he know?

There was a sudden silence as the rain stopped. Even gully washers move quickly this time of year.

Finally, Misty-Rae turned to pick her way from the small bathroom, through the clothes-strewn bedroom, and into the kitchen—if you could call it that. Underneath the layers of grime, the spotted linoleum was dull and sticky. A fan creaked and crawled in circles on the ceiling, its bulb barely bright enough to qualify as a light. Luckily, she remembered where the Jim Beam sat on the cluttered counter.

After she took a deep pull from the fifth, she held it out, frowning. The bottle — brand-new this morning — was already half-empty.

Damn.

Before she could dwell on that, a movement in the street caught her attention.

A figure loomed in the darkness, close to the edge of the porch light. Humid mist rose from the ground, blurring the figure’s shape as it clung to it. Misty-Rae narrowed her eyes and counted slowly to five before she took another pull, squared her shoulders, and left to address the loiterer.

There would be no looky-loos in her neighborhood.

As she stepped onto her sagging porch, Misty-Rae took a rattling breath before gesturing with the bottle to the stranger. “Hey, you! It ain’t polite to loiter. Git gone now.”

No response.

The porch light flickered and died, plunging her into darkness. Misty-Rae cursed as she tripped down the steps, landing with a grunt. She composed herself, then glanced toward the figure and shrieked. Up close, its pale visage was visible through the shadows. Clear blue eyes, untainted by the yellow-rimmed haze she’d become so accustomed to. They stared pointedly back, framed by mousy hair and a face she hadn’t seen since her floors were clean, the roof tended to, and her mother’s laugh had echoed in their small home.

“What?” Misty-Rae said, her voice quivering. “What are you after?”

The shade made no move to approach her, only observed with those piercing eyes. Beautiful eyes. Lost long ago at the bottom of the bottle.

Sweat trickled down Misty-Rae’s back, and her breath came in sharp gasps as she struggled against the unwavering glare. Eyes rolling and hands shaking, she shrieked, “I said, git gone now!”

Still, the shade stared.

With a howl, Misty-Rae flung the fifth before hurling herself at the figure. Her aim was off. Glass and liquid sprayed at their feet. Where she expected to grip flesh, her hands and face slammed into a rough surface. She crumpled to the ground with a moan, feeling jagged shards of glass cut through her side. Something warm and viscous dripped from her forehead, clouding her already-yellowed vision. She blinked through the haze at the cursed shade that haunted her.

The looming face of her brick-lined mailbox shone dully in the dim light.

Bewildered, the woman scrambled to push herself up before collapsing again onto the damp dirt. Terse breaths fell in and out of time with her staccato heartbeat while her eyes struggled to stay open. The world spun as she tried to make sense of what had just happened.

Draped in the darkness of this average August night, Misty-Rae’s eyes shut in a way that felt quite finite.