The Apron Strings

The first week in our new house felt like settling into a frozen ribcage. The duplex in the old mining town of Dominion, Nova Scotia, was a relic of a century past, with windows that rattled their teeth and a furnace that coughed like a coal miner. My husband, Leo, worked the night shift at the paper mill across the river, and I was left with our two girls, Hazel and June, in a silence thick as the snow that buried the roads. We’d come from a sun-bleached base in California, and the sudden, bitter cold of November felt like a living thing pressing against the glass. The house was cozy enough, all wood paneling and worn rugs, but there was a smell in the kitchen, sweet and faintly rotten, like fermenting apples. I chalked it up to old drains. I would learn to be wrong.

Leo had been gone for three nights straight, and I’d grown used to the rhythmic snoring of the girls from their room down the hall. On that third night, the sleep came heavy, filled with a memory I didn’t own—a woman in a gingham dress, her hands red and raw, kneading dough on a scarred wooden table. She hummed a song I almost knew. Then, a sharp poke on my left thigh, just above the knee. Twice. My eyes snapped open, and I reached across the bed, expecting Hazel’s small, sticky fingers. The sheets were empty. The room was dark, the only light a pale blue from the streetlamp outside, and I could see both doors closed. The girls were safe in their beds. I lay still, heart thudding, and told myself it was a muscle spasm, a dream. I forced my eyes shut, but the air had turned cold, a draft that smelled of apples and flour.

I started seeing her in the corners of my vision. A woman with brown hair pinned up, wearing a faded blue apron with white strings. She’d be standing at the kitchen counter when I turned from the stove, or at the window over the sink, looking out at the endless white. But when I looked directly, she was gone. The incidents were small at first: a drawer found open that I knew was shut, the feel of a hand brushing my shoulder when I was alone, the sound of a rocking chair in the room above, which was only an attic full of boxes. I tried to ignore it, blamed it on the wind, on my imagination, on the isolation. But the children began to talk. Hazel, who was five, asked me one morning, ‘Who is the lady who comes to tuck me in at night?’ My blood ran cold. I told her she was dreaming. June, just a toddler, would stare at a corner and giggle, waving at nothing.

One evening, in late January, Leo was on another stretch of nights, and the girls were in bed. I was in the living room, trying to read a novel, when I heard a distinct rustle from the kitchen. Frowning, I walked in and stopped dead. On the counter, which had been wiped clean an hour ago, was a layer of white flour, and in the middle was a handprint. A small, female handprint, but not a child’s—it was the hand of a grown woman, long and slender. And beside it, fresh as if just set down, was an apple, perfectly round and red, so crisp it looked fake. My skin prickled. That’s when I saw the apron. It hung from the hook by the back door, a thing I’d never bought—a blue gingham apron with white strings, the fabric stiff with age. I approached it, dizzy with fear, and touched the edge. It was cold, like it had been hanging in a freezer.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, listening to the house settle, and then in the dark, I heard the sound of chopping. A rhythmic, heavy thud from the kitchen. I got up, heart hammering, and crept down the stairs. The kitchen light was on, a dim bulb. The woman was there, her back to me, at the counter. She was chopping an apple with a large knife, the blade shining in the light. She wore the apron. Her motions were smooth, mechanical, and she hummed that same tune. I tried to speak, but my throat was closed. She turned, and I saw her face—not old, not young, with eyes like black pits, and a smile too wide. She held out a slice of apple on the knife’s edge, offering it to me. I stumbled back, but my legs were like stone. She just stood there, smiling, her head tilted. Then she turned back to the counter and continued chopping, each thud sending a vibration through the floorboards.

I grabbed the girls from their beds, wrapped them in blankets, and drove to the motel downtown, ignoring Leo’s confused calls. I spent three days there, unable to go back, and when Leo finally returned from his shift rotation, he came to get us, worried and angry. He said I’d been stressed, that I needed to see a doctor. It was Alaska that got to us, he tried to joke, but he didn’t know. I refused to go back to that house, so we stayed at the motel, and I only went back during the day to pack our things, my hands shaking as I avoided the kitchen. The landlord was understanding, said there had been ‘happenings’ in that house before, that the previous tenant’s wife had died there, a suicide in the attic, leaving behind her cooking things. He offered to let us out of our lease.

We moved to a small cabin on the outskirts of town, close to the mill, and for a while, I thought it was over. But the dreams never stopped. The woman, the apple, the chopping. And then one night, Leo woke me, his face pale in the moonlight. ‘There’s a woman in the yard,’ he whispered. ‘She’s just standing there, looking at the house.’ I pulled back the curtain, and there she was, in the blue apron, her white strings flying in the wind, holding a dripping red thing that I knew was an apple. She raised her hand and pointed at me. And then she vanished.

We left Dominion within the month, moving even farther north to a place where winter drowned all sound. But sometimes, on the quietest nights, I can still hear the chopping, rhythmic and patient, and I know she’s waiting. Somewhere, in a kitchen that was never ours, with an apron that strings itself, waiting to offer me another slice.