The Cinder-Witch’s Mark

The summer I turned five, we lived in a house that smelled of boiled cabbage and old plaster. It sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in a town called Ashford, where the heat clung to the pavement like a second skin. My mother was due any day with my brother, and my father worked nights at the canning factory, so the house was a world of women and waiting. I spent my days tracing the cracks in the ceiling, inventing constellations in the water stains, and playing with a collection of mismatched buttons I’d found in a drawer.

One night, near the end of August, the quiet snapped. At two in the morning, a hail of eggs splattered against the front of the house. I remember the wet thwack against the wood, the sticky yolk running down the windowpane. Curious, I slipped out of bed and pressed my face to the glass, watching the streetlamp cast long shadows over the yard. The eggs came in waves, three or four at a time, from the direction of the empty lot across the street where the goldenrod grew tall. My father, roused from sleep, stumbled out of the bedroom with a flashlight, shouting into the dark. He found no one, only the white and yellow mess dripping down the siding.

Later, after the eggs had stopped and the house fell silent again, something else happened. My father had gone back to bed, and my mother was dozing in the armchair, her hand resting on her swollen belly. I was lying on the floor of the living room, tracing the pattern of the rug, when I heard my father yelp. It wasn’t a scream—it was more like a sudden, sharp intake of air, followed by a string of curses. I padded to the bedroom door and peered in. My father was sitting up in bed, rubbing his bare thigh. ‘What?’ my mother grumbled from behind him. ‘You slapped me,’ he said. She didn’t answer, just turned over.

The next morning, my father was furious. He insisted my mother had hit him, but she swore she hadn’t moved from the armchair all night. They argued at the breakfast table, their voices low and sharp like broken glass. I sat between them, stirring my cereal, watching the argument unfold. My father showed us the red mark on his leg—a perfect handprint, but too small, with fingers too long and nails that left crescents in the skin. My mother’s hands were small and soft, but on a woman her size, the handprint seemed to come from a child, maybe even my size. I looked at my own hands, small and unmarked, and I knew I hadn’t done it. But I also knew something else: the handprint was warm to the touch, and it smelled faintly of smoke.

That night, the eggs came again, but this time I was ready. I had snuck a flashlight into my room and positioned myself at the window. When the first egg hit, I flicked on the light and swept the beam across the glow of the streetlamp. I caught a glimpse of something—a shape, half-human, half-smoke, with eyes like burnt holes in a blanket. It was standing at the edge of the yard, watching the house. It didn’t move when the light touched it. Instead, it raised a hand, and I saw that the hand was missing its ring finger, and the palm was black, as if charred. It pointed at me, and then it was gone.

I told my parents, but they dismissed it as a bad dream. My father went back to work, and my mother tried to rest, but the unease settled into the house like dust. The eggs stopped, but small things began to change. The buttons I played with started arranging themselves into patterns at night—crosses, circles, an arrow pointed at the back door. The cats in the neighborhood began to avoid our street, and the crows that nested in the elm at the corner were gone by the time the leaves turned.

A week later, my mother went into labor. My father was still at work, and the only neighbor with a car was old Mrs. Kowalski, who drove us to the hospital in her rattling sedan. As we sped through the empty streets, I saw the shape again, standing at an intersection, its hand raised as if in farewell. The hospital was bright and cold, and I waited in a plastic chair while my mother screamed behind a curtained door. When my brother was born, he was silent for a moment too long, and the nurses had to wipe his face with a cloth. My mother held him, and I saw that on his tiny right leg, there was a mark—a pale, perfect handprint, exactly like the one my father had shown me.

We never went back to that house. My father quit his job, and we moved across the state to a town where the houses had no attics and the streets were numbered. My brother grew up with that mark on his leg, a faint white stain that never tanned in the summer sun. He’d sometimes complain of a cold spot in his room, or that he couldn’t sleep because of the tapping on his window. My mother would laugh and say it was just the wind, but she never let him play outside after dark. And I never told anyone what I saw that night, because I knew that some things are better left unnamed. But sometimes, when the moon is full and the air smells of smoke, I still try to remember the shape of that hand, and I wonder if it’s waiting for the day my brother comes back to Ashford, to finish what it started.