The Glass Refrain

I was seven the summer we moved to the old farmhouse in Greymarsh, a town so small it didn’t even have a stoplight. My parents had split the year before, and my mother thought a change of scenery might help us both. She was wrong. The house was a skeletal Victorian, all peeling white paint and a wraparound porch that groaned like a tired animal. My room was at the top of the stairs, at the end of a narrow hallway lined with faded floral wallpaper that seemed to shift in the corners of my vision. I’ve always been afraid of the dark, but that house taught me a new kind of fear, one that seeped into my bones and never left.

One night, a month after we moved in, I woke to a sound unlike any I’d heard before. It was a low, mournful hum, rising and falling like a distant siren, but softer, more intimate. It seemed to come from downstairs, from the kitchen. I lay still, my heart thumping against my ribs, trying to convince myself it was the wind or the old pipes. But the hum was melodic, almost like a lullaby, and it drew me out of bed despite my terror. I crept to the top of the stairs and peered down. The hallway below was dark, but a faint, sickly light leaked from the kitchen doorway, casting a long, distorted shadow on the wall. I called out for my mother, but there was no answer. She’d taken a sleeping pill earlier; I knew she was out cold.

I forced my legs to move, one step at a time, my bare feet cold on the worn wooden stairs. The hum grew louder as I approached the kitchen, and I realized it was not just a hum but a voice, a woman’s voice, singing a wordless song. I stopped at the threshold, just as I had in that other house years before, and peered around the doorframe. The kitchen was bathed in the glow of the refrigerator light, its door hanging open. And there, at the sink, stood a woman with her back to me. She wore a long, white nightgown, the same one my mother wore, and her dark hair was loose, just like my mother’s. But something was wrong. Her movements were too smooth, too fluid, as she lifted a glass to her lips and drank. Then she set the glass down with a clink that echoed in the silence, and slowly, ever so slowly, she turned.

My breath caught in my throat. The face was my mother’s face, but the eyes were not. They were black, utterly black, like voids, and they held a sadness so profound it felt like a weight pressing on my chest. She looked at me, and her lips parted, but instead of my mother’s voice, a chorus of whispers emanated from her, overlapping and tangled. I couldn’t understand the words, but the feeling was clear: it was a warning, a lament for something lost. Then she raised her hand, and in it she held a photograph, the glass cracked and stained. She pressed it to her chest, and a single drop of water ran down her cheek, like a tear.

I couldn’t move. I was frozen, watching as she glided across the linoleum, past me, into the dining room, and then she vanished, as if she’d never been there. The refrigerator light flickered off, plunging the room into darkness. I heard a soft click, and then silence. I stood there for what felt like an eternity, my heart hammering, until I finally found the strength to turn and run back to my room, diving under the covers and shaking until morning.

The next day, I told my mother what I’d seen. She smiled, a tight, worried smile, and said it was just a dream, just my imagination. But I knew what I saw. And over the following weeks, the glass refrain came back, night after night, always the same: the hum, the open fridge, the woman at the sink, the black eyes, the cracked photograph. I grew sick, pale, unable to eat. My mother took me to doctors, but they found nothing wrong. They said it was anxiety, stress from the divorce. But I knew it was her, the glass woman, waiting to tell me something.

One night, I gathered my courage and decided to speak to her. Instead of running away, I stood in the doorway and whispered, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ She turned, her black eyes meeting mine, and for the first time, she spoke in a clear, human voice, but it was layered, like two voices at once, one my mother’s, one stranger’s. ‘I am the one who stayed,’ she said. ‘I am the one who waits. The photograph shows what was taken. The glass holds what is broken. You must remember.’ She extended the photograph toward me, and I saw it clearly: a picture of my mother, young and happy, holding a baby, with a man standing beside her, but his face was scratched out. ‘Your father,’ she said. ‘He is not who you think.’ Then she faded, and the kitchen was dark again.

I never saw her again. But I understood. The glass woman was not a ghost; she was a guardian, a keeper of secrets too painful for the living. My mother never spoke of my father, and I never asked. But I kept that image, the glass refrain, the sound of her humming, and the weight of her sorrow. I’m thirty-two now, and I still fear the dark, but I also listen for her, for the echo of the glass, a reminder that some truths are too heavy to be spoken, only sung in the quiet of the night.