The Sweeper of the Empty Lot

After my grandmother decided to sell the old family house, we moved into my mother’s apartment complex in a dusty provincial town. The building was a sprawling, two-story structure with eight units, and we took one of the smaller ones on the ground floor. I was fifteen, and the move felt like a demotion—from a house with a yard and my own room with peeling paint and a window facing the neighbor’s laundry line. The apartment had three rooms: my grandmother and grandfather took the largest, my two sisters shared the middle one, and I got the smallest, which was set at the very heart of the unit. Its only window looked out onto a vacant lot, a rectangle of packed earth and spiky weeds, bordered by a concrete fence that had crumbled in places. They said the lot had been empty for years, but at night, I sometimes heard rustling there, as if something were moving through the dead grass.

My dreams started the first night. I would find myself in an endless corridor of doors, all closed, all painted the same sickly green. At the end of the corridor stood an old woman. She was tall and thin, with skin like crumpled paper, and she wore a gray dress that seemed to absorb the light. She held a broom, not a modern one with synthetic bristles, but an old-fashioned one made of dried branches, bound with twine. Her face was always turned toward me, and she was always smiling—a wide, toothless grin that stretched her mouth into a crescent. She never spoke; she just swept the floor in slow, deliberate strokes, moving the broom back and forth as if clearing something invisible. Each sweep raised a faint dust, and the dust would drift toward me, making me sneeze. When I sneezed, I woke up.

At first, I dismissed it as anxiety from the move. But the dreams grew more frequent and more vivid. The corridor became more detailed—cracks in the walls, peeling wallpaper, a faint smell of rot. The old woman moved closer each night, her sweeping steps bringing her nearer to me. One night, I saw what she was sweeping: a pile of tiny, white bones, like the bones of birds or rats. She swept them into a corner, but they reappeared scattered across the floor. Her smile never wavered. I tried to scream, but my voice was gone.

I began to dread sleep. I stayed up until dawn, reading or staring at the window, watching the empty lot. Sometimes, in the pale moonlight, I thought I saw movement among the weeds—a gray shape, stooped, moving slowly. I told my grandmother, but she laughed. ‘You’re dreaming,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing in that lot.’ But I noticed she avoided looking out that window, and she started hanging a string of garlic near the kitchen door, ‘for luck.’

One afternoon, I was home alone, and the need for sleep overwhelmed me. I lay down on my bed, and the dream came immediately. This time, the old woman was directly in front of me, close enough that I could see the cracks in her lips, the dirt under her fingernails. She was sweeping toward me, and the bones were piled at my feet. I looked down and saw that the bones were not animal—they were tiny human fingers, toes, ribs. I looked up, and the old woman was no longer smiling. Her mouth was a thin line, and her eyes were black, without whites. She raised the broom and pointed the handle at me, then at the window. I turned to look. Through the window, I saw the empty lot, but now it was filled with graves, each with a small white marker. I recognized the names—my grandmother’s, my grandfather’s, my sisters’, my parents’. And at the center, a fresh grave with my name on it.

I woke with a jolt, my heart hammering. It was dusk, and the room was filled with amber light. I ran to the window. The lot was unchanged—just weeds and dirt. But on the ground, directly below my window, there was a single, white bone, gleaming like a tooth. I never slept in that room again. I slept on the living room couch, and after a week, we moved into my grandmother’s newly finished house. I thought I had escaped. But even now, when I close my eyes, I can hear the rhythmic swish of a broom, and I feel the smile of the old woman, waiting for me to return to that empty lot, where she still sweeps, patiently, for my bones to be added to her pile.