The Weight Above

The first night in the new house, I was two years old, and I remember the silence. Not peaceful silence, but a heavy, expectant pause, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. My aunt Nereida had brought me and my infant cousin to our grandmother’s home in a dusty expanse of California, far from the familiar chaos of the border. The house was old, with peeling paint and a porch that sagged like a tired spine. Its rooms smelled of mothballs and dried herbs, and my grandmother Odilia, a woman with eyes that seemed to see through time, occupied the largest bedroom. She was a curandera, I later learned, a healer who knew the secrets of roots and words, but there was a darkness to her craft that I only grasped years later.

Every night, as the clock struck the hour of wolves, I would begin to cry. It wasn’t a fussy wail of hunger or discomfort; it was a deep, gut-wrenching sob that seized my small body. Nereida would rush to my crib, her hands clutching a rosary, whispering prayers. She’d rock me, sing to me, but I only sobbed harder. Then, a few minutes after my cries reached their peak, a sound would erupt from above. It was like a massive animal—a bear, perhaps, or something worse—landing on the tin roof with a thunderous crash. The whole house would tremble, and dust would sift down from the rafters. Nereida would freeze, her eyes wide, and then she’d run to Odilia’s doorway, demanding an explanation. Odilia, seated in her rocker, would smile her thin, knowing smile and say, ‘Nothing, child. Just a bird or a stray cat. Go back to sleep.’

But Nereida didn’t believe that. She began sleeping with a kitchen knife under her pillow. And as the weeks wore on, the sounds grew more deliberate. One night, I cried until my voice gave out, and the crash was so violent that a crack ran across the bedroom ceiling. Odilia finally changed her tune. She said, ‘The spirit has taken a liking to the boy. It feeds on his sorrow.’ Nereida demanded we leave, but Odilia only shook her head. ‘No, it would follow. We must bind it.’ She produced a jar of murky liquid and a bundle of dried plants, and she spent a night chanting in a language that made Nereida’s skin crawl. The next day, the house was quiet. But at dusk, I started screaming without waking.

By then, Nereida had had enough. She called a priest, a young, earnest man with a cross that seemed too small for the task. He performed a rite of blessing, sprinkling holy water on every corner and pressing a crucifix to my forehead. I stopped crying, and that night, for the first time in months, there was no crash. The silence felt ominous, like the calm before a storm. But the next morning, Odilia found the priest’s holy water jar shattered on the kitchen floor, and the smell of sulfur hung in the air. The priest, pale and shaking, told Nereida to take me out of that house as soon as possible. ‘This is not a ghost,’ he said. ‘It’s something older, something that’s been with your family a long time.’ He left without looking back.

Within a week, Nereida had packed our things. She took me and my cousin, and we drove north, crossing state lines, leaving Odilia on her porch, her hand raised in a gesture that could have been a blessing or a curse. We settled in a small apartment in a town called Pinedale, where the desert gave way to scrub brushes and endless sky. I grew up there, and the nightmares faded. Nereida never spoke of those nights, and I pushed them into the vault of childhood—just a bad dream.

But a few months ago, Nereida, now an old woman with silver braids, told me the truth. She said that after we left, Odilia confessed to her in a letter: the thing on the roof was not a spirit. It was a manifestation of Odilia’s own jealousy. She had always resented Nereida for escaping the family’s shadow, and when she saw the love Nereida had for me, she could not bear it. So she called upon a thing from the earth’s raw deep—a wretch that liked the taste of a child’s fear. It would come to her house because she fed it, and the cries were the bait. She had tried to stop it, but the thing had grown strong, and the blessing only angered it. Odilia wrote that after we left, the crashes continued, but now they followed her, thumping on her roof even at noon, until she finally packed her bags and fled to Mexico, unsure if she could ever outrun it.

I listened to Nereida’s story, and I felt a cold that had nothing to do with the season. I looked out my window, and for a moment, I thought I saw the shadow of something heavy pass over the streetlight. I haven’t slept well since. And tonight, as I lie in bed, my heart racing, I hear a faint sound—like the brush of fur against shingles. It’s quieter than I remember, but it’s there. And I whisper, ‘Not me, not again.’ But the house groans, and the silence after is worse. I know that thing is still out there, waiting for the moment my grief finds a voice again.