The Weight of August

My grandmother’s farm was a place of creaking floorboards and the smell of old hay, a relic of a time before the world got so loud. It was August 2016, and I’d come back to empty the place out after she passed. I was twenty-three, but standing in that dusty kitchen, I felt like a teenager again, the same age I’d been when my cousin Dana died two years earlier, also in August, also from the pills she’d been hiding in her vanity.

I hadn’t thought about Dana in almost a decade. Not really. Sure, the memories were there, but I’d buried them deep, like the secrets we kept as kids. But being in her house, with its peeling wallpaper and the grandfather clock that still ticked, it all came flooding back. The last time I saw her was at the county fair, the summer she died. I was fourteen, and she was twenty-five, already thin and hollow-eyed, but still a presence that filled a room. I’d been walking with my best friend, Lucy, and Dana had called me over to the lemonade stand. She’d looked at me, her eyes too bright, and said, ‘You’re getting soft around the middle. You should think about running. It’ll keep you from turning into a whale like Mom.’ I was a size two, all elbows and knees, but her words stung like a slap. I shot back, ‘Why do you always have to be so cruel? I wish you’d just disappear!’ And I turned and walked away, leaving her there with her plastic cup and her trembling hands.

She died three days later. Overdose. They said it was an accident, but I carried the guilt on my shoulders like a cement block. For two years, I barely slept, replaying that conversation over and over. Then, in 2009, on the anniversary, I finally snapped. I shouted at her photograph, ‘I’m sorry, Dana, okay? I didn’t mean it.’ And just like that, the weight lifted. I went to college, fell in love, made a life. I forgot.

Now, standing in her kitchen, I felt a cold draft that had no business in the August heat. The clock on the wall, which hadn’t worked in years, suddenly chimed three times. I glanced at my phone: exactly 3:00 AM. I laughed at myself, told myself it was just the old house settling. I walked into the living room to check the circuit breaker, and that’s when I saw her reflection in the dusty mirror: a woman with stringy hair, wearing a faded yellow sundress, standing behind me. I spun around, and no one was there. But the air was thick with the scent of lavender, Dana’s favorite perfume.

My heart hammered. I told myself it was a trick of the light, the shadows playing games. I went into the bathroom to splash water on my face, and when I looked up, she was in the mirror, standing right behind me. Her lips moved soundlessly, but I read the words on her reflection: ‘You’re still soft.’ I whirled around, but the bathroom was empty. The water in the sink turned from clear to rust red, and the mirror fogged over, except for the word ‘RUN’ etched in the condensation.

I stumbled back into the kitchen, and the walls began to close in. The photographs on the wall changed: I saw myself at my high school graduation, then at my wedding, then holding a baby—but in every image, Dana stood in the background, her face contorted in a silent scream. The floorboards creaked behind me, and I felt a cold hand on my shoulder. I cried out, ‘I was just a kid! You said such horrible things! But I didn’t mean it!’

And the house fell silent. The smell of lavender vanished. The clock stopped. I stood there, trembling, until the first rays of dawn crept through the windows. I grabbed my phone to call a friend, but it was dead. I looked at the calendar on the wall, which I’d forgotten to take down. It was still open to August 19th—the day she died. I hadn’t noticed it earlier because it was covered by a fallen shelf.

I spent the next three days cleaning out the house, determined to purge every trace of her. I rented a dumpster and threw away her clothes, her books, her old diaries. But not before I read one. It was from the year she died, and in it, she wrote: ‘She told me she wished I was gone, but she doesn’t know how gone I am already. If she had just looked at me, really looked, maybe I would have stopped. But I’m too tired. I’ll be gone soon, and she’ll never know how much I loved her.’

I lost it. I screamed, I tore the diaries apart, I cried until I had no tears left. And when I looked up, she was standing by the door, solid and real, watching me with something like pity. She spoke, and this time I heard her voice, thin and cracked: ‘I know you wished I was dead. And now, you’ve wished it enough that I can’t leave. You’ve called me back, and I’m bound to you, to this house, to this day, forever.’

I ran outside, into the blinding August sun, and I didn’t stop until I reached my car. I drove away, and I never went back. But at 3:00 AM every night now, in whatever motel or apartment I’m in, I hear a knock on my door. And when I open it, no one is there, but the air smells of lavender. And in the mirror, if I stare long enough, I see her in the reflection, eyes black as coal, lips moving silently.

I still don’t know if I hallucinated it all. But last night, I looked in the mirror, and she was closer. She didn’t say anything, but I heard her laugh. It’s the same laugh she had when we were kids, before the drugs, before the cruelty. And I know now: I wished her dead, and my wish came true. But the dead don’t stay dead when someone like me calls them back. They stay to haunt you for as long as you live.

I guess the moral is: be careful what you wish for, because some wishes are sticky, and they’ll follow you to the grave. But by then, you’ll be the one looking back from the mirror, silent and waiting, and I don’t know who’s more afraid—me or the next person who stays here.