The shape the light made

The first time she saw him again, he was sitting in her daddy’s old chair—the one that always leaned a little left, like it was listening to something the rest of the room couldn’t hear.

It was just after a rain so thick it smeared the sky and made the pines bow their heads. The kind of rain that didn’t ask permission, just poured straight through you.

Mara stood in the doorway, barefoot, tea gone cold in her hand.

She didn’t blink.

Didn’t breathe too loud.

Just watched as he sat there, one leg slung over the other, elbow draped over the side like no time had passed at all.

But it had.

Four years, two months, and six days.

And he’d been in the ground for every one of them.

She didn’t scream. Mississippi women don’t scream for ghosts.

They nod at them,

maybe pour a second cup,

and carry on.

So that’s what she did.

She went back to peeling peaches in the kitchen, where the fan spun too slow and the air held the weight of every summer that ever was.

She didn’t look back.

Didn’t need to.

But when she set the pie on the windowsill,

the chair was empty again.

Only the cushion held a dent.

Just enough to make a person wonder.

The days passed like thick syrup, slow and golden and hard to swallow.

Mara took her time with things.

Fed the chickens.

Snipped roses from her mama’s wild garden.

Swept the porch in long, meditative strokes like she was brushing the memory of someone clean out of the wood.

But the house didn’t forget.

And neither did she.

It started happening more.

Not seeing him, exactly,

but feeling him.

Like the air shifted just so.

Like the dust remembered his weight.

She’d find the screen door unlatched in the morning, swinging lazy in the breeze.

The record player would click on and hum low—not a song, just a sound, like a throat clearing in the dark.

Once, she walked into the parlor and smelled pipe smoke,

though no fire had been lit in weeks.

She whispered his name.

Not like a call.

More like a prayer she didn’t know she still believed in.

The scent faded, but the stillness stayed.

Sweet as ruin.

She didn’t tell anyone.

The town had a long memory and a short fuse for women who talked about shadows.

Besides, her people were mostly gone now—

Mama, sunk deep in her forgetting,

her sister, long settled in Jackson with three babies and no time for the past.

Mara kept the silence the way some keep heirlooms—

delicate, sacred, too easy to break with careless hands.

The house itself began to lean toward the uncanny.

Mirrors caught her at odd angles,

sometimes showing more than just her shape.

Just once, she looked and saw two coffee cups on the counter behind her, though she'd only poured one.

She watched her own reflection blink slow,

as if it were trying to decide whether to stay.

Some nights, she would sit on the porch long after the crickets had gone quiet, rocking in her mother’s chair, listening to the Mississippi dark settle down.

That was when he came most often.

Not with noise.

Not with wind.

But with a hush so deep it made the stars feel far away.

And sometimes—

sometimes—he would hum.

Just that low, tuneless hum he used to carry around in his chest like a secret.

She never turned to look.

Knew if she did, it might vanish.

Instead, she’d close her eyes and sit real still,

like a child hoping the fireflies might land on her bare arms.

It was on one of those nights in late October—when the moon rose fat and hung low, like it couldn’t bear to leave the horizon—that Mara found the feather.

Black. Curved. Pressed gentle on the porch rail like it’d been placed.

He used to collect them.

Said they were signs.

“Feathers mean a soul’s trying to speak,” he’d told her once,

back when they still believed in small magics.

She picked it up, ran her thumb along the shaft.

The air felt different after that.

Not colder.

Just closer.

Like the veil between this world and the next had grown thin enough to breathe through.

She started talking to him then.

Soft, idle things.

“There’s frost coming tomorrow,”

or

“Catfish are running slow this year,”

or

“You never did fix the latch on that back gate.”

She didn’t expect answers.

Didn’t need them.

Sometimes the saying is the release.

Once, she told him she missed how he whistled in the garden.

Not a tune—just air, shaped around his teeth like it was going somewhere.

That night, she heard it again.

Faint. Fainter than a prayer.

But it was there.

And she cried,

but only a little.

Just enough to feel the edges of herself.

In town, folks started saying she looked tired.

Pale.

She said she was just “tending to things.”

Which was true enough.

Nobody asked what kind.

She started seeing flashes at the edge of her vision—

his hat left on a hook,

a boot by the back step.

One day, she found his wedding band on the dresser.

It had been buried with him.

She held it for a long time,

then put it in her apron pocket,

and kept it there.

Didn’t say a word.

November brought wind with teeth,

and with it, silence that didn’t settle right.

The house groaned more.

Floorboards shifted underfoot.

And the birds stopped coming.

Even the mockingbirds, who used to sing through storms,

were gone.

She stood at the kitchen sink one morning and said,

“I don’t mind if you stay. But I need to know what you’re waiting for.”

There was no reply.

Only the long sigh of the wind through the chimney.

---

That night, she dreamed of water.

Dark and still and deep.

He stood at the far side of it,

reaching.

She tried to step in,

but her feet wouldn’t move.

She woke with her hands clenched,

nails in her palm.

There was a line of blood.

Real as anything.

It wasn’t long after that when the preacher came.

Said he was checking on folks ahead of the storm season.

Brought a pie. Peach, store-bought.

He asked how she’d been.

She said, “Fine,” but her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.

His brow furrowed.

He looked around the room like it was colder than it ought to be.

Then he said something strange.

“You know,” he began, glancing toward the corner where the light always fell strange,

“your sister’s been asking after you. Says she hadn’t heard since the funeral.”

Mara blinked.

“Whose funeral?”

The preacher looked at her gently, like someone watching a child wake up too slowly.

“Yours,” he said.

And then everything stopped.

The pie fell.

She didn’t hear it hit.

The walls blurred.

The rocking chair behind her began to move on its own.

She turned to see it swaying gently,

as if someone had just risen from it.

And in the mirror behind the preacher,

there was only one reflection.

It came back in pieces.

The fever.

The way her hands had gone cold last winter.

The way the wind had whispered her name one night and never stopped.

She remembered sitting in this very chair,

a quilt wrapped tight,

his voice in her ear.

“We’re not done yet,” he’d said.

She’d smiled.

And let go.

But somehow, something stayed.

Not her body.

That had been laid in the ground up at Rose Hill Baptist, next to her mama and the boy who never did leave her heart.

But her reach.

Her longing.

The ache that kept setting the table for two.

She was the hush in the hallway.

The reason the door never quite latched.

The whisper in the cotton fields when the wind changed direction.

And he—

he was long gone.

Had moved on, like river water slipping past roots that used to hold.

She had been waiting on him.

But he wasn’t the one who lingered.

Mara looked at the preacher, who was still talking softly, though his words no longer touched her ears.

She walked past him, barefoot through the kitchen,

out to the porch,

into the Mississippi morning.

The air was thick with gold.

The sun had just begun to rise, soft as breath over the hills.

She stood at the edge of the yard,

where the grass grew wild and forgiving.

And for the first time in a very long while,

she stopped waiting.

Some things don’t haunt out of malice.

Some things stay

because they loved too hard

to know when to leave.