the spirits, the birds, the south//Chelsea Catherine

The Florida shack stood crooked, leaning towards the brick deck, the doorframe barely securing into the hinges. Wet lingered on the windows and the glass door, which was thin and rimmed by brittle, broken wood. The space stretched barely two hundred square feet and from my bed, I watched the shadows after the sun fled, the palmetto bugs that skittered across the ceilings. They rattled the walls, louder than even the hawks in the backyard.

One night in the Florida shack, I woke up to my grandmother leaning over the side of the bed. She had been dead for three years by then. Her smock was brown, her hair was done up like she was going to church. She sat down next to me. We looked at one another. I screamed.

When I flicked on the lights, she was gone. I scanned the small space, checking for the palmetto bugs that were usually everywhere, but all was clean and empty.

Was that you? I asked the ceiling.

It didn’t respond, because it couldn’t, but that didn’t matter. Ever since moving to Florida, spirits had clustered around me. These night spottings – my grandmother, dark shadows in the shape of a body, soft whispers in my ear – weren’t scary or malicious. They were telling me where to go and what to do, or so I thought.

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As a child, my mother hung sage plants in the corners of my room, with one right over my bed. She told me they would keep bad spirits from brushing up against me while I slept. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to what looked like gnarled, grassy hands reaching down at me.

My mother is a Louisiana native. Her people are of the swamp and red dirt, the mounds of claycrawfish ball and build into silos along the ground. They are superstitious folks.

I keep waking up and it scares me, I told her.

That’s what’s supposed to happen, she replied.

My mother had many spiritual routines. She licked her finger, then swiped an X on the corner of the windshield each time a car without a headlight passed us. She told me to hold my three fingers together – index, thumb, and middle – when scared and pray to the Goddess. She wrote notes to ghosts, thoroughly examined her dreams.

There’s so much more out there, she told me time and again.

And against my better judgement, I did believe.

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The spirits in Florida sent a glass bottle hurling to the ground one night, shaking the wall length mirrors across from my bed. They snuck up on me in the form of the palmetto bugs, which chattered and hissed across the floors, walls, and ceilings. The shack was wet and ripe with humidity – perfect for bugs – and eventually, their infestation was so complete, I woke each night jumping from my bed, having felt them or their ghosts tickling across my covers.

After a year and a half, I moved into a six hundred square foot apartment lodged in a building that served as a hospital during the civil war. The windows were large, the sunlight was plentiful, and there were no bugs. Yet, it creaked and groaned and while it wasn’t wet like the shack was, moisture lived in the walls, which had been wrecked by leaks from hurricanes year after year.

For the first two months, all was well. There were some soft footsteps from the apartment above but nothing major. Then it became clunks and pitter patters, the sound of someone pacing at all hours of the night.

No one lives there, the property manager texted me when I complained. No one’s lived there the

entire time you’ve been there.

One night, I managed to find sleep, only to be awakened near two am by a large, black shadow sweeping up over me, like a cape expanding in the air, which then came rushing down around me. I screamed for it to go away, that it was not wanted, just like my mother had taught me when I was a child.

When I flicked on the lights, the bedroom was empty.

It was a sign, I told my therapist. There’s too much energy in that building. Time to move.

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The last Florida house was a new build. It sat two feet off the ground, surrounded by old plywood made dark from the frequent storms. An avocado tree hung against the bedroom window, dropping giant Florida avocados to the ground.

In the new build, nothing chased me or warned me. There were only two incidences with palmetto bugs. I slept. At night, I’d wake up and the room was still and empty, dry and clean. When a woman broke my heart, the Florida house and its quiet spirits held me so gently. They rocked me and hummed me and cradled me when I wanted to die, as the seasons shifted, and part of the hurt ebbed.

Just a few months later, rental rates spiked throughout the area. Remote workers from New York City were moving to my slice of the south in droves, thick and entrenching as the hurricane rains. Rental companies catered to their higher salaries, forcing the rest of us to downsize, double up, or leave the area altogether.

I sat outside the house, the neighbor’s dog nipping at my ankles, and wondered where I would go. For months, I’d been looking at Springfield, Massachusetts. Sometimes, I’d pull up the city on Google maps and just look around at the old buildings, spiral and bricked, the church steeple, squat-like high rises, and soft hills curving in the background. Something about the city pulled at me.

It’s intuition, I told a friend.

Yours has always been so strong, she replied.

A few weeks later, after much research, I started packing.

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The Massachusetts house is mine, not subject to rent hikes or landlords. It’s buried under oaks and maples, the yard thick with ivy and tulip buds, blue jays and sparrows hopping from branch to branch. The sky sets rose and burgundy colored at least one night a week.

I move in thinking all my problems will cease. (My intuition brought me here. My intuition never steers me wrong.) Instead, I’m met with a toxic work environment where my supervisor screams in my face, the CEO tells me I have the personality of Mike Tyson, and other leadership team members make fun of my cheap clothing. The job starts my night terrors up again. They are so frequent and intense that I give myself a concussion one night.

It feels like the spirits are everywhere – slinking across the walls the way they used to in the Florida shack, nipping at the edges of the comforter – but this time, they don’t feel hopeful and aligned. To protect myself, I burn cedarwood throughout the home, place my mattress on the floor, and move all the furniture away from the bed so I can’t hurt myself during night terrors anymore.

What are you stressed out about? a friend asks me.

I don’t know, I tell her. Everything feels wrong.

Winter falls. The basement is unheated. The pipes clog. A squirrel moves into my attic. The air inside the house is so cold sometimes, it feels suffocating, like swimming through freezing, dead water. Work gets so bad that I stop going into the office altogether. I live in constant fear of being fired while my bank account hovers near zero, depleted from the house sale. In the evenings, I cry and ask my dead grandmother for help, even though I haven’t felt the ghost of her since leaving the south.

It’s depression, a former coworker says.

I want to tell her it’s something else. Something spiritual, maybe a part of me breaking off and dying to adjust to life in the north. I’ll try some supplements, I offer, and leave it at that.

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After my move north, I bought a car, not having had one in Florida. My insurance company spelled my name wrong four different times on the paperwork, stalling the sale and sending me into a spiral, only to find the car needed a new transmission a week after it all cleared. An old court case popped up unresolved, even though my attorney claimed it was settled five years ago. I struggled to make friends. Had night terrors. There was little joy to be found except on long walks around the local reservoirs, where I told myself to just get through the winter, just keep the pipes from bursting, keep the job, save up, keep my head down and work, and eventually, everything would turn out fine. I did spiritual rituals daily, reciting my gratitude at specific points in the day, blowing cinnamon through the doorways, doing new month ceremonies, obsessively pulling tarot cards.

My intuition, a faith of its own, had always been a point of pride for me. I couldn’t imagine it had steered me wrong now, after so many years of moves and challenges and growth. Why would my gut have chosen this place, this little nowhere city couched in soft hills, old brick buildings, and quiet, dilapidated houses, if it wasn’t for the best?

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Winter hangs sharp on the air, driving the birds and squirrels into hiding. I’m out for my daily walk one day when I notice my body struggling to keep up. It’s hard to catch my breath. My muscles are fatigued. I turn a corner and take a shortcut home, then sit on the couch and sip tea, wondering if I’ve caught the flu or COVID, but tests reveal neither.

The muscle weakness and fatigue continue until I can no longer do my daily walks, and instead spend hours on my couch, not going out, not traveling, with barely enough energy to do my work. My stomach hurts, almost like period cramps, and acne – the first I’ve ever had as an adult – has sprouted up along my cheekbones.

After some months, I find a new job where the people are good to me, and the night terrors stop. I buy a smaller bedframe, one that is closer to the ground, and spend one evening putting it together. It’s May by then, and I have been up north for almost ten months. The weather has been wet and rainy and cold, miserable in the most New England way possible. A film of fog lingers on the horizon, grey and dense enough that the sun can’t pierce it.

After assembling the frame, I lift my mattress, settling it sideways against the bedroom wall, to come face to face with a giant black stain. Cursed, I think. But then I peel back the mattress cover to find it’s not a curse, but mold, dark and dotting the spongey material like splatter paint. I seal it up and put it outside, douse the room with bleach, and open all the windows, a fan blowing on the floor to shoo the moisture back outside.

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After Googling mold exposure, I find the below symptoms match the ones I’ve been

experiencing:

• coughing

• sneezing

• postnasal drip

• itchy skin, eyes, and scalp

• fatigue

The symptoms of prolonged exposure I’ve been experiencing are:

• brain fog

• abdominal pain

• vertigo

• derealization

• rashes and acne

• ringing in the ears

• digestive issues

And, though there are few studies to prove it, I find several articles stating that prolonged mold exposure may lead to hallucinations.

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I sleep for several nights in the guest room while the main bedroom is still airing out. The rain becomes replaced by sunlight and low humidity, the grass in the yard growing green and tall. The squirrels and birds return, chirping so loudly my friends can hear them through the phone.

After two days of no moldy mattress, I have the energy to mow half the lawn and trim and get rid of old tree branches that have fallen over the winter. After four days, I wake up near six a.m., something I haven’t done in months, and go for a walk at the local reservoir. After that, I mow the rest of the lawn, check the gutters, set up a bed frame reinforcement, weed at the back of the house, and hula hoop for thirty minutes. The tickle of a wheeze is still faint in my chest, but my brain feels clearer, like a weight lifted.

I realize that mold has likely been in each of my homes in the south. Maybe it’s what made me see my grandmother and the dark shapes and shadows. Maybe none of it was real, a sign, or anything other than the way humidity can warp your brain after time.

It’s not depression, I text my former coworker. Not psychosis, either. I ask if she thinks this happened because I moved here when maybe my soul is supposed to be with my mother’s people, the ones in the clay and red dirt and snakey, Gulf heat.

Not at all, she replies. Just a casual accident.

A casual accident. Nothing predetermined. Not a message from the universe. Part of me is relieved, but part of me is also disappointed. It’s been months since I’ve believed in my tarot messages, since I’ve felt my grandmother guiding me.

I don’t particularly miss living in Florida, but I do miss the south. I miss the comfort of that last Florida house, the laziness of the avocado tree next to the bedroom. I miss my community and the ponds and turtles and the way the heat shaped the sunrises. I miss the days when I could call out to my grandmother, and she would find me in a bird or a song or a shadow slipping across the curtains. I miss the faith I once had in myself and in the universe, the soft hauntedness of the land, and how it was so easy to think my life was otherworldly and magical instead of some casual accident.

Chelsea Catherine (They/Them) is a winner of the Mary C Mohr award for nonfiction and their second book, Summer of the Cicadas, won the Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press. They are part of a cohort of ValleyCreates artist grantees in Western Massachusetts and their story, The Not-Deer, is forthcoming in an anthology out of London, UK. You can find more of their work at https://chelseacatherinewriter.com/