....The dead will walk the earth

The aches and pains were always worse with the weather. It didn’t matter if the weather was hot or cold, wet or dry, it always changed and that’s when the pain came on. By now, she’d gotten to be almost an expert in the levels of pain, and the types. If it was cold, the pain was deep inside the bones, almost hot and all encompassing, if it was hot and dry, the pain was a dull ache, almost a memory, a phantom. The house was sinking; she could feel it in her stomach, the way it lurched when she was standing still, the way the doors didn’t quite close properly anymore. When she stood in the front yard and stared at it, studying it, the house sat like a malignant rock, hunchbacked and looming, blocking out the sun, no matter what hour of the day. Spending too much time alone was a recipe for madness, she knew, it hadn’t been just coincidence that Uncle Milton had gone into the woods out the back end of the property and no one had ever seen him again, save for old Widow Harlis, but then the Widow wasn’t the sanest person either. Some of her family had disappeared mysteriously too.
The dirt road that connected her to the Harlis farm, and farther down, the Cripley place, was rutted knee deep, and the dust hung above it like it was afraid to settle. In the winter, it turned into a mud river, slow moving and slovenly, it moved with malignant purpose, carrying away small birds and mice; their wails of doom and terror swiftly swallowed up in the sound of the current. Her great great grandfather had built the house, and it sat on a small hill, surrounded by the moat he’d dug, a primitive levy to keep flood waters at bay, if it flooded at all. He had planted the apple orchard as well, but these days, it was just one more acre for the weeds to infest. The last crop of apples had been hard and sour, even the skins had been bitter, none of them even worth making pies out of.
The house sinking was her first sign that things weren’t the same as they always had been. After that, she noticed that it was dryer than it had been in years past, and there were more crows perched on her barn roof then she had ever seen before. She wasn’t like the Widow Harlis, thinking that crows were the bringers of evil and death, to her corn field perhaps, but oddly enough, they didn’t seem interested in it. They watched her lazily as she moved from the washer to the clothesline and back to the porch, occasionally shuffling their feathers and croaking amongst themselves. At night, she could hear them moving across the roof and pecking at her windows, even though it wasn’t any cooler in the house.
The third sign came when the Widow Harlis promptly dropped dead, not one hour after walking home from church. The crows were ominously silent, heads tilted at matching angles as they stared at the Harlis homestead. It was enough to pull her to the edge of the porch, balancing against the splintering wood railing as she tried to see what they saw. The Harlis place looked the same as it always did, the same clapboard siding bleached white in the sun, the same porch sagging slightly in the middle, the same confederate flag in the window next to the cloth with two faded blue stars; sons that had never come back from war. The more she looked at it, the more that house seemed to sag, as if the supports inside were slowly falling away, leaving it to collapse in on itself. That couldn’t be, the house was the same as it always was, the heat was playing games with her. And the crows were only birds, she didn’t need to go letting her mind run away with silly superstitions and mumbo jumbo.
She went through her Sunday chores, moving with practiced ease through dusty rooms humming to herself for company, after the radio had broken the week before. The Widow would be over shortly, to sit out on the porch with her while they chatted and she worked on finishing a dress that she could wear more easily in the pressing heat. She was startled then, when someone knocked on the screen door, the Widow didn’t bother with niceties, she would sit down then yell through the open door, for lemonade or water. There was a police officer on her front porch. She paused, then wiped her hands on the dishtowel and moved to open the door.