The swamp beats and throbs and hums with life. Sickly hot air meets a limitless blue sky, and below, a forest of teeth and limbs reaches toward a jagged scar of land that separates two properties.
One belongs to my family.
Gran lives on the edge of the Okefenokee wetlands in a damned city named Waycross, Georgia, in a damned county called Ware, as she would say. A place where nothing exciting ever happens, life trudges on, resisting change, and the people like it that way. It's a world built on legends and secrets that run like a vein through the heart of history.
Most claim only the craziest live this far out. And they're partially right.
"The brightest light casts the darkest shadow," Gran says.
I eye our property through the kitchen window. I happen to like the shadows, the seclusion of the trees, the whispers of the forest. Especially at night, when everything takes a less defined form, when the swamp comes to life.
I'm a replica of Gran. Except Gran is much older, wrinkled like a rippled reflection in water. My hair is hers, dark and thick, though hers has now faded to gray. And our eyes are identical, a solid brown—so brown that my pupils bleed into them. I am younger and more beautiful, she would say. But Gran says all kinds of things.
Gran despises the next-door neighbor, Mr. Cadwell, making sure to ignore his greetings and glances. He's nice enough, I suppose. But I don't know him like she does. Word has it they even dated once, long before she decided that he was evil.
It's true that I'm new. I've been here five days, though I've visited plenty of times over the years. Never long enough to know the old man next door for anything more than a passing hello lost on the wind. I glance outside again. Marsh is everywhere, pushing the smell of earth and fungus through the open window. Patches of water are blanketed in green algae, alligator eyes popping up like floating marbles. Cypress trees protrude from the murky water, reminding me of notches of bone, little leaves growing from them. Lifeless branches float along for the ride. The swamp is the kind of place a girl can get lost in and never find her way out.
I can't stop staring out the old, weathered screen.