The woman wakes at night, and does not know why. Each morning she checks once, twice, three times that her tripwires and springs and latches are untouched, and worries about thieves. For some time now, a strange smell has hung in the air, which she thinks, once, she might have known; it frightens her, because she has trouble recalling why it reminds her of festivals.
Spiders awake at the cusp of dark, and spin their fragile webs unseen by human eyes. The house is old, and beribboned by dusty shadow-houses in corners where no hand has swept since the great plague. The young, the strong, the powerful all went frothing and screaming into graves they'd dug themselves in anticipation of what was to come. There is no one, now, to spring her traps or to dust in the high corners. The nights pass without celebration.
She lived, though: old and sour and brittle as twigs, she lived while the reek of death hung solid as flesh in the air over another perfect summer. She lived while flies swarmed the empty beaches and the river was thick with bloated limbs. She lived to see the water run clear again and the tiny fish remember how to swim; she lived on rabbits and wild berries, and sometimes the cats brought her birds.
She lives, and it is a curse. At noon, a long habit, she goes to her father's radio, winds it ten times, and spins the tuning wheel through angry fuzz and silence, until she forgets what she is holding and puts it away again. When the evening light grows thin and pale, she brings water in a bucket for the cats, and counts them, fumbling with the names as one by one they stream past her liver-spotted feet to sleep safely where the monsters cannot find them.
She takes one last vacant look out at the river, bolts the door, once, twice, three times, and as the crickets begin their calling, she picks her way, shuffling and faltering, over spring-loaded floorboards – she does not take her eyes from the door. Finally she settles into the chair where once her nursemaid sat, still facing the door, and sleeps a not-sleep, uneasy. She dreams of a swathe of red past her vision, and wakes, and her eyes are bleeding – but it is the sunrise, resplendent through the tiny window set high in the wall.
She sighs, not knowing why she is relieved, and that is when she hears the knocking.