Sitting Still

The cabin belonged to her great-aunt Della, who had lived there forty-three years and died in February in the county hospital, not at home. The family decided this was a mercy. Maren wasn't sure why.

She drove up on a Sunday, windows down despite the cold, the road narrowing into switchbacks above Cosby. The agreement was simple: spend a week, sort Della's belongings, leave the key under the flowerpot for the realtor. She'd done harder things.

The cabin was small and smelled like cedar and something older — mineral, animal, close. It had one main room with a cot along the east wall, a potbelly stove, a shelf of mason jars filled with things Maren didn't inspect too closely. And by the window: a rocking chair, dark wood, caned seat, facing out toward the porch and the tree line.

She put her bag down. She started with the easy things: the kitchen shelf, the folded quilts, a box of letters she'd deal with tomorrow.

That first night, she fell asleep quickly.

She woke at 2 a.m. to the sound of the chair.

Not rocking hard — nothing dramatic. Just the slow, metered creak of weight shifting. Brrk. Brrk. The rhythm of someone thinking, or watching.

Maren lay still for a long time, listening. Old cabin, she told herself. Old floors, cold night, the wood contracting. She'd read about this — thermal expansion, settling foundations, all the mechanical reasons a house makes sounds. She believed those reasons.

She got up.

The chair was motionless. Facing the window, the way she'd left it.

She stood there in her socks, hand on the doorframe, waiting. Nothing moved. Outside, something in the woods called once — a barred owl, or something like one — and went quiet.

She went back to bed.

The second night it started later, maybe 3 a.m., and she was more awake for it. She counted the interval between creaks. Roughly four seconds. The exact tempo of a resting heartbeat slowed by something calm.

She lay there until it stopped.

When she checked, the chair was facing the room instead of the window.

She stood at the threshold and thought about this for a while. She was almost certain she'd left it facing the window. Almost. She moved it back, went to sleep, and spent most of the morning telling herself she'd been wrong about the angle.

By noon she half-believed it.

The third night she didn't get up. She pulled the quilt over her head and kept her breathing even and waited. The creaking went on for forty minutes — she counted — and then stopped.

In the morning, the chair faced the cot.

Her coat, which she had draped over the chair back the evening before because she was cold and didn't want to walk to the hook by the door, was folded on the cot beside her feet. Neat. Collar-in. The way Della would have folded it.

Maren sat on the edge of the cot for a long time.

She wasn't afraid, exactly. That was the part she couldn't explain, afterward: she wasn't afraid. There was no cold dread, no prickling skin, none of the thing she associated with terror. What she felt was something closer to the sensation of walking into a room and finding someone already there — a half-second of wrongness, the world briefly illegible, before the brain catches up.

The brain was having trouble catching up.

She left on day four, which she was not ashamed of. She packed in twenty minutes and left the key under the flowerpot as agreed and did not go back for the letters.

She told the realtor the cabin was in good shape, just needed airing. She didn't mention the chair. She wasn't sure how to describe what was wrong with it, because nothing was wrong with it. It was a chair. It sat still in the daylight. It had a caned seat and dark wood arms and it faced whatever direction it faced when nobody was watching, and that was simply a fact about it, the way some things are simply facts.

The cabin sold in the spring to a couple from Knoxville who wanted a weekend place.

She doesn't know if they hear it. She's never asked. She assumes they have their own explanations — old floors, cold nights, the wood doing what wood does.

She hopes the explanations hold.