Third Shift (Part Two)

Part One

Hey internet people-- I wasn’t intending for this to become a series -- it seems like generally people tend to post a part two the next day, or only a few days later, and that’s clearly not the case here. But in my particular case, the last couple of weeks have been something close to normal.I apologize if this is a bit long, but I’ve had a long night and there’s a lot to unpack. I hadn’t seen anything weird, hadn’t come across any creepy ladies, anything like that.

Except for the nightmares, things were going pretty smoothly towards returning to normal. Until last night.

The nightmares were pretty relentless, but nothing I haven’t dealt with before. Some.. events from earlier in my life have made me pretty intimately aware of the nightmares that come along with a trauma. My family says I tend to dwell, and I don’t doubt them. I have a tendency to replay bad days and worst case scenarios in my head over and over, and it seeps into my sleep. It had gotten so bad I’d started staying with my daughter and granddaughter, to avoid waking up alone and paranoid in an empty house.

Still, though, I felt irrational. At the store, any thin or twitchy women would make me start to sweat. My grandaughter, Olivia. was fascinated. I made the mistake of telling her what had me so spooked, and she’d bugged me to submit it to this place. I did, and a few people commented, a few suggested the woman was some kind of contagious monster. None of it put me at ease, partially because none of it fully fit what happened, and partially because just knowing a lot of pointless information about scary shit doesn’t make it less scary. Even writing this doesn’t help, not really. But I wanted to let people know. To warn them.

After three weeks of fitful nights, Olivia made her first helpful suggestion, that maybe if consulting the internet wasn’t helping, I should do the opposite - get away from it all. We often go down to visit her friend, Krys, in San Elizario, a tiny border town, and bunker down in our little tow-behind camper. She suggested we go out there, away from anything that reminded me of the woman. She even volunteered to drive.

I should have suspected her. Really, after weeks of begging me to go check out the river with her, badgering me to comment on the post or put up a part two, she just switched gears. I didn’t question it at all, but In my defense, I was frazzled and desperate for a good night’s sleep. I agreed to make our bimonthly visit to the tiny town.

I love El Paso, and Texas, but a lot of friends that have visited me here over the years say they don’t care for the feel here. If you live somewhere with forests or mountains or just in a town with some decent sized buildings or an area with some hills, like a lot of people do, it’s easy to understand why. El Paso has a couple of taller buildings, nothing that I would classify as a skyscrapers or anything, but most of the town is short, huddled together houses and businesses, rarely more than one story. But once you’re out of town, the land is immensely flat. Only an occasional, lonely outcropping might show up, but even those tend to stand few and far between. As a result, the sky takes up most of your view, and it's almost always cloudless blue - giant, unblemished, and flat. A lot of people aren’t used to that, they say it makes them feel like they’re being crushed or surrounded by it. I like it, myself. It makes me feel small, but feeling small can be a good feeling for some people. I thought that feeling might help me distance myself from that night.

The sky stretched and soared above us, and I was loving the ride when the land finally devolved into its default state. We were traveling alongside the Rio Grande, it was about a mile to our right, so the landscape was a little greener here than most places around. The desert has its own special shades of green that look utterly different than anywhere else I’ve been. They’re harsher. Looking at the greens of a field or forest or swamp, those are the greens of an abundance of life -- deep and luscious. They teem with life. The greens around here are greens of struggle, of hardiness, of survival of the fittest. They almost always have a brownish or yellowish tint to them. But once you get out of the few miles of farmland that stretch out from the river on either side, even the hardy greens fade away.

The desert is harsh, but even that can be beautiful in its own right.

Olivia, sat behind the wheel of my old blue pickup. It, like the rest of the world out here, was pastel fading to dusty brown. San Elizario’s a tiny little border town, where they don’t even bother to put gravel or stone tiles into their yard. It’s just brown desert dust, separated into squares by metal fencing, which works just fine. as it makes the whole backyard open to be parked and camped in. There are a couple hundred houses in the town, each with a sizable square of the desert to call their own. We were only about 10 minutes out now.

San Elizario’s got the kind of country-western quaintness you’d imagine, which is why I like to visit it so much. God bless El paso but the yards are small, and the houses are cramped together. You get more of that open-aired, old-school ranch feeling in places like San Elizario, and that can be a good breath of fresh air. I was hoping it would be. We passed the gas station I work at, where I’d had my encounter with the strange woman a few weeks ago. I didn’t quit, the job market isn’t great for an old lady like me these days, but I’d gotten more comfortable with it over the weeks, knowing if I saw the lady again it was supply closet or bust.

I stared out the window, appreciating the view of the city, flanked by a low hanging, close to setting sun. A moth that had somehow fluttered its way into the car headbutted my window a few times before dizzily trying one of the back windows for a change. I thought about rolling a window down to let it out, but Olivia interrupted that thought, clearing her throat. “Any new theories on the nosleep?.”

I rolled my eyes. I hadn’t checked the post and she damn well knew it. Hell, I haven’t checked it now. I’m writing this one to get it off my chest and then I’m done. It’s getting knocked out of this old head by some whiskey and reefer. “I’d think you’d know more than me, dear.”

She paused. “I guess so.” She turned towards me. “Aren’t you even a little curious, Grandma?”

I sighed. “No. I’m really not.”

“But, we don’t even know what she was!”

“Haven’t you ever heard the old thing about curiosity killing the cat?” I didn’t want to look at her, let her know how annoyed I was, so I stared out the window. The moth flew right by face, and I waved it away.

“Yeah, and satisfaction brought it back.” She said, matter-of-factly, flashing me a big shit-eating grin. She can be such a little shit sometimes.

“I think satisfaction would probably be the farthest emotion from what I’d feel if I saw that thing again.” I said, and this time I did look at her. The moth fluttered between us, but she saw the look on my face clearly.

“Yeah.” She said, the smile falling off her face. “What about the nightmares, though? Aren’t you worried they might not stop?”

“We can’t even know that those two things are related.” I said. It was a lie, of course.. They were very obviously related. It was insulting to her that I was trying to say they weren’t. I knew it. And Olivia knew too.

She didn’t try to fight me on it, just sighed. “I’m still worried about you.”

“I appreciate it honey, but I don’t think factual closure is what I need. Just time.”

She said nothing. She flicked her blinker, and I realized, with some shock, that we were already turning off the highway onto the dusty road that lead to San Elizario. This was where things got even more lonely, when even the highway, the last vestige of civilization, was out of sight. The sun hung low in the sky -- it’s winter here too, and the sun still sets incredibly early, even if it doesn’t get as cold here.

We were greeted by Krys’s mom, Isabella, as we pulled into their square of desert. She’s originally from Mexico, and is a very religious woman. She and I get along really well, despite that. She never seemed to have a problem with me and Marilyn, but she does have a huge problem with the occult stuff Krys and Olivia are into. She’s a nice lady, and tries not be controlling of her daughter’s friends or interests, but the distaste on her face whenever they so much as watch a horror movie is hard to miss. That’s half the reason we started bringing out the camper -- so the girls could watch their horror movies without Isabella being bothered, or them feeling judged. (The other half is that the house is really small and I’m a big lady who needs my own bed.)

She was happy to see us, but Krys was ecstatic. She and Olivia immediately huddled together into a whispering, giggling ball. They kept whispering into each other’s ears, seated next to each other at the dinner table, and glancing furtively around. Isabella seemed unamused, but not willing to ask about it, and, idiot me, I was too tired and stupid to muster up any suspicion.

But they were plotting.

Isabella and I made pleasant conversation while we ate tamales and eggs. She told me she prayed for me every day, and for Marilyn in heaven too. She’s really the sweetest lady. She went to bed early, around 8, and we made our way out to the camper. I hunkered down in my bed at one end, and the girls at the other where the bunk bed and TV was.

I turned my back to them, so as not to disturb them. I hadn’t slept for more than an hour at a time for a couple nights, preferring to catch short naps where the possibility of getting deep enough into sleep to dream was less likely, and I didn’t want them to feel like I was spying on their fun. Even just laying down with my eyes closed without fully going to sleep still allowed me to go into some kind of resting state where I felt at least a little rested later. But tonight, of all nights, I conked out immediately. No dreams to shake me awake at all.

I awoke to the fluttering noise of tiny wings. Afraid it might be the opening of a dream, I opened one eye hastily. It was just a large black moth fluttering against the light above me. Moths are one of the few annoyances that can be bothered to live in harsh conditions like the desert, and man if they don’t thrive. The sound of its wings was soft, but loud enough, and weirdly unsettling enough, to keep me from getting any real rest. I watched it for a while, and eventually it was joined by two more moths, all dancing around the light. I stared at them for a while, watching them smack into the light like the world’s worse kamikaze pilots, when I noticed.the girls’ movie was no longer going.

I sat up, expecting to see them conked out with the tv endlessly looping on some silent DVD menu screen, or maybe giving some kind of loading error on one of their movie websites. Instead, the TV was off, and the untouched bunkbeds were empty. The only light on their side of the cabin was a laptop, whose screen was too far away to see clearly. Needless to say, I was confused. I made my way across the cabin, hoping that maybe the bunk beds only looked empty as a trick of the light, but they were just as empty close up. One being empty wasn’t too weird -- the camper didn’t have a bathroom, after all. But both? That was suspicious.

I turned my attention the laptop. Two tabs were open -- a map site which was pulled up, and the El Paso Times, our creatively named local paper. The map was in street view, showing a daylit stretch of the fence that surrounds the Rio Bravo. It had a nearly illegible sign that read “UNSAFE AREA -- NO TRESPASSING”, which was the only thing that distinguished it from the miles of fence to either side. The site labeled it as a street on the edge of San Elizario.

Curious, I pulled up the other tab. It was an article on their website -- I only had to read the first two lines before my stomach began to sink. It was about the woman from the gas station -- it was an update (if you could call it that, all it did was verify that nothing new had been found) of the article I’d seen a few weeks before. Skimming it, I felt my stomach drop out entirely.The picture, captioned “the missing woman’s car, found outside of San Elizario”, had a picture of police standing stoicly around the SUV I saw last week. In the edge of the picture, you could just see the edge of a sign -- the first line started with “UN” and the second “NO,”

UNSAFE AREA -- NO TRESPASSING. Just the sort of thing a couple of occult obsessed teenagers would absolutely ignore

The feeling of unease I’d had building since I’d woken up now at its peak. It was like when an appliance is buzzing near you at a low frequency but you can’t figure out exactly where it’s coming from.The moths were back at the light, their big bodies casting shifting shadows around our circle of faces. Something about that made me even more nervous. One landed on my hair, and that was the last straw. I snatched all three of them out of the air, careful not to hurt them.

The thought of the dark outside the camper made me uneasy. Knowing that I was near where the woman-creature had disappeared off the face of the earth had made me stomach start tying itself in knots. That woman had been scary under the harsh fluorescents of a gas station from behind a counter. Hell, she was scary through a locked industrial door across a parking lot. The idea, as unlikely as I knew it was on some level, of seeing her in the dark outside of a camper window had me on edge. The police wouldn’t show up in two minutes if we called them out here like they did at the gas station. It struck me that I didn’t actually know if San Elizario even had their own police department, or even so much as a sleepy sheriff whose office doubled as their garage.

The moths squirmed and wriggled in my hand, soft and powdery. I’d forgotten they were in there. Luckily, I’d passed out with my shoes still on, which I tend to do while camping, so I didn’t have to pause to get rid of them. I strode too the door, and, before I could scare myself out of it, took a few steps away from the camper and extended my arm. I opened my fist, and the slightly sweat-dampened but otherwise no worse for wear moths exploded out into the night. They immediately swung around towards one of the camper’s closed windows, battering themselves against the glass. I let myself have a harsh little chuckle - an exhale that was equally exasperated as it was humorous - at their stupidity. I wiped the greyish powder they had coated my hand in onto my jeans.

A shriek rang out from the direction of the river.I jumped, and almost started to run towards it. The river was only about 100 yards away from the edge of town, and the edge of town was a few blocks down from Krys’s backyard. It rang again, loud and inhuman, but sounding just human enough to make my skin prickle. Not a young girl in danger, just a barn owl. I was already nervous beyond belief, a low, unpleasant hum in the back of my mind, and that damn thing was not helping.

I knew I needed to find the girls, and that meant going out towards that sound. I also knew that was an awful idea. All I had was a flashlight, another tool I always slept with -- no weapon, nothing. I know I’m a Texan, but I’m also a lower income Texan, and guns are not cheap. I know how to shoot one, but not how to afford one. A little voice in my head told me to ignore it, that they’d go on their silly little riverside excursion and hike home with some fun stories about a scary owls. But I knew better. After seeing the two pictures, one a blurry fullscreen on a map site, the other a crisp newspaper photographer’s weekly paycheck, I knew better. Those girls needed me, and they had no idea what they were in for if they did find anything.

I scanned the yard with my flashlight, and, after taking a deep breath, started towards the area the site had shown the sign to be in. After only about a minute of walking, I was outisde the city limits, in short expanse of scrubland between it and the river. In the light from the waning moon, I could just make out the fence around the river - the border fence between America and Mexico. Beyond that was the river. It’s not a particularly large river, not in line with the Thames or anything, its name mostly comes from it’s length. But it does get deep in some places, with a deadly undercurrent. A few texas towns a bit further down the river get a lot of dead bodies popping up of people who tried to cross but misjudged the undercurrent. They get buried in paupers graves, in plywood caskets. A lot of them are never identified.

The police in El Paso have let those downriver sheriff's departments know to keep an eye out for a little girl and her mom.

Now, I’m pretty partial to the desert during the day, but even I can understand people’s worries a little when the sun sets. The earth and sky combine into one dark mass, and the air gets heavy. But I was feeling a little better, regardless. I was almost to the fence, and the lights from town were still clearly visible. The stars and moon hung above, making some visibility even without the help of the flashlight.

The fence itself was even kind of unsettling. Bits of green poked through the fence, and the smell of plant life was heavy in the air. Down by the river is one of the few places plants bigger than scrub and softer than cactus grow naturally. Though they’re scattered, you occasionally even get trees right down next to the water. This area seemed to be a wider part of the river, though. There was a lot of vegetation down there, a wall of shrubs and trees about five feet high, a mess of scrubs and other small plants around it. I flashed my light into it -- it was one of the densest areas I’d ever seen around the river. The smell, a mostly alien one for me, hung heavy in the air, and unlike most parts of the river, it all crowded against the fence, as if it wanted to spread out even further..

I caught up with the girls as they were struggling to re-break the mended fence. Not that a great job had been done -- it was just chickenwire padlocked onto the hole the woman had made. Krys, who I could tell right away was the ringleader of this expedition, had come prepared with a bolt cutter. I have no idea where she got that at 17, but she had clearly planned for this for a while.

They were whispering furtively to each other. “C’mon, Liv.” Krys said, snapping off one of the padlocks. “It’s a big hole. We’ll both fit. I scoped it out during the day.”

Olivia, clearly worried and more than ready to head home, glanced around. She saw me, her eyes widened. I think at first all she saw was my silhouette, because her eyes got gigantic, but then shrank a little. I presume because she went from “I’m about to be murdered” to “Grandma is about to kick my ass” levels of fear.

An owl, maybe the same one from earlier, screamed again. “Hey Grandma.” Olivia said glumly, and Krys’s head shot up. She cursed in spanish again, exasperated.

“Hi, girls.” I said. I was putting on my best “you’re in trouble” voice. I was still really uneasy, but I knew I needed to show authority to get them out of there and back to the camper. “What are you doing?”

Olivia refused to make eye contact with me. Krys, having just broken the last lock, yanked the chickenwire off the fence and threw it off to the side. “Going down to the river.” She said, conversationally.

“No.” I said sharply, and she turned towards me, chin jutting out defiantly. I kept looking back and forth between her and the hole and the fence, to make sure nothing, whether it be a crazy lady or coyote, came charging at us. The owl let out its horrifying shriek again, still behind us but closer. Goosebumps erupted along my arms. It’s such a creepy sound, so close to human that for a brief second you think it is, before your logical brain steps in. And a human would have to be in a lot of pain and fear to make a sound like that.

The hole was large and jagged. We stood around it, scanning it with our flashlights. My sense of unease was back looking at it. It looked like something had wrenched the metal around, it didn’t look cut at all.

“Where did the hole come from?” Olivia asked, voicing the question that was hovering between the three of us. “How did she make it?”

Krys seemed uneasy now too, as if the thought that something actually dangerous might happen had just begun to occur to her. “I don’t know, maybe with her car?

“It looks… like it was ripped off.” Olivia said. I’d been thinking the same thing. “I don’t like this. Maybe we should go back, Krys. I think I’ve seen enough.”

Krys scoffed, although it sounded less confident than before. “We’ve already done the illegal part. Might as well keep go--”

A loud shriek sounded, right behind us. I whipped around and a huge white face with fully black eyes filled my flashlight’s beam. We all screamed, and it screamed back, coming right at us. Without thinking, I shielded my face and backed away. Olivia ducked behind me, still screaming. Krys ran through the jagged hole in the fence, cowering on the other side of it.

The owl looped around, and swooped back in for another attack, its razor sharp talons coming within an inch of my face. Shielding Olivia as best I could, I walked us backward through the fence, wanting some kind of barrier between us and the angry animal. The owl’s talons raked through the fence, still screaming it’s awful humanoid scream. I shone the flashlight on it and it twisted its face away. It let out two bursts of angry noise, and took off again. It’s call echoed from the sky, where it blocked out the stars before disappearing.

“Jesus.” I whispered. “Krys, are you okay?”

She laughed shakily. “I mean, besides all of my childhood nightmares coming true, yeah.” She chuckled nervously, and straightened up. “But hey, it got us through the fence.” Her voice got a little stronger. “I’ve never seen an owl act like that before. They don’t normally attack people.”

“Maybe that one’s got rabies or something.” Olivia said, pulling away from her painful grip on me.

I was still too shaken to join in on the conversation. They continued talking nervously, but I was no longer paying attention. The smell of greenery was strong here - abnormally strong for the desert. And under my flashlight's beam, it seemed that some of them were flowering -- odd for this time of year. Hell, even right next to the river you rarely saw this much plant life, and we were still a good fifteen feet away from the water itself. The smell was almost nauseating, perfuming the air. I took a step, trying to steady myself, and dozens of moths erupted, frantic and loud, from the underbrush, flying into my face and light.

I sputtered, waving them away. “Jesus. There’s so many goddamn bugs out here.” I directed my light towards the edge of the water. It was still mostly obscured by the weird amount of plant life, but I could see its edge. And then, from deeper in, I heard a splash. The girls both froze, lifting their flashlights up to help intensify the beam.

Dimly, in the center of the river, waist deep in the water, was the girl I’d seen in the backseat of the car at the gas station.

“Help!” She called, her voice rough and ragged. “Please! Mommy!”

“Oh my God.” Olivia whispered, and we all began to run towards the voice.

Krys and Olivia pulled ahead almost immediately, which wasn’t surprising given that I’m 40 years their senior. But my slower pace gave me more time to take in the scene. We were pushing our way through water swirling around her. Her wet hair, long and dark, was plastered to her pale face, her tiny arms held out to us imploringly. Her eyes reflected the light, gleaming with tears.

Krys was the fastest, plunging into the water first. She began to wade her way out to the girl. “Be careful! The undercurrent!” I yelled. But I was going to plunge into it too, the second I got there. That girl was so afraid. She needed us. Somehow, whatever her mother had become, she had survived it, and I had a chance to save her and I wasn’t going to squander it. Krys was already a few big steps out into the water, almost up to her own waist in the river.

The extra time gave the little voice in the back of my mind time to speak, and I realized what was wrong with the picture.

A burst of adrenaline shot through me, and I rushed forward. It was the kind of thing that I knew, even at the time, I was gonna feel hard the next day, but in the heat of the moment I couldn’t take the time to care. Olivia had just started into the water, up to her knees. I took a long bound, landing in deeper water, ahead of her but not quite up to Krys. Olivia screamed, but there was no time to see why. I feel like shit saying it now, but I was mostly zoned in on Olivia. I reached for Krys without looking, and missed. I grabbed Olivia’s arm and dragged her with me towards the edge of the water.

I had to get her out of the water.

She resisted, of course, trying to pull towards the girl. “Grandma wha-”

“Just go!” I barked at her. Her eyes widened at the fear in my voice, and she stumbled onto the shore. Knowing that she was safe, I whirled around just in time to see Krys lose her balance and go under.

“Fuck!” I screamed, and made a grab for her, getting ahold of her hair. As I pulled her head out from under the water, she yelped, and instinctively raised her hands up to try and wrench mine out of her hair, making her easier to drag. With the light from Olivia’s flashlight which she was now using to spotlight us, I saw pale white hands around her ankles and things that could have been faces at the edge of its beam. It happened so fast, but the faces, if that was what they were, seemed to be eyeless and screaming.

I might have imagined them. I’m not sure. But those hands… I’m pretty sure they were real. I think it was more than the undertow that brought Krys under.

“My mommy -- she’s sick! Please help me!”

Olivia was all the way out of the water, but I didn’t like how close to the edge she was. “Get away from the water!” I barked, and she did. Fighting the resistance (of the undertow, I was telling myself at the time) I moved my hands to Krys’s upper arms, my flashlight dropping, the beam aimed out towards the water.

“Help ME! HELP MEEEEEE!” The girl’s screams were more desperate. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING???!!!” She shrieked, and her calls became wordless. Her fear had changed to fury, and what humanity was left in her screams was quickly dissolving away. She was closer to us now, and her bruises and cuts were more visible in the flashlight’s beam, And her eyes were more visible too -- glazed with a thick sheen of white. Her skin was pure white, and her lips were blue.

I got Krys’s feet out of the water and shoved her behind me, never turning away from the thing approaching us.

Its hands, blue nail beds more visible now, fingertips starting to rot from the water, wriggled like maggots. I wanted to vomit looking at it. Its half-rotted, glazed eyes rolled back as its screams subsided. Someone screamed, I think it was Olivia, and the creature dissolved into the water in front of us. This time I screamed, and we all backpedalled away from the water.

A voice emanated out of the still rippling area near my feet. I recognized it immediately -- it was the unfiltered version of the voice of the woman from the gas station. Lilting, barbed-wire-wrapped-in-velvet, but not filtered through the vocal box of a human. “Clever.” The voice was overwhelming, maddening. It was like the smile, I knew if we heard it too much, we wouldn’t make it out of here with our sanity intact, but it froze us in place. I was still only about a foot away from the water’s edge, and couldn’t back away as the water began to move again. “Very…. clever.”

Another figure began to form out of the water. Now it was wearing the body of the woman from the gas station again, rotted and dripping. Its eyes were mostly gone, and its lips had begun to decay. It winked at me, and began to grin it’s awful, too-wide grin, it’s gums black and frayed. The wink gave me the millisecond of clarity I needed, and I snagged both of the girls’ arms and tore my face away from it. I felt fingers, cold and slimy, search for purpose on my back, but it found none, and it shrieked furiously again.

We started to make our way up the incline to the fence, stumbling and swearing, Krys crying to my right, Olivia panting to my left, when a new noise began. It started as a soft murmur, like a light wind turning the pages of a book. It got louder the higher we climbed, the closer to the hole in the fence. “Grandma” Olivia sobbed “What is that?”

I only tightened my grip on her arm. I didn’t have an answer. I could see the lights of town, the stars above us, and that’s all I had time to concentrate on. My calves were on fire and my breathing was labored, but I dragged the two crying girls with me with all of my might. Then, the sound surrounded us, and the lights from town and the stars were blotted out. Moths -- thousands of them, a solid wall of them, hit us head on, squeezing through the hole in the fence, fluttering through the latticework. I opened my mouth to scream, and several flew in, squirming on my tongue, in my ears, my hair. I was choking on them.

Their momentum pushed us backwards, their soft powdery wings on every inch of my skin. I wrenched around as much as I could without letting go of the girls’ arms, to make sure we weren’t too close to the water. The creature stood there in the center of everything, still illuminated by my fallen flashlight. The moths flew into its rotting eyes, decimating what was left of them, and fluttered in through the holes created by its missing teeth, alighting on its black gums. It was grinning the same grin I’d seen at the store. I knew, somehow, that this is what I’d sensed lurking under the surface before -- but even this wasn’t quite right. It was still shrouded just enough that I didn’t go mad just looking at it.

It was as much as I was willing to know. I tore my eyes away, spitting out a squirming, half-crushed moth. With my head turned to the side, I couldn’t even see my own arm in the mass, let alone Olivia or Krys. But I could still feel their arms, and with immense effort, I took another step forward, into the stinging, squirming mass, feeling them come with me. The creature began to shriek again, but now it was a terrible, screaming laughter. The sickly scent of moth and plant life made my stomach curdle.

The shrieks were now all around us too, and I realized with horror that I recognized the sound -- the owl. But now there were more, though I couldn’t tell where in the undulating mass of moths, The shrieks continued, and I felt a sharp pain on my scalp as something raked across it. Blood began to run down my face, hot and sticky, and moths started to stick to it.

Then, suddenly, everything stopped. We’d emerged, a few feet outside of the huge, ragged hole in the fence. Moths still squirmed on my face, stuck in my blood trail, and I spit another one, wet and weakly squirming, out of my mouth. I could hear spitting on both sides of me. I let go of the girls’s arms, and spun around. The river was dark, but calm, illuminated by the dim light of the moon. There was no sign of the woman, or the moths, other than the unfortunate string of them glued to my head with partially congealed blood, but three huge barn owls sat on the other side of the fence, cocking their heads at us. One opened its maw of a beak and let out the same shrieking laugh we’d heard only moments before.

Olivia grabbed my arm, and began to sob uncontrollably. Krys was crying too, and I reached out and put my arm around her shoulder. She turned into the embrace, sobbing. “I… I felt like I was going to go crazy just looking at it.” Krys said between huge sobs. “Oh god what was that?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to know. I don’t want to know.” I was in too much shock to have an emotional reaction, which was good because both the girls were a mess.

I looked over at the fence. One of the owls now stood in the hole , staring at me intently. “Clever. Very… clever…. Clever… Bird” It crowed, and then began to shriek with laughter again. Olivia and Krys cried harder. Gently, I pulled them away from me so we could start walking back to the camper. The sun was already rising. I checked my watch. I’d left the camper at midnight, took a ten minute walk, and had our… encounter, which only took maybe twenty minutes in and of itself -- or so it felt. But the sun doesn’t rise until about 7:00 am here in the winter. I was glad though -- I had a feeling the creature didn’t like the sun.

The girls didn’t seem to notice the disparity in time, and I didn’t want to worry them, so I didn’t mention it. The sun was peeking over the horizon as we walked the ten minutes home through the scrub grass in silence. I washed the moths and blood off my face, glad that the wound was hidden under my hair so I wouldn’t have to explain it to Isabella, and each of us took a long shower to wash all the moth dust off. We sat in silence in the house’s living room until Isabella woke up, and forced small talk as Isabella cooked us eggs and tortillas, but we couldn’t make eye contact with each other. Krys called her dad to come pick her up, and he was outside to get her when we left.

Our goodbye with Krys was stilted, awkward, and rushed. We were eager to get away from the place, and had only stuck around for pleasantries for Isabella’s sake. The girls shared a long embrace, and whispered into each other’s ears a little, and we hopped in the car. I decided to drive this time around. As I adjusted the side mirror, and Olivia buckled her seatbelt, Isabella, hand still on Krys’ shoulder, turned towards me to wave.

Sitting in the passenger seat of the truck on our way back, Olivia spoke up, in a voice still a bit hoarse from screaming. “Grandma, how did you know? How did you know something was wrong with the girl?”

I sighed. “Krys is what, five ten, somewhere around there? Pretty average height?”

She nodded.

“And the little girl was 10, or thereabouts. So probably like, four feet, maybe a little taller.”

“Yeah?”

“How was she waist deep in water that would have been chest deep on us?” I looked over at her.

Her eyes widened. She didn’t say anything else the rest of the ride home. When a moth fluttered out from the backseat of the truck. she crushed it against the dashboard without a word.

The one thing I haven’t told Olivia, which I never want her to know, which is why I’m posting this without her help, is that as Isabella waved goodbye in the rearview, she smiled at me. A smile that spread from ear to ear, and twisted her face. A smile that made me feel like I was going to go crazy just looking at it.

She -- it -- smiled and waved goodbye.

I’m tired, writing this from a hotel. We’re going inland, as far away from the river as possible. I wanted to post this to get it off of my chest, and to warn those of you who do read it. Stay away from the Rio Bravo at night, And if you hear someone crying for help, or see them reaching out to you from the water, be careful. Don’t go in.