In many a country’s folklore, the night of the winter solstice is when the barrier between the land of the living and that of the dead is thinnest, notorious in realms of paranormal activity, ghost stories, and myth.

I have had ghosts for as long as I can remember.

Cruel home ghosts with dark eyes and blurred intentions like the edges of their outlines, ghosts of hollowed hallowed ground, black with mind and silt. They slip through me, water over stone, wearing away, and we sit at the kitchen table at midnight while the rest of the world is asleep, the moon a rotted pearl in a shared teacup.

I have never been good at banishing them. Too kind, too soft, too timid.

My ghost of late was unlike the others, though. It lived in me, on my shoulders, in my bones for months on end, a venomous snake just under my pulse, striking silent and deadly each day. An animal, to be sure.

And it was exorcised, finally wrung from me, on the longest night, by another with her runes burned merciless onto my lungs, no crucifix to speak of.

She found me at the witching hour, dawn well over the horizon keeping light smothered and steel to give me my way thread by thread. She’d become a stranger, or at least, no one I would recognize. Not at first. With her lilied lips and narrow hips and fingertips and black jean rips, shredded through with skin and scythe. Her smile twisted between my paper ribs, ink splashed to stain well-kept memories.

She laid beside me among the covers, the bed dipping beneath her like bowed branches while she traced my cheeks in ice. My ghosts were never so heavy.

She unbraided my body.

Muscles, kneecaps, wrists careful and proper, soldiers along the edges of my sheets as she arranged all my pieces, in rows and valleys for her study. She sang while she worked, sewing sweet as spilled sugar. We said nothing as she scrawled poetry in the lines of my arms and wept love into my eyes, clean and crystal.

She did not explain herself, she did not answer my questions. Time to think provided me plenty, but my tongue was too neatly aligned with my radius and tibia for any protest, for any fight.

She leaned over me, and I stared at the ceiling. Unlike the others, her touch was firm where her shape was not. Digging iron into my ditches, her nails sought shells in my chest, and I could not scream.

When everything was stitched, seamed, and mended, my hair woven back, sternum screwed to spine, she held a mass of menace in the shallows of her elbows. Needled teeth stuck in its gaping jaw, dripping tar.

Bad dreams bite, but it didn't phase her. Only when its tentacles wrapped her slender silver throat and dragged her down into its grave did she open her mouth in a silent cry of injustice.