Violetta

When I met Violetta I was bulky with my first pregnancy. We’d just moved into the old Victorian house and I knew nobody in the neighborhood. She walked in through the kitchen door. Hello, Mother, I’ve been playing, she said, an odd statement from a woman with spiderweb wrinkles from forehead to collarbone. Sniffing the soup on the stove, she said, I’m hungry. I asked where she lived, and she giggled. In this house, silly! I shivered, recalling old ghost stories, then checked her tattered purse. She was a resident of a nearby nursing home. She ate some soup, then I drove her back. She reappeared the next day with a scraped knee—from roller skating, she said—and I offered her a Band-Aid and some apple juice. I should have reported her, but she was company. I called the nursing home when she stopped coming. They told me they had banded her, set an alarm. Like a captured bird, she could no longer migrate home.