Now I could hear other footsteps trailing the first. I pictured a whole gaggle of runners, a cross-country team sprinting by in their shorts as if nothing was wrong. God, that would be good. I was shaking.

The first runner came into view, really moving, and it took me a moment to recognize my own mother. I just watched stupidly as a blue woman-her face the bruised color of a sparrow chick-ran deliriously toward me, dress flapping. Her open mouth was an obscene black hole. Then it clicked: That housecoat…

"M-mummy?" I cried, stumbling backward.

As she attempted to lunge over the fence, her dress became entangled in the hooked wires, and she fell. Senseless with shock and grief, I cried out and jumped to help her, but froze again at the sight of her rolling and heaving in the dirt like a wild animal. She was so blue, blue as someone in the throes of strangulation… but she was not choking. All the while she struggled to get loose, the huge black pupils of her glaring eyes were fixed on me. It was such a manic, predatory look that I shrank back with fear. Then the dress gave way like a shed skin.

I don't remember screaming or running or anything else that happened for the next few seconds, but somehow I wound up crouched in the trailer, gasping for breath, with my back against the front door. The door rattled in its frame. I must have been in shock, because the strongest feeling I had was that I was late and my mother would be worried.

Once when I was in fourth grade, I had been so late coming home that she called the police. Some other girls and I had been holding a kind of seance in a churchyard, having convinced ourselves that the statues of saints moved when we weren't looking. We even gave offerings of pocket change. But then some less-credulous older boys showed up and spoiled the illusion.