I hear Zoey wake up at midnight wailing about a ghost by her bed. From behind her elephant plushie, she says she felt two hands on her head and something wet like a puppy dog’s nose on her forehead. The air around her bed is cold and damp with bottomland fog. 

So you tell me, Momma, are you kissing her goodnight, or are you trying to devour her slumber? Can’t you find something else to eat besides my toddler’s dreams? In the morning, after you’ve left a moth-wing dust on everything you touched, Zoey asks when the bad dreams will stop. I open her squeezy yogurt. Don’t know, baby, I say. But dreams can’t hurt you. 

I’d move us if we had somewhere to go. I’d sell this house if it was in any decent shape. To buy us some time, I sprinkle a row of salt across the windowsills and by the door. Last time I laid salt outside the house, deer crowded around our porch like it was a dang salt lick. But you eventually showed up. That’s how hungry you are. So hungry you could eat a house. 

🩸

I mention your presence to Grandma when I pick up Zoey after work. Grandma doesn’t seem surprised. Your Momma wants to come back, she said, set everything right. Grandma stands and shuffles to her kitchen. Her diabetic socks have holes in the heels. You’ve put us through too much, Momma. Grandma returns with a bible-sized, red leather book. Great-Grandmaw’s book. She kept it near the stove in her cabin in the hollers. The first time I visited that cabin, I was with you, Momma, barely older than Zoey, and you carried me on your bony hip. My last visit there was to pick up a bag of ingredients for Grandma. The next day was my high school graduation, which you missed. 

Grandma hands me the book. It’s time you claim your birthright, she says, and her voice echoes with hundreds of years, with knowledge as ancient and cold as Ozark spring water. Wait ‘til your Momma’s at her hungriest, she says, at the next full moon. 

After I fasten my sleeping girl in her car seat, I stuff the book into the glove compartment of the Bronco. I know what people call Grandma behind her back. I never wanted that same word to be said about me. But things besides addiction run in our family. Elemental gifts, hardened by time and circumstance, passing from one woman to the next. 

🩸

After I’ve put Zoey to bed, it’s 11 p.m. Armed with a broom to shoo away raccoons and possums, I get the book from my truck. I realize what I look like, broom and spell book in my hands, as I kick the Bronco’s rusted door shut. 

I open the book in the kitchen. An index card falls into the sink. A recipe written in Grandma’s handwriting. 

To Feed a Hungry Spirit 

Maw’s basic recipe, adjusted to feed Melissa if she comes back, and Lord knows she will try: 

− 2 ½ cups sawdust from the tree that broke through the windshield 
− 2 tsp. dirt from the bottom of her shoes, when she got out of the car and walked about four feet before dying from internal bleeding 
− 1 tsp. crushed oxycodone the paramedics found in her jacket pocket 
− A pinch of salt for the dough, a handful of salt for the threshold
− Enough rainwater from an April thunderstorm to make a soft biscuit dough 

Steps: 

1. Whistle into a paper bag the song that played on the car stereo when she run off the road. Add two tablespoons of granulated sugar to the bag 
2. Roll dough on floured countertop to ¼ inch, or as thick as the veil between worlds 
3. Cut & fry in oil, turning once ‘til golden like her hair 
4. Drop the biscuits into the bag. Roll it shut and shake it like you’re trying to wake Melissa after one of her benders 
5. At midnight, leave the biscuits where she needs to rest for eternity 

I can gather these ingredients, Momma. Your pill bottles are still in my bathroom cabinet. The tree is just a half-mile down the road. I drive past that tree every goddamn day. I should make you real biscuits instead. I have flour and baking powder and milk, but the milk is a week past expired. And you’d still always be hungry. 

🩸

The dough is the color of my skin—your skin—full of splinters, bruised, jagged. I put a raw flake of dough on my tongue. I taste your perfume. 

I fill your old cast-iron pan with half a bottle of slightly rancid canola oil. When the surface is shimmering—a sign the oil is hot and dangerous—I drop the biscuits into the pan. They sizzle and puff up. The grease snaps at my wrists. Sugar sticks to my fingers.

🩸

At the cemetery just before midnight, I push Zoey in her old stroller around the graves and patches of thistle and pokeweed. She wakes up just enough to ask me where we are, and before she can cry, I tell her we’re making the bad dreams go away. No more nightmares. Not even when you’re awake.

Did we wake up the froggies? She asks me. Go to sleep, froggies, she commands the peeper frogs chirping in the swampy lowlands around us. And for a few seconds, they go quiet. I find your headstone and rest the soggy, crinkled bag in the wet grass. I smell the sugar and oil and grief. My stomach growls. Zoey yawns and pulls her fleece blanket over her head. A blue mist rises from the ground. Pressure on my head, an ache in my chest, as it has been night after night after you died. I don’t want to see you, not in the condition you left this world. In response, indigo clouds shroud the full moon. I can still see Zoey, her pale blanketed form. Someday I’ll teach her the book, but first, I’ll teach myself. 

Come smell what I’ve cooked for you, Momma. Come and fill your broken belly, taste what you’ve made. Eat and forget you were hungry, and I’ll remember what it was like to be full.