The Haunting of Anna

Leaf cannot let Anna catch her watching. The room in which Anna performs is above street level, but Anna stops if she feels eyes on her, and then she quietly moves into the private space of the house.

Anna’s porch has long windows that act as walls. It is clearly an addition; one small window on the main frame of the house still remains and Anna does not pull down the shade when she stands at the sink. Leaf could easily see all the details of Anna’s house, but she only looks into the kitchen and the porch room. There are limits to how much one can invade another’s privacy, even if the object of one’s interest is an exhibitionist with some anti-social tendencies.

Anna’s performances are many and varied. Sometimes at night, she dances on the porch in the dark. If the weather is nice, she leaves the windows open and her music wafts across the street into Leaf’s sitting room. The street lamps provide enough illumination for Leaf to see Anna gliding around in the exposed space. Anna also paces in the dark if she is restless, her feet rumbling on the floor as she performs her precise square over and over again in the early hours of the morning. This is how Leaf knows that Anna is an insomniac.

The only night activities that Anna performs in light are reading and writing. Leaf especially likes how Anna presses her finger over certain passages as she reads, as if she is trying to absorb the ideas through her skin and let them travel up her bloodstream to the brain.

Leaf is Anna’s friend, but Anna is not Leaf’s friend. They never speak to one another. Leaf leaves presents on Anna’s top step: an old book, a slice of cake, a piece of beach glass. Anna takes these presents inside, but Leaf never sees what happens to them. Leaf worries that Anna throws away these things: the book was never read and the kitchen did not light up when Anna took the cake from stoop.

Leaf doesn’t know everything about Anna, and she’s constantly surprised by the things she learns. At each window, Anna has hung little bottles upside down. Most of them are rubbed hard with age and have a pale green. Some are cobalt or purple. Leaf did not realize one detail of the bottles until she overheard a conversation between Anna and a passerby.

A woman stood outside Anna’s house and stared up at the bottles twirling violently in the breeze. The stranger’s back said that something bothered her about the bottles. When Anna came out to watch the approaching storm, the woman called up to her.

“Those look a bit like spirit bottles. My grandmother used to hang them in a tree,” the woman said without introducing herself or properly greeting Anna.

Anna’s face lit up. “Yes, that’s the idea I had when I hung them.” She leaned over the rail to talk to the stranger. The woman turned and Leaf could see her disapproving face.

“Spirit bottles don’t have their bottoms cut off. They lure the evil spirits through the necks and trap them there,” the woman said smugly.

Anna smiled the falsely apologetic smile of someone who does not wish to validate criticism.
“Yes, I know. I don’t want to trap spirits. Who wants bottles of nastiness hanging where they live? Letting spirits know that I can trap them if I want to is enough to make them respect me.” The woman glanced sharply at Anna and shuddered before clipping off down the street as if escaping an insane person.

Anna adjusted the bottles that had become entangled in the wind before going into the house and out of Leaf’s sight.

On her darkest days, when Leaf struggles the most with being without being, she remembers that the bottles in Anna’s window are a warning to spirits. Leaf uses this to anchor herself to the land of the living: Anna is relatively tolerant of her still-human audiences. Leaf holds on to this life even though her passing is long overdue. She cannot bear to lose this last thing that she has without having.