The Maleovent Entity of Doris Bither

The first bruise sat high on Doris Bither’s inner arm, the shape of a thumb pressed hard enough to leave a crescent of purple under the skin.

She found it while rinsing plates in water gone cloudy with grease. The apartment sink backed up if you looked at it wrong, and tonight it stank faintly of cabbage and bleach. Doris held her arm under the yellow bulb above the counter and turned it this way and that. Four marks on one side. One on the other. Not a bump against a doorway. Not the edge of a table. Fingers.

Behind her, the boys were arguing over the television.

“I had it first.”

“You never have it first. You just sit closest.”

“Ma said—”

“Ma didn’t say nothing.”

Doris dropped the plate into the dish rack harder than she meant to. The wire frame clattered. “Enough.”

The room obeyed her voice for all of two seconds. That was the thing about the place. Nothing stayed settled. Not the children, not the pipes, not the shadows that gathered too thick in the corners after sunset.

She dried her hands on a towel that smelled sour no matter how often she washed it and went to the living room. The carpet had once been brown, maybe. Now it was the color of old tea, worn flat in front of the sofa. Her youngest sat cross-legged on the floor with a plastic truck in pieces around him, not playing, just pulling the same wheel on and off its axle. Her older two were on the couch, shoulders touching, eyes fixed on each other instead of the screen.

“Look at me,” Doris said.

They did.

She pushed up the sleeve of her housedress and held out her arm. “Which one of you grabbed me?”

The oldest snorted first, quick and nervous. “Nobody grabbed you.”

“Don’t do that.” She stepped closer. “Don’t decide I’m stupid before I finish asking.”

The middle boy’s face changed then. Not guilt. Worse. Recognition.

Doris saw it and felt something small and hard go through her stomach.

“What?” she said.

He looked at the window over her shoulder. The curtains were shut, but the fabric moved a little anyway, lifting and settling as if someone had passed behind it. “You had one on your shoulder this morning.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did,” he said, softer now. “By your bra strap.”

The youngest didn’t look up. “There’s one on your leg too.”

Doris turned too fast and banged her shin on the coffee table. The ashtray rattled. A lipstick-stained cigarette rolled free and dropped to the carpet, leaving a tiny black mark. She didn’t notice. She grabbed the hem of her dress and pulled it up to the knee. There it was: another bruise, dark at the center, yellowing at the edges like it had been there for days.

Her oldest stood up. “Maybe you do it in your sleep.”

Nobody spoke after that. The television laughed at some joke no one heard.

Doris let her dress fall. “Go to bed.”

“It’s not even—”

“Go.”

They went because she said it a second time. Shoes scuffed the hall. A door shut. Then another. The apartment settled around her with its usual noises—the refrigerator kicking on, pipes knocking in the wall, a radio from next door bleeding in and out under the plaster.

Doris stayed where she was, one hand on the coffee table, breathing through her mouth.

Sleep. Fine. She could have accepted sleep.

She could have accepted drinking too much and forgetting, or banging into things, or the boys horsing around and lying because they were afraid she’d come down on them. There were explanations for most things if you wanted them bad enough.

Then the lamp beside the sofa clicked off.

Not flickered. Clicked.

The room dropped into the blue light of the television. Doris stared at the lamp. Its chain still swung, slow and silver, as though someone had just let it go.

From the hallway came her youngest son’s voice, thin with the kind of fear children don’t know how to fake.

“Ma?”

Doris didn’t answer. She was looking at the dark mouth of the hall, at the shape standing inside it where no shape had been a second before.

It was taller than the doorframe should have allowed, and it moved when she looked straight at it. Not away.

• Closer.

Doris could not say later whether it had a face. She remembered the shape of the hallway more than the thing in it: the narrow strip of linoleum, the cracked paint at the trim, the boys’ shoes lined up by the wall. Then the air changed. It went cold in one breath, sharp enough to raise the hair on her arms. Her hand tightened on the table edge until the nail beds blanched white.

“Who’s there?” she said, though even then she knew how foolish it sounded.

The answer was not a voice. It was a pressure, sudden and heavy, as if someone had stepped up close behind her and put both hands around her upper arms. Doris jerked away and knocked the lamp clean off the end table. It hit the floor with a burst of glass. At the same instant the television went black, and in the dark she heard the youngest boy start to cry from the hallway, one sharp sob cut off halfway, as if a hand had covered his mouth. Doris moved toward the hall by instinct and got only two steps before something struck her chest hard enough to send her backward into the sofa. The breath went out of her in a flat grunt. She caught herself on the cushion and felt, through the thin cotton of her dress, a weight pressing down on her collarbone, then sliding, as if a hand had been dragged off her skin. She could hear the boys in their rooms now, doors opening, feet running, but they sounded far away, muffled by the rush in her ears.

The youngest was crying for real by the time she reached the doorway. He stood barefoot in the dark with one hand clamped over his own mouth and the other pointing past her into the apartment. Doris followed the line of his finger. Nothing there. Just the hall, the kitchen light leaking under the jamb, the broken lamp glass glittering on the floor like wet teeth. Then, right where the wallpaper had bubbled near the thermostat, something thudded once against the wall from the inside.

Her arm began to sting. She looked down and saw the skin blooming darker by the second, as if the mark had been painted under her flesh.

“Get back in your room,” she said, though her voice did not sound like hers anymore. The boys did not move. The oldest had come to the end of the hall and stopped there, one hand braced against the wall, his face pale in the television dark. He was looking at her arm. Doris lowered it quickly, but not before he saw the bruise spreading under the skin, a fresh bruise where there had been no impact she could remember. The youngest made a small choking sound and backed into the bedroom doorway.

Another thud came from the wall, lower this time, as if something heavy had shifted its weight inside the plaster. A picture frame on the buffet tipped and fell face-down with a crack of glass. Doris flinched so hard her shoulder hit the doorjamb. Her own fear made her angry, and the anger gave her enough to move. She seized the youngest by the collar and pushed both boys toward their room. “Stay there,” she said. “Do you hear me? Stay in there and don’t come out.”

They went, stumbling over each other, and she stood in the hall after they were shut away, listening to their breathing through the thin door. The apartment was quiet again except for the refrigerator and the faint, steady scrape of something moving over the wall in the dark, slow as a fingernail dragged across paint. Doris looked at the place by the thermostat and felt, with a cold certainty that sat in her stomach like iron, that whatever had touched her was still there.