Glimmer Year

The year the glimmer came back, Elwood’s great aunt Merle started painting the windows black. She didn’t explain it. Just took to the windows with an old bristle brush and a bucket of sootwater like there was nothing odd about darkening the house in midsummer. “You leave ’em open too long,” she said, “and it sees in.”

Elwood didn’t ask anything. He just nodded and handed her another strip of cloth to bind the doorframe. He didn’t like asking questions or answering them. Words tangled in his mouth or came out too slow, and people didn’t like to wait. People didn’t like it when he got stuck on sounds. His aunt never minded. She spoke soft and steady and gave him time to line up his thoughts like fence posts.

The long scar that ran from his left brow to the corner of his mouth made it easier to hide anyway—he could tilt his head, let his hair fall over his face, and most people stopped trying to talk to him and moved on. He was okay with that. Being looked at too long burned like sun on skin. Sometimes, he imagined his skin turning translucent under their stares, his thoughts bleeding out where they could see. It made his stomach clench, made him wish for shadows.

They lived out past Romp Hole proper, up where the gravel roads turned to bulrush and loose rock. The house leaned against the land like it had given up trying to stand straight—the porch sagged, the chimney cracked, but Aunt Merle said it still had good bones.

Elwood believed her. His parents and the rest of the family were gone. Had been for six years now. They said it was the lake, but he knew better. It was a glimmer year then, too. He didn’t dream of them anymore, not really. Just flashes—wet hair, broken glass, the sound of water.

You could tell a glimmer year, Aunt Merle said. The birds stopped flying straight. Dogs wouldn’t go into the hollers. Even the shadows leaned the wrong way, stretching toward nothing. Fence wires hummed without wind, and porch lights flickered blue before dying. And the woods smelled different—like ozone and peppermint, sharp enough to sting the eyes.

It started when Elwood was walking home from the gas station with a bag of milk bread and a pack of matches. The woods were too quiet. Not the normal hush, but a stillness that pressed against his eardrums like going underwater. The wind blew wrong, too—backward, curling in from the west when it should’ve been pushing south.

The Ozarks swelled with green so deep it looked black in the shadows. Vine-choked hollers yawned open like secret mouths, and wild trumpet vines tangled across the fenceposts, blooming out of season. The air had turned syrupy near dusk, heavy with the scent of burning and leaf rot.

Then, he saw the flicker. It came from a patch of woods he used to walk with his mother, years ago. Something in his chest pinched, like a thread snapping. Just a moment—a light between the trees, not bright like fire—just a pulse. A shiver in the green, like a seam in the world pulling, almost opening.

He blinked, and it was gone. But something in him stayed turned toward it, like a compass needle rattling against a storm it couldn’t see.

He passed the elementary school on his way back, though he hadn’t meant to. It was further than he usually walked, but his feet moved without asking. The chain-link fence around the playground was taller than he remembered. The swings were gone. In their place, three identical merry-go-rounds slowly turned in the windless air.

Elwood stopped and watched them. No children. No laughter. Just the faint metallic creak of rotation. He hadn’t gone to that school in years, but a flicker of memory surfaced—his mother waiting by the side gate, waving to him, the sun behind her turning her hair to gold. A glimmer-year memory. Maybe real. Maybe not.

As he turned to leave, he saw a face in the school window. Brief. Pale. Watching.

It looked like Sadie.

He blinked, and it was gone. Or hadn’t been there at all.

The notebook grew heavier in his backpack with each step. It tugged at his spine like it wanted to drag him into the earth.

When he got home, Aunt Merle was sitting at the kitchen table with the box. “You saw it,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Elwood nodded. For a moment, he thought he might cry. But instead, he just handed her the bag and said, “They moved the mile marker again.”

She didn’t look at him when she slid the box across the table. It was a tin lunchbox with a busted clasp and an old sticker on the lid—a cartoon possum holding a Bible. The air in the kitchen had a stillness that wasn’t peaceful, like everything was holding its breath.

“You remember how to keep a circle?”

He nodded. Charcoal, salt, spit. You didn’t break it once it was set, not for anything. He remembered the last time they’d drawn a circle. He was nine. His uncle had come back wrong from the lake, humming songs that turned sour in his throat. Aunt Merle burned rosemary and crushed ruta and black pepper into the corners of every room. Elwood had crouched beside her, too young to understand but old enough to feel the air turn stiff, like it was waiting to crack.

“Good,” she said, and her hand trembled. “You’ll be the last one who does this time.”

Inside the box was a strip of bone, a coin with no face, a glass bead with threads in it like veins. And the notebook—yellowed paper, shaky handwriting. Half symbols, half scripture. He touched the bead and felt a pull behind his eyes, like something waking up.

“It’s early this time,” Aunt Merle said. “It’s already started. Did you notice?”

He didn’t speak, but the silence wasn’t empty. It pressed down on him, squeezed his ribs, filled the hollows behind his eyes.

That night, Elwood stayed up listening to the woods. Not the coyotes or owls—he knew those. He was listening for the silence between things. For the glimmer’s rhythm. He lay with the bone whistle clutched in his palm, the notebook open to a page he didn’t remember writing, though it was in his own hand. The words were looping like a song:

If they forget your name, call yourself twice. If the stars bend, don’t follow them. If the glimmer speaks in your voice, scream.

They weren’t instructions; they were memory anchors, words like stones stuck fast in a river’s pull. The words made sense to him in a way most things didn’t. Like patterns inside patterns. Like something solid.

By the third day, no one in town remembered his name. He passed Mr. Lark on the church steps, who just nodded and said, “You new around here?” He passed Sadie’s mom outside the store, who told him, “You remind me of my daughter’s friend, the one who moved away.” Sadie didn’t look at him at all. She passed so close he could smell her perfume—lavender and lemon balm—but her eyes slid past him like water on glass.

The glimmer had rewoven them, soft and quiet as mist.

The only things still tethered to truth were the notebook, the bead, and the ache in Elwood’s chest that wouldn’t let go. He repeated names like mantras under his breath. His aunt. Sadie. His own.

He waited for full dark before he returned to the woods. He listened first, the kind of listening you do with your whole self, not your ears. Waited to feel if the woods would take him back. He felt it before he saw it, like something uneasy prickling against his skin. The forest glowed faintly with greenish light, not like moonlight, not like any light he’d seen before. It shimmered the color of bruises mixed with candle smoke, flickering at the edges of his vision. Something inside the glimmer had memory—but not his kind. It remembered in loops. It remembered in hunger.

Elwood didn’t shine a light. He didn’t speak. He just walked, bone whistle at his lips, not blowing—yet. Each step forward felt like stepping deeper into someone else’s breath. Shadows passed beside him, whispering in voices that sounded almost familiar. He saw the shape of his father standing under a tree, waving. He did not wave back.

The glimmer parted for him. It moved without sound, the trees leaning just slightly as if to let him pass. A hundred versions of himself flickered in the corners of his eyes—ages he never lived. Choices he never made.

He stepped into a clearing he didn’t recognize. In its center stood a tree—black, vast, slick as oil. At its base, his aunt’s scarf, laid carefully like an offering. Something moved in the branches. It came down quiet, like it wanted to be heard.

It took the shape of Aunt Merle, but its joints bent wrong and its eyes shone from too deep inside its skull. It smiled with too many teeth.

“You came back,” it said.

“No,” Elwood whispered.

He gripped the notebook, and the pages rustled without wind.

The thing closed in, its voice now a thousand voices—his parents, Sadie, himself—echoing memories back to him, with the edges filed down. No pain. No loss. Just clean loops. “You miss them,” it said with his mother’s voice. “I can give you back what you lost. Just let go.” It showed him the lake—calm, sunlit. His father in the boat, his mother calling his name. Sadie beside him, laughing like she used to. A perfect world.

But none of them said his name right.

Anyway, Elwood had already rebuilt himself once, after his face had been split open, his brain sloshed like water in a cracked jar. He wasn’t about to be rewritten again.

He pressed the glass bead into the bark of the black tree, like pressing a fingernail into a wound. The scream that followed wasn’t sound—it was memory being ripped, peeled, burned down to bone. The glimmer shrieked through the clearing, the babble of voices collapsing into silence.

Elwood didn’t move. He held the bead there until the bark cracked, until the black tree split down the center and bled. He mouthed the words, and his voice held steady.

He didn’t cry. But something behind his eyes went very still, like snow falling in a place no one would ever walk.

He woke up at the edge of the woods, the notebook clutched tight in his hands. The whistle was gone. The bead shattered. The sun was rising. A soft orange broke along the ridge, and for a moment the trees looked gold.

The glimmer was gone—for now.

At the gas station, the man at the register nodded at him and said, “Morning, Elwood.”

He said it right.

He said it like he knew.

That evening, Elwood sat on the porch with Aunt Merle’s scarf in his lap. He laid it carefully in the old lunchbox, feeling the soft fabric comfort his fingers as it grew dark, a thin crescent moon shining as best it could against the blackness of deep night. Crickets had returned to the fields beyond the porch, their song thin and uneven, like a choir relearning a half-forgotten tune.

He pushed his hair back and looked out. He didn’t hide his face from the dark anymore. It saw him, and he saw it, and neither of them looked away.

When the wind shifted, just slightly, he tied a black thread around the post in front of the house. Pressed his white-paint handprint there.

Next time, someone else would need to remember.