It used to be a child. Its lips mime words, but no throat remains. I would hide, but it is already sitting on my bed, one fragmented leg folded under what was once a nightgown.

The fan ticks overhead, stirring humid spores across sagging furniture. Outside, the night clops and laughs: hooves on cobbles, carriage wheels, tourists staggering home. Charleston’s charm drips from moss verandahs. But in here, the walls are close, and I cannot move.

The child’s stare is too wide, its puckered eyes glisten from moisture or a rippling unseen light. Shredded lips form syllables. It calls to me in silent panic. I wonder if the cries are in English, or Portuguese, or a tongue smothered before anyone thought to write.

I want to be awake. I smell my unshowered body and feel the fever-soaked sheets. The glass of water by the bed is still there. I cannot reach it.

The nightgown is torn but neat. Age-yellowed muslin, hand-stitched scalloped edges, frayed and leaking thread. The child’s visible limb ends at the knee; a bone protrudes like an exposed knuckle, the flesh boiled away. Inches away but separate, a tiny foot, shriveled and askew.

The lips part. Only then do I see the rusty shackle, cut into ankle sinew, its flakes merging with corrupted skin. The child's bone fingertips work at it as though it were a handle to carry the lost part of their body. No. It's an anchor. To a seabed. To the mattress. To this earth.

“You should not be here,” I whisper. But perhaps I am the one intruding.

The mouth moves again, word after word I cannot hear. I feel its breath now, short and rapid, its last gasp, forever repeating.

My arms move. The gesture draws it near. I feel nothing in my hands. Its head rests on my chest. I smell salt water and mould, yet underneath the rot, a trace of vanilla. In new darkness I focus on the weight of the air. I hold the shape of absence. It might not be there, and yet I follow the cadence of breaths, from gasp to inward sigh. Fingers trail across my chest and clutch at my skin.

I hear the faintest mewl of relief, but I cannot tell if it is mine or the child’s. 

This air once clung to that child: in fields, in kitchens, in the hold of a ship.

My breath slows. The sound of horses fades, the tick of the fan remains. 

And the fingers tighten.