Marlene pulled a heavy white pillowcase from the clothesline, the wooden pin popping as it released the fabric. The Mississippi sun felt like a warm, heavy palm pressed against her back. At seventy-one, her joints usually gave her a bit of trouble in the humidity, but today the air was dry enough that she moved with a rhythmic ease. She folded the pillowcase into a neat square and tucked it into the plastic basket at her feet.

Sundays were for the spirit, but Mondays were for the chores. Yesterday, Marlene had stood in the second row of the choir at New Hope Baptist, her voice joining forty-four others in a rendition of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” The congregation was small—just forty-five folks on a good day—but they made enough noise to fill the rafters. She liked the choir. It gave her a reason to wear her good hats and a chance to see people who didn’t live in her house.

Her house was a modest pier and beam structure, raised off the red clay by stacks of brick and sturdy timber. It had been her sanctuary for thirty years, ever since she moved back to the rural outskirts to claim a piece of quiet.

A sharp, thin “mew” rose from the shadows beneath the floorboards.

Marlene froze, the next clothespin held between her teeth. She took it out and set it in her apron pocket. Queenie, a calico with a notched ear, was stretched out on the porch steps, grooming a paw with total indifference. Queenie was the mother of the noise. Along with Big Tom and a tabby named Sister, Queenie made up the feline population of the property.

Marlene didn’t hold with the way folks in the city treated animals. To her, a cat was a creature with a job to do—mostly keeping the field mice out of the pantry—and a soul that deserved a full belly and a soft word. She made sure they had bowls of clean water and a scoop of dry kibble every morning. She’d scratch Big Tom behind the ears until he purred, but she wasn’t about to dress them in sweaters or call them her “babies.” They were animals. They lived their lives by instinct, and that included the lack of a vet. In this part of the country, you didn’t load a cat into a crate and drive forty miles for a surgery that cost a week’s groceries. You let nature take its path.

The path this time had led Queenie under the house.

Marlene looked at the lattice skirting that covered the crawlspace. Somewhere under the kitchen, tucked into the dry dirt and the darkness, was a litter of kittens. She had heard them for three days now—tiny, bird-like cries that signaled new life. She wanted to see them, to check if they were healthy or if Queenie needed an extra bit of wet food to keep her milk up, but the very thought of the crawlspace made her stomach turn over.

She had not been under a house since 1962.

Marlene was nine years old then. Her family lived in a house much like this one, sitting high on its haunches. Her brother had kicked a rubber ball, their only one, and it had vanished into the gloom beneath the porch. Being the smallest, Marlene was elected to go get it.

She remembered the shift in temperature as she went from the baking yard into the cool, damp shade. She had crawled on her hands and knees, the dirt gritty against her palms. The further she went, the lower the floorboards seemed to hang. She reached the center of the house, where the light from the edges became a dim, grayish blur.

That was when the world changed. A stray bit of Spanish moss, blown under by a storm, brushed against her cheek. To her young mind, it wasn’t moss; it was the hairy leg of a spider the size of a dinner plate. She had gasped, and the sound of her own breath seemed to rattle like the scales of a diamondback. In the darkness, every jagged shadow became a coil of a snake. Every rustle of a dried leaf was a swarm of insects closing in. She had become convinced the house was settling, sinking into the earth to pin her there forever. She couldn’t move. She had stayed in the center of that blackness, paralyzed by a nightmare of her own making, until her father had to crawl in and drag her out by her ankles. She had come out screaming, covered in dust and cobwebs, and she had never set foot in a crawlspace again.

Marlene shook the memory away and picked up the laundry basket. She didn’t need to go under there. Queenie was a good mother. Nature would handle the kittens just fine.

Her phone buzzed in her apron. She set the basket on the porch and pulled it out. It was a text from Mabel.

Kids are driving me crazy. Junior lost his shoe and Sarah won’t eat her peas. Wish I could come up this weekend but I’ve got to work the double shift at the hospital. Love you, Mama.

Marlene sighed, a soft, sympathetic sound. Mabel was in Montgomery, working herself to the bone to provide for those four grandchildren. She was a good girl, a strong woman, but she was tired. Marlene wished she could help more, but Montgomery was a long drive, and Mabel’s life was a whirlwind of school schedules and laundry of her own. They talked when they could, usually late at night when the kids were finally asleep. Marlene told her about the choir and the cats, and Mabel told her about the city noise and the price of gas.

“You hang in there, sugar,” Marlene whispered to the screen.

She carried the basket inside, the screen door clicking shut behind her. The house smelled like lavender and floor wax. She spent the next hour putting things away, smoothing the sheets onto her bed and hanging her Sunday dress back in the closet. She moved with a purpose, keeping her mind off the “mews” that drifted up through the gaps in the wood.

By the time the sun began to dip toward the horizon, painting the Mississippi sky in shades of bruised purple and dull orange, Marlene was finished. She felt a sense of accomplishment. The chores were done, the cats were fed, and the evening was hers.

She went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of iced tea, heavy on the sugar. She took a seat in her recliner and picked up the remote. The kittens would grow up, and eventually, they would venture out from the darkness on their own. She would see them then. She would hold them and make sure they were kind to people, and that would be enough.

Marlene settled into the cushions, the cool glass sweating in her hand. She pressed the power button on the television. She was finishing her laundry and looking forward to watching, “The Batchelor.”

Mondays were for laundry, but Tuesdays were for the quiet. Marlene stood on the back porch, her hand shading her eyes as she looked toward the gravel road. The morning air was thick, promising a heat that would settle over the Mississippi trees by noon. She had already put out the three plastic bowls of kibble, but only Big Tom and Sister had come to eat. Queenie was missing.

It was unusual for Queenie to be gone so long. While Marlene kept them as outdoor cats, Queenie was a diligent mother. She was young, barely a year old herself, and still prone to the sudden, wild urges of a hunter. That morning, a large swamp rabbit had likely emerged from the drainage ditch across the road, its white tail a flag that Queenie’s instincts couldn’t ignore. Despite the bowl of dry food on the porch, the drive for a fresh kill was a biological command. Queenie had crossed the blacktop in a blur of calico fur, focused only on the prey, and she hadn’t seen the logging truck.

Marlene found her an hour later. She didn’t have to go far. The cat lay in the tall weeds by the shoulder of the road, her body intact but still. Marlene looked at her for a long moment, a sharp pang of regret hitting her chest. She wasn’t one to mourn an animal like a person, but she liked Queenie. She liked the way the cat would wind around her ankles while she hung the wash.

“Dumb thing,” Marlene murmured, her voice steady but low. “You had a full bowl right there.”

She walked back to the house, her gait slightly stiff. As she climbed the steps, she heard it. From beneath the floorboards, the kittens were crying. It was a thin, high-pitched sound—the sound of hunger. They didn’t know their mother was gone. They only knew that the warmth and the milk were late.

Marlene sat at her small kitchen table and stared at the linoleum. She knew the reality of the country. Without a mother, those kittens would perish in the dirt within days. She could leave them to nature, let the cries fade as their tiny bodies gave out. It would be the easiest thing to do. She wouldn’t have to face the darkness under the house.

But the sound wouldn’t let her be. Every time she moved through the kitchen, the mews seemed to follow her. By three in the afternoon, her resolve broke. She told herself that she was being foolish. The fear she had carried since 1962 was a child’s fear. She was a woman who had raised a daughter alone, a woman who sang solo in front of a congregation every Sunday. She was stronger than a memory of spiders.

“It’s just dirt and wood,” she told the empty house. “Nothing else.”

Marlene went to the utility closet and pulled out a heavy metal flashlight. She didn’t look at anything else. She didn’t check her pockets. She simply marched out to the backyard where the lattice was loose. She knelt, her knees popping like dry twigs against the grass.

She pulled the wooden panel aside. The smell hit her first—the scent of cold, compressed earth and the metallic tang of old nails. It was exactly the smell of the house she had grown up in.

She clicked on the flashlight and lay flat on her stomach. The beam of light was a narrow yellow tunnel. She saw the kittens. They were huddled against a brick pier near the center of the structure, a tangled heap of black and orange fur. They were further back than she had hoped.

Marlene took a breath, held it, and slid her head into the crawlspace.

The transition from the bright Mississippi afternoon to the gloom was jarring. The world became a horizontal slice of existence. Above her, the floor joists were rough and splintered, hanging only twenty inches from the ground. She began to crawl, using her elbows to pull her weight forward. The red clay was dry and powdery, coating her arms and the front of her dress.

Every inch she moved forward felt like a mile. She tried to keep the flashlight steady, but her hands were shaking. She saw a thick cobweb draped between two beams, but she forced herself to look through it, not at it. It’s just silk, she thought. Just silk and dust.

She reached the halfway point. The heat of the day didn’t penetrate this far. It was cool, but the air was stagnant and heavy. She felt the weight of the entire house—the furniture, the walls, the memories—pressing down on the beams just above her scalp.

To reach the kittens, she had to navigate around a secondary support structure—a stack of heavy timbers that had been added years ago to level the kitchen floor. The gap between the timber and a brick pier was narrow. Marlene turned her body on its side, exhaling to make herself smaller. She pushed with her feet, sliding her shoulders through the pinch point.

She made it halfway. Then, her hip bone caught on a protruding bolt in the timber.

She tried to wiggle back, but her housecoat had snagged on the rough brick behind her. She was wedged. She tried to push forward, but the ground dipped slightly, and her chest was now pinned against the low-hanging joist.

She was no longer moving.

Marlene stopped. She told herself to remain calm. She needed to breathe. But as she inhaled, her chest expanded against the wood, and the pressure was immediate and suffocating. She tried to reach into her apron pocket, her fingers searching for the familiar shape of her cell phone.

Her pocket was empty.

The realization hit her then, sharper than any physical pain. She had left the phone on the kitchen table, right next to the half-full glass of sweet tea. She saw the image of it clearly in her mind—the screen dark, the charging cord coiled like a snake.

She was seventy-one years old, wedged under a pier and beam house in a rural county where her nearest neighbor was half a mile away. Her daughter was in Montgomery, likely putting the children down for a nap or preparing for a night shift at the hospital. Mabel wouldn’t call for hours, and even if she did, the phone would ring in an empty kitchen.

Marlene was not going to get out.

She stopped struggling. The panic shifted from a frantic, physical thing to a cold, intellectual certainty. She looked at the flashlight lying in the dirt. The beam was hitting a cluster of old jars she hadn’t noticed before, probably left by a previous owner. They were covered in a thick layer of grey grime.

She realized that this was her final view of the world. She wouldn’t see the sun set. She wouldn’t see the choir on Sunday. She wouldn’t see Mabel again. The silence of the house above her was the most terrifying thing she had ever experienced. It was the silence of a tomb.

She thought about the “Bachelor” starting at seven. She could almost hear the theme music. She imagined the TV clicking on, the bright colors of the screen reflecting off the empty walls of her living room. The refrigerator would hum in the kitchen. The clock over the stove would tick away the seconds. And she would be right here, inches below the floor, invisible to the world.

She felt a strange, detached pity for herself. She thought about her life—the years of hard work, the pride she took in her home, the way she made sure the cats were always fed. It all narrowed down to this dark, dusty space. The kittens had stopped crying. They were huddled together in the dark, just like her.

A sudden, crushing pressure began to build behind her ribs. It wasn’t the wood of the house this time. It was an internal fire, a white-hot spike that started in her chest and raced down her left arm. Marlene tried to cry out, but her lungs couldn’t find the room to draw a breath.

Her vision began to flicker, the yellow light of the flashlight receding into a tiny, distant point. She felt her heart stutter, a frantic, uneven beat that couldn’t keep up with the terror. She stared at a single splinter on the joist above her eyes, watching as the detail of the wood grain blurred into a grey haze. The fire in her chest exploded into a final, blinding heat. Marlene’s head slumped into the red clay, her eyes open and fixed on the darkness.