THE WOMAN IN THE CORNER

My heart had swollen until it seemed lodged in my throat.

I wouldn’t let her see the fear on my face.  

I dropped to my knees and dragged myself toward my little girl, gathering her into my arms.  My knees slid across the kitchen tiles. Heat coursed from the nape of my neck down my spine. By the time I held her against me, my fingers had begun to shake. I’d known fear before, but never like this—never as something that lived beneath my skin, coursing through my veins.

Over the past fifteen minutes, she’d asked the same question again and again.

“When will the lights come back, Mommy?”

Even though I knew my four-year-old had no real sense of time, every answer was the same.

“About another hour.”

That was what the electric company had said.

The moment the fading daylight withdrew from the window, her small fingers clutched the hem of my T-shirt, and she edged half a step backward. I brought her into the kitchen because it was the last room in the apartment to surrender to darkness. Her eyes went straight to the far corner. She settled beside my feet and absently stacked a few plastic bowls, falling quiet for a minute or two before asking again.

“When will the lights come back, Mommy?”

I clenched my teeth. Every so often, I drew a slow breath and let it out, because there was nothing else, I could do. In my mind I cursed the rotten trees, the storm, the city officials—anything that might be blamed.

“It might take another hour,” I said softly. “Don’t be scared. It isn’t even dark yet. What are you afraid of?”

She lifted one tiny finger and pointed to the opposite corner of the kitchen—the very place where she had been staring all along.

Her voice dropped to a whisper.

“I’m scared she’ll come closer.”

My face went cold.

For the first time, someone other than me could see her.

Every hair on my body stood on end as a cold terror slid down my spine.

She had always been here.

Lurking somewhere nearby.

I can’t remember when I first saw her. Maybe I’d never really been alone.

She was a young woman with long, filthy hair, sitting beyond the reach of what little light remained in the kitchen. Her eyes drifted back and forth between my daughter and me. She was painfully thin, her face hollow, her eyes were sunken deep into their sockets.

In the beginning, she only appeared among crowds.

To remember the first time, I saw the Ragged Woman, my mind drifted years into the past.

I was sitting in a mathematics class while the teacher shouted at me, threats and insults striking harder than the lesson itself. Instead of answering back, I held my breath. When I finally exhaled, a woman’s shape slipped from the mist of my breath and crept into the corner of the room.

The kitchen pulled me back.

Darkness had climbed over her head now, swallowing most of her face. I couldn’t make out her features anymore, but I kept my eyes fixed on her. I didn’t dare look away.

Then another memory broke through.

A history professor paced across the lecture hall, flinging his grand speeches at the students. Before he finished his sentence, tangled hair rose slowly into view behind him, climbing past the window frame. Eyes that looked freshly unearthed from a grave locked onto his throat.

By then she was no longer a ghost. She had become something pale and flesh-bound—something that occupied space.

After that she emerged from the shadows little by little.

She sat quietly in the corner during annual reunions with my university friends. While everyone traded polished smiles and rehearsed stories, she looked only at me.

For one impossible moment, I thought she pitied me.

I smiled back.

Her mouth stretched from ear to ear.

It wasn’t a smile. It was an imitation of one.

Her eyes flicked between me and the others, as though she were studying how human beings belonged together.

That was the day my hands first began to shake.

Just as they are shaking now.

A tiny hand settled over mine.

I looked down at my daughter’s soft fingers before lifting my eyes again.

The Ragged Woman had not moved.

Darkness had swallowed her from the waist down.

Though I could no longer see her face, I knew exactly what waited there.

The same impossible grin.

It never changed.

She always sat in some forgotten corner, watching me with that monstrous smile and those wide, unblinking eyes.

On my wedding day, I searched every corner of the reception hall.

For the first time…

…she wasn’t there.

Years later she returned in a dream.

She climbed onto my chest with that same stretched smile, her eyes impossibly wide, and wrapped her hands around my throat.

I tried to scream.

I reached for my husband, who was watching football in the living room, but no sound would come.

When I finally woke, I screamed for real.

He was beside me almost instantly.

But the image remained.

Had I been dreaming?

Or had I opened my eyes too soon?

After that, she returned to the corners.

At first, she only watched.

Then she began to speak.

Just a few words.

“It’s your fault.”

“Nobody cares.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You don’t have the strength anymore.”

She stood on the other side of the divide.

The side everyone else seemed to belong to.

The day the nurse placed my daughter in my arms, wrapped tightly in a hospital blanket, I believed something in my life was about to change.

It did.

Just not for the better.

I came home carrying fresh stitches, the smell of dried blood, and the sharp sting of antiseptic.

In the small bathroom mirror, I barely recognized myself.

I looked years older.

My hair had become a nest.

Dark hollows had settled beneath my eyes.

I still hadn’t figured out how to exist in the world myself, and now another human being depended on me to teach her how.

At night, after she fell asleep, I cried.

Most of the time she slept against my chest.

I was terrified that I would die and leave her alone with her.

Whenever the Ragged Woman made the slightest movement, I met her with a fury I didn’t know I possessed. She would shrink back into her corner again.

Even while I doubted my own mind, I never laid my daughter anywhere near the place where she sat.

I stayed awake, keeping watch over her, until sleep ambushed me without warning.

Time dissolved.

Sometimes I caught myself whispering into the dark,

“When did night fall?”

The Ragged Woman would sit in the corner of our bedroom and whisper for hours.

“Imagine what would happen if you simply left.”

“One morning you wake up… and you keep walking.”

“Just walk.”

“As far as your feet can carry you.”

“Don’t stop.”

“Disappear.”

“Never let anyone find you.”

Sometimes I shouted back.

“Shut up!”

For a little while, the silence returned.

But after I yelled those words in public a few times, everything changed.

Some people quietly drifted away.

Others stared, uncertain what to make of me.

Worst of all were the ones who mistook me for someone desperate for attention—or tried to force their neat little psychological theories down my throat.

None of them knew she existed.

My world grew smaller.

The circle of people around me shrank until, before long, either they had abandoned me…

or I had abandoned them.

Just like the daylight abandoning us now.

Darkness had swallowed half the kitchen.

My daughter buried her face against my chest.

From inside the darkness, the Ragged Woman’s fingers began to emerge.

Even I had spent years convincing myself she wasn’t real.

Yet here, in this dark little kitchen, my daughter had seen her too.

I was terrified.

And yet, somehow, I had never felt closer to my child.

I looked toward the corner.

The Ragged Woman leaned forward and whispered,

“That isn’t your daughter.”

I refuse to believe her.

I tighten my arms around the little girl and wait for my husband to come home.

Over the years I have doubted my own mind more times than I can count.

But I have never doubted him.

Because he is real.

Only real people tell you they love you.

And every single day…

he does.

Salimeh Mousavi, Maragheh, Iran