Once I arrive at the rental house, I turn off the car and check in by messaging the host.

Hey Craig, made it all the way from Chicago. Everything looks lovely, checking in now.

A little signal pops up to show he’s seen it, but no further response. He’s probably got twelve different properties in the county, I think. That’s how these types make a living. The knot in my left shoulder is so tight that I feel it clicking as I roll my shoulders forward and back.

Muscles aren’t supposed to click. The soreness radiates into my neck and ties up in a neat little headache at the base of my skull. I dig two fingers into the knot and pitch my sunglasses over my shoulder into the backseat. I shed my scratchy blazer and unclasp my necklace, stuffing it in a pocket. I can’t believe I drove all the way here in my work clothes without doing that yet.

I heft my oversized duffle from the trunk and breathe in the country air. The place is a little Wisconsin farmhouse overlooking rolling hills of wild land. I’m here to recharge or, I guess, just work on unclenching my jaw for the 72 hours I’ve paid for. I can’t quit my job, so I guess this is the next best thing. The sun hits gold on the tall dead grasses surrounding the house. Gray siding. A freshly painted yellow door with a keypad above the doorknob. The wind is fierce, cold–my lips sting where I’ve licked them–but the view is fair enough. Three large pine trees tower directly behind the house, standing darkly against their backdrop of farmland-turned-prairie. Early frost has browned out the landscape, making the green of the pines startling. I key in and open the door, the duffle’s strap heavy on my shoulder.

I’m not really superstitious, but I check the horoscope app on my phone as I cross the threshold. What portents, my digital fortuneteller? What destiny do you foresee for my still-tense jaw? I should not have had the venti latte that I thought I deserved in a drive-through back in Glendale. A little pink box spins on the screen as animated stars collapse and reform. The suspense is killing me, until ding! My phone has read the cosmos.

LOOK TO THE ONES ABOVE YOU.

I chuckle. Ah yes, nice and ominous. That’s what I love about this app. Completely cryptic. Completely unhelpful. There’s a perverse kind of comfort in that. I set my phone on the bench in the doorway, and plunk down the duffle. I notice that the zipper is beginning to separate itself in the middle. I shouldn’t have forced that extra sweatshirt in. Even Old Reliable has its limits, I suppose. That’s fair. I pushed it too hard.

Caffeine is surging through my body. I flop on the blue couch in the living space. My loosened hair lolls limply to the side, but I just stare, buzzing, at the slowly rotating ceiling fan until I feel completely empty of all thought. Sleep then sees my weakness and pulls me under.

I groggily wake to a subtle but persistent hiss. A brush of air and a whispered rasp. It rattles me. My eyes snap open. There’s a hum, too. I tell myself to get it together. It’s just the heat coming on. I feel the warm air coming from somewhere, though my eyes can’t place the vents. The ceilings creak as the old house struggles to keep warm.

I get up, twist the bathroom faucet and splash some water on my face. It’s icy cold. I look out the window. The sun is already hanging low in the sky, but I decide to brave the wind and check out the walking trail before it gets too dark. I finally ditch my blouse and work pants, cursed as they are with the smell of the office. I change into jeans, and pull on a t-shirt and the thick sweatshirt that was the duffle’s undoing. I notice an acidic smell pumping in along with the heat. The furnace in this place is definitely doomed, I think to myself. Probably why my host Craig needs money from stressed out city folk such as myself. I rifle through the duffle for my knit hat.

I decide to quickly check my work email on my phone, because I am an idiot. Before I can quite register the 23 new unread messages, my phone glitches, flipping back to the horoscope app I had open. I see LOOK TO THE ONES ABOVE YOU one more time before everything pixelates away into a blank pink freeze that I can’t back out of.

This is a sign, I think. A real one. I turn my phone off and head outside without it.

I find the sign pointing toward the walking path. Once I accept the whipping wind, everything really is pretty. The hills ripple. Dry, feathery grasses rustle all around me. The path seems to have no end, so I turn around after a time and head back the way I came. As I approach the house, I see something moving. A huge black smudge makes circles in the sky. It seems almost to have fingers, the bird. A vulture riding the thermals.

When I return to the house, there is a small wet pile in front of the door. It smells rank and acidic. Some creature’s fierce little welcome. I’m not sure what to use to clean it up and I don’t really want to get any closer, so I decide to let it dry and crust up. Tomorrow’s problem.

I come inside and shed my knit cap. I listen for the hissing sound and can’t hear it. But then–no, there it is. It is persistent. My phone seems to be working again, though. I start scrolling through the work emails, and take care of the ones I can address with a quick one-liner. The others can sit. Out of habit, I flip back to the horoscope app, but it hasn’t switched over to the next day’s reading yet. Same message as before.

The pantry is furnished with basics, ripe for scavenging. I find a small pot to boil some water and, when it starts rolling, I dump in a generous half-package of rotini. I set a small jar of sauce on the counter, stomach aching for a nice bowl of basic pasta. While I’m waiting for the noodles to cook, I watch the sun setting through the tall picture window at the back of the living room, which frames the tallest of the three pines. My heart catches when I see the vulture land heavily on the tree, scrabbling for purchase on a high branch, great black wings flailing for a moment until it balances its body into a hunch. It tucks its naked head down, folds its wings up. I imagine I can feel it staring at me. The kitchen timer starts to beep.

I turn off the burner, drain the noodles, and dump them back in along with the sauce. I grab the biggest spoon in the drawer and a potholder for my lap. I bring the whole pot over to the couch and sit down. I stir the pasta and start to bring the first spoonful to my mouth, but I find I can’t lift my arm. The knot in my shoulder muscle screams as a weight presses down on me. A sharp pricking digs into my back, clawing me. I stay still, breathing through it. Just a muscle spasm, I tell myself–is this what those feel like?

“Ow!” I say, and the weight releases immediately. But I feel a tiny gust of air and a soft fluttering against my arm. The goddamned hissing sound intensifies, but I quiet my nerves, happy the spasm has passed through. I do a couple shoulder rolls and finally succeed in raising the first warm bite of pasta to my mouth, but when I look to my right, there’s something very odd sitting next to me. A vulture. Or, I suppose, the ghost of one. What else could it be? It is made of white light.

It bobs its head. It is hissing at me.

I chew my noodles and think about this.

The creature fans its wings out, glowing and wide. I wonder if this is the mental breakdown that will envelop me, the one I’ve been waiting for. But I keep looking at the ghost bird. It stops hissing, and I am awash in gratitude for the silence that follows. I hold my hand out. The vulture hops to the side, dodging my touch. It is looking out the window at the living vulture, which is still settled in a dark lump against the trunk of the tall pine. The ghost bird hops closer in a bouncing ball of spectral light, wholly fixated on the sight of its earthly counterpart.

I’ve never been haunted before, nor have I had a stress-induced break from reality, but regardless of which one of these is happening, I make the choice to befriend the ghost bird.

Is she a metaphor for something? Hell if I know. But a bird needs a nest. I grab my broken-zippered duffle and empty all my clothes out on the coffee table. It’s a cheap composite wood deal–people don’t buy the good stuff for their rental properties–so I can easily, if awkwardly, lift it. I place it right up against the picture window. The sun is all but gone now. The ghost bird is still there, bobbing its head. It lets out another half-hearted hiss in my direction.

“Look, love,” I say, “I didn’t ask for you to show up, either.” I arrange the socks, shirts, and sweatpants into a rough circle around the little cave made by the open duffel in the center. It looks comfortable enough. I give the glowing bird one more glance, then grab my phone and my noodles, and retreat into the bedroom for the night. I close the door quietly against whatever the hell is happening to me.

I wake up to brilliant sunlight on my second day at the farmhouse: the only full day, as tomorrow I’m scheduled to drive back home. My clothes from yesterday are in a bundle on the floor from when I got too hot under the wool blankets last night. The heat is still pumping into the bedroom in earnest. The cool wooden floor feels soothing on my feet. Even though I’m naked, I decide to throw the door open to whatever nonsense awaits me. It’s morning, after all. I stride over to the clothes nest I made last night “for the ghost.” I laugh at myself. I also remind myself to call my therapist, or maybe my doctor.

On first inspection, the pile of clothes seems to be just that and nothing more. But when I take a new pair of underwear and shirt from the pile, the smell of carrion almost flattens me. I check another shirt, and another, but they all smell like death. I heap everything into the compact washer stacked in the little closet behind a sliding wood door. God bless Craig for having detergent. No wonder he’s a Superhost. I assume the smell has something to do with the ghost bird, who I assume is real, or something close to it. My other assumptions are far scarier, and I don’t let myself think about them. The fantasy of telling my boss I’m never coming back flirts across my brain. I’ve been out of the city for less than 24 hours, I’m stiff and I’m haunted and maybe having a break with reality, but I’m still having what I consider to be a great time.

I run a hot bath in the giant tub that dominates the bathroom. If nothing else, I think, I’m getting my money’s worth out of this stay on the water bill. It feels incredible to ease myself into the water, feeling the night sweat slick off and the water surround my body. The bathroom window isn’t privacy glass, so I suppose anyone could see my nakedness if they wanted to, but there’s nobody out there. The most glorious, intense sunbeam streams through the window and right on to me. It is simply beautiful, until I see that the blinding shimmer at the edge of the tub above my feet has some substance to it. It’s the ghost vulture again, her wings fanned lazily open to absorb the heat of the sunbeam, her eyes closed and happy. “Well hello, love,” I say. I bathe, cautiously, remembering how sharp her claws are. But she doesn’t seem interested in using them. Vultures only eat dead things anyway. It’s like I can feel her animal joy at the sun. Or maybe it’s my own.

When I hear the washing machine beep, I emerge from the tub and dry myself with one of Craig’s fuzzy white towels. I need to give him an A+ review, I think. The ghost bird hops around in the tub as it drains, dipping the tips of her feathers and kicking up spray. I try to lighty dry her ghostly head with the corner of the towel, but she starts hissing again, so I back off. “Sorry!” I say. I secure the towel around my waist and switch the wet clothes over to the dryer. Ghost bird swoops into the living room along with me. Realizing it’s a new day, I check my horoscope app. I read the resulting message out loud to the winged ball of light careening around the house:

TWO WILL BECOME ONE.

“Two what? Wait, isn’t that a Spice Girls song? Hang on, are these horoscopes all song lyrics? Is that what I’ve been missing?” I watch the pink graphics swirling around the message on the screen. But when I look up from my phone, the ghost is gone. I suppose such is the way of ghosts, even when they’re vultures.

I look up vulture facts on my phone as I wait for the dryer to finish. I dislike how lost I feel when I finally pull on my toasty laundered jeans and shirt. Just like the keen joy I felt when I was watching the ghost vulture in the sunlight, I have a sense that I’m feeling an outsized loss, something that might not even be mine. After all, I’ve lost nothing. Not recently. I honestly don’t have much to lose.

My phone starts to buzz aggressively and I nearly drop it. My boss is calling me. On a Saturday. Again. I let it vibrate, my panic rising with each guttural hum. If I don’t answer it, he’ll just keep calling me. If I do answer it, when I know he knows I’m on vacation, what message am I sending him about what I’ll put up with? I hate myself for it, but I accept the call just before it goes to voicemail.

“Hey, Jeff,” I say, attempting a kind of firm-yet-casual thing. “What’s going on?”

Before Jeff has a chance to fully elaborate on something he just wants to run past me real quick, a bright flash of light explodes outside, lighting up the three tall pines in the picture window as split-second silhouettes. I watch a large, dark bundle of feathers flap, scrabble, and fall from the center tree and hit the ground hard. Suddenly, I can’t even comprehend Jeff’s words on the phone. It’s like he isn’t even forming words, just sounds. I hang up, and sprint to the door. An intense feeling of need sweeps inside me. Just by virtue of its strength, it is like a euphoria. It converts into motion. Soon, I’m outside kneeling next to the huddled mass of feathers at the foot of the tree.

The fallen bird’s head is wrinkled and red. It looks thin and empty as the wind rattles it. A white-tipped beak glints in the sun, but there is no shine to the eyes, which are oozing something milky. The chest quivers, almost like she’s taking her last breaths, but I can tell the movement is only the wind. It’s already over. Her wings are tucked in tight. I don’t care about whatever pathogen or lice might be woven into her feathers–I hold my hand out, and sink my fingers into the ruffles on her neck, feeling the last warmth that will belong to her. And then my ghost bird is there, too, stretching her wings out of the dead lump of bodily form and looking at me with eyes like stars.

“So, this is you?” I say. She hops around the body. She says nothing, because of course birds don’t talk. But I can tell she means yes. “You were ready to go, huh?” I ask. “Out of the body before the body was done?” She quirks her head. She’s growing brighter by the moment, and I struggle to keep my eyes on her. She fans her tail and faces the wind. I watch her until her brilliance overlaps the sun, and she’s gone. Nothing to do with the dead pile of feathers on the ground.

I realize I am still holding my phone.

I open the messenger for the rental and click on Craig’s name.

Hey Craig, any chance I would be able to extend my stay through next weekend?

His icon pops up nearly immediately. Seen. He gives me the go-ahead right away and sends the link for payment. He asks if I’ll need anything else, because he’s a Superhost, but I answer no.

Then, I call Jeff back. I imagine what it feels like to fly into the sun. Even while my boss talk-yells his pressing ideas at me, the tension in my shoulder manages to let all the way go.

There’s a sudden, welcome silence on the other end as I calmly tell Jeff that I’ve decided to quit. Bless the bird. I’m still alive.