“Did you know that early astronomers thought there were oceans on the moon?” I asked, looking up from my book.

My mom shifted in her bed, a tangle of IV tubes shifting with her. “Of course. The moon seems like the perfect place to find an ocean.”

“What a shame we never found water then,” I said. “Because those false seas, astronomers called them ‘maria.’”

Mom smiled. “How sweet of them to name the moon oceans after me.”

“Well, they didn’t find any oceans,” I reminded her.

“Maybe they just didn’t look hard enough,” she replied, a little laugh slipping from her lips.

For all of the pain she was in, all of the fear she must feel, my mother always had the kind of laugh that could light a candle. We were in her hospital room, the same one we’d been in and out of for the last year and a half. Sometimes we had a roommate, sometimes we were alone. Always she held steady enough for both of us, the rock I tied my hope to, the wall against the grief I knew was coming.

Cancer is such a mundane word for something so hungry and cruel. I’ve noticed medicine does that a lot, covers horror with tedious language like a bed sheet over a body.

Malignant. Inoperable. Metastasized. Terminal.

But when she laughed...when she laughed we weren’t in the hospital anymore, we were home. When she laughed, she wasn’t sick, she was young again, and I was a kid, and the world was a bright place begging to be explored. What a miracle my mother was. Cancer had taken so much from her, aged and hurt her, but it could never steal her laugh. That was hers to keep.

A Doctor's Grim Prognosis

“How are we feeling today?” the doctor asked. He came in less and less often. We could all sense this was the final stay in this room.

“Just brilliant, doc,” my mom said, struggling to sit a little higher. “We can still go dancing later if you’d like. Though we’ll have to ask for my son’s blessing. Ever since his dad died, Brian’s been very protective of me.”

I put on a stern face. “I’ll need to know your intentions are pure, Dr. Bradshaw.”

“As the driven snow,” he played along. “But I might need a raincheck on the dance, Ms. Willen. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

He emphasized his age, running his fingers through grey-white hair. My mom tapped her bare scalp.

“Right there with you, tiger,” she said.

Dr. Bradshaw smiled but I could tell he was burdened. I saw him glance at the small idol I’d placed on my mother’s nightstand. The talisman was a miniature oak tree carved from gray soapstone. There were four faces etched into the tree, a sentry against ill health and bitter spirits. I could tell the stone tree made the doctor uncomfortable. In all honesty, I had a tough time looking at the idol for more than a few seconds. The faces were each whittled in vivid expression. The face closest to my mother’s bed was smiling kindly and the face pointed towards the door was snarling, meant to ward away harm.

The final two faces were both weeping. All four shapes were too human, too raw. There was a *weirdness

• to the stone tree that put people on edge but I’d grown used to every shade of weird you can imagine. My mother’s side of the family was full of stories of unexplained luck and mysterious tragedy, whispered secrets and unexplained deaths. By all accounts, my maternal grandmother was either an honest-to-goodness witch or full-bore, high-caliber crazy, or both. *Probably

• both.

The stone tree was from a box of my grandmother’s things I’d found in the attic earlier that month. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but my mom did seem to get a bit better when I’d brought in the talisman, at least for a little while.

I was daydreaming about family history and the odd box while Dr. Bradshaw checked his charts and mom’s vitals.

“Can I talk to you for a moment?” he asked, ripping me back to reality. Dr. Bradshaw tried to keep a light tone but I could tell he didn’t have good news.

A Race Against Time

The hospital hallway smelled like ammonia and birthday cake. Someone must have had a party, maybe a patient, maybe a nurse. Strange how you remember the insignificant details while your world is crashing down around you.

“I’m so sorry,” Dr. Bradshaw told me. “The results came in this morning. It’s spreading aggressively. We...we held it back as long as we could, Brian. Your mom is a fighter. But right now we just need to, well, to try to keep her as comfortable as we can. Brian?”

The wall was cracking, grief waiting on the other side, heavy and cold as an empty house. I’d known for months that this was the most likely outcome but it still hurt to hear. Hurt worse than I could stomach.

“There’s nothing left to try?” I asked, fighting down the urge to throw up. “Anything, experimental, untested, anything?”

Dr. Bradshaw shook his head. “I’m sorry. Sometimes we just run out of options. She fought a good fight.”

“How long does she have left?” I asked, looking back into her room. She’d fallen asleep.

“Not long. Maybe days. Have you considered hospice?”

The smell of ammonia and birthday cake. The steady beep of mom’s heart monitor. I tried to focus on the world around me. My hope wasn’t dead yet. If medicine couldn’t help my mom, maybe something older could. I thought of the box of my grandmother’s things waiting in the attic. There was a lot in there I hadn’t gone through yet, books and candles and secrets and lost things. Maybe there was a cure or at least a way to keep the fight going.

“No,” I said. “If all that’s left is to make her comfortable, I want to take her home.”

The doctor smiled. “I understand. We can give you some medication, ways to help her with the pain.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Your mom’s been in a lot of pain but she’ll have peace, soon. You’ve done all you can.”

“I know,” I lied. “Thank you.”

Bringing Grandma's Secrets Home

Mom lived in a small ranch house ten miles outside of town. There wasn’t much in the way of neighbors besides some woods and a creek slithering through her yard. It was a windy, warm March afternoon when I took my dying mother home. That night I began my work. I was going to turn the house into a bunker, a maze Death could never solve. I would keep my mother safe, I would find a way to keep her alive.

The little red book was full of ideas. Running water was an obvious place to start. The creek behind the house was barely a trickle but it should provide some coverage to the south side of the property. Salt was next, lining the doorways and window frames, then in an unbroken circle around the entire house. This step was to be repeated daily, the red book stressed, or even multiple times per day. Even a moderate breeze played holy havoc with any salt poured outside so it was always best to trace and retrace every few hours. *Water and salt were common defenses

• against man’s oldest enemy and well known. The book offered other, less conventional, advice.

It took me nearly a week to finish carving the symbols and signs into the walls, the floors, even the trees on the property. Sometime around noon on the third day, on my back in the crawlspace etching strange marks onto the underside of the floor, it struck me how ridiculous I was acting. There was no proof that any of the information in the little red book was anything other than the delusional ramblings of a bizarre woman I’d only met once or twice as a child. For all I knew, the runes meant to ward off Death were actually a grocery list written in Cantonese. But I was desperate, and every time I saw my mother she looked frailer, more fragile. So I continued carving and praying and building layers upon layers of protections to keep Death far away.

Exploring the Property

Making my marks took me all over the property. It was a big yard, nearly three acres that blended gradually into the surrounding forest. I wasn’t able to pinpoint the exact boundary where cultivated met nature, the edges simply bled together, but I did my best to create a clean border with lines between the symbols. I’d always loved the wildness here, the way you could wander a few hundred yards away from home and feel like you’d traveled hundreds of years into the past to somewhere primal. This was the perfect playground for a kid, whether I was out exploring trails or trapping minnows or spending the summer building yet another treehouse, convinced this would be the final one. It never was, I was never satisfied.

The house itself, though small, was more than enough room for my mother and me. Dad died when I was seven. I don’t remember much about him, just how big he seemed, with a bonfire grin and arms that I thought could hold the whole world. My mom often said I took after my father. I could see it in the old pictures of him, we had the same eyes, green as moss in the summer, and the same fiery shock of red hair, enemy to every comb on the planet. The sicker mom got the more often she called me by my father’s name. I worried when she drifted away like that but a part of me was proud she’d mistake me for him.

The Grandmother's Legacy

After all of the symbols were carved there were a few steps left in the book to deter Death from visiting. There were dozens of charms and talismans in the bottom of the old box in the attic. I sat up there combing through everything my grandmother left behind, referencing the red book, pushing the tiny charms into tidy piles. None of the idols were larger than my thumb. Some were iron and others were wood, some were heavy, others light. All of them were uncomfortable to look at or touch.

The attic was drafty but not nearly enough to explain the cold that burrowed into me as I sorted the charms. I’m not particularly tall but the attic felt like it was designed for dolls, beams so low I couldn’t even walk bent over. I moved around on my knees, rough floorboards threatening splinters even through my jeans. I could have taken the box downstairs where I’d have more room but the idea filled me with a deep unease. It seemed better to leave the box up in the attic, only taking down objects as I needed them. Up here, at least, my grandmother’s items, her legacy was...quarantined.

The red book was very specific about the distribution of the totems around the house and property. I walked carefully through my mom’s backyard, boots plopping in and out of mud, compass in hand. It had rained nearly every day since I’d taken my mom home from the hospital. I knew it was almost certainly a coincidence but couldn’t help wonder if the soft curtains of rain falling to the ground were for her. I placed charms in a compass rose with the house in the middle. The most disturbing objects were given places of honor at each cardinal direction.

Water, salt, wards, charms, all placed carefully, intentionally. My grandmother’s book promised that these would offer some degree of protection against the inevitability of Death. The symbols would confuse it, the talismans distract it, and the water and salt make barriers to slow it down. But Death might still find a crack to slip through, so the red book recommended one final trick.

The Final, Disturbing Ritual

There was a small candle in the bottom of the box, dirty white as stained paper. When I took the candle from its case the smell made me gag. Have you ever walked past a portable toilet in the dog days of summer? When it’s so hot, the blue plastic has started to warp and bubble? Imagine that smell distilled into a finger’s worth of wax. I brought the candle downstairs, placed it on the dining room table and set it alight.

The wick caught immediately, the flame burning an unusual red-brown. No heat came off of the candle and it actually seemed cooler the closer I moved my hand to the fire. Once the wax began to melt the smell was ten times worse than it was back in the attic. I choked down a greasy sickness crawling up my throat and quickly left the room, shutting the French doors as I went. That helped trap the odor but I couldn’t shake the sense of nausea. I went to check on my mother.

“Do you remember the day you ran away?” my mom asked, sitting in her bed, lunch untouched on the nightstand beside her.

I didn’t think she had any weight left to her. Her eyes, once so full of life, were dull and distant. Yet, she was awake. She was talking.

“I remember,” I said, sitting beside her. The smell of the candle still lingered in the back of my throat. I looked at her, really looked at her, trying to memorize every line on her face, every strand of her thinning hair.

“You were gone all day,” she continued, her voice raspy. “I was so scared. I thought I’d lost you.”

“You never lost me, Mom,” I told her, taking her hand. It felt impossibly fragile, like a bird’s wing. “I’m right here.”

She squeezed my hand weakly. “I know, honey. I know.”

As the days passed, my mother grew weaker. The house was a fortress of salt and symbols, wards and strange charms. The candle burned in the dining room, its foul odor a constant, sickening presence. I stayed by her side, reading to her, holding her hand, praying that whatever ancient magic I had invoked would hold. I didn't know if it was working, if any of it was real. But I had to try. For her. For the sound of her laugh, which I hadn't heard in days.

Then, one morning, the candle flickered and died. A profound silence fell over the house. I rushed to my mother's room. She was still. Peaceful. But she was gone. The magic, whatever it was, had failed. Or perhaps, it had simply done its job, allowing her to pass without further pain. I sat with her, the silence of the house pressing in, and wondered if the real magic had been in her laugh all along, a light that even death couldn't extinguish.