“She is an osprey now, you know. But she used to be a witch.”

Sister was trying to reassure me, but I wasn’t reassured. 

“Or, she looked like a witch, you know? But she could change herself into a bird. That’s a shapeshifter,” she said, blowing a plume of smoke out toward the golf course for effect. “That’s just what they do.” 

I was sitting with Sister on a bench at the edge of the miniature golf course, under a bright flood lamp that only made the darkness beyond its grasp that much darker. There was a last scrape of daylight above us. Night was folding in quickly. 

On the course, kids swung clubs at each other’s faces. The old man who rented clubs and colored balls stared at my sister like he’d never seen a girl before. Dads were cursing like the score mattered, wiping sweat off their foreheads. They banged their clubs on the miniature lighthouse, the windmill, the whale.  Big ugly bugs fluttered around the floodlamps, drunk with blood. 

Looming above all this was what lay just beyond the hedges—a hollow, empty house. Branches pushed their way out from the inside, breaking through the brittle shutters.  A rusted weathervane peaked from a widow’s walk with tiny windows like open mouths. Atop the weathervane sat a large dark bird, peering down at us. 

Sister lit another cigarette. She blew the smoke at a constellation of blood-scratched mosquito bites on her legs. 

“Yeah, a shapeshifter,” Sister said earnestly. “She had a pet osprey, some people said, but other people say that she was the osprey. Then they built this golf course, right next to her house.  She stood in that top window up there, staring down at this golf course. Am I scaring you? Are you scared?”

“No,” I said. 

“Anyhow, they say that she cast spells on the golfers. Like, she hated the dads, because she didn’t have a dad I guess, and she didn’t have a mom.  Or she had them maybe, but she hated them, and she kept them in the basement with the spiders.  Or she murdered them and chopped their heads off and kept their bodies in the basement. I can’t remember. It was in the newspaper or something. Anyhow, the golfers? She sat up in that window and she spun the windmill at all the wrong times. Or she tilted the course so they couldn’t sink putts.”

At the windmill, a dad was smashing his club on the astroturf. It broke in two. Then he stormed off to the parking lot, leaving two little boys staring at the broken club. I looked back up at the windows.

“But the shapeshifter is dead now,” I asked. “Right?”

“Oh yeah. She’s definitely long dead.” 

Sister slapped a mosquito on her tanned arm. She smeared the blood around with the heel of her hand. 

“She is long dead. I’m certain of it. But you know, ospreys never die.”

“They never die?”

“Never. Ospreys live forever.”

Sister started giggling. She blew another puff of smoke out into the humid air. Night settled over the miniature golf course like a bowl of chocolate milk.  Passing headlights flushed the darkness out of the hedges. Dad, I thought, might be driving across the island, angry, looking for us. But it was more likely that he was sitting alone in the kitchen, drinking, looking for his cigarettes, or staring at the nazi snipers still hiding in the bushes of the neighbor’s back yard. 

I pressed my face against Sister’s skinny arm. It smelled like coppertone, and baby oil, and something else. She was leaving in the morning. I didn’t want her to leave. I pressed harder.

“Ow,” she said, pushing me away. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on,” she said, snuffing her cigarette butt out on the concrete edge of the ninth hole and leaving it there.

“Are we going home now?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.”

We climbed onto our bikes. I followed her out of the parking lot.  She turned around the hedges. At first I didn’t see her. Then I saw her yellow t-shirt. She had pushed through the hedges, into the overgrown tangle of the house across the street.

“But you’re not allowed in there,” I said.

“Come here, you have to see this.”

“But you’re not allowed. You’re not allowed to go in there.”

I said it, but I walked in, slowly, and stood next to her.  The tangled yard was illuminated from the miniature golf course’s flood lamps. In the dim light, the big windows of the old house were all kicked in, staring down at us. The front door was bolted shut with a No Trespassing sign. 

“Dare me to go in?” Sister said. “Do you dare me?”

Sister looked crazy-cheeks glowing, hair tangled in salt water, nose burned bright red-but she also looked deliriously happy.

“We can’t go in there. It’s locked,” I said. “It’s illegal, I think.”

“Don’t be scared,” she said. I followed her up to the porch.

“We’re gonna get in trouble, you know.”

“With who?” she laughed. 

Sister pushed on the door and the bolt popped open. We were staring into a darkened hallway with a half-broken staircase. A cloud of dust rose when she opened the door. The place smelled like rotten teeth and charcoal.

“I’m just gonna take a peek,” she said. 

She walked into the hall and took three steps up the stairs. Standing there barefoot, in her yellow t-shirt and shorts, half-covered in sand and sunburns, she suddenly looked to me less like a self-assured, angry tween and more like a sad baby.

“Come on,” she said, waving to me at the door. 

It felt like something fluttered at the top of the stairs—a shadow or a curtain or the flutter of a great black wing. Then there was a loud snapping noise. The staircase collapsed around Sister, folding all around her, her red hair and yellow t shirt enveloped in black dust. 

I turned and started running. I left my sister behind. I did. I left her behind. I didn’t stop until I reached the hedge. And then I turned and looked.

Sister came somersaulting out of the front door. Even in the dim light I could see that she was coated in the silt of the old house. 

She sprang to her feet, unharmed, her fists clenched at her sides.

“It is time to go home now,” she said, to me, as if I hadn’t run away. 

We pushed our bikes back through the hedges. She climbed on her bike, and I climbed on mine. We started pedaling under the sagging leaves, the dirty night sky shifting from twilight to darkness above us, homeward.  

I was too scared to talk. What scared me the most was that Sister had shifted. She was no longer the big, brave older sister who snapped back at her drunk dad and smoked cigarettes. The person who tumbled out of that witch house was barely bigger than I was. She was a bare wisp of a little girl in a t-shirt, as terrified as I was-- not for what she had done, but for what, at that moment, we might both become.