It's ten p.m. and snowing like a bastard when the pounding starts on my door. Loud enough to wake the dead.  The hammering shakes the whole wall, causing me to spill hot chocolate down my T-shirt.

Expecting the police or an armed crook, instead I'm met with a Hamish homeless-pigeon-lady or something - a sixty-odd year old with sideburns, chin whiskers and a sinister grin.  Her head is tilted slightly left, and she's gripping a carpet-bag full of Jesus pamphlets.

"Oh Jesus!" I whisper.

Pointing at my chest, she croaks, "You've spilled somethin'."

Her hair is frizzy graying blonde, jammed into a maroon felt hat with the front pinned up.  It's covered in flowers and snow.  She's wearing a long snot-green coat and clunky shoes, and warbles over the wind, "My name's Mary."

I've got nothing against religion, but this woman has abortion clinics exploding in her eyes and bruises on her knuckles, so with a shudder I close the door.  If you've had religious door-knockers, you know this doesn't work.  With lightning precision she slams her shoe into the gap, jamming it
open, and pleads for five minutes shelter from the storm.

I poke my head out, to see if she has a car nearby so my conscience will let me shoo her off.  Alas, the Jesus Chrysler is nowhere in sight.

With ice clinging to her facial hair and her cheeks all blood-vessely and windburned, how could I refuse?

When I cave, Mary's assertions of gratitude last way too long, making me rub the back of my neck in discomfort while she gushes.  Her smile is huge and her teeth are like skewed tombstones, black around the swollen gum-line -
and as I close the door behind her, she licks her lips triumphantly. I hang Mary's coat on a radiator and hand her a towel.  Scrubbing her head, she says, "Does my good Samaritan have a name?"

"Joe," I say, wanting to avoid conversation while I come to terms with the strange situation.  She smells like a wet dog, and amid the stink is a strange meaty odor that connects with my sense of taste.  The feeling makes me gag, so I turn away and hope she doesn't notice.

She twists the corner of the towel delicately, making a tiny Unicorn-horn.

"Well you're very sweet, Joe.  Redheads are usually evil."

I sweep my hair back defensively.  "We are?"

"Yep, you are."  She puts the Unicorn-horn in her ear, and twists it again like she's tuning a guitar.  "You're Satan's children."

I refrain from contesting her logic, so as not to be lured into a discussion concerning evil.  She hands me the towel, the corner now yellow and shiny, and pulls up a chair at the kitchen table while I make some more cocoa.  Out the window, the storm is going crazy.

Mary says, "Are you religious, Joe?"

I shake my head no, but I'm praying the snow will ease up soon.

Her vomit-green eyes glaze over.  "I knew a Joe once; a little fat thing with a big, hairy mole." Waddling to the sideboard, Mary turns a bottle of olive oil so the label faces the front, and then lines up a box of pasta and the cutting board beside it, tapping the sides straight.  "He was my childhood sweetheart."

"What happened?" I ask, feeling obliged.

She smiles sadly.  "He was killed in an Albanian civil war.  They stabbed him with a pitchfork, then chopped him up and fed him to their pigs."

Mary lets out a long, crackly sigh as I stand agape, wondering if that was true.  She slithers over to the rail, straightening and lining up the corners on the dish towel.  Then she notices a drawer ajar, so she closes it and sits back at the table.

"Oh my god, that's terrible," I respond.

Mary beams.  "So you ARE religious after all!  You know, He sent me here tonight."

"Who?"

She points up, discreetly nodding at the ceiling.

"He sent me to save you.  Your life's in danger, Joe - don't know how, don't know when - but don't worry; me and the big man are on your side.  I'm your guardian angel."

I squint and press hard at my eyeballs, wondering why lunatics always gravitate towards me and never my friends.  As I re-focus, colored stars twinkle across my field of vision.

"My life's in danger?"

Mary reaches inside her coat, adjusting her breasts and scratching an armpit.  "Yup; You're due to die anytime now, but it was an admin error - sort of my fault - so I was sent to intervene.  But don't fret 'bout that now.  Let me tell you how I found Jesus all those years ago."

Despite my protests, excuses and groans, she launches into a story crazy yet dull enough to send a glass eye to sleep.  I glaze over until she stops.

After twenty minutes I go upstairs and look out the landing window.  The blizzard seems to have calmed some, and I'm tired and have to be up at six.

I dig some gloves and a scarf out of my drawer for Mary, then prepare myself for the guilt-ridden task of asking her to leave.

With a deep breath, I walk back into the living room to deliver my unpleasant news. But Mary is stone-cold dead on the floor.

***

It's after midnight when the police and paramedics arrive, having struggled to get their cumbersome vehicles through the storm.  I'm so tired I'm practically hallucinating, and their questions hit me in the face repeatedly, like the flashing lights on their cars.

Curtains twitch furiously along the street - in their excitement, somebody even yanks their entire curtain-pole down.  My neighbors already think I'm weird because I don't mingle much, but from the looks on their faces now, they probably think I murdered this unusual, hairy woman.  And they're wondering, What was that poor, unusual hairy woman doing in his house in the first place?

The hullabaloo takes hours, but most of the time is spent waiting and shivering defiantly, between bouts of repeating myself to stupid public servants with superiority complexes.  By the time they bag her up, sign their statements and leave, it's 3 a.m., my eyes are like piss-holes in the snow and I feel in worse shape than Mary.

It's six in the morning when I finally quit trying to sleep, so I decide to make coffee and let the night's craziness sink in at its own pace.

After calling in sick I play with the remote for an hour, sulking at bad daytime TV.  Two episodes of Jerry Springer later, I force myself to try to sleep again.   Heading upstairs I start sneezing, my sinuses clog and my headache begins with a vengeance.

I wake up about six p.m. from a nightmare-filled sleep, my swollen sinuses kicking the shit out of my eye-sockets.  It's dark outside and snowing again, so I sit on the windowsill, watching the huge flakes spiral under orange streetlights.  My mouth feels like Gandhi's flip-flop and my head keeps pounding, so I wander downstairs to get some water, food and medication.

With my evening breakfast, I wash a couple of Nuprin down with a lukewarm jug of morning coffee, then flick the TV on and stare through it.  Then there's a knock at my door.  I answer in my pajamas, but nobody's there.  I look down for footprints.

I smell a burst of hairspray on the breeze.  A blinding light comes at me and flames lick my eyes, almost burning my face off.   I drop to the tiles.

Then I see Mary's snarling teeth as she sprays the aerosol onto a lighter.  I scream and stumble, my back burning as she chases me indoors.  I gain some ground, then duck another blast, catching her arm and snatching both the
aerosol and the lighter away.

I go to the door and throw them across the yard, where they clatter on the fence and make a dog bark.  My sinuses clear thanks to the burnt-eyebrow stench, and I glance up just as she rushes me again with a knife.  Her lunge misses and I tackle her into the snow, shaking the knife out of her hand.  When she stops trying to bite me, I fall off, panting and sweating.

Mary curls up in a ball and whimpers.  The whimpering becomes wailing, which then becomes bawling and screaming at the top of her voice.

"You tried to bury me, Joe.  I thought you were a good Samaritan, but you tried to have me buried.  You redhead!  I hate you!  I hate you!  How could you do that to me?  You tried to have me buried alive! Waaaaaaaaah!"

I try unsuccessfully to calm her down, and then as more curtains twitch and hateful faces appear in doorways, I take her indoors.

Mary's still sobbing twenty minutes later, her teacup rattling in the saucer as she trembles, periodically snorting back giant gobs of mucous.  Her hands are scratched up, and her carpet bag is nowhere in sight.

"Mary," I say.  "You weren't asleep - you were DEAD!  You must have come back to life, but the paramedics declared you dead too.  They took you off in a body bag."

"I was asleep!" she hisses, in a voice tinged with hurt and bronchitis. "I'm a heavy sleeper!"

Shivering, I take a couple more pills despite the four-hour warning on the bottle.  Chugging down the last dregs of cold coffee, I turn the thermostat up to seventy five.

"So what happened when you woke up?"

Mary picks her nose, digging deep, then rolls up the nasal ore between her finger and thumb.  "I was locked in a box.  It was freezing, and I started screaming.  Somebody finally let me out, then I got dressed and left."

I lean on the radiator, trying to suck up heat through my buttocks.  "So. why did you come back here?  Why didn't you go home?"

She gives me a dirty look - which for somebody as dirty as Mary, is quite easy.

"This is where I belong, Joe.  I've told you - I'm your guardian angel."

The horror suffocates me like a shit-filled snorkel - she expects to stay!  Mary walks over and deposits the rolled up booger into the trash, and outside, the blizzard starts up again.  Once more, I thumb my eyeballs almost to popping point.

"One night.  That's it."

***

Everything is dark and silent.  I drool onto my pillow, and think I wake myself up with a fart.  My mouth tastes like postage stamps, and the glowing red digits say 3:15 a.m.

Movement and light catch my eye.  By the time I turn, she's so close my blood freezes.  Inches from my face, Mary's hands are raised and clawed, her hair and clothes blowing out behind her like a ghastly, cheesy horror movie
ghost.  Her eyes and aura are glowing white, and paralyzed I can do nothing but watch.

She screeches, "You thought I was dead because I AM dead!  How else are angels supposed to be?"

She points to her head with a bony, crooked finger.

"So my brain's a little off.  That's what happens when you inhabit a half-rotten body to save some ungrateful little red-headed bastard who doesn't deserve it.   If you try to bury me again, I'll kill you myself!"

I jolt upright as the palsy releases me, and Mary's hideous form blinks out like a frame change in a video.  I reach out to make sure she's really gone.

  Trembling, shaking, terrified, my mind takes ten minutes to calm, which at this time of night feels much longer.

It seems now like a dream, but I have a feeling she delivered it that way.  My bowel clenches and my bladder is full, but I'm scared to leave my bed.

The following morning, after being told four times she can't stay any longer, Mary asks me to drive her into town.  As I get dressed, I find an old yellow toenail on the carpet by my bed.  Holding my breath and picking it up with tissue, I flush it away.

Giving Mary fifty dollars guilt money, I drop her at the first church I see and then head into work still sick.

The bottle factory is a noisy, uncomfortable place at the best of times; the constant high-pitched clinking chews on your head, and when the clinking dies down all you can hear is machinery. By lunchtime I'm practically balled-up in my chair, shaking, wracked with fever and hurting down to my marrow.  My boss sends me home.

I walk in through the front door.  My shoes in the hallway are neatly lined up in pairs; Mary must have fixed them during the night.  I go to make coffee, and the kitchen looks pathologically neat and tidy.  All the dishes are washed and lined up in rows on the drainer, and she's plucked all the spikes out of my cactus.  The thought of her touching my dinnerware skeeves me out, so I put them back in the sink for another wash.  The place still smells of her decay, so despite the cold, I go to open the back door.

I stop dead when I see the broken window and splinters of a forced entry.  The door is already open.

Armed with a knife and heavy iron skillet, I proceed cautiously towards the living room, poke my head round the door and then groan in despair.

"Mary!  What the fuck.?"

She's in a rocking chair, knitting.  I don't own a rocking chair.  She's got an orange cat curled up in her lap, and a can of Heineken on the table beside her.

Putting the knitting down, she raises her eyebrows and looks at me like cooking-fat wouldn't melt in her mouth.  Her wide eyes are rimmed red, decaying at the edges, and there's dry, yellow crust where her lips join. 
By the rocking chair is her carpet bag, and she gently reaches into it, taking care not to wake the cat.

I'm too stunned to react, and Mary breaks my shock by holding out an envelope.  With shaking hands, I open it to find two-thousand dollars.

"I'm sorry about your door," she whispers, sipping her beer.  "Hope that covers it."

"Wh. where did you get this? I gave you fifty this morning cuz you were broke!  And where did the rocking chair come from?"

Mary shrugs, stroking the cat.  "I won it all in a game of poker at the church.  I wanted to repay your kindness."

I sit on the couch, stupefied, but the stench of bad meat brings me round.

"Take this," I say, pulling a couple of hundred dollars from the wad, "and use it to get a room somewhere else.  You've got one minute to be gone before I call the police.  And take that mangy animal with you!"

I give her the money and maintain a deadpan stare while Mary rocks, still stroking the cat.

"No," she says flatly, and picks her knitting up again, casually clacking the needles.  "I'm your guardian angel - this is my job, get used to it."

I reach to the phone, hitting the speaker button so she knows I'm not bluffing.  Dialing 911, I maintain eye contact as I report the intruder, then hang up.

"Fine," she says, spearing the ball of wool and thrusting it indignantly into her bag.  Cradling the cat like a baby, she stands.

As she gets up the cat's head flops back, mouth agape, eye missing, and I discover the source of the rotting smell.

A gargle leaves my throat.  "It's. It's DEAD!" I stammer, falling against the door frame, suddenly dizzy and weak.  "You're INSANE!  Get out!"

"You call me crazy," she spits, "but you don't know the difference between dead and asleep!  C'mon Ginger.  We know when we aren't wanted."

Softly, Mary lays the dead cat in her bag, points her chin skyward and struts towards the front door. She slams it, leaving me staring in bewilderment at the empty rocking chair and half-empty beer can.  I watch through the window to make sure she leaves, and after sharing a few words with my neighbor at the gate, Mary trudges off through the snow.

Feeling a rising in my gut, I barely make it to the bathroom before puking myself dry.

***

The muscle-headed cop raises his heavy eyebrow - a gesture he's been rehearsing for years, for the day he gets to be the smartasser instead of the smartassee.

"So the intruder was the dead woman we carried out two nights ago?"

I nod.  "Yes. But evidently she wasn't dead.  Check with the morgue."

"Don't tell me my job.  Where is she now?  And what happened to your eyebrows?"

I touch the stubble of my former eyebrows and suppress a blush.

"A cooking accident.  She left."

The cop raises his eyebrow again, its heaviness mocking me.  He sits back, his posture indicating he neither likes me nor takes me seriously.  "Okay.  How exactly did you get her to leave?"

"I asked her.  She said no.  So I called you guys, and after that she left."

The cop scribbles this down, looking like he's struggling with the big words.  "Okay - so did it occur to you to call us and tell us she left?"

I almost launch into the story about the dead cat and the vomit, but figure I'll be doing myself more harm than good.

"No, it never occurred to me."

The cop finally leaves.

***

That same night, Mary burns my shed down, my fever kicks up a notch and I collapse from nervous exhaustion.  It's less than three hours since Robocop was in my house, and when the obnoxious truck with blaring siren pulls up
outside, I pinch my nipple (slightly too hard) to confirm I'm not dreaming.

As I wander out, incredulous, there's already a crowd in my back yard around the bonfire, and Mary is down on all fours, coughing and puking from smoke inhalation.  The shed was full of chemicals and wood before the fire, so
there's barely anything left by the time they extinguish it, except a charred lawnmower skeleton, some blackened tools, burst paint cans and a big crispy band of ex-grass around the mess.

The woman from number twelve wraps Mary in a blanket, throwing a cut-throat glare my way, and the man from eight puffs his chest out and folds his arms like he wants to kill me.

Mary glances at me with sad and exhausted eyes.  "I'm sorry, son; I was just trying to keep warm after you made me leave.  I didn't mean to."

She breaks down in sobs and a unified, horrified gasp ripples through the crowd.

"Your own mother!" someone says.

"She's not my."

"You sick bastard," someone else growls, widening his eyes like Hulk Hogan.

"You deserve to rot in hell.  What happened to your eyebrows?"

"May you die of gonorrhea!"

"DIE, you twisted shitbag."

"HEARTLESS!"

"Scum!"

I crouch by Mary and ask the neighbor to give us a minute.  Mary starts to speak, but I hold my hand up to stop her.

"Two gallons of creosote and outdoor weather sealant.  A coffee jar full of paint thinner.  A half-full gas canister, and a propane tank.  Junk wood from my old fence.  Oil, brake fluid and WD40 for the car.  A blow-torch, with fuel.  A chainsaw, also with fuel, and enough paper in the recycling bin to ignite a fucking school.  And you decided to have a CAMPFIRE?"

"I was cold."

A fireman interrupts us, holding his hat to his chest.

"Miss. did you have a cat in there?"

Mary's eyes inflate.  "Oh no. GIN-GEEEAAAAAR.  My BABY!  Is it. Oh my GOD!  If only you'd let us stay the night, Joe!"

She wails a theater production as they bring out the charred cat corpse, and my neighbors start growling in a warlike manner.

From the blackened mess, there's no way to prove this cat was already dead.

Try explaining that to the mob in my yard.

My mind finally overloads, and I pass out.

They take us both to the hospital in the same ambulance, strapped onto opposite stretchers with oxygen masks clamped to our faces.  After that, I lose track of Mary.  I'm in and out of consciousness as we get there, vaguely aware of people running tests, poking me with shit and talking about fishing.

A couple of hours later, I'm checking out with doctor's orders to take a week off on strict bed-rest, with somebody to take care of me.  I nod, lacking the energy for debate, but I don't have anyone to fill that role.

I'm signing the forms when Mary ambles up in her tatty coat and hat.  She's wearing boots with a hole in the front, and thick brown socks scrunched up, poking out the top.  Twirling her beard nervously, she asks, "Wanna share a
taxi?"

I stare at her in silence and she cowers, like she expects an explosion.

I walk unsteadily towards the sliding doors.

She follows me down the road for half a mile, pleading and begging and tugging on my sleeve.  I know I shouldn't, but I give in.  We find a cab downtown, and both get in the back.  The driver asks what happened to my eyebrows, and then rolls the window down to alleviate the Mary-stink. Halfway to my place, she says, "Joe, I know you hate me, but I owe you my life and need somewhere to stay for a few nights.  You need somebody to look after you, and I was sent by the Lord to do it.  Can we call a truce until you get better?"

Sliding down in the seat, eyes closed, I say, "One condition."

I feel her eyes brighten.  "Anything!"

"Tonight, you wash your clothes and take a bath."

"Thank you Joe!" she hisses, grabbing my hand with her freezing, clammy meat hooks.  "Thank you."

The following week is a haze, the days reduced to lucid scenes between sixteen-hour bouts of sleep.  Mary-stink pervades both my dreams and my waking hours, and her insistence of my peril torments my paranoid mind.  Through the night, she patrols the house wielding a shovel like an axe, guarding the place.  She keeps a knife inside her hat and a corkscrew in her pocket, and I see her practicing her blade-swings in case anyone breaks in through the window.

She explains her crazy tactics and I listen, because it's easier to humor her than argue and risk her bawling to my neighbors.  If anyone comes in through the main window, she tells me, they have to step over this razor-sharp bear-trap looking device, and she'll have their balls.  If anyone comes through the back, they get the shovel in the neck, a pan of
boiling water in the face and beaten to death with a lead-filled sock.

Every day I get better and she rots a little bit more.  I throw an empty juice carton away and find a toffee-apple in the trash, with her two front teeth still attached.  The roots are black and bloody, and the next time she smiles, the gap confirms it.  I find a toe in the bathtub, which - although it means she's bathing - doesn't make me very happy.  And sure enough, when she sleeps, her body is no more than a sweaty, yellowing carcass, freezing to the touch.

Tuesday night, I think she's licking my face as I sleep.  I wake up to find crust on my cheek and a piece of her lip on my pillow, but she denies it vehemently.

Wednesday night she finds a dead rabbit, but I won't let her keep it.

Thursday night I go to the bathroom, disoriented yet managing to pee inside the bowl without excessive rogue sprinkles.  Padding back down the hallway, I'm almost asleep before I even get back in bed.  And when I do, Mary's
there wearing a silky nightgown, and I lay on her.

I spring out like a Jack-in-the-box, hitting the wall with the sheet still attached, fumbling for the light switch.  As my eyes adjust, she rises and comes towards me wearing lipstick, blusher and mascara.  She grins a coy, toothless grin and twirls her sideburn seductively.

"Joe, what are you doing?  Come back to bed!"

She sweeps her hand through her crisp hair, and her ear drops on the carpet.

I recoil as she reaches out, with torn strands of hair tangled into her cracked, painted fingernails.  Backing up, I wobble out in a stupor, slamming the bedroom door and passing the shovel leaning against the doorframe like an obedient pet.

Shivering on the sofa amid thoughts of suicide, I listen for her coming, but thankfully she stays in my room.

***

In the cold light of day I feel much braver, and want this over quickly so I can get on with my life.  Today I'm going back to work; I'm done with Mary.

"But I'm your guardian."

"OUT!"

Mary trudges off through the slush, and I grab the car-keys.  I'm still sick, but if she knows I'm home, she'll hang round all day.

***
At the end of a typical hellish day, the horn of freedom blares over the factory.  The crowd stampedes towards the clock-machine in slow-motion and joy.  I wait excitedly in line for 3:59 to become 4:00, then everyone punches out and heads for the exit.

Twenty feet before the exit, I walk by a stack of pallets and Mary lurches out in front of me.  She's staring straight at me, blocking my way out.  Ashen, rotten, half-bald, eye-sockets dark and receding, her movements appear desperate; she can barely keep her now fetid remains upright.  Other people see her too, and everyone stops.  Somebody says, "What the fuck is that?"

It all happens in an instant.  A heartbeat - if you blink you'll miss it.  The eyewitnesses interviewed later on TV say the same thing.

A forklift flies round the corner - the driver is having a heart attack, we find out later - and a fork spears Mary in the neck, slamming into a wall.  The impact decapitates her.  The other fork hits a gas main, and the sparks create a fireball which takes out half the wall, a low section of roof and sprays us all with hot glass shards.  Aside from the driver being killed and a few minor injuries, everyone else is saved because Mary appeared.  And more to the point, I am saved because Mary appeared.

On the scene of the accident, the reporter asks me, "What do you know about the woman who stood in your path?"

Staring vacantly out, over the rubble and through the blown-up wall, I see a shredded carpet-bag.  I shake my head.  "Nothing."

The reporter says, "It's unconfirmed, but one of the witnesses claims she was his dead aunt.  They buried her eight weeks ago, and then her body went missing."

I raise my stubbly eyebrows at the camera, and say, "Huh."

Twirling my car keys and stepping over charred bricks, I walk out into the sun.