I hear the laughter, and I think sometimes the whispers, of ancient Native American children late some nights when I’m sitting on my back porch smoking cigs. This is not some tired stab at the Southern Gothic supernatural. I mean this is Oxford, one of the birthplaces of American Gothica, but I’ve already used two periods. I’m simply writing about my experiences late some nights, when I’m by myself, listening to, existing along with these laughing spirits and the vast network of wild creatures that lie just beyond the incandescent glow cast by my flood light. I don’t hear these children every night but I’ve witnessed their phenomena more than once. The first time was only a few months ago.

It was an ordinary night, alfresco, and I was in my usual rocker underneath the hanging ferns and myriad spider webs and dirt dauber nests that help number my back porch. I was a bit tired but sleep wasn’t closing in. I wasn’t nodding or drifting. I was awake, lucid. I’m not a drinker, either, so no beer or liquor goggles were skewing my reality. I’m just sitting there listening to the usual nocturnal soundtrack. I can distantly hear the humming of passing cars on Highway 6 below, but it’s background noise at best, and I have to lean into the sound. All in all it’s very peaceful.

I reach down to grab another cig when it happens. I hear distinct and definite laughter issuing from the woods. I freeze. It scares me at first. Body stiffens, erect, and muscles contract, neck hair stands at attention. I feel my heart kick up through my tank top. Baboom, baboom, baboom. I lean forward with head tilted and listen……. Silence. It feels like something’s about to happen but I have no idea what. I think of the ether of old, unseen matter carried on some unseen medium, or things pushing against opposite but equal things to create the cosmic equilibrium. Uneasiness flows like the mighty Sardis spillway as palms moisten. I brush my hair over to the right, out of my eyes. Sudden intense burning sensation on my right knee, JESUS, I dropped my cig. I rub the freshly blistered skin but this only intensifies the burning. Heat and friction do not mix. Things become other things in the presence of extreme heat, I remember, like my newly chaffed skin, black and dry, choked of life or liberty. I pick the cig up, shift it to my left hand and continue to listen.

A couple of minutes go by, and I’m on the edge of my seat, ears up. The sliver in the sky pulses moonblue and lambent, and I consider secret things. Finally I hear the laughter again, and this time it’s louder, clearer. It’s the unmistakable titter of children. But who are they, and why are they playing in my woods at three in the morning? I begin to brainstorm about young kids who might live nearby. There’re actually no youngsters on my street, and most if not all of my neighbors are middle-aged to elderly. A few have grandkids, and they occasionally come to visit, but no children LIVE around here. And even if they did, why’d they be down there in my woods, alone in the middle of the night, giggling to each other in the blackdark? It made no sense at all. I sat and continued to listen and the laughter did not cease. Occasionally I thought I sensed whispers as well, but couldn’t be sure. What I was sure about was that I was no longer alone. And in some weird way that gave me comfort. I didn’t know from what or where these noises were coming, but I felt connected to them, much the same way I feel connected to this rolling hill country that I’ve grown up around and on, those verdant bluffs that scatter sound through distance and topography.

I think, for me, these things are linked, the land and the spirits that hold dominion over them, and every once in a while, when you least expect it, when your frustrations and fears and shortcomings and inertia seem to all collide, on the verge of driving you straight off of the proverbial cliff, you’re reminded that you’re not alone, that the things you endure by day will, by night, reveal some covert and profound meaning. It could come in the evening after a long, soul-crushing day of work in the form of a moment of clarity as you realize how insignificant your suffering is, impressing not a blip on infinity’s radar, a confounding relief that sometimes grips me, or as a laughing spirit in the middle of the night, tempting you to join and aiding your realization that endless potential lies latent within, a double helix of possibilities that don’t bind you to any one person or place or bent of your nature.

With the night comes peace, inspiration, reflection, and above all, understanding. I understand that I’m connected with this land, these spirits and animals. I know that my greatest weakness, all my anxieties and regret about past, present, and future that constrict me by day, will be converted by night through some queer alchemical process, or maybe the First Law of Thermodynamics, into my greatest strength, the confirmation of my own membership among that vast and supernatural matrix of all things physical and spiritual that somehow work in mysterious harmony to create the palpable, distinct atmosphere that is my personal Night.

Something changes as twilight refracts, not length of shadows or angle of sun, but a property ineffable, unable to be explained, like Lorca’s duende that rises from the soles of my feet on up. I’m at once ushered through a narrow space between worlds, from my own plastic reality to a brilliant and resonant place, vibrant with meaning. The darkness insulates me, much like gristle around newly formed bone. It’s only in this peaceful and nonlinear world where I can tap into the past, and simultaneously see the future. Everything is in superposition once the sun goes down. I know that as long as I live, as hopeless and meaningless the daily grind becomes, that, by night, I have an entirely different reality that’s accessible, just waiting for me to dive in. And I will. I do. I hear the laughter, and at first I didn’t know why, but the more I listen, the more I understand.

One night, just a couple months back, I was in my rocker as usual, but on the lookout for whatever had been setting my dogs off in a chorus of howling every few evenings the previous week. I figured it could be one of the creatures captured on the game camera I’d installed the week before. I’d already seen lots of ‘em in the flesh, like deer and possums and raccoons and skunks, just loitering behind the chain-link fence that borders my yard a couple dozen feet into the woods. I’ve had encounters with creatures you wouldn’t expect to find traipsing around your property, like the escaped yearling from a small plot a couple miles away that’s connected to my place by vast and profound woods stretching from my back yard for miles. I’m no whisperer of any sort. It’s because I live on a lot, behind which borders one of the only undeveloped expanses of forest that’s left in a ten-mile radius.

My house is on the west side of town, equidistant between Rowan Oak and Grisham’s old stomping ground. Take one left out of my neighborhood and not another of any kind and you’ll be in Batesville within fifteen to twenty five minutes depending on the weight of your foot. These woods run from the edge of my back yard, unmolested, all the way onto Old Taylor Road, a distance of about 3 miles, and beyond for about another quarter mile or so. After that, and all around, is the new super-developed Oxford, equipped with condos squished into places you wouldn’t think a building crew would be able to squish condos into. The point is, this forest is it as far as natural woodland environment within miles, and all the wildlife from in and around those now-developed areas has been forced into a more concentrated domain, which happens to run up and around my back yard. I’ve seen dozens of red foxes and vixens, coyotes, armadillos, at least one bovine, coons of all kinds, beavers, groundhogs, copperheads, cottonmouths, garter snakes, king snakes, flying squirrels, one bobcat, black widows, brown recluses, red wasp nests aplenty, hornets, those dreaded holes in the ground festering with yellow jackets, the cousin of the red wasp, and above all else, a mountain lion. That’s right. A frickin’ mountain lion.

It happened about a year ago actually, summer of ’18. I was puttering around out back late one night, ‘bout 1:00am, and I’m smoking my cig. I suddenly heard the most terribly visceral, blood-chilling shriek coming from my neighbor’s back yard, to my immediate left, about twenty-five or thirty feet away. It was piercing, and cut through the night like a blade to birthday cake, straight through me. My hair’s beginning to stand just on recall. It sounded exactly like a woman screaming, shrieking for dear life. I honestly thought there was a lady, maybe my sweet next-door neighbor, being attacked in her back yard. You learn a lot about yourself in a time like this. You can either stand up to the challenge, whatever it may be, or you can shy away and scoot like a coward.

I bolt inside faster than I’ve ever run. Collaring composure, I realized I couldn’t just leave her alone out there. I’ve known this lady for fifteen years. She’s a great neighbor, the best you could ask for. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the only working flashlight out of the four on the kitchen table and ran back out through the French doors, opening both for some reason, before rushing to where I’d stood moments before. The notion of owning a gun occurs for the first time ever. I listen but hear only the silence of stones. I called out her name but nobody responded and there were no footsteps to be heard. Just eerie silence that seemed to grow before dying down again, like your ears popping on a mountain road. I turned the flashlight on and pointed it to the general vicinity of where I’d heard the awful scream but didn’t see anything. I put the light down and looked around. Legs were wobbly. Stomach kept dropping over and over, like a circular rollercoaster that just won’t stop. I was terrified was what I was.

Turning the light onto the spot again I scanned her back yard. Then I saw ‘em, two shining orbs a few inches apart, and froze. They were eyes, and they were looking at me. I dropped the light and tried to gather myself. I picked it back up, swinging it elliptically across her yard and that’s when I spied it. About twenty-five feet away from where I was standing, I watched a huge cat with a head that, in profile, was shaped exactly like my orange house cat. This thing had to be twenty times the size of Mr. Badness. I could not believe what I was seeing, and shined the light long enough to see it smoothly prowl back towards the edge of the woods and out of the circumference of my light, before dropping it yet again and bolting back inside, adrenaline and endorphins fueling me forward.

I busted through the two open doors and slammed ‘em behind me. I was almost in a state of shock, and dashed to my computer to YouTube sounds of all sorts of wild cats in the southern US of A. I eventually found an audio file of a mountain lion screaming, and this was exactly what I’d heard. Once confirmed, I was simply astounded. A mountain lion in Mississippi. I went back outside to find nothing out of the ordinary, the carnivorous creature had cooly crept out of sight, leaving just the woods and all the other less frightening animals I’ve grown inwardly friendly with. I was no longer scared, despite knowing this huge cat which could and would eat me alive at first opportunity was shuffling, creeping around my woods, probably looking at me that second. But the connection had been made. I felt it, some transcendental link to that wild animal, its spirit more precisely, and I began to wonder if those whispers I’d heard were somehow associated with this feeling of correspondence with everything that surrounded me. It was like some mystical union with the land that I love. Words and phrases like animism and anima mundi popped into my mind, and I felt like getting on my knees and talking to plants. I felt I knew the secrets of ancient stones buried all around. I wanted to worship, like some modern-day Druid, the timeless oaks that towered above.

This place where I’ve resided for more than two decades is also home to that endless catalogue of wild creatures and restless spirits, seen and unseen, each possessing a glorious spot, myself included, in the opulent kingdom of evening that blooms and expands by twilight like some cosmic mandala as the nuclear reactor in the sky casts its last merciless ray before being subsumed into the surrounding hill country, like some solar Oreo dipped in milk.

From my back porch bullfrogs consecrate the night as luminous sheet lightning blankets an original sky above, and I hear the circular, unmistakable cadence of the barred owl, probably standing watch from its perch in an elegant American beech, catching a glint of the moon’s ardent offerings before floating off to places clandestine and unseen. I am alive.