the vent knows

“The Vent Knows”

A Southern Haunting in Three Acts and One Missing Puzzle Piece

by [Anonymous but Clearly You Know Who]

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ACT I: The Mustard Lineage

In the peeling heart of Bogalusa, Louisiana, where the air was 87% humidity and 13% fried chicken grease, there lived an old woman named Gladyas who had committed one of the great American sins.

She put mustard in the mac and cheese.

The great fracture.

The single, glistening sin in an otherwise holy lineage.

Mustard.

In. 

The mac.

And cheese.

Not the powder kind, either.

Not that subtle whisper of dry Coleman’s.

A full squirt, yellow as warning paint, tangled among elbow pasta and government cheese like a highway crash.

But listen.

Even saints stub their toe.

Even Gladyas—Bogalusa-born, yam-blessed, apron-starched to hell and back—might’ve had a moment of

“Just a touch. Just for tang.”

And maybe nobody spoke up,

because it was her kitchen,

and fear of God ran just behind fear of that wooden spoon.

But even as a child—five years old and already aligned with the forces of ancestral judgment—I knew:

This is how kingdoms fall.

So I did what had to be done.

Each time I visited, while Gladyas sat in her recliner watching reruns of the 700 Club—where prophets wore wigs taller than the regional Baptist dome—with my tiny hands, turned her picture frames backward.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

One by one.

In silent protest of culinary blasphemy.

Gladyas, 91, stoic and sharp as glass, noticing the frames turned and probably thought:

“The spirits don’t like my mac.”

My mother, watching this unfold, thinking:

“Grandma’s slipping.”

But no.

It wasn’t dementia.

It wasn’t spirits.

It was a small child waging righteous psychological warfare over cheese integrity.

I was a ghost of taste, haunting mustard itself.

I didn’t yell.

I didn’t cry.

I simply rewrote the atmosphere.

Years of this.

No confession.

Just quiet haunting.

A battle for the sanctity of starch fought with shadows and hinges.

Eventually the entire genealogical altar turned around. 

Great-grandparents. 

Civil War veterans. 

A 22-year-old man who looked 48, wearing the kind of wool that caused heatstroke and frostbite simultaneously.

Every one of them, colorized like a PBS documentary about cholera, staring into the camera. 

Predicting your sins.

All of them, rotated to face the wall in a silent, collective protest.

No. Not protest.

Lineage maintenance.

Lineage maintenance.

Somewhere, deep in the pantry of the afterlife, my great-grandma’s ghost is whispering:

“The child was correct.”

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ACT II: Salt on the Wound (Watermelon)

Then came the salt.

One hot June afternoon, I watched Gladyas approach a wedge of watermelon with a glint in her eye.

She took out the shaker—not even kosher salt, just iodized table treason—and gave the melon a generous dusting.

I gasped.

Mustard in the mac was forgivable.

A culinary misdemeanor.

A sin of flavor confusion.

But salt on watermelon?

That’s intent.

That’s pre-meditated umami treason.

“You seasoned the joy,”

I knew

This can’t go unpunished.

I whispered into the fan, which only stuttered back

“shuh shuh shuh… sin…”

It was then that I found it:

A lone puzzle piece.

Bent.

Unloved.

Clearly part of a cloud or a dress or a generic non-background background.

I walked to the hallway vent—just wide enough to swallow something small but essential—and slid the puzzle piece between its teeth.

A sacrifice.

A prayer.

“Take her.”

One shake of salt, one piece gone.

With a flick of my small wrist, down it went into narrow floor vent.

The clatter was faint, but final.

By summer’s end, the puzzle was riddled with holes—blue sky eaten away, a cat’s head dissolved into absence.

She never asked where they went.

Maybe she thought the ghost had moved from photographs into paper.

Maybe she was right.

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ACT III: The Clock of Birds

Gladyas, ever suspicious of technology but not QVC, had once ordered what she thought was a simple wall clock.

She trusted the voice on the screen.

She gave it her credit card.

And what it gave her back…

was the cursed timekeeper of the avian underworld.

Each hour?

A new winged cry.

Not soothing.

Not natural.

But wrong, like a cardinal with a Brooklyn accent.

Trills from bird species that hadn’t been seen in Louisiana since the Dust Bowl.

And because the alarm setting was misunderstood—left in “demo” mode—it went off every night at 2:00 AM.

I heard those 2AM birds

and thought:

“They deserve this.”

Because once you add mustard to mac,

Salt to the watermelon,

the birds come.

In the dead hours, she would wake screaming.

“There’s birds in the chimney!”

I, once again, remained silent.

The vent knew.

The ancestors—framed and turned—knew.

The puzzle gods knew.

A 91-year-old woman in a bird-haunted home,

wrapped in the quiet rot of time and mustard, calling in the chimney man.

He arrived in a Ford F-150 with no ladder and too much skepticism.

He wore overalls and judgment.

He walked through her home with a flashlight and the silence of a man who had seen things in other homes he could never unsee.

He looked up.

Then down.

Then at her.

“Ma’am… you don’t have a chimney…” 

He said in he flat tone of a man who’s seen too much.

And in that moment, she knew.

It wasn’t birds.

It wasn’t ghosts.

It wasn’t even the devil.

It was something far worse.

It was consequence.

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EPILOGUE: In the Vent

Years later, long after Gladyas passed and the house was sold, someone pulled the old vent cover off to clean the ducts.

Inside?

57 tiny puzzle pieces.

Dusty.

Warped.

Patient.

Waiting.

The people didn’t know their story.

They fed them to the vacuum.

But as the machine whirred, it made a sound—soft, almost like a whisper from an old rotary fan:

“shuh shuh shuh… sin…”