Sickhouse

like red-rimmed lids

Sheridan stepped lightly as a feather up the stairs, and yet she sounded like a fleet of soldiers marching to the barracks. She couldn't possibly mean... she thought, but her mind trailed off as she searched for the words. She knew how ridiculous this thought, this little hope was. And yet Sheridan couldn't wind her fingers around it and choke it, try as she might. Turning down the hall, her feet instinctively made their way for the first door to the left. She had hated how open this room was to everyone. How often had the door unlatched, showing her naked to whoever walked by? To go into any other room, you had to first pass this one. The bathroom was just across from it and the two other bedrooms were just past it.

Sheridan stepped in and looked around her, a sudden, but altogether familiar figure to the room. The bed-her bed-was still tucked into the corner of the room, beside the doorway. A light, rose-colored quilt was laid next to the pillow for her. She grazed the white bars of the bed frame with her fingers. She thought of all the times she awoke in the middle of the night feeling tied to the bars, paralyzed in bed because someone was standing in the hall watching her. At least, she had always been convinced someone was there. And now, she was back, bittersweetly condemned to her childhood bed.

Sheridan had a screaming feeling that she wasn't meant to be here. In the room, in the house, maybe. She spun around and grasped the door frame for balance. There she saw black, pulsing ticks-a squirming line of black crawling atop and under itself. Jerking her hand back, she blinked and it dawned on her what she was truly looking at: the measurements of her growing body made by her mother and father in black permanent marker. Sheridan stepped back and traced the lengthening of time with her eyes. She remembered her mother always pushing her against the door frame, repeatedly reminding her to stand up straight. She never seemed to stand straight enough for her mother, but when she pulled her away to look at the new mark drawn on the wooden frame, her mother sighed upon seeing how big her baby was getting.

Her fingers grazed the cold wooden frame before she sat down on the bed, a tangled mass catching in her head. What was this? Sheridan began to pull it apart, but each time she yanked at a thread, a thought, it seemed to tie deeper into the knot. She was overreacting, she told herself. She was seeing things, as one does from time to time, and she was overreacting.

Sheridan thought of Avenie. She felt guilty for tarnishing her home, however many years ago. Sheridan wondered how many other places her family had blemished. The house was in rough shape, what with its leaking pipes, crumbling foundation, moldy rooms, and such that Avenie had disclosed via letter was still plaguing the house, but Sheridan couldn't help but rub her neck at the thought of contributing to its sorry state. The urge to run to her and apologize jumped into her mind.

Wasn't she being dramatic? Avenie knew the state of the house when Sheridan was just a girl, and she knew it when she repossessed, or, possibly more accurately, "adversely possessed" the house years later.

Sheridan set her bag on the bed. There certainly wasn't much to look at. Curiously, almost everything from her childhood was left here, waiting. Her bookshelf/toy bin at the foot of the bed, her paintings, her dresser in the corner, and even her oven playset. She opened the closet to find some of her old clothes and toys still remaining. Tears stung her eyes. She'd never realized just how much her mother had left behind.

"Is everything just as you left it?" a breathy voice asked, tickling Sheridan's ear.

Her pulse raced in the mere seconds it took for her to reply.

"Yes. Yes, it is," she whispered, trying to wrench her eyes away from the inside of the closet, from the safety of her little dolls and bears, to look behind her.

She stepped back to close the closet door and, closing the door, she saw Avenie standing in the doorway of the room.

"Is there a draft in here?" Sheridan said, tugging on her ear.