It must’ve been a hell of a sight, my bursting into the hallway like that. All six feet of nurse Jon rushed in to get ahold of Ferra before she could turn on herself, while Mary led me to the nearest private bathroom to see if I needed stitches. I tried to help her, but my hands were shaking.

            “Here.” Mary used one of my hands to hold a towel against my forehead and placed the other one firmly in my lap. I knew I should make a joke, or tell her I was fine, but I was afraid I’d start crying if I tried to say anything. This wasn’t the first time Ferra had gotten aggressive. She hadn’t recognized me in almost a year, and it was nothing for her to call me a fucking kidnapping bitch. She’d even smacked me a time or two, but this was the first time she’d left a mark.  

            Worse still, it wasn’t the violence that had been so upsetting. It was the terror in her eyes. Her mind was coming apart. Over the last few years, the world had filled with homewreckers, then secret police, then murderers. It was hard to tell what we were to her now, if we were even human at all.

            “Maya. You know she didn’t mean it,” Mary crooned. She used a damp towel to scrub the drying blood off my face, then got to work on the cut.

            Of course she was right, but knowing that made it worse, not better. Knowing that was the whole problem.

            “It would be easier if she’d always been a bitch,” I managed to say. My voice crackled, but it didn’t break. Good for me.

            “Don’t worry, plenty of them were. And now they’ve got no one but us to throw shit at.”

            I sighed. Mary pulled me back together with some butterfly bandages and gauze.

            “I can get you some scrubs if you want to change.”

            I declined. I tried to wash my hands, but most of that blood was congealed by now. I had to scratch it off with my fingernails, and even then, the lines on my palms were still reddish brown.

“Oh wow, I thought Casey looked like shit.”

            Of the three of us, Sean was the only one that could walk into a bank right now and get a loan. Casey, who couldn’t have been there for more than a few minutes, was still red faced and sweaty in his stained tee shirt and running shorts. I’d at least gone home to change first, but the cut had already taken on a mean purple hue and started to.

            It had earned me a few looks on the way in. Luckily, Sean had staked out a table in one of the more private corners of the Barking Dog. It wasn’t the best café in our tiny, middle-of-nowhere town, but it was the only one that didn’t have Bible verses painted on the walls.

            I shrugged. “Just can’t keep my mouth shut, I guess.”

            Sean’s face changed. “Didn’t Ferra do that to you?” He leaned on the table with his arms crossed in front of him. Despite the tailored button-downs and the black credit card I knew was in his wallet, Sean always looked slightly uncomfortable. Plenty of guys were a lot more arrogant with a lot less going for them, but I guess you couldn’t outspend your dad calling you a disappointment for thirty years.

            I nodded.

            “She’s a pretty good shot, huh.” 

            “Oh my god, fuck you.”

Casey laughed at his own joke. He had this big, deep voice, and you could feel it in your bones when he laughed. It sucked when he followed Sean’s lead and turned serious.

            “You’re doing a good thing, taking care of her,” he said.

            I wasn’t that good of a person. There was no way my cousin could do much for her, since he was barely into his sophomore year. We sort of had this deal that I would take care of his mom while he was getting his life set up. Then, if her early onset was genetic, he’d take care of me. It was a harrowing thought.

            “Don’t do that. Hey.” Sean leaned in until he forced me to look at him. “You’re here. It’s over for today. You’re fine.”

            I looked away and nodded, if only to make my friends feel better. I had a clear memory of the first time I realized that Ferra wasn’t the only one I had to worry about. The way the dread took root in the pit of my stomach. I used to be able to ignore it, but it seemed lately like it was growing. Spreading, like a cancer.

            Sean leaned back, but he kept his arms crossed over his chest. He stared down at the table. “So, I hate to keep the mood down, but I got a call from Dale a few days ago.

            Casey and I sat up straight. “Is he okay?”

            Of course, he wouldn’t be making phone calls if he was in solitary or the infirmary, so it couldn’t be the worst-case scenario. Still though, he could still have gotten wrapped up in something that tacked years onto his sentence.

            “He’s…I think he’s okay. He’s not hurt. Or in – not like legal trouble.”

            “What’s going on?” Casey’s deep voice rolled right over the café’s radio. We got a few more looks, and Sean, in response, lowered his voice even more.

            “I’m not really sure. He was upset. He kept saying that something was wrong, but not like, one specific thing. He just kept saying that something was about to happen, or someone was about to do something to him. But not like a fight, or anything like that. Not like a person. And then he asked me if I could feel it. And I mean, that’s just the gist of it. It was kind of a long phone call. He wasn’t always…” At a loss, Sean shook his head. “Coherent.”

            The silence that followed was heavy. Dale had problems, for sure, but they were firmly rooted in reality. Even when he got drunk enough to start bar fights out of nowhere, he’d never rambled like that, and he’d never been paranoid.

            “Should we call someone?” I asked.

            A firm “No” was their immediate answer. “You don’t want to end up in a psych ward in prison.”

            “So what do we do?”

            No one came up with an answer.

The unease clung to me into the next day. Anna Perin and I were seated by her studio’s front window looking at tile samples. The big table usually had the best light, but the clouds were dense today. What’s worse, there was a strange yellow tint to the light that did break through, like it was about to storm. It made it almost impossible to judge the colors in the tile.

            “It feels wrong,” I said, not about the weather.

            She gave me a sympathetic nod. “I know.” We’d known each other as long as we’d both been in business, her a designer, me a contractor. Up to now, our relationship had been strictly professional, but it softened when I had to take time away from clients to get Ferra’s house up to date for the real estate market. Tiling over her cracked linoleum floors could buy her a few more months at her private nursing home, and Anna had been pretty generous with the discounts.

            “I wish I could tell you something nice, but it’s probably going to be hell until you get it sold. At least you’ve got something to occupy your time.”

            “Right.” I tried to have an opinion about the samples laid out in front of me, but my heart wasn’t in it. “I’m tired, Anna. Just tell me what to do.”

            She nodded. “Do a hex tile mosaic on the floor. Glossy white. Flat white ceiling, satin beige walls, glossy white trim, and for the shower wrap-around…”

            “I swear to god, Anna, if you say white subway tile-”

            She laughed. “Okay…black river rock slabs. And we’re done.” She stood up and began to pack away her samples into their box.

            “Hey, did you hear about fight at Kroger’s?”

            “What?” I’d been staring out the window at the gathering mass of clouds, and thought I misheard her.

            “A fight broke out. They had to call the police.” Now that we could pay attention to something else, Anna took the seat right next to me. “It was two women. They were fighting over a bag of sugar.”

            “What? Did they know each other? Was it not about the sugar?”

            “No, that’s the thing. My sister works there. She said people have been stocking up on all kinds of shit, but like in a subtle way. Like, two bales of paper towels, three cubes of bottled water…”

            “Three bags of sugar.”

            “Exactly.”

            I gestured out the window. “Does it have to do with that?”

            She looked. “I don’t know. It’s not supposed to storm in the next ten days.”

            “Maybe it’s a freak thing.”

            She shrugged. “Maybe it’s just the seasons turning over. Everyone’s getting stocked up.”

            “Maybe it’s the full moon.”

            There was a pause while Anna pulled up an app on her phone. “It’s not.”

We put in the orders, and I spent the rest of the day at Ferra’s house. Her belongings were in a storage locker, but plenty of her remained in the empty shell. She haunted it in the colors of the walls, the scratches on the floors. No matter what I did to make it another person’s home, it still smelled like her. Even when I tore up the carpet and restored the hardwood floors underneath. Even when I put in new appliances. An oven she’d never cooked in. A washing machine that had never used her detergent.

            On top of all the other baggage that would come from selling her house, I felt bad for whoever bought it. Maybe if I sold it to a witch who really knew her shit, she’d be alright. But in all likelihood, it would go to an affluent couple looking for an investment property. They’d turn it into an AirBNB and do their best to sterilize the energy with beige carpets and grey furniture, but they’d would never get rid of her.

It was getting dark when I got home, and someone was waiting on my porch. They were hunched over, pacing back and forth. I froze, thinking back to the fight at the grocery store, and slipped my phone out of my pocket. Just as I started to type 9-1-1, the guy turned around and called out my name.

            “Sean?” I rushed up the concrete stairs and there he was. He looked shaken. It was hard to see his face in the dark, but I could tell from the way he shifted his weight back and forth that he was almost frantic. “What’s going on? Are you okay?” I squeezed his arms, and he stilled.

            He opened his mouth to say something, but shook his head. “I just don’t want to be alone.”

Five minutes later, he was sitting at my kitchen table while I stood by the coffeemaker.

            “I don’t know, it’s just…everything. It’s like all this shit has been piling up and piling up and I – I can’t calm down. Like, I’m used to my dad being on my ass about everything, but now there’s this thing with Dale, and I can’t just call him. And someone almost beat the shit out of me on my way to work-”

            “Wait, what?”

            “Yeah. I guess I cut him off. He actually got out of his car, walked up to mine, and starting pounding on the window and screaming at me. I guess I should’ve called the police, but I just wanted to get away. I drove off when the light turned green.”

            “Fuck, Sean. That’s…a lot.”

            “Yeah. I mean, I’ve been this anxious before, but, I don’t know. This just feels different. It’s like, the worst part of my day was trying to take a piss, because I was so scared to be by myself. It felt like something was going to sneak up behind me the entire time.

            “Someone with a tire iron?” I tried to joke.

            He stared at my refrigerator. “You know when you’re a kid, and it’s dark, and there’s that scary hallway, or basement, or closet, or whatever, and you’re just scared of it. Like, you know there isn’t a person there, you know that monsters don’t exist, but when you have to walk through it, you feel like something’s about to reach out and get you?”

            “Have you-” The coffee pot dinged, and we nearly shit ourselves. I sighed off the tension, and got some mugs out of the cupboard. “Have you taken anything yet?”    

            He hesitated.

            “Sean.” When he still didn’t answer, I gave him this withering look, until he started to squirm.

            “I haven’t…filled the prescription in while.”

            I slammed the creamer down on the table. “Can’t possibly imagine who gave you that idea.”

            “It’s not his fault. I just…I’m not on when I take something. It was noticeable.”

            “Sean, you can’t just…” I gave up. “Look, you can hang out here tonight, but you have to go the pharmacy tomorrow.”

            He gave me this big-eyed, sad, sincere look that was unique to him. He was a little too clean-cut for my taste, a little too timid, but that look always got to me.

            “Thanks Maya.”

            I rolled my eyes. We had coffee while we waited for food to be delivered. We put on some brightly lit show while we scrolled through our phones. It got later, and later. We both had to get up early, but Sean never said anything. I wondered if he was afraid to split up and be left alone on the couch. Of course, I did speak up either. He was my friend. It was only decent to sit with him through his unmedicated crisis. It certainly didn’t have anything to do with my own dark bedroom.

            I woke up just as the light was coming back into the sky. The TV was still on and put out some comforting background noise. At some point, we had snuggled up against each other. He smelled like good cologne, tastefully applied. It almost felt like everything was okay.

It wasn’t. I should’ve known something terrible was going on when I pulled up to the nursing home and two police cars were parked in the turn-around. I tried to tell myself that one of the nurses must’ve gotten caught stealing pills. It wouldn’t be the first time.

            Deep down, if I was being honest with myself, I knew better.

            To their credit, the staff was doing a good job keeping things under control, but the faces at the nurses’ station were panicked. They mouthed tense words back and forth, and all of them stared down the hall that led to the common room. It was the first time I’d seen its giant steel doors closed.

            A clanging sound echoed from behind them. We all jumped. The only other sounds in the lobby were the drone of the overhead lights and a resident standing nearby, who kept calling “Amy” into the hall.

            “Aaamy.” She said again, but her overall demeanor didn’t match the others. There wasn’t any fear in her eyes, or much of anything. She had the flat voice of someone stuck in a different, abbreviated time and place. A fleeting burst of connecting neurons in the dark.

            “Aaamy-”

            “Someone take her back to her room,” the charge nurse snapped. We made eye contact, and I knew.

            “Hey.” Mary appeared beside me. She tried to smile, but her eyes were wide with concern. She took my arm just as a series of metallic bangs erupted from the common room. “Maya, come on. Come with me.” She ushered us into the nearest staff room and closed the door.

            “What’s happening? Is she okay?”

            “Nobody’s hurt, okay. Everyone’s fine. Ferra’s going to be alright. She’s just going through it right now.” Mary used that rhythmic, soothing voice you’d use on a crying child.

            “What are you talking about. What’s going on, Mary?” I looked at the door as if Ferra might be right behind it.

            “She’s having an episode. You know how she’s been getting agitated. Well, she must have found a broken bed in one of the rooms, and she managed to break off a piece of metal railing. No one’s hurt. We called the police because people in her state usually calm down when they see a uniform. They’re de-escalating as we speak.”

            I nodded, but I couldn’t stop trying to stare through the walls.

            “It’s okay. She’s not in trouble. We’re not going to kick her out. Maya, it happens.” She rubbed my arms the way I’d done to Sean last night. I covered my mouth and tried not to cry. “Listen,” Mary continued. “I have to go for now. Your aunt isn’t the only one losing their shit this week. It’s a madhouse. Just stay in here, and I’ll come get you when everything’s okay.”

“You said it already is okay.”

            Mary looked at me with sympathy, but didn’t say anything else as she closed the door behind her. She didn’t close it quick enough to hide another distant crash.

            I was there for another hour. Ferra was frail, or at least frail looking. The cops didn’t want a physical altercation if they could avoid it. They talked her into a sense of calm and eventually, she just handed them the metal bar and asked to go home. They sedated her and took her back to her room. Mary led me back to see her when she was settled in, now catatonic in the hospital bed. She was forty-five, but she looked seventy. Her face was completely hollowed out, and her hair was gray, but that wasn’t new. I didn’t stay long after that.

It seemed all day like it was going to rain. That same sickly yellow light diffused through the low hanging clouds. But the first thing I did was open all of Ferra’s windows. It was unsettling to be in an empty house when it was all buttoned up. It could feel like being in a separate dimension altogether, where you can see the outside, but you’re separated from it by more doors and glass panes.

            More than once, which was noticeable in a town our size, sirens blared in the far distance. I knew I should be prepping the bathroom shower for its river stone tile. Or cleaning out the basement, or fixing the drywall in the corner of her office. But today, and after everything that’d been happening, I couldn’t bring myself to wander too far into that other dimension. Something about turning all those blind corners, over and over again, just creeped me the fuck out.

            I hovered around her front two rooms, organizing tools, touching up the paint in the foyer. Staying close to the door. I probably should’ve texted Sean and asked him if he actually went to the pharmacy on his was to the office, but I didn’t want to overplay my hand. If his dad had an issue with Zoloft, it would be delicate work to convince him otherwise.

“Hey, ma’am.”

            I gasped. A man had just come up to the window. The hoodie and jeans hung off his frame, but he had eight or so inches on me. “What are you renting this place for, ma’am.” He was young, too, young enough to think that calling people ma’am was going convince them of something.

            “We’re selling it.”

            He thought for a minute. “How much are you going to sell it for?”

            Just so you know, no one goes around looking to buy or rent.

            I locked the front door. “It’ll be online.” I picked up a skill saw as if I were going to put it away and started closing and locking the windows. When everything was shut, I beelined toward the kitchen to make it out the back door. The guy was most likely trying to case the house, but wasn’t ready to do anything, by which I mean break in and strip out the copper wire. He’d probably be happy to let me speed away in my car and at the moment, we were in agreement.

            I had the back door open, keys in hand, and just before I shut it, I glanced down the hallway to my right.

            There was something around the corner.

I froze. The hair stood up all over my body. I couldn’t see it. It was hidden just out of view. It didn’t make a sound, but it was there. I could feel it. It was there. It wasn’t a person. It wasn’t a monster. But I knew it was, and I knew it was there as if it were right beside me.

It’s a wonder I didn’t crash my car on the way to Sean’s apartment. Of course, the second I was out of there, I started to convince myself that I’d just had a mini panic attack, or a psychotic break. It’s not like they weren’t going around. Even so, the physical effect on my nerves lingered. My hands shook so much that I couldn’t get the key in his door and ended up pounding on it instead.

            “What the fuck? Are you okay?” He had a towel in one hand and his shoulder length hair was dripping wet. He looked exhausted, possibly a little high.

            “It’s Ferra.” I surprised myself. I meant to tell him about the house even as I opened my mouth, but I suddenly couldn’t do it. I realized how it would sound. Besides, the familiarity of Sean, with his tattooed hands and ragged sweatpants, pulled me far from that house. It made me want to melt through his entryway and lock out the impending doom with the sickly yellow light.

            “Is she okay?”

            I nodded, but my throat constricted and my eyes burned.

            “She held the fucking nursing home hostage.”

            “She what?”

            I told him what happened earlier that day. He gave me this big eyed, sad, sincere look as he listened and dried his hair, then twisted it back into its usual bun.

            “She’s getting so bad. And it’s happening like, so fast. Like she was taking care of me five years ago. And then things started happening, and I just lied to myself for months because I couldn’t even imagine that something was wrong with her.” I’d started crying for real at this point, and Sean walked over to put his arms around me. He smelled like Bronner’s almond soap, the only thing strong enough to get rid of the smell of the restaurant. “What if it’s already starting,” I whispered into his tee-shirt.

            He pulled me back to look me square in the face. “It’s not. Maya, she had a really hard life. She had, like, ten times as much stress as a normal person. And she drank a lot, and she-” I knew he was trying to think of a diplomatic way to say that my uncle gave her a few concussions. “She had a lot of injuries.”

            I rubbed my eyes, then the rest of my face. “Every time I forget something, or can’t think of a word….”

            “It happens to everyone on the planet. I promise. What’s the thing they say? It’s not forgetting where you left the keys. It’s forgetting what keys are.” He tried to smile. I noticed again how tired he looked.

            “Did you just get home?”

            “Picked up a double. Nothing like working all night, and then working all day.” He kissed me. Then he went over to his little kitchen counter where he opened up a Styrofoam clamshell and presented me with a very aesthetic piece of chocolate cake. “I swear to God, I’ve made like two hundred of these this week.”

            I joined him, and we split it. A few seconds into a quiet stretch, he said. “I talked to my mom last night, before work. She heard through the grapevine that my dad has cancer.”

            “Oh.” I almost said that’s awful as a reflex, but stopped myself. “Are you going to go see him?”

            He thought for a second, then shrugged. “I’ve only met him like…twice. I don’t think he could pick me out of a line-up, to be honest. I don’t even have his number.” He sighed, and followed it up with an ambivalent smile. “You’ve got to admire someone who really knows what they don’t want.”

            A few hours later, we were on opposite sides of Sean’s bed enjoying the peaceful transition between turning off the lights and letting our phones drop out of our hands. I was on my side, dangerously close to hanging over the edge, when he rolled over behind me and rested his chin on my shoulder.

            “You know what we could do?”

            “Oh yeah?”

            He slid his hand under my shirt by way of explanation. Men always had such warm hands. Normally I would banter with him for a minute, pretend to be uninterested and let him convince me otherwise, but it had already been such an awful week. Without another word, I rolled over and pulled him to me.

            We were past the point of no return when Sean’s phone rang.

It was the time of night when no call was ever good. At first, we ignored it. The caller persisted. When the phone started to vibrate for the second time, Sean finally surrendered and checked the ID. His face was somber as he rolled off me.

            When he clicked accept, the din of roaring static filled the room, like when people answered the phone in a wind storm.

            “Casey?” Sean’s voice was tense. The roaring became more of rhythmic pulsing and I realized that it wasn’t wind. It was someone breathing. Or, more accurately, someone hyperventilating.

            “Casey. Casey, what’s going on?” The way he skipped confusion and went right to upset made me wonder if, despite his perpetually relaxed demeanor, Sean had also been feeling whatever was in the air.

Casey tried to talk, but it was high pitched and choked, like he was sobbing. Sean kept asking him to clarify, to repeat himself, but not much was getting through. The only phrase I could pick out was “in the house.” All of the sudden, despite Sean’s presence and the warm bed that smelled like almonds, I was back at Ferra’s house, starting at down the hallway at that corner.

            “Okay, okay, just hold on. I’ll be there in five minutes.” He looked at me, and I was sure now that he, too, had noticed the extra sirens, the fights, the yellow tinge in the clouds. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he promised as he was getting dressed. I wasn’t proud of it, but I didn’t offer to go with him, and he didn’t ask me to.  

            Up to this point, I’d been basking in the comfort of my boyfriend’s apartment. Everything was familiar. Everything was safe. Sean was safe. His place was like its own little dimension. I was sure that while I was there, it would shelter me from whatever was stewing just beyond the walls. Then I was less sure. Then I wasn’t sure. Then I was staring at all the dark corners, listening to silence, afraid to close my eyes.

            I couldn’t be alone right now.

            As soon as I stepped out into the hallway, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Even with the unrelenting overhead lights that beat back the shadows, I could immediately feel that I was in a windowless bottleneck. I had to force myself not to run down the stairs, but I sure as fuck was not taking an elevator.

            I was relieved to finally push my way out of the building. To breathe the open air, even though it was muggy and smelled like wet leaves and cigarettes. I didn’t have a destination in mind. I just wanted to be where someone else was, so I veered down the sidewalk toward a row of storefronts with their lights still on.

            They did a fine job of illuminating the trash built up against the curb. Several buildings had plywood screwed up to protect the glass windows. Most of it was covered with uninspired graffiti. Not the artistic kind that brings artists back to a neighborhood. More like a plethora of vague threats and poorly worded sexual propositions. One window I passed was decorated with a huge, blurry swastika. I stopped. It had to be new. Surely the city would’ve covered it up if they knew about it. I looked all around me. Was this neighborhood always like this?

            Of the unabandoned store fronts, only one was actually open. A little diner I had never noticed before. I was surprised when I went in to see almost a dozen people there, but then again, maybe they all had the same idea.

            “How are we doing tonight?” The waitress smiled at me. She looked as tired as the rest of us, but steady, stable.

            I couldn’t think of what to say, but I gave her a half-hearted smile in return.

            She sat me, gave me few minutes, came back. “Just coffee’s fine,” I said.

            “Are you doing okay?”

            I had to say something, and I didn’t have the energy to pretend. “My boyfriend’s dealing with a family emergency.”

            She cast a glance over her shoulder and nodded. “Well, it looks like you’re in good company tonight. Seems like that sort of thing is going around.” The streetlight just outside the diner flickered and went out. Several of us peered out the window. The clouds blotted out every point of light in the sky. “Maybe it’s a full moon.”

            “It’s not,” I said, though I couldn’t remember how I knew that. A few minutes later, the waitress brought me coffee and bowl of sugar packets and creamer. I checked her nametag. “Thanks Anna.”

I didn’t go back to Sean’s place until he got back, and even then, I asked him to come pick me up. “What happened?” I didn’t mean to sound so demanding, especially because Sean looked like he was running on fumes, but it didn’t seem to faze him.

            “He’s okay, Maya. He just fell out of his chair, and…sort of had a panic attack. He’s fine now. He sends his love.”

Casey didn’t look fine when we met at the café the next morning. Then again, none of us really did.

            “God, Casey, you look like shit,” I told him. Despite the bags under his eyes, he laughed, but he cut off abruptly a second later.

            “Fuck,” he breathed, going totally still as an obvious wave of pain crashed through him. “I think I twisted my whole fucking spine last night.” He shifted in his chair, cringing the whole time. “Hey, can you-” he whispered to Sean, who nodded and bent down under the under the table, where he twisted Casey’s foot in its stirrup.

            “That good?”

            He visibly relaxed. “Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Sorry, I’m just so stiff, I can’t really bend that far at the moment.” His attention flickered to me. “What’s your excuse? You sleep at all in the last few days?”

            “Well, I did just have my head split open.”

            Before we could start to riff in earnest, an argument behind the counter caught our attention. The owner’s face was taut as she tried to talk to one of her baristas. We pretended not to eavesdrop as their voices rose in and out of earshot.

            “I am not going down there by myself,” the barista stage whispered.

            “Allie, we have two call-offs today. I need you to suck it up and do your job.”

            “I am doing my job. My job is up here. If you need shit from the basement, you go get it.”

            “Allie, I’m in the middle of five different things-”

            “I’m in the middle of five different orders right now. Get the boxes yourself.” The barely-older-than a teenaged girl slammed her towel down on the counter and grabbed another mug from the rack.

            All three of us tried to think of something funny or clever to say to each other, but no one came through.

I had considered selling Ferra’s house as-is. My cousin had helped me clean it out when we moved her, kicking and screaming, into the nursing home. We could have put it on the market then, but with the outdated appliances, the carpets, the wobbly window frames, she wasn’t going to get a lot, and I was terrified that she would run out of money. If she ran out of money, I would end up taking care of her.

Call me a piece of shit, but it was all I could do to visit her a few times a week. I couldn’t live with her. I wouldn’t be able to work. I wouldn’t be able to leave her alone. My entire world would be watching hers disintegrate. I had to finish the house.

            The place did not look any friendlier than when I left it. Luckily, the windows were still intact and the lights came on when I flipped the switch. No one had stripped the copper wire while I was gone. Still, I held onto my keys as I walked through the foyer and into the living room, not entirely convinced that that guy hadn’t been waiting for me to come back and open the front door for him.

The place was still. The only sound came from the hum of the new refrigerator. The wind had picked up outside, but I’d taken care of the window frames, and the house was now properly insulated from the rest of the world.

            The next project was the bathroom. I’d already ripped out the old shower wrap-around, already drywalled and finished and painted. Already waterproofed the walls for the new shower. The next thing I had to do was pick the tile.

            The bathroom was up the stairs and all the way down at the end of the hall. I’d decide what I wanted, then leave to go put in the order somewhere. Maybe call it a day after that. Maybe take some days off after that.

            When I got up there, the bathroom was brighter than I expected. I’d forgotten that its windows looked out over a drop-off in the hillside. Without the trees in the way, the room got some of the best light in the house. Just make a decision and go.

Square tile on the floors. Flat white ceiling. Satin blue walls. Glossy white trim. Glass mosaic for the shower. Done.

            It was on the other side of the bathroom door. I knew when I turned to leave, and my whole body just stopped.  It was in the hallway, just out of sight. It didn’t make a sound. It didn’t have a smell, it might not even have a body, but it was there.

Those windows looked over a drop-off in the hillside. That hallway was the only way out of the house.

It wasn’t a person. It wasn’t a monster. It was the thing that gets you.

            The door began to open.

            I tripped as I attempted to run down the stairs. Maybe I was so overcome with panic that I didn’t even try to run down them. Maybe I leaped from the top. It was a miracle I didn’t break anything. Or maybe I did, and the adrenaline stopped the pain. I didn’t take the time to think about it as I tore through the living room and the foyer and out the front door, down the steps and the walkway, and out into the road.

            I gasped in huge breaths, so much that I was already lightheaded, but the control had left me. Everything around me was frightening. The distant sirens, the storm clouds. Even the bumps in the road startled me.

 I realized that I was clutching something so hard, it had begun to cut into my hand. I threw it away from me, and it landed on the sidewalk with a series of clinks. A collection of little strips of jagged metal collected on a ring. I stared down at it, confused, trying to think of where I had ever seen it before.