Someday you will come across a house, and you will make your home there. Someday you will realize this house has a certain number of windows on the outside, and a certain number of windows on the inside, and that these numbers are not the same. You will try to count, and re-count, and will grow frustrated and confused, and eventually you will forget and life will continue, as it does. But then someday you will have a child, and the child will grow older, and when the child is still small but old enough to count, the child will count the windows. The child will realize there is an extra window in the little attic (the attic they are not allowed to be alone in), a window that does not exist. They will ask you about it, and you will hum and say something vague, and move on to thinking about other things. But your child will remember, and they will wander around the outside of the house, lost in the summer greenery of childhood, and they will search and search and never find the window peaking out. So one quiet night, when the wind is gentle and the shadows are quiet, your child will sneak out of bed, and steal the key to the little attic, and they will climb the creaking stairs, one at a time. If you ask them, they will say they could hear whispering, whispers winding down the halls, coming from the top of the house, coming from the other side of the glass. But you won't get a chance to ask. Instead you will awaken in the night knowing the way a person sometime knows that something is terribly wrong. And you will run to the attic, understanding only now that there is something wrong with the attic, has always been something wrong with the attic, that you were always afraid of this, all this time. You will lunge up the stairs, clumsy and wild-eyed, to find the attic door gaping open like a hungry thing. And your child will be there, on the other side of the room, stepping off a wooden stool and slipping through the tiny window frame that has been locked and bolted and painted shut for years. You will lurch forward as they disappear head first through the window, you will grasp for their tiny child's foot as it slips away, and when your hand closes over nothing the attic shadows will rise up to swallow you, as if a sink stopper has been pulled and all the light is draining down, down and away.
Someday you will wake up in a different house you have lived in for years. You will go to the kitchen the way you do every morning, and make the same breakfast you have been making for years. You will drop the coffee mug, will watch it shatter on the floor, as you finally remember, as it all comes rushing back. You will run frantically through the house, opening doors to rooms that are yours but also wrong, all wrong. You will already know what you won't find, and still you will fling open every door, hunting for a bedroom, shouting the name of a child who no longer exists.
baratheonpilled
germansingergirl
gracieabrams
