Chapter 1 · The Last Thing I Left Behind
I woke standing in the hallway of my own house. That should have been the first warning. People wake in beds. They wake in recliners with the television judging them in blue light. They wake in parked cars outside gas stations, mouths dry, necks ruined, wondering how long they have been disappointing themselves. They wake beside wives who have turned away from them in sleep but not yet in life.
They do not wake upright between the family photos and the thermostat, hands hanging loose at their sides like someone has set them there and walked off. I looked down at my feet. Bare.
The hardwood beneath them should have been cold. It was January, and that hallway always got cold after midnight because I had promised Mara for three winters that I would seal the draft around the front door. I had bought the weather stripping. It was still in the garage, unopened, leaning against a paint can we had not used since Eli was five and decided his room needed one blue wall because “space has to start somewhere.”
The floor should have been cold. It wasn’t. Not warm, either. Nothing. That was wrong, but not wrong enough to understand. The hallway was dark except for the police lights. Red. Blue. Red again.
They moved through the front windows and crawled over the walls in slow, polished waves. Over the picture of Mara at the beach, laughing with her head turned away because she hated photographs unless she didn’t know they were being taken. Over Eli’s second-grade school photo, where his smile looked like it had been negotiated under threat. Over the crooked nail where the smoke detector used to hang before I took it down to change the battery and never put it back.
I stared at that nail for a long time. Longer than a nail deserved. Somewhere in the house, a woman screamed my name. I knew the voice before I knew anything else.
“Mara?”
The word came out thin. Not quiet exactly. Quiet would have meant I had control over it. This was different. My voice seemed to leave my mouth and die six inches away, as if the house had heard me and decided not to repeat it.
“Mara?”
The scream came again. This time it broke in the middle. That was worse.
End of excerpt · © Brandon Haskin
