Winter was settling in when I arrived at that house. The air, leaving behind the briskness of fall for the curt bite of snow, hung heavy over the property. The yard that surrounded it was coated in a layer of dead and dying pine needles. What few deciduous trees still stood on the grounds had long since shed their leaves in preparation for the cold and stretched their bare limbs out towards an overcast sky. The house itself felt like winter.

It was the house I was born and raised in, and yet it felt like a stranger. I suppose it had a somewhat gloomy aura—perhaps it would have excited a thrill-seeker to see such an antique: a behemoth standing strong against the best efforts of time.

As for me, I couldn't say I felt the same.

For as long as I could remember, I had always been a complete and total failure. Where my brother Virgil got straight A's and a full ride scholarship to study psychology on the East Coast, I barely graduated high school and only sort of scraped by in our local community college. Of course nobody would be impressed with my general associate's degree and pitiful transcript, but that was all I could manage. Even as an adult, even after our aunt died from cancer and Virgil left the house without a word, I never got better.

I could never find any passion in my life. I tried anything I could get my hands on—gardening, piano, archery, knitting, reading, hiking... Nothing worked. None of the jobs I worked were satisfying either. Everything felt empty and hollow to the point that I didn't even really want to feel better, I just wanted to lie down and forget. And every time I felt like that, every time I wanted to forget about the world, I couldn't help but think about Virgil and how much better he was than me.

In middle school, I had tried to be friends with Virgil. I really did want him to talk to me, for us to be closer. I wasn't particularly good at talking, but I still tried. Maybe I thought that he could fix me, that we could be real siblings and that I could be a real person. He pushed me away every time. I guess it made sense in the end. Virgil hated me about as much as I hated myself, I think.

So what do you say when, after three years of radio silence, that kind of brother calls you and says that your parents are officially dead? 'Congratulations?' 'I'm sorry for your loss?'

He was my brother, my twin, the same age as me right down to the hour, but it felt like I was talking to a stranger who had somehow dialed the wrong number. I couldn't recognize him. All I could think about while he was on the phone with me was how different his voice sounded. It was lower, deeper. It was dead and glassy like a gutted fish. When we were younger he had always been angry, always had something bothering him... He would shout sometimes, throw things, maybe slam the door and lock me out. He had a stitch in his brow that never came out when I was around. But at the very least, he was alive and breathing; his short temper aside, he was still a person. The man on the other end of the phone didn't feel like a person. It was like I was talking to a tin can.

“...Violet, are you listening to me?”

“—Sorry?”

“So you weren't listening.” He sighed, and I heard something like papers being shuffled before he continued. “The main point is that they've been missing long enough to legally be declared dead, so I filled out the forms for it to be done. I've dealt with most of the paperwork, but I can't finalize the inheritance without your input.”

“Mine?”

“Yes. You're the only other living family member.”

“Oh... Okay.”

“Most of their assets are purely fiscal, but there's also the house... I'm not interested in it personally, but we've got to do something with it.”

“The house? Where?”

“What?” A hint of exasperation had crept into his voice. “Colorado, in the mountains. We lived there when we were younger, before Lisa adopted us.”

“Oh.” I couldn't remember at all. “Right, sorry.”

“Anyways, it's an old house and it hasn't been maintenanced in over a decade. At this point it'd probably be better to just tear it down and find someone to buy the land...”

“—No. No, I'll take it.”

“I'm sorry?”

“I said I'll take it.” A quiet house in the mountains, where nobody would have any reason to look for me. It seemed absurdly convenient. “Am I allowed to do that?”

“I mean... I suppose? I'll ask the attorney about it. If you're going to have the house, then the value will probably be deducted from your portion of the money our parents had...”

“That's fine. I don't need it.”

He was silent for a few moments. If I hadn't known him better, I might have even thought that he was thinking about something I said. “Alright then. I'll let you know when everything's settled. And about the funeral, since we're here...

“I think it's pretty obvious that we don't need one, so you don't have to worry about that.”

The story went that my parents' family had owned and maintained the house for generations. While I didn't know its exact age, its vaguely Victorian architecture and antiquated appearance did suggest that it might indeed be very old: old enough, even, to require a skeleton key. How it hadn't been robbed or simply destroyed in all the time that it remained unoccupied was a mystery to me, but the front door swung open with minimal complaint.

While not in evident disrepair, a furry layer of dust clung to every surface. The walls were drafty. The furnishings were out of date. The wallpaper was yellowed and faded, peeling off to reveal both the styles of eras long past and the moldering walls hidden beneath. The air was sharp and dry, the kind of sharpness that makes you want to sneeze with each breath. It mostly just smelled like dust. The hint of evergreen and rotting oak that crept in around the edges, though, was strong enough to make me grimace.

The wooden floors creaked and groaned as if they were being strained past their limit by my weight. Decades of hot summers and even colder winters had expanded and contracted their planks until they couldn't return to their original size. While the house was certainly abandoned, at some point it must have been emptied of my parents' personal effects—every drawer, cabinet, and shelf laid bare and vacant. The windows were swathed with spiderwebs, but the view outside was certainly scenic. Mountains rose and fell sharply into the distance; the sky was somehow both bright and gray at the same time.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

It would make for a lovely place to die.

I wasn't really planning to die before Virgil called me. It was just that the house made it all so convenient. A paid-for house out in the mountains and just enough money to live without working for a few months. If I was able to go through with it, then everything would be over and I wouldn't even be bothering anyone; maybe some hikers would find my body in the woods and Virgil would have to do more paperwork, but nobody would grieve or be scrambling to make ends meet. Even if I chickened out, I still had the option to get a job again and keep living until I couldn't take it anymore. It was perfect. Romantic, even—just like the shitty novels that my parents had written while they cooped themselves up here.

...Obviously I knew it wasn't healthy to think of it that way. There's nothing romantic about me hurling my sorry ass over a ledge, regardless of how miserable I am while doing it. But making a decision for once in my life, doing something drastic and irreversible, actually felt pretty good. I was giddy with a sense of manic euphoria. As I walked through the house—up and down the stairs, peering through windows and peeking at corners—everything seemed foreign and unreal, like I had walked onto the set of a historical drama. I wasn't happy, but my steps were light. The heavy weight of “survival” had been lifted off my shoulders. I didn't want to waste any more time on life; I had nothing to lose anyways.

That being said, I didn't go out immediately. Maybe I was just afraid, but at the time I had the very reasonable justification that I wanted some time to decompress before I made my decision. I wanted to savor the inaction, to rest a little more. Naturally, though, it was a little hard to have a relaxing nap in a bed whose blankets seemed to be knit from dust and cobwebs... So, some cleaning was in order.

I was never a very good housekeeper, but I did some minimal dusting and sweeping to make the house less, well, fuzzy. I couldn't find a laundry machine anywhere, so I just tossed the old blankets in a corner and slapped my own on top of the mattress. That was where the cleaning stopped: now that I was able to curl up in bed comfortably, I had no desire to do anything else.

My tendency to lie in bed for hours on end was something that I developed after my grades spiraled to oblivion in eighth grade. Wrapped up in blankets and swaddled in warm, silent darkness, it was my one hideaway from the world.

Of course, Virgil wasn't pleased by it in the slightest—“You can't just hide from everything” this, “You're being ridiculous” that. Sometimes he'd yank the blankets away, grab my arm and tug me out; those were some of the only times where I actually believed that I had a brother. I would oscillate between seeing him as a fiend and a saint. He clearly could care, so why didn't he care about me? What had I done wrong for him to be so mad? I didn't want to think about it, but he always found a way to make me wonder.

“You can't do this,” Virgil had chastised me once after yanking me out of my comforter cocoon. “You're being childish.”

I glared at him from where I sat on the bed, my face half-buried in my arms. “Shut up, you jerk. Aren't I a kid anyways?”

He gave me a mean stink eye in return. “You're thirteen.”

“So? I'm not an adult.”

“You're not a baby either! Just 'cause you're not old enough to vote doesn't mean you're not old enough to have a brain.”

“'Scuse me?”

“I said what I said.” He was glancing at his nails like he had said something so obvious that it wasn't even worth paying attention to. “You, Violet Bauer, are the dumbest brat I've ever known.”

I think after that I must have swung at him... not that it would have gotten me anywhere. I fought some when I was younger, and I would usually win simply by virtue of playing stubborn and dirty. When I fought with Virgil, though, he would always beat me. I was always left completely outclassed and cringing in the dust. He knew how to push my buttons, but I don't even think he knew he was doing it. He just hated me by nature and he knew how to make me absolutely miserable... So, he would. Like salt in the wound, he always had to rub it in that I would never be like him. No matter how hard I tried.

Virgil always seemed to know something that I didn't. It was infuriating how effortlessly he surpassed me; he didn't have to try at all. Anything I did, he could do better—so why do anything at all?

I didn't understand why he hated me so much at first. I could understand why he'd hate me now, after all of the fistfights and arguments and airborne objects, but I never got why he held so much animosity for me back when we were just little kids. I knew he could laugh. When school was over for the day, I'd see him laughing and playing together with his friends every now and then. He had friends, so obviously he didn't hate everyone. But whenever it came to me, he was cold like a frozen tundra.

If someone asked if we were related, he'd say no. If we went home at the same time, he'd walk on the opposite side of the street. He didn't seem to like Aunt Lisa either, but when it came to me I was no better than the dirt on his shoe. I couldn't remember what I did to make him so upset. Before Lisa was taking care of us, I couldn't really remember anything at all.

At first I thought that maybe it was normal, or that Virgil and I both shared that void in our memory. What little I could remember about our parents was transient, like lantern slides flickering in and out. I know that they insisted the whole family be smartly-dressed and well groomed. My father had a booming laugh; my mother sported a beautiful smile. They were decorated novelists, but they were eclectic and reclusive—they lived out in the Colorado mountains with off-the-grid tinfoil hat enthusiasts and hippies of an age gone by, avoiding the public like the plague. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remember their faces or even their names. When I mentioned this to Virgil, though, his face knitted together into a look of disgust.

My parents were a strange, almost hypothetical existence for me. The stories my aunt told me about them seemed almost purposefully vague, embellished with homely details but lacking anything concrete.

“Are Mom and Dad like you?” I was sitting next to Lisa on the couch when I asked that, glancing over a book she had picked out for me. She chuckled a little.

“I'm not sure what you mean, honey. 'Like me' how?”

“Well...” I frowned. “I dunno. They like reading books, right? We like doing that.”

“I think so,” she replied. “Your parents make a living off of writing books, so they probably like reading them too.”

“Probably?”

Lisa slowly thumbed through the magazine she was holding, not looking in my direction. “I don't know for sure. Laura wasn't really the bookish sort when we were kids, and David, well...”

She set it down for a moment. “I barely spoke to David at all. He was a man of few words.”

“Hmm.” Like most children would, I had started to lose interest once she started giving vague answers. “So what'd they write?”

“Murder mysteries,” she said. “Thrillers, dramas, that sort of thing. I assume that's how they got to know each other in the first place.”

I glanced up at her, my curiosity piqued. “Did they ever write about a real murder?”

Lisa sighed. “Stop it, Violet. That's just gruesome.”

“Hmph, whatever.”

We read in silence for a while. The rasping noise of us leafing through pages bothered me somehow, especially the wobbly sound that Lisa's magazine had. I set the book down, staring out the window while I tried to think of something to say.

“Will we see Mom and Dad again?”

Lisa stopped turning the pages, becoming very still.

“No,” she said eventually. “You can't see them again. I'm sorry, Violet.”