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.

Avenie stepped into the room, like a tradesman ready to assess the damage. She pointed up to the side of the closet where drywall had hastily been set. That was right, she thought. Her uncle had come down to help rebuild the side of the closet where a leak had sprung. The leak came when Dada was too sick to do it himself, so her uncle had helped out.

“They never finished the job…” Sheridan muttered, more to herself than to Avenie.

Avenie drew back her arm and looked at her, the woman’s eyes prodding at the girl like a falcon designedly pecking at its food.

“My u-uncle and my dad’s handiwork,” Sheridan said, sniffling. “I had almost forgotten that there was a leak. My dad said it was coming from the chimney.”

The woman nodded slowly, her eyes still prying into Sheridan. Sheridan averted her gaze.

A long silence followed, with Sheridan staring anxiously at the drywall and Avenie staring at her, until Sheridan finally broke it. “I’m sorry they never finished.”

At this, Avenie smiled softly—sadly, Sheridan perceived, once she could bear to witness those pleading, teary eyes shining in her face.

“It’s not your responsibility to apologize. It’s not anyone’s—not for that, at least,” the woman replied, her head lolling forward on her thin neck.

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It was then that Sheridan realized how frail Avenie really appeared. She was a towering force, truly, but a tilting one. Sheridan stepped back, out from beneath her shadow.

She smiled at the woman politely. Sheridan nodded her head, eyeing the door, unable to think of any words to say. But, Avenie opened her mouth and quickly shut it. There were oceans, gray and uncharted, of unsaid words between them. Avenie stepped forward, towards her.

Again, her red lips parted only to shut tightly. After a moment of pressing silence spent staring at their lifelines, she said, “Good night, Sheridan.”

She wished her a good night as well, hoping she would leave so she could crawl into bed and cry. And Avenie did, peering, with those red eyes, into her soul one last time before finally closing the door behind her. With the latching of the door, something unlatched, finally, within Sheridan.

She spent the first hour or so of that night stifling her sobs. She wasn’t even certain where Avenie was sleeping as she hadn’t heard any of the other bedroom doors down the hall, so she supposed she simply hadn’t gone to bed yet. Still, she had to be quiet. She wanted to shove her head under the covers in embarrassment, but feared Avenie somehow seeing her like that. She clung to the pink quilt Avenie had laid out for her.

So much should have been said, but what? Sheridan had longed to bare her soul to Avenie, like she had in the letters, and so briefly in her childhood. She had bared her soul, hadn’t she? Or had she whitewashed it? Of course there are things you don’t share with someone you haven’t seen in a decade. You don’t share how bad off you’ve been. You lie. You say “I’ve been good” or “I’m doing well” or some other inane platitude to glaze the eyes over. You don’t say the truth: that you’ve been adrift since losing your home.

That night, as with anyone who turns from their unconsciousness, was one filled with dreaming. At last, that place beneath wakefulness where the unconscious catches and faces one dead on—dead on and on and on.

Her dreams were the cup of water she, the restive painter, dipped her brush into. The paint, the things that happened in the waking world, diluted and fanned out into the water, into her unconscious mind. Her turning back and forth from painting to cup, painting to cup—waking, dreaming, waking, dreaming.

Even sleep was no reprieve from her waking life. The paint bled into her dreams and the vicious cycle never ended. Were her painting more lively, more bright, maybe then it would all be bearable. But alas, her life was not lively or bright. Her paint was monochrome and dull, and therefore, so too was her painting.

This dream, like so many others, was a concoction of fiction and reality. Sheridan was wandering around the rundown townhouse she lived in with her mother and sister, alone, as always. She couldn’t remember who began pulling away first, her, or Mummuh and Aideen. The screaming and fighting had picked up again as they always had. Like growth spurts, she thought. Always, growing and growing, those painful, shooting sprouts, filling the house as it once did at home. Home. Sheridan wanted to go home. At least there were good memories there, unlike at the townhouse.

There were the memories of Dada, of their dog when he was happiest—of all of them when they were happiest. With Dada gone, with their dog gone, now Sheridan had no one left to devote herself to. Now, she was just a leech sucking at her mother and sister.

While pacing around the townhouse, the building slowly shifted into her home. One by one, rooms began transplanting each other in the blink of an eye until finally, all congealed into her childhood home. Every room was white and brightly lit, as if heaven were radiating through the windows. The air was hazy, like being in a constant stream of sun. The ceilings rose and the rooms widened in grandeur, the house stretching.

Furniture was only ever in the corner of her eye. When she tried to fix her eyes on something, it simply disappeared, burned up by the white sunbeams streaming in. Sheridan lifted her hand to cut through the stream, to shield her gaze from the sea of silky cobwebs flaring all around her.

She had waltzed into her mother’s bedroom from her own, or rather, what she could surmise was their bedrooms, and stood, stark and bare, there in the middle of the room. With her head spinning, she stilled her body. At the edge of her wavering vision were a pair of slim feet poking out from behind the corner of the bed.

She ran from the scene before she ever really saw it. She flung open the door and sprinted into what should have been the hallway. What lay there instead was the very room she had just run from. Again she flung open the door. Again she was met with her mother’s bedroom. Again she tried to escape. Again. Again.

Sheridan panted as she stumbled back upon the scene. With tears blurring her vision, she stepped towards the bed frame's edge. She put out a shaking hand to steady herself, but her fingers never grazed the mattress or frame. Time stood still, though she knew it couldn’t. Her heart pounded in her ears like the faithful beat of a metronome, reminding her of the seconds passing by, as long and stretched as minutes, as all color flushed from her face.

She inched her way to the corner of the bed. The long, thin pair of feet were still there, sprawled out on the floor. She drew in a ragged, hollow breath. Sheridan bolted for the door and this time, the house was laid out as it should’ve been. She sprinted down the hall, light blinding, suspending her.

And she was caught. Waves of sheer white curtains kept her from running any further away. Deeper and deeper she drove herself into the sea, deeper she trapped herself in that web. Fingers pressing the walls of the veils, she spun and spun for some way out. Sheridan would return to her mother’s bedroom if she had to, really face that ghastly scene if she had to. She would do anything to escape the dance she was now condemned to.

Sheridan wanted to cry for help, but couldn’t utter a sound. Gaping and gasping like a fish, turning and twisting, she clung to the curtains and pulled. But they still stood, resilient to her. This was her existence now.

A voice rose, in that mist of veils, where hers could not. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” it said softly. Tears, warm and unfaltering, sprung to her eyes and streamed down her cheeks. With quivering lips, she tried to search for her own voice, but even if she found her voice she didn’t have the words for it.

Sheridan stepped back, driving herself into the voice’s source. Through the curtains, hands grasped her own, fingers lacing into hers. She backed up further and the warmth of a body pressed against her. A hand released its hold of hers and slid around her waist, digging into her flesh all the more.