Those cranberry-crusted window sills

like red-rimmed lids

could only obstruct

any vision

out

“You look younger than I remember,” Sheridan sputtered.

The woman made her way to the staircase, a white hand gripping the railing. Dangling a slippered foot over the shadowy edge of the top step, her feet seemed to lace into the stairs. “How is that?” she asked, smiling a smile like that which a mother would hide after her child says a very serious, very silly thing.

Sheridan instinctively shrunk into herself, but upon stealing a glimpse of the woman and seeing she was sincere, she turned her shrinking to shrugging. “I don’t know. I guess I just remember you being older than you ever were. I thought so, anyway.” She smiled sheepishly. “When you’re little you think everyone is bigger than they really are—teens, adults and dogs, wolves, you know? And then you get to be their age and you realize how small you really are.”

“Ah, I see,” she replied, gliding down to Sheridan. “Our veils are different. You look at me now and see me younger while I look at you and see you older. When was the last time you were here—or even seen me?” She was taking Sheridan’s coat now.

“Gee, I guess that would have been around the time I started middle school. It’s been a long time…”

She tried prying her eyes from the floorboards. She longed to look around the house, if only a single room, but she couldn’t raise her gaze. Upon walking through the front door, Sheridan had felt the presence of a small table beside her, and had caught a coat rack in the corner of her eye. What she was certain of and what was clear was an ornate navy rug brushing the toes of her shoes like a wave crawling ashore.

“I am Avenie,” the woman said, “from the letters.”

“It’s nice to meet you. Well, ‘meet you-meet you’, I mean—to really meet you. I’m Sheridan,” she stammered out, regretting saying anything as she felt her words tumble out of her mouth. She stood there, blank, unsure if a handshake was expected. She fumbled with the bags in her hands.

Avenie placed Sheridan’s coat on the rack and gently guided her forward, out of the doorway. “Won’t you come in?”

Sheridan nodded, but she was already being taken into the living room. This was once her living room, too.

She sat on a maroon loveseat adjacent to a vintage sofa upholstered in sea-green velvet. Glancing around as discreetly as she could, she noticed how old everything was. The furniture and decor appeared to be antique or thrifted. Her mother would have hated it, but Sheridan quite liked it. The lampshades cast the room in a warm, sickly yellow glow, illuminating a dusty old walnut bookshelf brimming over with books. Across from her sat a ring-ridden coffee table covered in mail. Were she not a half-stranger to this place, she could see herself cozied up in the worn armchair by the window, gazing past the wild lilac branches pressing against the glass.

“I asked after who owned the house now at the county recorder’s office, but it was a dead end. I found the last owner, but they brushed me off. They just told me to write here. How did you come to own the property?”

“Adverse possession. The owner abandoned the house. And ever since, I’ve taken care of it,” Avenie asserted as she straightened herself against the sofa.

Too embarrassed to ask the woman what “adverse possession” meant, Sheridan simply nodded, looking away in case she had a blank or confused stare that would give her away.

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” Sheridan sighed contentedly.

Brushing aside the mail, Avenie beamed. “Oh, I hoped you would like it.”

Her words drew a smile from Sheridan. That a stranger would care what she thought of the state of something as meaningful as their house, something that was once hers, but now was not, filled her with a pulsating warmth.

She had been frightened to come here alone, but she was suddenly glad she hadn’t asked her mother or sister to come along. Had they joined her on this visit, she would have been mute and in a shell, encased one second and husked the next. There was no gluing a shell back together, and once her mother broke it—see, she’s here! well-adjusted and pretty and functioning, too—all that shielded her was a membrane, feeble and sheer and scant. She would cling to this wan film, press it to her bare flesh. It was no use. Everyone could see past the shroud, see the naked, the disfigured. She would go home, and over time she would recuperate and regrow her shell, only to have to do it all over again.

Glancing out the window, Sheridan spotted the sun setting shyly behind the thick treeline. The sun was not itself visible, but its orange glow gasped through the leafless mass of branches a final dying breath. The bus trip hadn’t taken any longer than estimated, Sheridan supposed, but she always left early just in case. She had gone out so little this winter she forgot how soon the sun went down.

The sun must be cursed to die each night, she thought. It is interred into the earth and must rise undead on the other side. Only she couldn’t distinguish whether her sun was living or dead when it rose on the horizon before her. Was this sun waking to another last day, rising and falling to its end? Or was this sun the animated remains roaming and eventually returning to its grave? Sheridan feared she could not recognize a living corpse in front of her.

Having only just arrived, she knew it would be rude to excuse herself to bed without a long conversation to get to know each other. Still, she could already feel herself stifling a yawn (out of exhaustion or anxiety, she wasn’t sure). It locked in her jaw and stuck.

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Avenie’s nightgown was as far as Sheridan could lift her eyes. She wanted to see her face, not just a distant gleam atop a black staircase, but to really see her. Regardless, she could gather a little apart from her face: long, pale fingers running along the silk of her navy-as-a-starless-night-sky gown, green veins pulsing from the white skin of her hands and feet, and thin auburn hair hanging from her head. And when she lifted her arm to tuck some stringy hair behind her ear, the sleeve of her dress slid down and Sheridan saw bones. All she could see were bones. She knew ashen flesh was stretched taut and thin over those bones, but all that stuck were protruding bones. They jutted into the eye.

Sheridan knew, too, although she did not know how, that Avenie was beautiful. What little she could see seemed to suggest, at least to another, otherwise, but she could see the beauty in that as well. She could see friendliness, homeliness, and potential, so long as that was what Avenie wished for. Sheridan saw that when she gazed at this woman, she was looking into a sister mirror.

“Would you like something to drink? I have tea,” Avenie said suddenly, startling Sheridan.

Had she been staring? Had she been staring, Avenie? Sheridan nodded eagerly and, gesturing to the bookshelf, asked, “May I take a look?” so that she could do something natural.

“Of course! I’ll get the tea,” replied Avenie, smiling and stepping into what Sheridan knew to be the kitchen.

She rose from the loveseat and walked over to the books, her feet making the floor creak with every step. And Avenie moved so gracefully, without a single sound. She must know every floorboard in this house, she thought. Sheridan wished she knew how to sooth a floorboard like Avenie surely knew. With the slightest shifting of her weight, Sheridan could send the floor beneath her wailing, so she tried her best to be as gentle as she could. Her thoughts, filling up with shhh entirely, leaked out onto her lips. “Shush,” she whispered to herself. Imagining herself as a levitating specter, she leaned softly forward on her toes.

Frankenstein, Giovanni’s Room, The Bell Jar,  Mrs. Dalloway, The Secret Garden. All classics, all secondhand. All were noticeably worn in one way or another—dog-eared or water-damaged, pages were torn or spines breaking. Oddly, the covers were practically pristine. That’s probably why the bookstores accepted these despite how worn they were, Sheridan thought. It was only when she drew her eyes to their corners that she could see they were frayed. This couldn’t be Avenie’s carelessness. She couldn’t imagine this woman taking such poor care of her possessions. There were numerous collections of poetry: Millay, H.D., Whitman, Mary Oliver, Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Plath. Repeat offenders such as the Bronte sisters, Toni Morrison, Poe, Tennessee Williams, and Shakespeare were scattered along the shelves.

When was the last time she had read Shakespeare? It must have been high school. She frowned to think of it. Had it really been that long? It seemed neglectful to deprive herself of his romance, of his tragedy. She tried to recall a quote from one of his works, but all she could think of was one from a piece she had yet to read, Twelfth Night. It was the bard’s clown singing, but a single line: “Journeys end in lovers’ meeting.” Sheridan had heard this gem passed down from Shakespeare to Jackson to Wolf Alice.

She looked about the house now—shyly, still, though Sheridan could not discern why—that she was out from under Avenie’s nose. Her mother really would hate its new, or old, dressings. Her mother never cared for the house anyway, not like Sheridan had. Sure, she took care of it as best she could, but she never cared for it. Mummuh has been ready to pack and leave since Sheridan and her sister, Aideen, were little.

Until one day they really did leave. Eventually no one called for them. Sheridan lost touch with everyone outside her sister and mother. Now, peering around the dim house, she searched for the smallest hint of home as she had known it. Really, wasn’t she missing all of it—squinting her eyes and missing the bigger picture?

Still, look, the wallpaper was still peeling here beside the window and there under the light switch. She could flip the switch and the same wires crawling within the walls would send an electric current to the same lamp overhead, even if the bulb may have been replaced a few times since she last did. The lilac tree outside, as it was and always had been a tree to her, still blossomed perennially each spring. This was the very same lamp and tree, never mind what the passage of time may have tweaked.

“You seem grave,” a voice slipped in.

Eyes bulging and bolting to where she had heard the small words, she smiled a dumb, awkward smile.

“Ah,” she let out after a moment of searching for sound within her, “I seem to be prone to the grave.”

The instant Sheridan said it, she heard Mummuh hiss in her head, Don’t say that sort of thing! Avenie didn’t seem shocked or pitiful. She smiled gently and Sheridan thought of bright little tealights being strung up.

“What’s troubling you?” asked Avenie, pressing a mug of tea into Sheridan’s hand.

She paused for a moment before gesturing for Sheridan to sit down. Feeling the warmth of the cup radiate from her palms to her cold, dead fingers, Sheridan shook her head and smiled as tears welled. She wanted to give out a chuckle. How ridiculous she was being! She wanted to be in on the joke.

Choking back a sob, she babbled, “It’s so silly, really. I’m sorry. Just being back here… It’s overwhelming, a little.”

Avenie nodded, her head bobbing sweetly like a dark tulip in the breeze, her neck the green stem which struggles to hold itself up. 

“You’ve had a long day. Why don’t you head up to bed? Drink your tea, it will help you sleep,”she said, sweet as rippling honey.

Sheridan did not reply. She simply sat and drank from her cup. Gulping down the warm, golden chamomile tea, she gazed at the swirling steam rising before her eyes. And stealing glances from across the table, Avenie never stopped smiling. Even when she lifted her cup to her dry crimson-painted lips and the cup obscured her vision, Sheridan could feel herself being watched. Maybe it was the window sitting behind Sheridan that made her feel so deeply observed. Or perhaps it was the mirror over Avenie’s shoulder that Sheridan couldn’t stop staring at.

In the mirror, Sheridan sat stark stiff on the maroon loveseat, bug eyed and yellow under the lamplight. The lilac branches scraped the glass like nails in the evening breeze and tapped gently at the window once it died. All was still then, like Sheridan, until the sharp bang of the shutter sent tremors through the house and the girl. She whipped her head back so fast her neck nearly snapped.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” cried Avenie. “That happens on particularly windy nights. I’ve wanted so long for someone to come and fix it.”

Avenie quickly rose and took the empty mug from Sheridan along with her own and cleared her throat.

“I suppose you’re ready for bed now. Well, go on to your room. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended. We can talk all day long tomorrow if you like!” Avenie chirped.

With a puzzled expression, she stuttered, “M-my room?”

The slim woman turned and headed into the kitchen, waving Sheridan off. “Of course!” she shouted over her shoulder. “Your room!”