A Halloween Story

On a rainy night like this, I remember how the paint burst like blisters and oozed to the floor. The bare walls pleaded but held on, waited to catch a glimpse of my back before the door shut behind me, and sealed their fate. Then the roof gave and I felt the gust of my house’s last breath and I didn’t need to turn around.

I knew what remained of the red door, the windows, the staircase, my bedroom — a pile of black and streams of gray rising high above it. I didn’t need to turn around to know what the sounds and the smells already told me. The house and the fire that destroyed it crackled and smoldered in the rain.

Under a different roof now, I listen and wonder when it will succumb to the beating water. A rainy night turned restless. What once lulled me to sleep, now awakens the pieces of me that I thought burned to ash.

I think now of how safe I once felt beneath shingles, between cuts of hewn wood jointed by flimsy bits of metal.

Surrounding my house was a forest: a thousand trees breathing, pulsing with the life of a million creatures all moving and slithering within it. I wonder now what kept them there for so long, what secret held them within the trees.

Before the burning, I can’t say that I ever thought of it. How the red door that I closed every night was thinner than the width of a woman’s back. How…