This Sinister House
                                                                             “She told herself it was time, time to let go, time to move on.”

Silence...she never knew it could be so loud. It filled the hallways, the cracks in the walls. Even the storm that raged outside remained quiet when its light struck the ground. 

A flash from the storm lit up the house and caused Rose to break her daze. Her eyes roamed across the furniture making their way to the fireplace, and then to the walls filled with family photos. 

Rose moved from the doorway to make her way around the house. As she opened the doors to all the rooms, each one gave her another memory of her siblings, memories of the objects in each room that they had broken with their mischief. Eventually, she stood in front of the room at the end of the hall.

ROSE sat in big letters on the door exactly as it had from when she was younger. She reached for the doorknob and turned it. To her surprise, it was locked. Not once in her life were any of the doors in this house locked, other than the front door. What made it even stranger was that the door knob didn’t have a key, let alone a keyhole. It couldn’t be locked.

The strangeness of the lock door suddenly slipped Rose’s mind; she turned away from her door to make her way back to the living room. 



     2. 

When she woke up on the sofa in the same clothes from the night before, it took a moment of blinking for Rose to realize where she was again. 

The storm still raged outside of the window on her right; the dinner table to her left. Rose stood up and walked towards the dining table, looking at each placement, circling the table like a predator. Eventually, she picked up a plate from the table, holding it in both hands. When she looked up in front of her, before her stood a wall filled with pictures; her eyes landed on her reflection in one of them. 

Rose lifted the plate still in her hands and threw it, with all her force, at the pictures. The plate shattered on impact, taking a few pictures and their frames along with it. Rose picked up another plate in one hand, this time smashing it on the floor. She proceeded to do this with every plate, every glass, and even every fork, knife, and spoon until the kitchen table was just shards of glass itself. 

Rose made her way to the living room, walking right up to the curtains, grabbing them, pulling down until the curtain rod hit the floor with its metal.

She was alone. 

Rose moved from room to room smashing, tearing, and destroying everything in her way.

    3. 

She held up the family photo as she knelt on the ground, shards of glass all around her. When she looked to the side, with a sudden movement of manic intent, she grabbed a piece of glass from her broken glass garden and attempted to use it to put the picture she held back together. She didn’t care if the shard hadn’t actually broken off from that specific photo. She was damned if it wasn’t going to fit, as if it were Cinderella’s shoe and this was a fairytale.

Maybe if she put them back together, it would be alright. Her family would show up and all would be back to the way it was. That never happened. The rest of Rose’s day consisted of smashing pictures, followed by her attempt to put the pieces back together, followed again by more destruction and re-piecing. 

Rose stood up, exhausted from her meaningless work. Eventually, she ended up in a random guest room, falling almost immediately onto the bed into sleep.

    4.

She could hear every drop that landed on the roof, every so often startled by lightning streaking down the windows. She didn’t dare to move.

There was nothing she had to do and no one she had to see. 

Rose now knew that she was all alone in this sinister house. 

Eventually, she made her way to the mess in the kitchen. At first, she walked delicately to avoid the glass, but then she lost the motive to dance around her pain and stepped directly on the broken glass that decorated the floor. 

Something in Rose told her to look down the hallway beyond the table. Her eyes landed on the door she had labeled as her own. ROSE. And suddenly, she knew what was going to be behind that door; she didn’t want to face it. But it didn't matter; Rose had learned that the right time never comes. 

She reached for the doorknob and this time, it opened.

    5.

Rose stood on the dirt shoulder of a back road. 

In front of her lay what her psyche had tried to forget… herself. Rose’s body laid next to the car, still as if she could pretend she was only asleep. But now Rose had remembered the full story. She had died that day. She never did make it to the hospital; she died on that street alone, unwilling to move on. 

But she had to now. 

She told herself it was time, time to let go, time to move on. She felt relief as the world around her started to grow brighter. She started to fade away with it; fading away, an hour, a day and evermore. The storm had passed, and so had she.