The House on Maple Hollow Lane
The moving truck groaned to a stop at the curb like it, too, was tired of the whole ordeal. I sat wedged between a box labeled KITCHEN—FRAGILE (MOM'S HANDWRITING, MOSTLY LIES) and another that simply read LILY'S STUFF, as if my entire fifteen years of existence could be summarized in two words and a strip of packing tape. My knees ached from three hours of sitting cross-legged on a bench seat that hadn't been designed for human comfort, only for cargo, and I suppose that's technically what I was that afternoon. Cargo, relocating.
Mom cut the engine and the silence that followed felt enormous, the kind of quiet that comes after a long argument nobody wants to admit they've been having. She unbuckled her seatbelt too fast, like she was afraid if she moved slowly I might ask her something she didn't have an answer for.
"Well," she said. "Here we are."
I looked up through the windshield, and the house looked back.
Three stories of weathered gray shingle rose against a sky gone the color of a healing bruise, dusk pressing purple and orange at the edges. Black shutters flanked each window, half of them hanging slightly crooked, like a row of eyelids that couldn't quite agree on how…
