found drama

Her room is up a flight of concealed stairs that wrap around the exterior of the building.  (Very Vermont.)  The building is house-like.  Impossible to see, it feels like a huge Victorian.  Maybe six bedrooms.  Maybe haunted.  Definitely cut up for rentals.  Her room is up that flight of stairs.  Stairs to nowhere.  Stairs that don’t creak the way wood should creak.  At the top of the stairs is nothing but a wall.  It looks like the stairs should be torn down, like they’d never really gone anywhere in the first place.  That’s only if you don’t know what to look for.  At the top of the stairs you find that seam in that wall; maybe an eighth of an inch at the lower right corner, right along the edge of what looks like siding.  It shouldn’t be there.  You give it a precarious shove, easing that heavy wedge of a door open.  It’s like a cork or the stopper in an ink jar.  Her room is behind that heavy wedge.  She’s expecting you, olive skin and lusciously full cheeks.  Her verb is bounce, her adjective is wild.  The door can be locked from the inside but not from without.  The security comes from the fact that it’s not really a door but more of a puzzle piece.  The security is to protect her from those invaders, the threatening supernatural elements.  Vampires, zombies; she knows you know.  She wants you to love her but there is something sinister and necrotic about her.  Like her shadow speaks on her behalf, half a moment behind the conversation, beleaguring each point with twice the deserved weight.  You recoil from her advances and flee.  Tear through the building.  Behind each door is a room from another building.  All within the same house.  A bedroom.  An office.  A museum’s hall.  Aisles from a convenience store.  Door after door, like cutting through decommissioned movie sets, fleeing toward the other side of the eyelids.

About Rob Friesel