Hushed voices snaked through the old house’s corridors, “Did you hear?” The boy looked to his lady and shook his head making his tussled hair sway. The voices slithered into his ears, “Here. There? The stairs.” A heart too young to have felt so much climbed into his throat and made itself at home.

Pint-sized shoes made quiet footfalls up the stairs to the right, but the house was so still, so quiet, so dead they sounded like an anvil chorus. Every breath was a scream announcing his path. Newly born drops of sweat came into being, squeezed into a dusty, dimly lit world, and thundered to the hard wood floor like a torrential rainfall.

The voices, more urgent now, pursued him, “I know. I know. Gently.” Dry eyes longed to cry as the boy fled down familiar hallways. He fled from the shadows. He fled into the shadows. This was all he could do, so small, so frightened, so alone in a house of a million memories of warmer, more comforting days. Those days were gone. And the present closed in.