Hothouse Literary Journal Issue #10 (2018)

ing her skin. The smell was unbearable. She turned her head and retched onto the heap, though she had little but bile in her stomach.

Somewhere there was a mass of skittering and motion under the farther bags as rats shifted to her sounds.

She made it to the chest and pulled open all its drawers and took her father’s staple gun and a thick, oily canvas tarpaulin. She followed the low candlelight and found the door back to the house. On the threshold she looked down at her feet, at the coated skin and matted hair and filthy toenails, and jerked her head back up. She took off her sweatpants, took the key out of the pocket, wiped her feet with their tops and tossed the ruined fabric into the garage and pulled shut the door.

Remnant grime followed her upstairs, greenish-brown footprints on the wood and carpets. She came to Catherine’s door and unlocked it. The wind pushed, and Abigail pushed back. Inch by inch, the door cracked and then there was another lull in the wind, and Abigail staggered forward and stumbled into the bedroom.

The broken window was a great, circular porthole that dominated the outward wall. Shards of glass jutted out from its perimeter and scattered like shrapnel on the floor. Under the glass was a bench window seat built into the wall where Catherine had often sat and peered out into the wide world like the sole passenger of some giant ship. The floor was littered with all of Catherine’s drawings and paintings, soaked through and tattered and lost. Pellets of tennis-ball-sized hail filled the corners. Catherine’s narrow brass bed had flipped and stood now on its side against the wall. Her soft pink comforter, stamped with a cartoon princess, laid crumpled underneath. The walls were as pink as they’d ever been. Abigail stared at the room for a while and felt like crying, but didn’t let herself.

She went to the window and tried to step up onto the bench, but she was weak from hunger, weaker than she’d realized, and she had to claw onto a corner of wall to pull herself up. Abigail wobbled and misjudged her balance and fell forward. As she caught herself on the window frame, a spike of broken glass caught in the palm of her 32