ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 35
The Boarding House
Jonna Batten
At first glance, it could have been any other house, in any other
normal neighborhood. The lawn was untidy but not quite wild, the
painted exterior was flaking and clearly ancient, and there were
shoes on the porch. It was the shoes, really, that first attracted him
to the Boarding House, though he was never fully conscious of it.
Shoes meant people, and people meant life and safety and comfort.
He didn’t notice it at first, but there were no shoes on any of the
other porches on the street. Perhaps it was the incessant rain and
the storm clouds gathering in that distracted him from the emptiness all around. There were no cars parked in the driveways or on
the road. No little children roamed the sidewalks in search of puddles to splash in or worms inching across the pavement. Usually, he
looked for these things. Today he was blind.
What was possibly the only disconcerting thing about the Boarding House, what almost made him turn away, were the flowers.
There were dozens of them, great white lilies scattered under the
windows and packed in pots by the porch. They smelled putrid, rotten, the odor dredged up and intensified by the rain.
But if he covered his nose, the house was almost charming. In the
most peculiar way, it reminded him of the home he grew up in, with
the milky glass windows by the front porch and the shaded veranda. It even had the same door: cherry red, with the handle slightly
askew.
That wasn’t all. There was a girl in the window. Her face was
distorted by the glass, but he could tell she was young. It made
him wait, the way she watched him. He could have kept walking,
tried to get out of the rain. But her eyes followed him in that placid,
almost vacuous way children have about them. Those eyes were
inviting him. Come on, they said, let’s play!
So he stared back at her, his lips curling into a smile. He walked
the length of the sidewalk, paused, turned back again, retracing his
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