Her mother barricaded her in behind household goods, newspapers, rotting vegetables, until the house became its own creature in the child’s mind. How wave builds upon wave, a crowd roars to hear its own voice, worms halved multiply, and sound expands into silence. Silence. The way the piles of stuff swallowed her voice. The house was eating her: toenails thickening with fungus, red rings on her body expanding from pinpricks to a target. Books gave her temporary escape: books with tooth-marks, books with tears, crumbling spines, books burning – feeding the blaze the day the squirrels chewed through the electrical wires – books that had charted her way through the years blackened, covered with melted plastic, words disappearing before her eyes, going, gone. And then, nothing was quiet. The walls clattered as they settled into the earth. The bathtub she’d slept in sank gurgling into despair. The building retracted into itself. She – soft flesh – edged her way out. It’s two years now. Two years since her mother buried herself past saving. There’s no gravestone yet. Just clean grass, waiting.