Palaces by Simon Jacobs

Author:Simon Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio

The mention of food surprises me; it seems to come out of nowhere and, thus, sounds like a lie. “Would you want to stay in the place where your parents disappeared?”

You absently start untying one of your shoes. “Another house, then.”

“Do you trust her?”

You look up at me accusingly. “An eight-year-old girl? Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t we try to help her?”

These are two separate questions, but before I can point this out, I hear two quiet knocks on the wall just beside the bed. Your face breaks into the kind of smile that tells me this is a decision I never had a say in.

“I’ll go,” I say.

“You don’t have to go. You just have to knock.” You turn on your knees and lean down, press your ear to the wall.

“I just want to check on her.”

I don’t know what I’m doing. As I open the door to the hallway, you knock back. Almost immediately, Vivian knocks again. You reply, two knocks. I think: You are doing this all wrong. I should be stopped.

When I open the door to the mirror bedroom, I’m greeted with an image of Vivian from almost every angle. She’s crouched on the floor by the wall, her hand raised in this useless game with the wall, with the reflected version of herself. She turns to look at me across the darkened room where I stand rooted in the doorway, suddenly multiplied six times over, briefly uncomprehending my naked face, her eyes glowing in the dark, already gone.

“I wanted to see if you needed anything. Goodnight.” I close the door without waiting for an answer, reach absently into my pocket. I stumble in the hallway, in the dark; I reach out and grab the banister. My throat constricts. I punch my chest, like there’s some object caught in there, some hard evil I can cough up.

In our bedroom, you are still knocking. One of you will need to stop first. “How is she?” you ask, grinning.

I say, “Cozy.” The word feels dishonest, as far from the truth as possible. I say, “Falling asleep.”

*

Hours later, I lie in bed in the dark beside you with my eyes open, wracked with fear, our conversation unfinished, my hands so wide against the sheets that they ache, sweating out my palms. The canopy shifts above my frozen body, the air invisibly packed with motion, with vying forces pushing against each other. My existence hangs in a state of loaded potential, a behavioral holding pattern. The room feels poised to propel me forward at any moment, to bear me out of bed and into the rest of the house. If I fall asleep, I know the knife will appear in my hand, and that this time, I may not be able to control what I do with it. I can almost feel its weight in the bed with me, the weight of the gun; I can smell it. The reappearances—in this house, in others—are warnings: that

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