A year after my dad passed, I dreamed him standing at the bottom of the basement stairs, saying "not tonight, not those stairs." I skipped them the next morning. The top step had come loose overnight.
I have walked the same block to the bus for eleven years. One Monday there was a brick house between two homes I knew by heart, in a gap where there had never been room for one.
Two weeks after we buried Rooster, I heard his tags jingle down the hall and felt him jump onto the foot of the bed, exactly the way he had for nine years.
I bought a beautiful old mirror at an estate sale. Movement in it lagged, a heartbeat behind the real room. One night my reflection stayed still after I turned away. I covered it. I still hear it under the sheet.
Every night, footsteps crossed the upstairs hall and stopped outside my daughter's room. Cameras showed nothing. Then she started leaving her closet door open "so he can get out," and I found the old handprints.
Our daughter's invisible friend lived 'where the house goes down' — a spot that made no sense until renovations uncovered a sealed staircase, and Tilly stopped coming.
