My Houses

My parents are on vacation, and the babysitter has plotted to let some burglars into our house, who will kidnap me and my twin brother. I hear her talking to the men as she lets them into the house, so I run upstairs to hide while my brother runs to the basement. I think they capture him, but I climb out of the upstairs window and run though my neighbor's backward in my pink nightgown. I ring their doorbell frantically, but the men pull up in the driveway. I sprint across the street to my other neighbor's house, yelling, hoping someone in the neighborhood will hear me. As I run up to the door a man opens it and I run inside. With a chill, I realize the man is not my neighbor, but a cohort of the crooks.

I crouch in the my neighbor's kitchen, which is now much older with a wood stove and dirty pink linoleum floors. I know it is useless hiding here.

My parents hug me and as we walk back to (not) our house. They press the garage door opener and the walls roll up, revealing a gigantic well-stocked beverage refrigerator, like the kind in the grocery store where the shelves are tilted so the bottles slide forward. My sister lounges on top of the bottles on the top shelf, a little cramped under the roof of the machine. She welcomes me back and casually asks if I am going to stay away for a while this time. I hadn't thought of that, but now I remember that sometimes after an Ordeal, children will stay away from home for a while, having earned a vacation. This sounds like an excellent idea to me, so I climb up into the refrigerator, the heels of my striped Fluevogs slipping on the plastic bottle caps, wedge myself underneath a ceiling beam and into the other side of the refrigerator, and slide down and out for the house.

Kathryn and I drive along a freeway towards Canada. We approach a bridge spanning a ravine, and somehow get in the wrong lane so that we hurtle at a rapid speed down a small river in the center of the bridge, and down into a tunnel in the face of the cliff.

Somehow we survive, and pull up in the line to cross the border. The wait is going to be a long time, so we decide to get out the car and use the bathroom and a Chuck E. Cheese/cruise ship we can see on the a nearby forested hill, but I think it might be in Canada, and I worry that we won't be allowed back to the car without our birth certificates. Kathryn isn't concerned, so we continue on.
There are more people with us now, like Anna, Kellen, and Lindy, and as I wait for them outside of the bathroom, I critique the wall in front of me that I see as somehow more generic than any other wall I have seen. It is coated in plastic, and has perforated outlines where one might punch out an extra doorway of needed. I scoff at the Chuck E. Cheese/cruise line for only having used one of the five possible doorways.

We go back to the car, which is now a school bus that we live in. Somehow it is turned around facing the other direction, but everyone else is convinced that Canada is that way anyway.