Black.

It is black.

It is dark. She feels it all around her.

What does darkness feel like? It feels like this.

Though she does not ever remember feeling this darkness before, it touches her like an old lover. It is a feeling she does not want

Slowly she rises out of the darkness and stands looking around her. The basement is also dark, but this darkness has holes. Its fabric is worn thin in many places, letting the perceptions of sight pass through it. As the many tangents of perception pass through the darkness to her, a subtle duality forms within her. She knows that she has never been here before, yet it is familiar and full of remembrances of a past she does not have. She knows she has never been here before because she has never been before. Time has just begun its slow march upon her being. Or perhaps it is a long-time resident who has just announced his presence.

She sits back to rest upon the battered chair against the wall. She is not tired, but responds simply to habit. The shelves beside her are host to an eclectic swarm. Salenger, Twain, Silverstein and Steele share a plateau with Barbi and Ken. A once-desired prom dress lays boxed beneath a worn pair of work gloves and the left-over pieces of a repaired television.

This is not the place.

Up.

Four large rooms array to make a floor; a narrow hallway passing around the last corner to complete the shape. At the end is the unused service entrance--a strange and fascinating door to a child, a curious anachronism to the adult,

To the left, the smallish kitchen is lit by the blood-orange light of the coffee-maker's on-switch. The smell of the bitter liquid filling the air with the rich aroma of a burnt offering.

Again to the left is a room possessed by a mighty oak table. She is fascinated by the look of it, and walks toward the monolith. She passes by the near seat at its head, and circles around to the right, diverting from her forward pace. With an ease she pulls the smaller chair out from its position and brushing her dress beneath her legs, sits. For a moment she is distracted from the massive span of wood before her, and looks instead at the dress. Thin white cotton, with layered skirts, hang loosely and gently upon her. It floats behind her movements with an ethereal grace as if the gentle pull of gravity has deemed itself too harsh for the soft fabric and relented. Light, too, seems to have taken kindly to the magical garment. The tiny particles draw to it from no apparent source, to dance faintly beneath the thin veil of the cloth.

Again, though, the wood demands its due. She looks at the vast solidness of the polished surface, her hands gently stroking its smoothness of their own volition to find a small flaw; beneath the lip above her lap, her fingers rest upon the small scratches of a kitchen knife: "LL".

Through the doorway across from her, soft couches and an old piano. To her right, shelves of books and the corner of a television peek around the frame of another door.

She looks back at the table behind her and to the piano at her left, then to the solid brick fireplace behind her right shoulder. The mantle holds a vast array of half-burnt candles below a pair of grayish black stains on the ceiling; the brass of the holders tarnished with age and affection.

Through the door to her left and up the stairs, she moves. At the top she passes the closed door of the storage room to her right and glances only briefly into the guest room in front of her. Instead she turns around to her left and up the last two steps to look down on the stairs she just climbed.

She ignores the two last doors to her right and looks instead at the single open door at the end of the short hallway. From beyond it comes the faint flicker of a single candle. This is the place.

The room surrounds her with its knowledge as she looks at the body of the woman in white cotton laying in painful peace upon the bed amid vast fields of red over flowered print sheets. Beside her on the nightstand, held by the wet blade: a note laying within the redded yellow glow of the candle's flame.

"of all the ones who fight to be me, at last we know who has won.

-Laura Leigh"