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I hate her. It takes less than three minutes. Possibly a record.

April turns the phone back toward herself. “But you know what? We needed a fresh start.”

We?

She looks toward the car. A dog? Please don’t let it be a dog. Dogs piss on things. For a while Eleanor had had a string of those small yappy dogs who spent the better part of forty years peeing on my feet. Nasty little creatures.

Perhaps she has a husband. The thought is unexpectedly irritating. Or children. Even worse.

I endured children in this house before. Sticky little monsters who throw rocks at gargoyles and dare one another to climb onto the roof.

April opens the rear passenger door. She pulls out a potted plant. I stare. She carries it toward the porch with both arms wrapped around the pot.

“This is our home now, Gerald.”

The plant, presumably Gerald, offers no objection.

April sets him beside the front door. “Try not to die.”

Excellent advice, Gerald. Though I can assure him it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

She returns to the car. Then again. And again. Boxes begin accumulating on the porch. Along with clear plastic bins of clothes and books and kitchen implements. There’s a hideous lamp with a green shag shade. Two suitcases. A battered yellow chair.

An enormous plastic bin that splits open halfway up the steps and spills what appears to be every cleaning product ever manufactured across the porch.

“Son of a biscuit!”

April catches a bottle of something blue before it rolls off the edge.

I would laugh if I could.

She gathers everything, stuffs it back into the bin, and continues. There is something relentless about her. She should have stopped twenty minutes ago. She is flushed and sweaty. The curls around her face are damp. Twice, she has paused to press a hand against her lower back.

But she keeps going. Back and forth. Car to porch. Porch to car. Until she wrestles a box out of the cargo area that is clearly too heavy for her.

She gets three steps. Stops. Adjusts her grip.

“Okay.” Two more steps.

“This is fine.”

It is not fine.

Her arms are trembling. “Everything is⁠—”

The bottom of the box gives way. She yelps.

I experience a sharp, violent jolt of alarm.

April jumps backward as approximately two dozen books crash onto the gravel where her feet were a second before.

Something cracks.

For one impossible instant, I think it is me.

I feel— Something. Not the vague awareness I’ve existed within for decades. Not stone. Not the distant echo of sensation.

Feeling.