Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (2)

The house is a storybook house. A huff and a puff and we’ll blow it down house. The roof is soft and tumbled. The bushes grow tall past the sills. Evergreens lean in from high above the cracked slate path, torpedoing pinecones to the ground. The floor slats are slants and the furniture slides, clawing away at the varnish. Big sheets of snaggled paint have split from Sophie’s bedroom wall and, like glaciers, crashed.

But there is a window—one—that is not tumbled, that is whole. Sophie waits until her mother leaves for work before pulling down the mid-air stairs and climbing into the pink scratch of the attic. Through the window at the far end of the room falls an oblique square of sun. Toward that oblique Sophie makes her way (careful on the cross beams, careful with the splinters, careful not to fall into the quilty insulation—that’s what the pink is, insulation), then sits watching the world beyond, the house across the street, the sloppy dog, the scramble of legs and tail that is the dog. The dog rumbles and slides, keeping guard over his house. He runs the grass alley between the fence and the porch and scurries a squirrel into a tree. He barks at the white car with the pistol muffler that goes roaring past—down the narrow asphalt, gone.

The dog is preamble; he waits.