won’t allow the lights to stay on. You flip the switch and the house snatches the light into shadow. The phone call from your mom crackles and disconnects. She’s been talking for a year about cleaning the house in preparation for her death. Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep in bed. This is the house where your dreaming self stays. Even when you’re awake it exists, like an attic of the mind. You think of it before you fall asleep, hoping to dream of it again. Maybe this time you’ll find the architect. It’s a mansion really. With back stairs that lead to that other wing. That bedroom you’ve never seen before. That annex of possibility. The chimney that’s also an exit but will only act as an entrance. It wounds you. The magic house can feel like being birthed, but will definitely kill you. Your childhood house had attic stairs behind a door. You were terrified of what might be up there. Once, you had sleep paralysis and a bat flapped helplessly into the room, landed on your chest and you were stone. Inert as a sheet of paper as the bat twitched on your breastbone. Your breath is gone. Summer air breathes through the open windows. Everything is moving except you. Is this what it is to die with things left undone?

Jessica Purdy

holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems and microfiction have appeared in Gargoyle, Gone Lawn, Litro, ONE ART, Radar, The Ekphrastic Review, The Night Heron Barks, and numerous others. Her books Starland (2017) and Sleep in a Strange House (2018) were both released by Nixes Mate Books.

Her recent chapbooks include You’re Never the Same: Ekphrastic Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023); and The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), poems based on dollhouse-scale dioramas by forensic scientist Frances Glessner Lee which were collected in Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and used to train homicide investigators.

For a longer list of other publications, plus a portfolio excerpted from The Adorable Knife and published by Buttonhook Press in 2022, Murder in the House: The “Nutshells” of Frances Glessner Lee, visit the author’s website:

www.jessicapurdy.com