HAUNTED

The world looks different when you’re mildly concussed.

After falling down the stairs at school, Molly noticed little things on her street that she hadn’t thought anything of before.  The paintjob of one of the houses, the color of her neighbor’s cobblestones.  She hadn’t even noticed that the Rivers’ got a new treehouse.  Although, she supposed that she didn’t look up that often.

Molly walked up the path to her old house.  She felt instinctively for her neck as she climbed the steps.  She had really taken a fall.  Luckily, she felt completely fine.  She felt no pain at all in her head or neck and, as far as she could tell, she had sustained no major injuries.

She stepped onto the welcome mat and turned her key in the lock.

She stopped for a second before she opened the door.  She knew something was off, but couldn’t tell what it was.

That’s when it hit her: when had her parents bought a welcome mat?

Molly opened the door and found a room that bared no resemblance to the one she left just that morning.  The wallpaper was torn down and the walls were painted red.  Every piece of furniture that Molly had grown up with was gone and replaced with something newer and fancier.  The couch she would come home to lay down on after school, the chairs that were aggressively ugly but too comfortable to throw out, even the television!  Not one thing from the morning had stayed the same.

Molly ran up to her room in a frenzy.  She threw open the door to find a nursery.  Where her bed should be, there stood a clean, white crib.  A mobile of horses hung in the air just above it, chasing each other around and around with no chance of catching each other.

Molly felt like throwing up.

What had happened to her home?  What had happened to her parents?

Not too much later, she heard the front door open.

Molly crept her head cautiously out of her room to get a glimpse of the new intruders.

        It wasn’t her mother home from work.  It was a younger woman.  A younger woman with her mother’s key to the house.

        That’s when Molly was sure of the worst.  Her parents were not coming home.

        “What did you do to them?!”

        The woman dropped her purse.  She scanned the room trying to find the source of the voice.

Molly made no point of hiding.

        “What did you do?!”

        The intruder’s breathing became much more irregular.  She made small whimpering noises as her eyes darted around the room as if she still couldn’t see Molly.

        Molly picked up a vase and threw it at the woman, nearly missing her head.

        “Answer me!”

        The woman looked up.  The look on her face proved that she saw Molly now.

        The woman turned and ran out of the house, screaming her entire way down the street.

        No one ever trespassed in Molly’s house again.  Not the woman.  Not her husband.  And not whatever baby was living in Molly’s room.

        Eventually Molly forgot what she was doing there.  But she knew, even as the doors were locked and the windows were boarded up, that she had reclaimed her house.

        Forever.