She wakes with something moving behind her teeth.
Mara has come home to bury her mother and empty the house: the narrow terrace on the coast where she grew up, where the nursery at the top of the stairs still holds a dead child's mobile and a cot no one ever took down. She means to sort the Denby mugs and the folded Radio Times and be back in London by the weekend. That was nine days ago. She has stopped counting the days well.
The wallpaper has begun to breathe. The taste in her mouth is almost floral. Every morning there is a little less of her, and the house is patient, and grief, it turns out, is the one thing that makes a person easy to move into.
When her sister finally comes, the kitchen will be clean, the photographs back on the wall, and a fish pie thawing that no one living made.
The first of five rooms in The Feeding House. A quiet, literary horror for readers of Shirley Jackson and Susan Hill. Best read with the lights on.
