"15849 Maple Avenue" by Amber R

Today is Thursday, January 11 and it is raining. The sky is dark and gloomy as ever,
most haven’t seen the sunlight in months. Amongst the darkness, yellow specks of light reflect through the puddles in the streets. Families gather in their homes filled with warmth and comfort for protection against the downpour, except one. At the house at the end of the street, 15849 Maple Avenue, the lights are out. No one is home and no one is together. Within the house, the door echoes in every corner of the room with a light pitter patter from the roof. A girl takes her first step into a world she had long regretted to return to. A world that she had once fled from months ago. Back in November, it happened, the fall from grace. The parents that had once belonged to her, were gone. After all the neglect and lonesomeness, she couldn’t take it. She imagined that if she had just disappeared then maybe they would notice. Although keeping close by, she watched her family break from a distance, her mother left last month to look for her and her father is nowhere to be seen. Tonight is the first time she has stepped back through the house that built her. The girl thinks to herself, “The floors are different. Everything has changed.” She thought that maybe if she’d touched this place, she’d feel it, but the truth is, she still feels empty. Alone at 17, Elizabeth walks through the kitchen and the dining room where her family never gathered. She dreamed that one day, she would feel the warmth and comfort like the families down the street had. Elizabeth realizes that she will never have that. “For dreams and fantasies

are for the foolish,” as her father once told her on her fifth birthday. She begins to speak to herself as she has these past months; “Mother knew better than to open her mouth to Father, for she knew what would come if she did.” Within her thoughts, she envisions what that day was like when she had left. Dad walks in through the front door from work, and into her room to make sure she is doing her homework, but she is not there. He starts yelling and goes to her mom who is folding laundry, that she is gone. The floorboards creak as Elizabeth creeps upstairs to her old safe space, where she spent most of her time. Little did she know that her saving grace was just outside her window. Memories linger among the walls and they urge her to leave and to never look back. Elizabeth being the obedient child that she is, goes away from this haunted place. Back downstairs ahead the front door awaits her departure, she walks slowly and out into the street. Out into the rain she goes, within the illuminated homes she sees a child, Thomas Peters, a 7 year old boy with an expression that she had never noticed before. A look similar to the one in the mirror and a family as imperfect as her own. Elizabeth thinks to herself, “Perhaps there is more, than we may know.” With this, she continues down the street and disappears into the twilight.