One room, drowsy as honeysuckle, has The Best of Nancy Drew. The other has a tattered copy of Frankenstein. August presses against leaded glass. Behind each latched door a shush of turning pages. Where to go, how to disappear. Can a room survive without its walls? Neither tells the other.

Jackie Craven is the author of Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018) and a chapbook, Our Lives Became Unmanageable (Omnidawn, 2016), winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Award. She has recent poems in  AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. A longer version of this story appeared in Pleiades. See more at JackieCraven.com.