The light was creeping in around the edges of the curtains, so she knew it was time to get up. Grandma wouldn't mind now. The sun was up so she could be up too. This was a sleepover, and now that the sleeping part was over, the fun could begin.

“I wonder what’s for breakfast?” she said aloud because she said almost everything aloud. She loved books, actual books, not just the ones with pictures, and had listened to more books on tape than she could count. As a result, when she was alone, she often assumed the role of narrator of her own life.

 People said she was precocious, at the very least smart, for four years old. And maybe so. But precocious or not she was the picture of a healthy mental state, moving through her day in a constant flow of conversation with herself.

“She got out of bed and went to the bathroom,” she said quietly, doing just as she said. She entered the bathroom which was shared by an adjoining bedroom. The other bedroom was vacant these days. All of Grandma’s children were grown.

“She went pee and wiped very carefully,” she continued, “so she didn’t get her fingers wet.”

She wound a wad of toilet paper around her hand and dabbed.

“Then she washed her hands. She was tall enough to reach the sink without a stool.”

The girl wobbled on tiptoe and leaned as far over the big vanity as she could, her index and middle fingers just barely able to slide over the rounded tap handles.

“She used just a little bit of soap” –giving the dispenser a short pump– “because that’s all you need. She rubbed the soap all over her hands and fingers and thumbs and then she rinsed it off.”

She patted her hands in the puddle of sudsy water gathering in the basin, mesmerized into silence. She watched the suds rise higher and higher before she remembered to turn the water off. The suds made a little staticky sound, and she watched the minute bubbles pop and hollow out places in the suds.

“Then she dried her hands with a most beautiful pink towel. She loved the towel so much, she wished it was her very own that she could take home with her and use every time she washed her hands.” Grandma got out the special pink towel just for her when she came for a sleepover.

She dried poorly and left the bathroom with cold, clean fingers, two of which she stuck into her mouth, the middle and index fingers of her right hand.

With her freehand, she opened the bedroom door and looked down the long hall toward the living room.

She could tell it was empty without moving from the threshold. The open floor plan allowed enough light from the kitchen window to spill into the edges of the living room, so it wasn’t completely dark. But the living room curtains were not yet opened.

“I wonder why the house is so dark, she said to herself.” The girl stepped cautiously out of her bedroom. She called it her bedroom. Really, it was just another spare in which the grandmother had put a twin bed with a cutesy cheap comforter and a plastic play kitchen bought at a garage sale.

“She crept quietly down the hall,” the girl said. The only sound was the stick of her bare feet lifting off the hardwood with each step toward the darkened end of the house.

She reached the end of the hall and took in the kitchen, dining room, and living room, all of which she could see at once.

“Why isn’t the TV on, she asked herself. I want to watch TV while Grandma makes muffins and sausage.”

The girl padded softly to the living room rug, but the view was no different from there. The curtains were closed, the television was off, the breakfast was unmade. The house, she concluded, was somehow still asleep. How this could be, with daylight seeping in around the edge of all the closed curtains, she couldn't understand.

She put her fingers into her mouth and walked back down the hall.

It was really the longest hall she knew. She could start at one end of it and be running at full speed long before she reached the other end. And it was windowless, nothing but a dark corridor of openings to all the other rooms of the house, most of which sat empty for days at a time.

At the end of the hall, there was another hall to the left, a much shorter one with only one door. This one led to Grandma’s bedroom.

The girl slowed her footsteps as she reached the end of the long hall. There was no light coming from the semi-closed doorway in the short hall. This meant Grandma hadn’t opened her heavy blue window shades that blocked almost all the light.

She stood at the corner of the hallways, not sure what to do. She sucked her fingers and thought of nothing because she didn’t know what she was supposed to be thinking.

After two or three minutes, much longer than she ever stood still and said nothing, she took another step. The sound of her foot peeling off the floor echoed loudly in the short hall, and she started to feel nervous. The sound was too loud in the quiet house, and she started to feel like she ought to be afraid.

She heard a dog barking from somewhere far away, the neighbor’s dog across the street. Then she heard birds outside Grandma’s closed windows. She walked to the door that hung half ajar and peeked around it.

The shades let just enough light in at the bottom and top to show the big dark bed in the middle of the room with a lump on the left side. She knew the lump was Grandma and felt that the house wasn’t as quiet as it had been a minute ago.

She stepped onto the bedroom carpet and walked silently to the far side of the bed. There was Grandma, still fast asleep. She was lying on her back, arms at her side.

The girl didn’t take her fingers out of her mouth right away; she just looked for a long time. She’d never seen Grandma sleeping before. She hadn’t known for sure that Grandma did sleep. She put the little girl to bed when she spent the night and was up and dressed in the morning before the little girl came out of her room. Grandma asleep in her bed was a revelation.

“Grandma,” the girl said. “I’m awake.”

Her voice sounded very loud in the quiet room, which she found got quieter when she spoke. She drew back from the bed, her sucking fingers hovering below her chin.

“Grandma, can you wake up now?”

The grandmother made no move to get up. The little girl watched her face carefully, but the eyelids did not flutter. The nose did not wrinkle or sniff. The temple did not pulse with whatever was inside it that made it flutter like a tiny heartbeat sometimes. Exactly nothing happened.

The girl walked back out of the bedroom and into the hallway. She watched her feet as they took slow, sticky steps away from Grandma who would not wake up for her.

“She didn’t know when Grandma would wake up,” she said around her fingers, which she thought had better stay in her mouth for now. “She didn’t know what to do.”

The girl paused at her bedroom and looked inside at the light around the curtain. There was no doubt that the light was coming in and would come in very bright indeed if the curtains were opened.

The thought was enough to propel her down the rest of the long hall to the dark living room again. She took bigger, more determined steps across the living room rug to the windows, and with both hands she jerked the curtains across their rod high above her. It took several tugs, but she got them open. Light filled the big room, streaming over the rug where she stood in a long, bright ray. It made her arms and toes and face feel warm, and she sucked her fingers more contentedly in its heat.

She stood there a long time looking out the window at the sunny neighborhood. She saw a car drive past the house, and a little while after, someone walked by with a dog on a leash. Things were normal out there. It was a safe, ordinary day.

“Now, what can I eat for breakfast, she said.”

The girl went to the big walk-in pantry off the kitchen. It was dark so she dragged the step stool over and turned on the light.

The bottom shelf was her shelf. That’s where Grandma kept the applesauce cups and gummies and individual packets of cheese crackers for her to help herself to. She stepped down off the stool and fished a packet of crackers from their box.

The packaging made a horrible loud noise.

“Oh!” the little girl said, withdrawing her hand and jumping back. “I don’t like that sound. It’s too noisy.”

She stood in the pantry halfway between the door and the shelf in a turmoil of indecision. The noise was terrible, enough to draw any number of hidden monsters to her exact location, and for some reason she thought she needed to draw as little attention to herself as possible. The house was too quiet.

But she was hungry and here was the food she knew how to get herself. She put her fingers in her mouth and took them out again. She tiptoed to the shelf and tried again as quietly as she could, easing the packet out of the box bit by bit. She thought it still made too much noise but perhaps not enough to bring whatever was lurking out of its hiding place.

She fumbled as quietly as she could with the packet until she got it open. She had been worried about that; she couldn't always get it open without help. She’d gotten lucky.

“She got the little butterfly bowl out of the cupboard and poured the crackers into it. Then she took it to the living room and sat down on the floor to eat them because she wasn’t supposed to sit on the couch.”

She sat on the floor and leaned her back against the tan leather couch. It was cold through her nightgown.

She took one cracker out of her bowl and nibbled it. Then she ate the rest of them more quickly than she’d meant to. The feeling of hunger seemed to grow as she ate.

She coughed suddenly, spraying the rug with bits of cracker that had stuck in her throat. The crumbs that flew out were mostly dry. She was mostly dry. She coughed violently a few more times and went, still coughing, to the dining room table. Her sippy cup was there on the placemat where she’d used it at dinner the night before.

She climbed into the chair and sat in the booster seat that was buckled to it. Her booster seat at Grandma’s house. No one else needed it when she wasn’t there. In between coughs she took long sips of the water, now tepid and old tasting and nearly gone.

The little girl gasped after emptying what was left in the cup. While she sat there, catching her breath, she looked around at the table. It hadn’t occurred to her to eat her crackers there instead of on the living room rug. The crackers were a snack, and she always ate snacks at Grandma’s on the living room rug. The table felt unfamiliar, wrong, even, in this light. The dining room curtain was still closed.

“Grandma?” she called suddenly, not knowing she was going to before she’d done it. No answer came.

She climbed off the booster and took the empty sippy cup from the table. She didn’t stop to think about it but began walking back down the hall, one sticky foot in front of the other. She didn’t pause to look in at her empty room or the dark empty bathroom in the hall or the other empty spare bedroom at the end of the long hall. She made it all the way to the door of Grandma’s room which was still hanging a little ajar, exactly as she had left it.

She paused a moment before entering, putting her head around the edge as before. The shades were the same dark rectangles that let in only a strip of light on the wall above and below. The lump in the bed was the same, too. Still cold and still.

She walked around to Grandma’s side of the bed.

“I need some more water.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper and that sounded too loud. She held the cup out slightly, just in front of her body, for the grandmother to see. If she would just open her eyes, turn her head a little, she would see.

The little girl put her two fingers back in her mouth and waited. She studied Grandma again.

She looked closely at what she could make out. The face with its nose pointed at the ceiling, the arms like branches held close to Grandma’s body, the outline of feet slightly splayed under the covers. The mouth hung a little ajar, like the bedroom door.

In the end it was the mouth.

“She’s dead, the girl said.” It was an idea that came into her head from a squirrel she’d seen outside her house once, not long ago. It lay in the road with its arms by its sides, its nose pointed in the air and its mouth a little bit open.

“Grandma?” the little girl said. “Are you dead?” She spoke louder this time, so loud she knew whatever there was in the house to hear her would hear her. She whimpered.

“I know you’re not dead, so please get up.” But she did know. She knew it like she’d been told.

“The girl left the room quickly.”

She dropped her cup on the floor and hurried out, closing the door behind her. The sound of it clicking to send a loud echo down the hall, waking a sister sound from the other end of the house.

The girl wanted to whimper more, but instead she stood in absolute silence and felt her heart race in her chest.

“That was an echo, she said to herself. And she stood very quietly and waited for a long time.”

It was the longest the little girl had ever waited for anything not to happen.

Finally, her heart stopped racing. She put her ear to the grandmother’s door but could only hear the sounds in her own ear, of her own blood pumping in her head. She backed away, hating every sticky sound her feet made on the bare floor. Then she ran down the hall.

At the other end she screamed, then she covered her mouth.

“You have to be quiet, she told herself. Be as quiet as you can.”

She stood on her tiptoes and peered out the living room window. The sun was still shining outside. The other houses looked familiar and safe, unlike the living room, dining room and kitchen behind her. They looked strange and hostile, ready to unleash secreted evils on her now that she knew she was alone.

“Get dressed, she said. You know how to get yourself dressed.”

But she paused at the opening to the long hall. It was still so dark. And her feet would make the sticky sound every time she took a step.

“I need more light, she said. When there’s light, it will be safe.”

She hesitated, looking down the hall.

“Go, she said. She made her feet walk down the hall, even though she was afraid.”

Her first stop was the office, off the foyer. The heavy decorative drapes were operated by a pulley, one she wasn’t supposed to play with, but she knew how it worked. Grandma had let her open them before once, to be helpful.

She fumbled in the dark room, feeling her way toward the bookcase. When she reached it, she ran her hand down its side and to the little gap between its back and the wall. She found the cord.

She pulled the wrong end at first and nothing happened, but then she tugged the right end, and the curtain gave a shudder and opened. The crack widening between the panels sent a tall beam of light into the center of the room. She tugged a few more times, each one widening the gap until the room was lit with all the daylight she needed.

The tugging had been hard for her. Not because it had been straining in an ordinary way, but because each tug made a squeak that sounded like a bugle blast in her ears. Her heart was racing again by the time she finished.

She didn’t let herself bask in the bright office. Moving on the momentum of her mission, she carried on.

“Now, she said, I just need to make the bedroom safe.”

She crossed the hall at a slight angle and entered her dark bedroom. The long curtains covering her window hung almost to the floor but were blocked by a desk, and the desk was blocked by her play kitchen.

The little girl was desperate for the curtains to be open and for the outside to come streaming in as it had done in the living room and office. Those places were now safe and normal, nothing would come there that wasn’t supposed to. The desk presented a problem.

She let the scene in the dim bedroom fill her eyes then turned around to face the doorway. Beside the door was the light switch. She already knew she couldn’t reach it without her stool and that was in the hall bathroom, a room without any windows.

She looked at her bedroom window again. The daylight spilled out the top.

She slid her plastic kitchen out of the way; it shifted easily on the carpet, she’d discovered while playing with it. Behind the kitchen was an opening in the desk where a chair was supposed to be, but Grandma didn’t keep a chair there. Instead, she kept shoe boxes stacked one on top of the other. The little girl toppled them and hurled them behind her like she was trying to uncover something buried alive.

When she’d removed the shoeboxes, she crawled under the desk. She couldn't stand up, but she could sit on her heels. Her eyes had adjusted to the semidarkness, and she gripped the curtain in her hand.

She slid her hand up the curtain between the back of the desk and the wall, trying to reach as high as the top of the desk would let her go. Then she yanked.

It was an awkward, mostly ineffective movement, trying to pull both up and over while crouching under the desk, but the curtain slid an inch on its rod. Then an inch more and an inch more. The little girl crawled out from under the desk and ran around to its side. She had moved the inner edge of the curtain over far enough to reach it from the outer edge of the desk and continued to pull it from there.

After she’d gotten the first panel as open as she could, she ducked back under the desk and tried to push the other panel in the opposite direction. Her first swat at it was lucky, and the curtain slid over several inches. She ran to the other outer desk edge and pulled it back from there. The room was now safely lit.

The floor, littered with shoeboxes that had fallen open and spilled their footwear, lay where they fell. The girl opened her little pink suitcase.

“She grabbed her dress and put it on, but first she took off her nightgown.”

The narration was simultaneous with the actions. She was moving quickly, exhilarated by her conquest of the curtains and breathing heavily between statements.

The nightgown caught on her hair, but she yanked it off anyway, ignoring the pull to her scalp.

“She didn’t bother putting her things back in her suitcase because it didn’t matter if she put them away or not.”

With that she left the hair clips and socks–which had flown out of her bag when she grabbed her dress–on the bed where they had landed, along with her discarded nightgown.

She was sliding her second arm through the sleeve of her dress when the cry caught in her throat. A strangled cry, the tail end of it escaping anyway and frightening her more than she already was.

Her eye had caught a glimpse of something else in her suitcase revealed by the removal of the dress she had just put on, and the sight of it brought a realization that both froze her body and made her sweat. It was another dress.

She remembered something she hadn’t thought about at all since she woke up that morning. That this was a special sleepover; it was meant to be for two nights.

She slammed down the top cover of the suitcase, hiding the second dress, the one intended for tomorrow, a day she could not think of. The tears that she’d been holding in started to spill over, and she had not yet learned how to cry quietly.

Her wails rose and fell, echoing throughout the empty house, summoning an endless, nameless, terrifying horde to her bedside, she was sure. She began to hyperventilate. She was prone to breathing too hard, her mother called it, when she got to crying. What was it her mother always said?

“Don’t-don’t-don’t wo-work y-y-y-your-s-s-self u-up, she-she- s-said.”

She repeated the line several times, but the next thing she knew she was opening her eyes and staring at the ceiling. She wasn’t crying anymore, and she couldn't figure out why she was lying on the floor. She stayed there for a minute while the memory of where she was and what she was doing came back to her.

She sat up and looked at the room. The suitcase had fallen from the bed too and the contents had now emptied onto the floor, the dress for tomorrow on top of everything else.

She ran from the room, tripping over shoeboxes and sprawling into the long hall. She crossed it and rushed through the foyer to the front door. She gave the handle several downward cranks, the cries rising again in her throat, but she kept them there. Only a whimper slipped out.

The door was solid, no window in it or on either side of it. The foyer was still mostly dark except for the light that spilled into it from the office and a little from her bedroom. She reached up to turn the lock, but it was well above the handle.

“I have to get out, I have to get out.”

She strained on her toes and reached for it again. Then, she stopped.

“The little girl remembered, Grandma has a step stool. I’ll run get it as fast as I can.” She rushed to the bathroom.

She tore around the corner and back into the hall before making a sharp turn into the dark hall bathroom. The outline of a child’s step stool was dimly illuminated by the light from her bedroom window across the hall. She picked it up and dashed back to the front door.

The step stool gave her all the height she needed. She turned the bolt and jumped down, kicking the stool out of the way. Something in her was desperate to get out, to escape the house with the mostly dark rooms that she had made safe for a while but now seemed to be conspiring to contain her forever. Even until tomorrow.

She pulled the handle and the door opened, making a small creaking sound. The little girl rushed out into the world of normal outside noises: birds, dogs, cars, lawnmowers, the rumble of semi-trucks on the interstate just over the hill. The world was alive. Grandma was dead, but the world was alive.

She ran all the way out of the house, down the front porch, and stood on the sidewalk. It was warm and her feet made almost no noise on it. Then she turned and ran back to the front door, looking into the house that was unbearably dark compared to outside. She took a step in, grabbed the door handle, and pulled it closed. With a click she cut off everything inside.

Now the outside was safe.

“She walked to the end of the sidewalk and looked…”

She wasn’t sure what to look for.

“She stayed at the end of the sidewalk. She sat down there and waited.”

The little girl sat sucking her fingers in the sun. Its heat began to turn her cheeks red and mat the hair around her face to her forehead. Every now and then she would push her hair back from her face with both hands and sigh.

“She was hungry.”

The little girl mumbled this around her fingers, tracing the bumps in the sidewalk with her free hand.

“She was very hungry. And she was thirsty. But the food was inside the house–”

She turned and looked over her shoulder at the house. The windows whose curtains she had opened were gaping black holes, dark yawning maws of something greedy and hungry. She turned away.

“–and she wasn’t ever going back into the house.”

The sun became too much for her eventually. She crawled off the sidewalk–actually crawled–across the grass to where a little Japanese maple grew. Its branches were low and thick and made a deep, cool shade.

She sat under the red-leafed branches for a moment but then lay down. She put her head in the grass, her fingers in her mouth, and fell asleep.

At 4 o’clock the mailman arrived at the grandmother’s house. He saw a little girl, curled like a cat under the Japanese maple with her fingers in her mouth. She was fast asleep. He slipped the mail into the box and shut the lid. He looked at the girl then at the house for a long time, waiting.

 The engine of his mail truck hummed, and the truck made tiny vibrating jitters, idling in front of the sidewalk. He looked at the little girl again.

 He unbuckled his seatbelt and had the first foot out of his truck when he wondered what in the world he was doing. Didn’t he see kids doing crazy stuff every day of the week?

He stood with one foot on the truck step and the other hovering just above the road. He looked back at the house, squinting into the dark windows.

Then he shook his head, sat back down, and drove on.