Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (2)

The house is a storybook house. A huff and a puff and we'll blow it down house. A Bashful, Doc, and Sneezy house. The roof is soft and tumbled. The bushes grow tall past the sills. Evergreens lean in from high above the cracked slate path, torpedoing pinecones to the ground. The floor slats are slants and the furniture slides, clawing away at the varnish. Big sheets of snaggled paint have split from Sophie's bedroom wall and, like glaciers, crashed.

But there is a window—one—that is n