How to Sell a Haunted House

by Grady Hendrix

Louise held Poppy’s feverish, limp body for hours, wishing harder than she’d ever wished before that for just sixty seconds someone would hold her, but no one holds moms.

Whenever Louise got anxious, her dad always said, You know, Louise, statistically, and there’s a lot of variance in these numbers, but in general, from a strictly scientific point of view, everything turns out okay an improbable number of times.

But she didn’t have a choice. She would have to handle whatever happened. There was no such thing as too much. There was just more and more, and her limits didn’t matter. Life didn’t care. She could only hang on.

For Louise, it came and went. Sometimes it wouldn’t bother her for years, and sometimes it hit hard. The worst was when she dreamed they were still alive and it had all been a terrible mistake.