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.

“The Velveteen Rabbit is not a compelling theoretical framework for the physical universe,” Louise said. “It’s a children’s story.” “So’s the Bible,” Mark said. “But you got people making laws and killing each other over it every day.”

She cried because at last it hit her that time only moves in one direction, no matter how hard we wish it wasn’t so.