Home Is Where the Heart Is by Annemarie Bennett

The girl wanders into the house on a whim. The house is old and abandoned, tucked into the woods with care, and beckoning her through its rot. She reaches the front door with ease. Pulsing weeds dot the crumbling slits between wooden boards chipped with faded white paint. 

The door opens itself. An old woman stands inside the house, hand anchored to the doorknob. She doesn’t speak, only chokes back a quivering sob. The door closes itself - the old woman’s hand still fixed to the knob. The girl backs away, inching closer and closer to the only exit she can see: a staircase that seems to hold its breath as she approaches while the old woman shakes her head slowly, wincing in pain. The floor yawns open and in an instant, the girl has leaped from the now open abyss to the staircase and the old woman has fallen. 

The girl now knows her only options are to climb to the next floor or fall into the dark. She climbs. Though she can see the second floor, it somehow stays out of reach. She climbs for an eternity, tears of frustration long since dry and replaced with the hopes that the top step would one day be under her feet, now calloused and wrinkled with age. Her childhood shoes dangle from her clutched, knobby hand as though that could possibly return her youth. 

In a blink, she reaches the top of the stairs. The room she is met with is simple: wooden floors find communion with cobwebbed walls and across from her is yet another staircase. She turns around rapidly, but the staircase she had just climbed is now a door. She panics and reaches for the knob. 

The door swings open. From the outside comes a girl. Herself. Somehow, she is here, and she is young. The old woman lets out a silent sob. Her hand is unable to move from the knob. The door slams shut and herself backs up to the staircase. The old woman shakes her head no, but each millimeter of movement brings unbearable pain. And then, the floor buckles into the darkness and the old woman watches herself take refuge on the stairs. She opens her mouth, but no scream arrives. 

She falls for a second eternity. She lands in a room of cushioned floors and walls, a ceiling of abyss above her. Dark blood oozes from slick muscle wrapping around the room which beats. Arteries and veins swirl up the walls and loop across the living floor. The veins begin to loosen themselves from their fleshy refuge. They strap the old woman to the house’s Heart. Some begin to bore holes into the old woman’s skin and snake their way towards her own heart. Through the invasion, as her vision grew dark, and stars spot across the empty, she finally understands. She dies an infinite death knowing she exists only to be drained and discarded. 

Annemarie Bennett is a horror author who recently graduated with a Bachelor's in Creative Writing. She has published poetry and flash fiction and has placed first in two fiction writing competitions. She had a poem place third in the 2021 Poets' Roundtable of Arkansas: Jeanie Dolan Carter Memorial Award contest.