Free The Book of Living and Dying by Natale Ghent Page A

It pointed to the little house hiding beneath the spruce trees, one eye open. His room.
    Creeping up to the house, Sarah stood on the stone andpeeked through the glass. The light was on but the room was empty. She walked around the house, gaping through the darkened windows, the accusatory faces of the masks gaping back at her. “I can’t go home,” she said aloud, making her way back to his room. Standing on the stone again, she could see that the window was slightly ajar. A small push and it swished easily open. She measured her options briefly, then clambered up, feet kicking against the side of the house, the sill cutting into her hips until she flopped onto the bed like a fish.
    Unsure of what to do, she simply lay there, her ears still ringing from the noise in the bar. What if his father came home? It would be best to leave, to pretend she was never there. But she didn’t want to go. She felt she had to see him or she would go crazy.
More crazy.
The pot and alcohol helped influence her decision to stay, encouraging her to put her head down on the pillow and wait for him to crawl in beside her. It was too tempting to explore, though, to see more of him. She got up slowly and moved over to the shelves.
    The stacks of videos sat neatly filed next to the TV. Each one had a clean white label bearing only the date, nothing more. Sarah selected one: January 8. She looked at it and pushed it into the machine. Turning on the TV, she adjusted the volume so there was no sound. The tape rolled and jumped. There was no image, only snow. Then the faint outline of a young child. A boy, maybe? Michael? A cousin, running along the beach? The picture was grainy, uncertain. Now the boy walked down the hallway of an old house, opening doors, the rooms cavernous and uninviting. The image cut to a dog, a golden retriever, trotting along a sidewalk, looking into the camera, a thin cord of silver trailingbehind it like a luminescent spiderweb. The screen blurred with snow as the picture skipped away.
    The fog buzzed on the screen for a while before Sarah decided there was nothing else on the tape and rewound it. Putting it carefully back in its jacket, she replaced the tape on the shelf in its original spot and selected another: July 15. Again the blurred image, the tape jumping, but the same boy, it seemed. As she checked the date on the jacket again, a strange cityscape sprang up on the screen, the buildings slightly distorted, sometimes looming, sometimes wavering as though under water. Then nothing, the image fading to static. Sarah hit rewind, replaced the tape and pushed another into the machine: September 15. The tape was blurry, as before, the image snapping and jumping. But this time the figure of a woman slowly emerged. A young woman with long hair, sitting on the edge of a bed. The aspect of the room was familiar. It was Michael’s room, she realized, yet somehow different, with certain details more vivid than others, while other parts receded into shadow. The camera moved closer to the girl, her face in profile and indistinct, the features unclear except for the smile that crept across her face as she let her jacket slip from her shoulders and worked the edge of her sweater up, her long hair fanning out, her breasts blooming from beneath the sweater, exposed and full, like peonies.
    Sarah giggled, she couldn’t help herself.
So this is your secret.
    The girl laughed too, her face turned away for a long while before she finally faced the camera, the image flickering, becoming cloudy, then starkly sharp. Sarah gasped.
    “What are you doing here?”
    She spun around in horror as Michael’s silhouette filled the doorway, the image of the girl still moving on the screen.
    “What—what is this?” she stammered, pointing at the screen.
    He glanced at the TV. “Turn it off. I can explain.”
    The girl in the tape continued to laugh, inching her jeans down over her hips.
    “How did you do this?” Sarah shrieked, finding her