Free The Bargaining by Carly Anne West

rooms of rosebud wallpaper, all pinks and purples and oozing femininity. But old femininity. Like doilies that have been sitting underneath potted plants on side tables for too long, the dirt forming a brown ring. Charred ends of wallpaper strips stop and start, with gaping holes exposing custard-yellow glue that failed to do its job long ago. These rooms are the first since the hallway in which I’ve seen a recurrence of the fire damage.
    I walk to the corner of the room at the back of the hall—the second of the pink rooms—and examine the heap ofmoldy bed linens piled and abandoned, their once pink hue looking peachy now.
    I pinch a corner of the sheets and lift, leaping back when a brown spider the size of my palm skitters out of its hiding place and through a massive hole in the back of the closet.
    â€œSo that’s what I get to think about before I go to bed tonight,” I say. “Where that thing’s crawling while we’re sleeping.”
    I take a picture of the bed sheets and a picture of the closet hole. When I lower the lens, a smudge on the window catches my attention.
    Crossing the room, I see that it’s less of a smudge and more of a print. An upside down hand print. I hold my own up to it and cover it easily, my fingers reaching over an inch beyond the print on the window, though it makes my wrist ache to get it angled just right.
    Upon taking my hand away, I notice I’ve left my own print, which should have obscured the first. Instead, they’re overlaid.
    Then I finally see the problem. Disbelieving, I raise the window and let in some of the rain, reaching for the smaller print and rubbing it with my thumb. My suspicion is confirmed when it smears easily. The print is on the outside.
    I close the window fast, the chill from outside snaking its way up my arm.
    I picture myself as the owner of this little hand, bending my wrist to make an upside down print from where I’m standing. Given that the torque of my wrist is still struggling to right itself, I can’t figure how it could happen.
    The final room is perhaps the biggest train wreck of them all, the place where previous renovation attempts came to die. It’s as though every ounce of furniture missing from the other rooms has migrated here. Five dusty, yellowed mattresses form a kind of fort across the room, lining a sheltered pathway from the window to the closet door, which stands firmly shut thanks to one fallen blue-striped mattress with satin piping. I have to climb over three dressers, all emptied of their drawers, a lamp with no shade, and heaps of papers and blankets and damp bedsheets to reach the window, which is, thankfully, easy to shut against the downpour outside.
    Robbed of its sound, the room feels somehow embarrassed now, like that sudden hush that falls at a party, and only one person is still talking loudly about what she found in her dad’s sock drawer. A few of the papers piled around the mattress fort still titter under the remaining draft, but the rest of the room waits for me to make a move.
    I snap a picture of the barricaded closet door and push away the thought that I’ll find an even bigger spider thanthe one setting up camp in the room across the hall.
    While the hallway and the twin pink rooms exhibited some evidence of fire damage, this room displays none of that aside from the strong acrid odor. It’s worse here than in the rest of the rooms by far. I search for the source—sure something in this room is charred to a crisp—but I can’t see even a square foot of flooring in the midst of all the rubble.
    It might be the clutter that kept me from noticing the wall to my right until now. The only wall that isn’t painted a sort of overcast gray color in this room. Instead, it’s covered over sloppily with the same floral wallpaper from the hallway, though it runs out halfway down the wall about a third of the way across. The remainder is covered in