Homes likes these, there’s nothing unique about them. About a hundred of these very same homes popped up almost overnight, fifty or sixty years ago, so that this one is the same as the next, as the next, as the next. They’re all the same, every single one of them, except that one may be brown and one may be blue. But they’re all ugly and stodgy and just plain blah. Just like my very own home across the street from here. It’s ugly, too. It’s dark outside, still night. We walked until we could walk no more, and then, instead of going back home and to bed, I came here. To this home. To Pearl’s home. “Tell me about this ghost,” Pearl says. She sits on the floor before me, her legs pulled up into her. How I came to be here, I don’t know. I just did. She folds her hands into her lap. The scintilla of light that sneaks in through the edges of the boarded-up window reflects off the pointed, triangular tooth—my necklace, my shark’s tooth necklace, which lies over the neckline of her own T-shirt.
