His head sloshed, making him feel seasick. He was looking for—what again? A tool? Something he could use to pry something else open. They used to tell the younger boys they were going to dig the coffins back up and make them look, but it never really scared them. They knew better; it was just flat-out too much work.

Doug had almost gotten retired along with the wire rug beater. He looked like he’d gone through a threshing machine, and all for bringing a tree toad into her kitchen, which the older boys had told him to do. They tiptoed around for days, staying out of her way as she tended to the wet rags and what all else that she had to keep putting on him. Age seven.

The TV people were swimming behind their glass but he couldn’t make out who they were. Or where this was exactly; it had the feeling of home but he couldn’t really see that well, so it might be someplace else. He was used to being wrong in the head, but not wrong like this, where he was just wandering around in the dark. He moved closer to the TV and in its flickering light he saw scattered across the rug those long-ago posies, pink and red, with their grime-rimmed nails and their gaggous stub ends, as real and unreal as anything in a Halloween haunted house.

Suddenly, he remembered stepping on her hand as he strode from the room and how it moved under his boot like a snake.

When Joan was a little girl, her sister used to torment her by pretending to be dead, slumped in a corner of the living-room sofa, mouth slack, eyes fixed and staring, Wally Gator on TV, their mother banging around in the kitchen.

“I know you’re not,” Joan would say at first, sitting down in an armchair with her snack; she’d watch television, peripherally keeping tabs on the eerily still body across the room, getting more and more certain that her sister was alive but at the same time more and more uncertain. “I’m telling,” she would try.

Nothing but a clanging stillness from the corner of the couch until eventually Joan couldn’t take it anymore, the utter lack of sister where there used to be a sister, panic rising like a tide, lifting her out of her chair, and floating her across the room, where her sister would inevitably frighten her so badly that a long piercing shriek would leap out of Joan, unfurling into the domestic air of the household.