The echoes of mother’s rusty voice slipping up the aged stair case were swallowed by the thick velvet burgundy drapes that rested awkwardly over the dainty attic windows. My dense dress fabric made miniature mountains over my shriveled body and I imagined a tiny inch worm trekking over the deep green patterns of the valleys in the rumbling material. My limbs had become vines, thick foreign growth around the smooth, sweet smelling wood of a table leg. The ancient bureau had been banished to the damp heavens above the house decades ago and smothered with a white linen sheet until its slow oak breath finally ceased and the cobwebs spun their way around it. Another call from mother’s weak chords swam through the house and reached my skin which was perishing with the deceased furniture. The heavy air which eternally drenched the room suckled on my pores and I felt my soul had drifted too far past conscious life to return my mother’s shouts. She was growing impatient and her beckons rose like smoke stacks: thick and cloudy enough to shock my lungs into reality, but too delicate and immaterial to grasp onto as my escape route. Her tone’s desperation tugged on my fingers and slowly they individually detached themselves from their frozen claw around their host and fell to the landscape in my lap. I pulled back the curtain to the rest of the attic and pressed my weakened fingers into the splintering floor to push my weight up. Once upright, sprinkles of darkness rained through my vision and my ears sung as I balanced myself and waited for my blood to finish rushing. I walked swiftly over the creaking floorboards, gently enough that mother wouldn’t hear my being in the forbidden place. My shoeless stockinged feet caught on the wood which pricked my arches until I reached the opening that looked down on the second floor whose warmth and color coaxed me back from the black and white galaxy above.