As houses go, I have known no other. Partitions and offshoots grow on ours, like generation after generation of parasitic children. My family has known no other. The house grows bigger. The house grows more hostile. I have nowhere else to go. I have my family to think of.
            Today I aired my room and set it to rights. I breathed dust off my old diaries. The edges of the pages had softened, they were no longer sharp. The memories had softened too, like jagged pieces wrapped in cloth. I skimmed through them and wherever there were blank pages and missing memories, I filled them in from imagination.
            My daughter helped me. Her name is Farrah and I love her sharply. My love for my child can never be blunted or muffled. She is an exhausting child at times, but she can never suck it out of me.
            We took my clothes out, folded them, and put them away. We stitched sachets of fragrant dried flowers and spices to put in the cupboards. Farrah is good with a needle, and as a matter of principle ignores the scissors, breaking the thread off with her pointy little teeth. We were pleased with the sachets after we completed them. Farrah held them to her cheek. She has a sachet filled with lavender and love that she sleeps with. She keeps it under her pillow. Our pillows are filled with sawdust and wood shavings. They have a comforting scent.
            Farrah asked for a story. She devours stories. All our books have bled their ink and are unreadable now. I opened one of my diaries, old enough to be innocuous, and I read out an entry that I had filled in from my imagination. Farrah said it was too good a story to put her to sleep. That was a pity; more often than not, the only sleep we manage to get is in snatches during the day. But it flattered me. I would write more for her sake if I wasn’t so afraid of running dry.
            Farrah opened her toy chest, made of leftover wood from a coffin. (There is nothing coffin-like about it, except that it groans a little every time.) It has mermaids and scallop shells carved on it, just like a treasure chest. Farrah’s father can carve wood if he can do nothing else, bless his heart. His wooden toys and carvings keep us going. It’s not easy to keep a house like this going.
            Farrah was busy with her toys, so I got busy in the kitchen. I cooked a lunch that should satisfy anybody reasonable. I take my family’s nourishment seriously. I see to all the cooking. I keep this house fed.
            Farrah’s father ate quietly and gratefully. He always does. He knows he must keep his strength up. But Farrah was unreasonable. She lay down on the stone floor and flailed her limbs as though she was making a snow angel on a hard frost day. I can never withstand her tantrums for long. She knows this, wicked creature. As soon as I gave in, she latched onto me. I floated through the rest of the house in a hazy fatigue. The house dripped blood, some of it my blood from that afternoon. When I was hazy like this, it was easy to imagine that I could see a stealthy ripple in the walls.
           The blood dripped through the night. Impossible to sleep through the sound of it. Farrah’s father was still in the woodshed. I could hear him chipping away at the wood. He worked all day and night to keep us going. When I heard him at it, I couldn’t sleep. It felt indecent to sleep when he was working himself to the bone. He didn’t have the strength to fell trees anymore, and had to depend on woodcutters.
            I lay with my eyes open in bed, and thought of the morning. I would have to clean the blood. I see to all the cleaning. I keep this house spotless.   
           In the morning I would learn the house again. There would be another alcove, perhaps. Or, a window would deepen to make a seat in front of it. A window seat would be nice. I could settle down to read a book there, when I have a spare moment, when I’m not drained of energy.
            Farrah lay awake too. But she didn’t stay in bed, not even when I was stern with her. She padded out of the room. I listened to her feet fade away. I couldn’t hear her anymore. Then I heard the groan of her toy chest. 
            In the morning I slept.                  

Uma Padmasola lives in India. She reads tarot when she isn’t reading books. She experiences writing as inevitable.