One of the drawbacks of living in a haunted house is fighting with it over which color to paint the kitchen. Susan wasted a month stubbornly repainting it blue before giving up.
“What if we just left it blue?” Susan screamed at no one in particular.
The walls in the kitchen were a weird orange-y shade of blue that made her stomach feel uncomfortable. She wasn’t completely sure if it was the shade of not blue or the sinking feeling of failure, but she was considering throwing up. The pans in the lower cabinet rattled. Susan tried hard to hear the train that must be on the tracks four blocks away, but there was no telltale siren and the floor itself was holding alarmingly still.
“Ok, fine, listen!” Susan said to the rattling pans.
The pans fell silent.
Susan sat down in the middle of the floor at a complete loss as to what her next move was going to be. She wasn’t sure if she was negotiating with a house or a ghost or something in between, and none of the options made her feel all the way sane.
“What do you want from me?”
A closet door upstairs creaked shut. Susan wondered what that might mean. It wasn’t a slam, definitely not aggressive, but it wasn’t an inviting sound either.
“Do you…” Susan hesitated. The question on her lips was not one she really wanted answered because she wasn’t really sure if there was anything she could do with the answer. She took a deep breath in.
“Do you want me to leave?”
Silence.
She held her breath. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked away quietly. Then there was another click somewhere in the front of the house. Her brain tried to remember what that sound could have been. She stood up and wandered through the house to the front door which was now locked.
“So, I should stay then?”
The teapot on the stove began to whistle and the coffee cups in the cabinet above the sink rattled softly. Susan let all the air she’d been holding in out of her lungs. Her shoulders sagged and she walked back into the kitchen. She pulled down the jar of tea bags from the top of the refrigerator and found a mug in the rattling cabinet. With the stove off and tea brewing she slumped down in the only chair at her small kitchen table.
“Ok, I’ll stay.”
The baseboard heat purred as it sprung into action.