disappeared

Extract from Mark Gluth, The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis:

Mira and I played video games and drank iced tea. Link was named Mirabeth. Her print was hanging next to the couch. She asked me what I was writing when she took the picture. I told her that I was writing a story, that it was set in the cul-de-sac in the woods. I told her I was writing a paragraph about one of the houses. That it was haunted and cursed.
That night it rained in sheets. Peter turned off the lights and we looked out the windows. The wind blew the leaves off the trees. One of them fell and just missed the house. We spent the next morning sawing and stacking it. The rain continued and the leaves clogged the storm drains. Children wearing boots stomped through puddles. Water sprayed as they rode their bikes. That night I dreamed I was in the house in my story. A murderer had killed a young girl in it. Her death had cast a spell that turned the house into a black hole. I was trapped. The next morning I went for a walk after I drank my coffee. The edges of the clouds were part of the sky. My face felt damp. Someone rode a motorcycle down the street. I pictured a barn on an empty road. Later I wrote, then rewrote, a paragraph in my story. It was my dream. The narrator was a witch. She had ideas about undoing the spell that trapped her. She used a pen knife to carve a circle into the wall. She climbed through it and floated in space. Everything was a ghost of something else. The halos around the stars looked like cellophane. The light that they showed bent and scaled past her. She closed her eyes. Silence coursed around her. Everything disappeared. The end.