The Rules

M. Christine Benner Dixon

Clara listens, eyes on the ceiling. Tim is still asleep. It is one of his most infuriating traits. He can sleep through anything. It’s always Clara awake in the night because of the storm, the shouting in the street, the banging shed door, the clatter of dishes settling on the drain rack. She’ll be half out of bed, as if she—just on the cusp of middle age and dressed in a set of ratty old pajamas—is any match for the horrors of the dark, and there he is, asleep. Still. 

So still. Now Clara’s mind jumps the track to its other pet terror: Tim has died in his sleep. She is leaning over to listen for his breathing when she hears the noise again. It’s a loud snap, close and sharp, like one of those little paper-wrapped snappers. Again! Clara could swear the sound is coming from under the bed. She flashes through every childhood terror of bad men reaching out strong, rough hands for her ankles. If you want to steal something, then do it, Clara thinks. She slouches down into the covers.

Snap! No, it’s not like a snapper, exactly, more like the crack of a crowbar on wood—sharp and violent. Her gruesome imaginings begin to compound—someone has murdered her husband and is crawling under the bed, cracking the old floorboards as they creep toward her side. A deranged attacker, unreasonable and unstoppable. The shadows around Tim’s body take on a bloody cast to her mind’s eye. In a burst of bravery, Clara reaches for her husband’s shoulder and shakes it. His flesh is still warm, at least. Slowly, Tim turns himself in bed, pulling out his earplugs and looking around at Clara.

“What is it?” he asks, clumsy with his words.

“Listen,” Clara whispers. Tim rustles under the covers so that he’s on his back. He yawns. All is quiet.

“I don’t hear anything,” he says, scratching his hairy chest through his t-shirt and yawning again.

“Under the bed. It was cracking the floor.” Clara points down into the mattress between them.

“Cracking the floor?” Tim echoes, doubtful. “Do you want me to look?” He would rather go back to sleep.

“I’ll do it.” Clara holds her breath as she drops her feet over the side of the bed. There would be something a little bit satisfying in being murdered now, if only for the sake of vindication. 

But no monster or madman grabs her. It is quiet. The clock by the side of the bed says 3:18. There is the distant sound of a car, and the toilet turns on briefly to refill the leaking tank, but nothing more. Stomach in knots, Clara slides out of bed and crouches down. 

She can barely see the edges of the flat totes that she stores under there—wrapping paper, off-season clothes, old books from college that she can’t bear to throw away. Now that she thinks of it, there probably isn’t room for a full-grown man. Maybe it’s a squirrel. 

Crack!

“Aha!” Clara barks. Tim startles in the bed.

“What? What? Sorry, I drifted off.” That figures. 

“I think it’s a squirrel,” Clara says aloud, not whispering anymore. “I’m going to turn on the light.” 

Tim groans. 

They’ve had squirrels in the house before. They got back from a weekend trip once to find pictures knocked off of shelves, a pillow torn open, chaos in the kitchen. At first, they thought they had been robbed, but then Clara had unwittingly flushed the little beast out of its hiding spot. A few minor mishaps later, they successfully chased it out the front door, and life returned to normal. 

Clara turns on the light switch and squints against the blare of yellowy light from the ceiling. Tim, now out of bed, starts fishing for the totes on his side. Clara goes to do the same. The box of shorts and summer tops, which she had finally gotten around to putting away two weeks ago, slides with a hiss across the hardwood floor. She hooks her fingers under the plastic ridge of the second tote, but it won’t come out. She can get it to swivel side-to-side, but it won’t come toward her.

“It’s stuck,” she says to Tim. “This one is stuck on something.”

“Try pushing it to me,” he says. Again, it swivels on the far corner but won’t move in or out. 

“It’s not working.”

“Let me see.” Tim comes over and kneels by the bed, putting his cheek on the hardwood floor, his flannel-clad rump in the air. His t-shirt slips up, exposing his little hairy potbelly. “It’s too dark. Can you get a flashlight?” Clara pushes herself up using Tim’s back as leverage and heads out of the room. She comes back with a small flashlight and hands it to him.

“Thanks,” he says, clicking it on. “Huh.” 

“Let me see,” she says and nudges her way to his vantage point, taking the flashlight from him. She directs its beam all around the plastic tote. The top of the box is clear of the bed frame by a good inch, and there doesn’t seem to be anything blocking it. “I don’t see anything.”

“Me neither,” says Tim. “Maybe the squirrel’s holding the other side.” Tim snorts at his own joke. Clara had kind of forgotten about the squirrel theory.

“What do you think it really is?” she asks, righting herself and dusting her hands.

“Frankly, at this point, I don’t care. Let’s deal with it in the morning.”

“But I need to know.” Clara is the kind of person who finishes her projects once she starts them. She will stay up all hours mudding drywall, rearranging the dining room, drawing up plans for next summer’s garden. She loves making progress. “Can we just look so I can sleep, too?” she asks.

“Fine, whatever. Let’s just do it.”

“Thank you.” 

The bed isn’t heavy. It’s just their pillow top mattress on a wood frame, wooden slats running lengthwise, rounded posts and a modest headboard—something they got in Amish country years back. They get on their respective sides of the bed and, gently lifting the frame, walk the bed toward Tim. Clara hobbles around the side of the plastic box as she passes, letting her side of the bed down a bit harder than she intended once she’s clear. She cringes. They just refinished the floors, and she still feels protective of them. She put those felt sticky pads on everything—the chairs, the table, even the bookcases.

Tim comes around the bed to watch as Clara lifts the box. The front end of the tote lifts a few inches, but something is still hindering that one corner. She gives it a sharp tug, and the box pops loose. A little piece of rigid plastic skitters across the floor. Where the tote had been stuck, a nail juts out of the floor at an angle. Clara inspects the box, perplexed. 

“What the heck?” says Tim, grabbing his own arm and squeezing it. “How did that happen?” 

Clara has no answer for this. 

“Look,” Clara says. “Tim, look.” Across the space where the head of the bed had been, a half-dozen or so more nails are protruding from the hardwood. Clara’s mind reels for an explanation. “It’s probably the cold snap. The house is contracting or something, I guess.” Tim looks at her for a beat, his eyebrows low. It makes him look a bit like a caveman.

“If you say so.” Clara is the handier of the two of them. Whatever the task—installing a new faucet, insulating between the porch roof and the house, patching the walls after the electricians have done their work—Clara gets on YouTube and figures out how to do it. This makes her feel more secure than having money in their retirement accounts, honestly. She loves tending to her house, shoring it up, filling in the cracks. Tim usually defers to her on matters such as these. “Let’s deal with it tomorrow, though.” Tim scrubs his face with both hands, scratching at his beard under his chin. “You wanna move the bed back?” he asks.

Clara hesitates. On the one hand, she hates to leave the room in a state of disorder, the bed crowding up next to Tim’s dresser like that. Home should feel homey. On the other hand, she would like to hammer those nails back in before they reset the room. No sense in just covering the problem up.

“It’s okay, we can leave it,” Tim says, noting her consternation. “Can we just move it back a little so I can get my drawers open?”

“Yeah, okay,” Clara says. They shift the bed back a foot or so, and Tim crawls in, yawning. She walks to the light switch. 

“Wait,” says Tim. “I need to find the other earplug.” 

Clara waits until he holds it up, then flips off the light and makes her way back to bed. 

She climbs in at the foot to avoid stepping on the nails with her bare feet. But rather than climb back up to her spot, she just sits there, left foot tucked under her, right foot dangling over the edge of the bed. Tim sighs contentedly as he settles himself under the covers and reaches a sleepy hand out to squeeze her knee as a goodnight gesture. She pats her husband’s hand.

“Goodnight.” 

“What’s that?” Tim asks, craning his neck up from the pillow.

“Sleep well,” Clara says, loud enough to get through the earplugs.

“Mm-hmm,” he responds and nestles down into the covers. 

Clara slides back off the bed and makes her way downstairs. She curls herself under a green and white afghan on the couch and settles in with a book she’s been meaning to read for weeks. The orange-tinged light of a little shaded lamp shines gently over her shoulder and onto the page. When she begins to lose track of the words, she lets the book settle on her chest and snuggles into the crook of the couch. 

A few hours later, when Tim passes through on his way to make coffee, Clara wakes and stretches her arms above her head to rouse herself. She is startled when she suddenly drops, the front seat rail of the couch hitting the rug with a heavy thud. The whole right side of the sofa—arm and everything—slumps against the end table. Clara is wedged between the loose arm and the sliding board slope of the seats.

“Tim!” she cries. He is already rushing back from the kitchen, bag of coffee in hand. 

“What on earth?” He stands frozen in place. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Clara says. “Help me up.” She tosses the book aside, wincing a little at the mussed pages. He sets down the coffee and helps her get to her feet. 

“Are you okay?” Tim asks, his forehead knit. 

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” Clara is trying to believe it. “I just—everything’s just—coming apart.” Clara is surprised to find herself hyperventilating, her panicky need for breath pushing everything else aside.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Tim says, guiding her over to the armchair. She sits, and he pets her head, his fingers soft in her hair. Slowly, Clara brings her breathing back into a regular rhythm. “Everything’s not coming apart,” Tim says. “Just a few things. Just the couch and, you know, the house. No biggie.” Clara chuckles at this, and Tim smiles, pleased to have made her laugh. 

“I know,” she says. “I know. I’m just a little on edge, I think. Just tired.” 

“That couch had it coming,” Tim assures her. It is an inherited piece from his mother when she moved into the retirement home—Tim will sometimes reminisce about spending sick days on this couch back in high school. It’s too big for their small living room, really, a blue-green monster, but they needed a couch, so they took it. 

“I could try to fix it,” Clara says flimsily. 

“Nah.” Tim shakes his head. “Don’t bother. Or maybe just patch it up so we can sit on it until we can get to IKEA. But don’t do too good a job.” 

“No problem,” Clara says, smirking. 

“Coffee?” Tim asks, pushing himself to his feet and grabbing the bag of coffee beans off the side table. 

“Yes, please. And strong.” 

“Righto.” 

Clara ends up taking the day off from work. She is an administrator at a small non-profit that redistributes excess goods to charitable organizations. But today is Friday—a day she’s usually alone in the office anyway. The collection crew is all set up for the weekend already. She can check her email from home.

Clara goes down to her workbench in the basement and paws through a bin of assorted hardware. No sense wasting nice new screws on this old couch. Clara dumps a mismatched handful of screws—the longest ones she can find—into a pouch on her toolbelt, slips the hammer into its loop, drops a nail set into another pouch, and grabs the electric drill. 

Back upstairs, she props the body of the couch on stacked cans of tuna, which she thinks is rather clever, then screws in the fasteners, their little half-stripped heads bright against the dark fabric. Tacky, for sure. But oh, well. It’s just temporary.

The nails in the bedroom drive back in easily. Several of them splintered the floorboards on their way out. That’s disappointing. She can putty those spots later, should they ever rearrange the bedroom. Hopefully, this is the end of it. 

Clara runs her fingers through the dust bunnies and tosses the fluff and hair into the trash can. Then she slips a sock from the laundry under the foot of the bed frame so she can slide the bed back by herself and have it all back to normal by the time Tim gets home. 

That done, Clara goes back downstairs and opens her laptop. But instead of checking her email, she gets sucked into browsing IKEA couches. Maybe they should get one that’s also a pull-out bed. Then, when her sister and her kids visit, no one has to sleep on the floor. Flipping back and forth between open tabs—changing the color, comparing dimensions—Clara begins to realize how tired she actually is. 

Clara takes off her tool belt, which she had absent-mindedly kept on all this time, and drops it to the rug beside the couch. Then she arranges herself horizontally for a “rest” (as her mother would call it) and pulls the afghan over her, letting her eyes drift closed. She told Tim she wouldn’t fix the couch too well, but it’s as solid as ever, she notes with a flare of pride. 

Clara always dreams during naps. She dreams at night, too, but nap dreams are the most vivid. They seem to start immediately and last right up until the moment of her waking. This is one where she discovers a room in her house. She is down in the basement, and there is a door there that she has never opened. She goes in.

It is a long room, like a performance hall, with shallow steps that run down between arched tiers of benches. She immediately begins to make plans for this new room. They could host music nights here. Or put on a play. There are high windows at the far end, above the stage area at the front, dropping dusty shafts of light into the room. Clara surveys the neglected room, littered with debris. She is eager to repossess this forgotten space, improve it, start something and make progress. 

But now she can’t find the door to get out of the room. She’s searches frantically. The light is fading. She gropes her way to the opposite wall, running her hands through cobwebs and flaking paint. Clara's head makes contact with something in the gloom—a long, wooden ladder. 

If she can get up to the windows, she can signal someone for help. The ladder catches on unseen impediments, wobbling nerve-rackingly, as she drags it. Clara wrestles it into place and climbs toward the windows. But under her weight, the ladder’s feet fly out across the floor. She plummets—

Clara awakes with a gasp. In that strange slow motion of crisis, Clara is aware all at once that the couch has collapsed again, and she is falling with it, into it. There is a horrible, grating, crunching sound that accompanies her fall. She flails to catch herself, and her arm scrapes on something jagged. There is a pain in her thigh, too. Clara cries out, as much out of indignance as out of pain. It was supposed to be fixed. Why won’t it just hold together? 

Clara lays in the heap of the collapsed couch for a beat, eyes closed, before she begins to crawl out. As she struggles to her knees, it becomes apparent that the ruination of the couch, this time, is greater than just a detached arm. Clara finds that the frame has been wrenched apart all along the body of the couch, and even the fabric has detached and has slipped off the cushions and the back, exposing the old crumbling foam and corroded springs in the guts of the couch. She must have scraped her arm on one of these springs. The screws that she put in this morning carry shards of splintered wood in their threads, as if they were forced out of the frame.

Clara checks her arm. She’s bleeding. Her thigh is still hot with pain, but the thick green denim pant leg was not punctured. It really hurts, though. These little attentions to her body help her avoid the obvious: this is not right. This should not be.

The couch has fallen to pieces. It is rubble. There is nothing left holding it together. The splints that run across the frame are broken at every nail point. Brackets and webbing are tumbled together in the well of what was the seat. 

Crack! From underneath the heap of the couch, the snapping sound. Again: crack! She can hear the splintering of the wood. The floor. Crack! Crack! Clara backs away until her legs touch the recliner. Crack!

“Stop!” Clara shouts at the floor. “What are you doing? Stop it!” In the quiet, something in the couch pile shifts and settles, then, crack! This last nail pushes up under the rug, making a neat little mound under its scrolling floral pattern. Clara’s fear is layered now, with anger. There are rules—physical laws, the laws of reality—that must be followed. This is not right. She wants to close her eyes, refuse to bear witness to such a violation. What else can she do? 

Crack! Crack! Crack! 

“No,” Clara says through her teeth. “Stop it.” Clara takes two desperate steps across the rug to snatch her phone off of the side table. 

Crack! This time, she feels the violent thrust of the nail under her foot. She runs for the door.

Outside, Clara texts Tim, not trusting her voice to call. What on earth can she tell him, though?

She settles on: Can you come home?

He is quick with his reply: you ok?

Yeah I think so . . . just freaked out

abt the floor?

Yeah

Close enough—she will show him the couch when he gets home.

But somehow, perched on the porch steps, strands of her hair lifting in the breeze, Clara begins to feel silly for getting this worked up. Whatever happened in there, it has to have an explanation. It has to. She’s just psyching herself out. Outside in the sun, in this cool, bright, late-autumn day, she is reminded that those laws she was so angrily defending in there are, in fact, immutable. The laws of motion and mass and cohesion order the world—always have and always will. The patterned shadow of half-bare maple branches sways gently over the sidewalk. A few more leaves detach in the breeze and trickle down in a red-leaf shower. A cardinal and its mate swoop by, one after the other. It is all normal, all fine.

Clara lets her face drop over her hands, loosely caged around her phone. Whatever is going on in there, Clara thinks, I can figure this out. This is manageable. She is about to text Tim to say never mind when his reply comes:

ok coming home see you soon 

She looks at her phone, wondering how to tell him not to bother. No, let him come home. In spite of all her big talk, she wants him there with her. She scrolls on her phone while she waits—letting her mind drift away on trivialities. He pulls into the driveway fifteen minutes later and goes through his routine of turning down the radio, setting the parking brake, flipping up the visor. All as it should be. All right. Tim slams the door of the Civic and strides over to where she sits.

“You okay?” he asks, helping her to her feet. “Oh, that’s too bad,” he says, gesturing to the spot where she had been sitting. “You were so proud of those steps.” He kisses her cheek. She looks down. A long, deep crack runs down the middle of the porch steps. Clara stares hard at the crack, dread churning in her veins. 

These steps were one of the first projects she took on. When they bought the house, the concrete was cracked, crumbling, unsightly. What with replacing the knob-and-tube and putting on the solar panels, they couldn’t afford to have someone do the cement work. So Clara decided to do it herself. She had called her dad, watched every YouTube video she could find on the subject, consulted with the guy at the hardware store. And then she had done it. And now this, too, was coming undone.

 Tim furrows his brow, evidently worried by the expression on Clara’s face. Clara tries to shake herself back, to regain her confidence. 

“Come look at this,” Clara says, skipping the cracked step and reaching for the front door. Tim follows quietly.

The scene inside is exactly as Clara left it—a jumble of blue-green fabric, wire springs, plastic bits, staples, wood. He gives the whole mess one of his lowered-eyebrow caveman looks and scratches his beard. 

“I thought you were going to fix it.” 

“I did,” she says. She points to the screws now dangling through ripped fabric on what used to be the arm. “It was fixed. It was solid. Then I fixed the floor upstairs. I came down to check my email. I looked at couches online. Then I took a nap.” She reports her actions meticulously, earnestly, hoping he might hear something she missed, some clue. “It just fell apart. And then the nails started again.” Clara wrestles the edge of the rug free and peels it back to show Tim the nails. “That one came up right under my foot.”

“Are you sure you weren’t—sleepwalking or something? Like, maybe you’re doing things in your sleep and dreaming up the rest.” Sleepwalking. The idea swells her heart with relief. She has had dreams so vivid sometimes that she mistook them for memories before. This time, she has dreamt herself from new rooms into old ones, from repair to destruction. Yes. It would make a lot more sense than . . . all the other gaping possibilities constrict and recede. She turns from them by force of will.

“That’s really weird, though, right? And dangerous. If I’m doing this while I’m sleeping . . . I need to see someone.” And what will they tell her? What will the diagnosis be? Comfort is proving elusive today.

“As long as you’re only destroying old, ugly furniture, I say carry on,” Tim teases, his eyes crinkled at her. Clara half-laughs through her anxiety. 

“I know, right? I have no regrets, but . . .” She shakes her head. “I need to call the doctor. Who do I even go to for this? A sleep specialist, I guess. Do you think I’ll have to do one of those things where they watch you sleep?

“I always wanted to do one of those.” Clara gives her husband a sidelong glance. This is just like Tim—always hungry for data on himself. The main screen of his phone is a grid of widgets that report to him about their investments, his fitness, the productivity of the solar panels, what have you. Clara has no doubt that Tim would sleep soundly through such a thing and wake refreshed.

They set themselves to the work of cleaning up. They shove the dismantled pieces of the couch into thick construction bags. Clara hammers the floorboard nails back in. Tim chides Clara for her scraped arm and forces her to put antibiotic cream on it. Clara sends a message to her doctor, though she expects she won’t hear back before Monday. They bring the camp chairs up from the basement and watch TV in them, joking that these might be an improvement on the couch. 

Almost single-handedly, Tim seems to strong-arm this strange and disturbing day back within the scope of ordinary life—which is erratic at times, but which can be managed. Like he did with her father’s dementia. It was hard. At first, they thought his slips were just mistakes. Doesn’t everyone have trouble remembering names sometimes? Her dad tried to cover for himself, laughing off the fact that he had just called ten minutes ago as if it were a joke. Tim was her gut check, then: “That was weird, right? Something’s wrong.” It had made Clara feel sane and safe to have Tim there, affirming her own observations back to her. 

And later on, when things got worse, Tim was still there, still solid, a fixed anchor in the rock that held her weight as she scrabbled on the edge of a void. They never knew if her dad was calling to quiz them about the gas mileage of their new car, or if was he going to be mad at her wrecking his Ford twenty-five years ago. Sometimes he whimpered to her, frightened that he was being followed by “the government.” They developed a sign. If it was one of the bad days, Clara would put her free hand on her head until Tim saw it and came over and stood with her, hands on her shoulders, while she listened to her dad and grieved.

She had probably never loved him more than then—when they, together, held onto what was real. And now. She loves him now, too, in that same way.

Now, though, she is worried. Because this is different. Will he be able to hold on as he did before? Is this within his power? Is it within hers?

“Your leg,” Tim says at bedtime, pointing. Clara looks. A deep red blotch, just beginning to purple, on her thigh. 

“Oh, yeah,” Clara says. “I hit it when the couch fell.”

“Ouch.” He grimaces.

“Yeah.” Clara steps into her pajama pants and climbs into bed beside her husband. She sits with her back against the headboard, arms crossed. Sleep has never come easily for her, but now, the thought of just closing her eyes and falling asleep (like Tim does every night) seems downright impossible. 

“You keeping watch up there?” Tim asks, lifting his head to look around the room facetiously.

“I guess so,” Clara answers, not engaging with the joke. “I’m just—what if I—what if I sleepwalk again? What if I destroy something? What if I hurt you?”

“Hm,” Tim says, ruffling his hair. “Why don’t you use the sleeping bag?” He means his lightweight mummy bag. He’s had it for years. He likes to bring it with him when he travels—just in case. In case of what, Clara has never been quite sure. “I can cinch up the face hole. You won’t be able to do any construction projects that way.”

“Or deconstruction.”

“That, either.”

“Yeah—okay. Let’s try it.” 

Tim hops out of bed and fetches the sleeping bag from his closet. Clara climbs in. He zips her up, tying the hood tenderly around her face. They both laugh at this part. She is like a larva in its cocoon. “Comfy?” Tim asks.

“This is super weird, but I guess it’s okay.” Clara finds that she can still bring her hands up and fold them under her chin, which has been her self-soothing sleeping posture since she was a girl. 

“Sleep well, my little burrito,” Tim says. He goes to the door to hit the light switch. “You look very cute.” 

“Oh, good,” Clara answers into the dark. “That’s exactly what I was most worried about. Now I can rest easy.”

“You can,” Tim says, sincerely. “I hope you do.”

“Yeah, we’ll see.”

Tim is asleep, as usual, within minutes, his hand resting on her stomach. Clara stares at the ceiling, trying not to squirm. It’s foolish, she thinks, for her to be this upset. Her life is fine. Her life is good. She and Tim are happy together; a lot of people don’t have that. She has a meaningful job, and she does it well. Yes, she’s been through some grief with her dad’s passing and that tension they had with their neighbor (before that asshole finally moved). But that’s just normal life stuff. It didn’t break her. 

But with this, she’s terrified. She’s terrified that whatever is going on is something she’s doing, and she’s terrified that it’s not. A tear slips down her face and soaks into the sleeping bag taut around her cheeks. There is something seriously wrong with her. Or—she lets the thought assert itself—there is something seriously wrong with the world, and all the rules are broken or breakable. Clara curls her wrists together over her chest and focuses on breathing slowly. Tim turns in his sleep, drawing his hand back from her body as he does so.

She is not ready for “normal” to change. She has built her life within the structures of the expected; she doesn’t know how to live if she can’t count on the floor staying nailed down, the couch not falling apart as you sleep on it. If these rules are breakable, then so is she. Another hot tear makes its way to the sleep bag’s edge.

Well, one thing is for sure: this self-pity doesn’t do anyone any good. Whatever this is—these new rules, this sleepwalking problem, whatever—it is here now. Flailing for the world-as-it-was, tempting as it is, is pointless. And perhaps the great change she so fears is that she will have to sleep in a cinched bag every night. So what? At least she won’t go tearing the house apart in her sleep. At least she won’t hurt Tim. And what of the cracked cement step? Clara tries to sweep this thought away from her, but it is blown back into her face in bothersome wisps.

The sound of trickling plaster behind the wall wakes her up before she even knows she’s asleep. Clara immediately puts image to sound. She’s worked on these old walls over the years and knows what it looks like back there. There is empty space between the rough wood cladding of the exterior and the pine lath of the interior wall. Fat lines of long-ago hardened plaster, filled with sand and horsehair, squish out from between the slatted lath. Every once in a while, an ancient globule of plaster that has hung precariously from the back of the wall for a long century comes free and tumbles down into the vacancy, bouncing from side to side as it falls. It’s nothing unusual. It’s just that Clara wishes it hadn’t fallen on this night. She shifts awkwardly in her sleeping bag and tries to go back to sleep, but her eyes fly open at the sound of more falling plaster. Then another piece goes. 

“Tim!” Clara waits for him to respond. Several more chunks of plaster seem to loosen and drop. Clara knees her husband in the hip. He stirs. 

“What’s the matter?” he mumbles.

“The walls.” 

“Hm?” Tim props himself up on his elbow and looks around, blinking his eyes to clear them of their groggy haze. But it is quiet now. 

“The walls,” Clara says again. “They were . . . the plaster was falling. It’s doing it again. It’s not me.” Is this a relief? She does not feel relieved, somehow.

“Okay.” Tim’s tone is noncommittal, neither fully sympathetic nor fully believing. It is the tone he takes when she tries to explain that what her sister said was not innocuous, that it was a barb meant for her. It annoys her.

“I heard it!” Clara insists, flat on her back and staring at the grey shadows of the ceiling. 

“Okay,” Tim responds, mirroring her annoyance. “But I don’t hear anything.”

“I know. It stopped. It always . . .” Clara stops what she is saying. It is a horrible thought. Is it only doing it to her? Tim only ever sees the aftermath. That’s the easy part—once it’s all over. “Just listen,” she tells him. Clara starts at a sound, but it’s just Tim scratching his chest through his shirt.

“Sorry,” he says. They stay quiet. Nothing. Clara can hear Tim’s breath deepening and slowing into sleep. And just like that, it starts again—the rattling knock of three or four pieces of plaster at once shimmying down through the cavity of the walls.

“No, no,” she whines. Tim rouses next to her, and the room goes silent.

“Hm?” he says. “Sorry.” 

“I can hear it. I swear.”

“Hm.” Barely more than a grunt. Clara thinks he might have dropped back to sleep, except for the fact that the walls are still silent, waiting. Then Tim rolls over and leans out of bed, reaching for something on his dresser. He slumps back onto the bed and rolls over to face her. “Ear plugs? They’re fresh.” He holds his hand out.

Clara sighs at the dark shape of his hand. Could it be as easy as that—just block it out? So they lose some plaster down the walls. So the nails come up again. Let it happen. Let it come, whatever it is. Deal with the aftermath.

“Yeah, okay,” she says. Tim frees her so that she can put the ear plugs in herself, then he zips her back up and ties the hood.

“Get some sleep,” Tim says and rolls back to his side of the bed. To her surprise, the silence soothes her more than she expected. She begins to dream of her sister. Their parents, too. Her father, alive. And it is all normal and easy and formless. 

Then the ceiling falls. Clara wakes gasping, her mouth, eyes, and nose filled with the grit and powder of the broken plaster. She coughs and spits and tries not to blink. A large chunk has landed on her legs, and one shin is hurting badly. Tim is shouting, out of bed in a wild, disoriented panic. Clara struggles inside the bag, clawing at the opening. She slips her face inside the hood to wipe it clear. Her terror and the closeness of the bag leave her starved for air, and she fights to find the opening again. 

“Tim! Help me!” 

“Oh, my god! I’m coming.” Tim crawls over the bed, his hands and knees crunching on rough pieces of plaster, which tinkle and slide with each movement. “I can’t see it! Hold still!” He fumbles for the zipper.

“Untie me!” Clara is desperate for oxygen, but every dusty breath makes her cough. Tim, nearly hysterical, knots the cord in the dark.

“I need light,” he pants. The floor between the bed and the doorway is full of broken plaster. Clara can hear him stumble and groan as he goes. Then the light is on full blast, and Clara closes her eyes, feeling the grit on her eyelids as she does so. She tries to keep her eyes still inside their lids.

“Hurry!” 

Tim rushes back to her, faster now that he can see. Clara peeks her eyes open again. Through the cloudy air of the room and the blur of her tears, the extent of the disaster is apparent. Every piece of plaster in the room has detached itself and fallen. Ceiling, walls—everything. There is rubble on the dresser tops, the armchair, the fan blades, the top of the closet door, which stands ajar. Bare wood lath, like bars on a cage, close them in, and the vacant spaces behind the lath breathe cold air into the room. 

Clara gasps and coughs as Tim fights with the string. She searches with her fingers for the zipper and finds it just as Tim frees the cinch around her face. She struggles out of the sleeping bag, her pajamas incongruously clean in this room heaped over with debris and swirling with dust. Clara notices a thick drip of blood running from Tim’s forehead to his cheek as he helps her out of bed. They pick their way desperately toward the bedroom door. 

The hallway is perfectly still and clean. Nothing out of place. They stand with their backs to the bedroom door. Clara coughs. Tim leans over and ruffles through his hair. There is a clicking of sand and plaster bits hitting the hardwood floor.

“Don’t do that,” Clara says, touching his wrist. “You’re making a mess.” 

Tim stops, looks at Clara. “Wouldn’t want to do that,” he says to himself. Then they both go silent.

“This one was not my fault,” Clara says. Tim is surprised into laughter. His laughter, familiar and full, feels reckless to Clara. Doesn’t he realize what this means? Clara stares at him.

“Tim,” she says, “Tim, this isn’t funny. This can’t happen. This is . . . something is going on.” His face catches on her words and turns serious. His beard bristles out as he frowns.

“Come on, hon. I mean, obviously, something is going on. But not something something. It’s got to be . . . I don’t know, it’s magnetic or something.”

“Magnetic?” Clara knows what he is trying to do. Wasn’t she doing it, too? But it’s pointless. She can see that. It’s pointless and it’s dangerous.

“Or something. Or a couple of different things. It’s an old house. Things go wrong.”

“Our room is—destroyed! There is nothing that does that.”

“Well, apparently, there is.” 

Each of them is stubborn in their need for a place to stand; neither is willing to leap across the growing chasm. Their faces are dull with plaster dust. Tim’s beard and eyebrows look almost white, and the blood on his face is caked with dirt. Dust covers Clara’s face like a grey mask, her neck clean by contrast. 

“This is stupid,” Tim says at last. “We don’t need to figure this out right now. Let’s get cleaned up and then we can talk.” What sense is any of this going to make after a shower? Clara wonders. But she does not stop him. She has no better plan.

Tim starts the shower as Clara slips on a pair of flip-flops and ventures back into the bedroom to get some clothes out of their drawers. It is freezing, and the dark hollow behind the lath creeps her out. She pulls clothes out of the drawers quickly, almost arbitrarily, unwilling to linger. But before she leaves, Clara pauses in the doorway, looking back into the room. This is bad. It is destruction and chaos. This is dissolution. The air smells dirty. It smells like the dead past. She turns off the light and closes the door.

By the time they both have showered, it is almost dawn, and the windows are brightening. Tim makes the coffee as Clara sits at the table, watching him over the counter that separates dining room from kitchen. 

“We need someone to make sure the house is sound,” he is saying. “I mean, we’re probably stupid to even be in here right now. If it turns out the house is safe, we can get someone in to take care of it.” Clara shakes her head. During her shower, she got one thing straight for herself: when the next thing comes, she wants to know it, face it, to look at it straight on.

“I can do it,” Clara says. “I’ll fix the walls.”

“But you don’t have to is what I’m saying.”

“I know.” He doesn’t understand. She needs him to understand. 

“If you want to take this on, fine. But right now, we have to get out of this house until we know it’s safe.” Tim pulls out the travel mugs from the cupboard and puts cream in them in anticipation of the coffee. “I’ll call Walter to see if he can come by today. Contractors work on the weekend, right?”

“I guess,” Clara says. Walter won’t be able to help, but she doesn’t want to fight with Tim about it. There is still a part of her that wants him to be right. His belief that this is manageable, that it is just a matter of contractors and weight-bearing walls, tempts her unbearably. 

Walter shows up around ten, and he and Tim go through the house together. Clara stays out in the car, staring at the house. She loves this house from the first time they saw it, touring with the realtor. It was one of the smallest houses on the block, but she didn’t care about that. The house looked so friendly to her—like one of those big, noble dogs. Half brick-clad, half siding, cute little dormers, a big front porch. Good sun exposure on the gardens, too. She has tended to her little house with true pleasure and affection. Every improvement has felt as if she were caring for a loved one—cutting down that awful yew, tearing up the carpets, putting in the French drain. And it’s been perfect. It’s been everything they wanted. 

But now, somehow, it’s coming apart. This house that she loves is falling to pieces around her. She had not known to fear such a thing. How could she have defended against it? She looks away, tears in her eyes.

Tim and Walter come back out, laughing together cordially. Tim has a duffle bag over his shoulder, and he locks the front door behind him. Walter comes over to fill Clara in.

“Everything looks okay,” Walter says, resting his chin on the open car door, “structurally speaking. Floors, ceilings, walls—nothing is sagging, nothing out of alignment. The bricks would show it, too, if there were a real big shift. You’d see cracks, but it looks solid.”

“Walt thought maybe it was some kind of rot in the plaster—a bug or something,” Tim adds, tossing the duffle in the back seat.

“Maybe,” Walter corrects. “The damage could have happened a while ago. It was probably just waiting to fall. You might end up with the same problem in other rooms. But honestly, I’m just speculating. I’ve never seen anything like this. Regardless, I don’t think it’s dangerous to the house as a whole. At least, there are no signs of that yet.”

“Well, that’s good,” Tim says encouragingly, looking at Clara for affirmation. She squeezes out a smile. “Hey, thanks, Walt. I really appreciate your coming out on such quick notice.” He shakes Walter’s hand.

“No problem, man. I’m just glad you guys weren’t hurt,” Walter says. Clara looks at the band-aid on Tim’s head. She touches the lump on her shin from where the plaster chunk hit her. It is still raised and tender.

“Us, too, buddy,” Tim laughs. “Us, too.” Walter salutes his farewell and walks off to where his truck is parked along the street. Tim turns to Clara. “At least we don’t have to worry about the whole house collapsing.” Clara looks up at him. He shuts the back door vigorously. 

“I hope not,” she says. Tim sighs.

“Anyway, I say we get out of here. Just take a step back from all this. I called that little bed and breakfast out in Geneva—remember that place? If you really want to, we can come back tomorrow, but we don’t need to, you know.”

Clara looks up at the house sadly. What happens if she leaves? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know the rules. Maybe, if she leaves, she can spare her beloved house the damage she is causing. But maybe, if she goes, she’ll learn something about how this—whatever it is—works. And she doesn’t feel like fighting.

Despite her best efforts to stay awake, Clara falls asleep on the drive out to Geneva. As long as Tim is awake, though, she reminds herself, it should be okay. As long as the rules don’t change. And what guarantee is there of that? None. None, she thinks as she drops in and out of sleep, her head jerking back up when it falls forward.

In spite of herself, Clara does feel better away from the house. They have lunch at a cafe in Geneva then take a walk along the river trail. The exercise helps. Just keep moving, keep walking. The path unspools under their feet as they go, hand in hand. They don’t say much. They just walk, listening to the rustle and crunch of dry brown leaves from the sycamores and the oaks above.

But as night falls, Clara feels her worries snarling into a rat’s nest of doubt and fear. She keeps losing track of the plot of the TV show they’re watching. It’s late when Tim switches it off. Clara quails at the thought of their going to sleep now. Or ever. 

“Do you think . . .” she ventures. “Do you think we could—trade off?” Tim draws down his eyebrows.

“Trade off what?”

“Sleeping.” Tim sighs. He’s understandably tired.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. It . . . it always happens when I fall asleep. But not if you’re awake, not if you’re there to see it.” Tim shakes his head.

“That’s just coincidence.”

“It’s every time. If we trade off, maybe it will be okay. Maybe nothing will happen.”

“I mean, I doubt . . .” 

Clara has no patience for this right now. “You don’t have to believe me, Tim. Can we just do it, please? Can we just try it?” Tim sits on the bed and scratches his beard.

“If it would make you feel better . . .”

“It would,” Clara snaps.

“Okay, so let’s try it. But—I have to be honest—I don’t think I can stay awake right now.” She softens her tone, relieved at his concession.

“That’s fine. I’ll go first.” Tim presses his fingers to his temple and nods. 

“Well, okay then. I want you to feel comfortable.” It is open pandering, but Clara doesn’t care. 

“Thank you,” she says.

She wakes Tim three hours later, when her eyes have grown starchy with exhaustion and her head has begun swimming. He does not disguise his exasperation well, but he forces himself out of bed nonetheless and goes over to the gold-upholstered fainting couch, phone in hand. Clara is asleep in seconds.

It feels like only seconds after that when her eyes fly open again. Something woke her up. A noise. It’s happening again. It has followed her here. She looks for Tim in the dark. He is sitting on the couch, but his head is flung back, mouth wide open. In sleep? In death?

“Tim!” Clara cries. He starts up. She is grateful and furious. “You are supposed to be awake!”

“Sorry, sorry!” He says, scrambling for his phone, which has dropped to the floor. Was that what she heard? This was a bad idea. How does she know that her sleep hasn’t been pulling down the stairs at home, peeling the paint, melting the windows from their sashes? And Tim is too far away to stop it. She doesn’t know how this works. She shouldn’t have left. 

“You have to stay awake!” 

“I tried!” Tim objects. “I’m just—I’m so tired, Clara.”

“You don’t think I’m tired? I thought that maybe I could trust you to stay awake when I asked you, pled with you to do it.”

“You know what? This is ridiculous. You want to stay up, do it. But I am going back to sleep.”

“Please do! Please do! One of us should.” Clara grinds her words at him. 

“For god’s sake, Clara, don’t be a martyr. Go to sleep! It will be fine. Nothing is going to happen.”

“You don’t know that!”

“I do know that! The world doesn’t just fall apart.” Tim roughs the pillow into shape and throws himself down on it. Like a child, she thinks. She wants to be a child, too, to cry about the injustice of this, whatever this is. She wants to protest, but there is no one to receive her complaint. Weariness swelling her joints, Clara takes Tim’s spot on the couch, still warm from his body.

In the morning, they pack their things in silence, both of them softer than they were the night before but still uneasy with one another. Clara can hardly stay standing as she waits for Tim to do his last sweep of the room, she is so wrung out with fatigue. He avoids her eyes as he finally steps toward the door. But his foot kicks something which tinks against the wall and rolls. He glances down but then shrugs, reaching for the door.

The glass knob comes away in his hand, its collar and spindle clattering to the ground. He looks at the pieces in stolid silence, then up at Clara’s sorrowful face, then down at the doorknob in his hand. 

“It’s not—” he says, then nothing more. He is still. 

Clara feels apology swelling in her. She wants to tell him she’s sorry—for what is happening, for the disintegration of the world around them, for not knowing the rules. She wants to say that she needs him to come over to her side before the gulf between them becomes impassable. But she does not have the words. Her lips feel stuck together, too heavy to part. So she just watches as he fiddles the spindle back into the door to turn the latch. Then she follows him to the car, her eyes dry and slow in their sockets.

He wakes her when they get home. They sit in the driveway, Clara looking at the house, Tim looking at Clara. The house looks the same. Its same big-dog friendly face looks over the same waning autumn gardens. It looks the same, but it isn’t the same. It is a vulnerable thing, corruptible, wearing the guise of a lost and gone security. How long will Tim hold out, Clara wonders. Until their house is just a skeleton draped in wires? Until it crashes into the basement? Will he ever understand?

Though, Clara knows, she could not explain it if he asked her to. She doesn’t have any idea what they should do. If she flees, will the dismantling chase her, follow her to her sister’s house and tear it apart around all their heads? Should she take herself to a blank, unpeopled prairie and wait there until the earth cracks open to swallow her? Or could they resist it, outwit it? Guess at the safest path and hold to it for the sakes of their lives? Perhaps—if only she can make him see. 

But if she can convince him, what then? Tim will tire of keeping guard against an uncertain destruction, she fears, and so will she. Their vigilance will become mundane. Everything does. This present menace will fade to a backdrop. Their staid routine will tempt them to take little risks. He will drift to sleep, despite his promises. She will learn, too late, what rules cannot be bent. And the consequences will be harmless and disastrous in turn. Today, a threshold loosens, tomorrow the foundation turns to dust.

Clara turns to meet her husband’s eyes. His face is slack and loving, patient. Please don’t leave me, Clara thinks to him. Please have it in you to do this. She leans over and kisses him on his bristly cheek, and he smiles. Then Clara opens her door and gets out. The upstairs windows reflect bright clouds back to her, clean and unremarkable. We will see this through together, Clara thinks. The house holds still before her, frank and familiar.

“Clara?” It is Tim. He has gotten out of the car, but he is not facing her way. Instead, he looks across the street at the neighbor’s house. Clara shifts herself to follow his gaze. 

The grass is heaped with green-grey slates. On the bare roof, ripped and tattered tar paper shivers in the mid-morning breeze. The gutters are sagging with the weight of shards and shingles. Two houses down, a section of brick cladding has fallen away. Two men are loading the toppled bricks into a wheelbarrow with heavy movements. All along the street, there is damage, collapse, disintegration, though the sun shines just as plainly on the scene as it ever has. 

Tim turns to his wife. His shoulders are square with her, his one hand extended across the roof of the car in her direction.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.” Clara looks at him. She sees the child he was in his face, beneath the beard and heavy eyebrows, so open, so unprepared for the world.

“Okay,” she tells the boy, the man, her husband. “Come on, then.”