smoke.
The opening is large enough for Zachary to step through but there’s not enough light. Most of the light here comes from a fringed lamp on a table across the hall. Zachary pulls the lamp as close to the newfound hole in the wall as its cord will allow, wondering how the electricity works down here and what happens if it goes out.
The lamp consents to coming close to the opening but not all the way in. Zachary rests it on the floor and leans it—the fringe delighting the cat—so it tilts toward the opening. He steps over the not-painting and inside.
His shoes crunch on things on the floor that are known only to the darkness and Zachary thinks maybe it’s better that way. The lamp is doing an admirable job of illuminating but it takes his eyes awhile to adjust. He pushes his borrowed glasses up closer to the bridge of his nose.
He realizes that the room is not getting brighter because everything within it is burned. What he’d guessed to be dust is ash, settled over the remains of what was, and Zachary recognizes precisely what was, before, some indeterminable amount of time before he arrived.
The desk in the center of the room and the dollhouse atop it have been burned into blackness and rubble.
The dollhouse has collapsed onto itself, the roof caving into the space below. Its inhabitants and surroundings have been incinerated and left to memories. The entire room is filled with charred paper and objects burned beyond recognition.
Zachary reaches up to touch a single star suspended on a somehow intact string from the ceiling and it falls to the floor, lost amongst the shadows.
“Even tiny empires fall,” Zachary says, partly to himself and partly to the cat who peers over the top of the picture frame from the hall.
In response, the cat drops out of sight.
Zachary’s shoes crunch over burned wood and broken bits of a world that was. He walks toward the dollhouse. The hinge that once opened the house like a door is intact and he unlatches it, the hinge breaking with the movement and the facade falling onto the table, leaving the interior exposed.
It is not as thoroughly destroyed as the rest of the room but it is burned and blackened. Bedrooms are indistinguishable from living rooms or the kitchen. The attic has fallen into the floor below and taken most of the roof along with it.
Zachary spots something in one of the burned rooms. He reaches in and lifts it from the ruins.
A single doll. He wipes the soot from it with his sweater and holds it up to the light. It’s a girl doll, maybe the daughter of the original doll family, painted and porcelain. Cracked, but not broken.
Zachary leaves her standing upright in the ashes of the house.
He’d wanted to see it as it was. The house and the town and the city across the sea. The multitude of additions and overlapping narratives. He’d wanted to add something to it, maybe. To make his own mark on the story. He hadn’t realized how much he’d wanted to until faced with the reality that he cannot. He can’t decide if he’s sad or angry or disappointed.
Time passes. Things change.
He looks around the room, the larger room that now houses a single girl standing in the ashes of her world. There are strings where stars or planets may once have hung from the ceiling, little wisps like spiderwebs. He can see now that there is more that has survived whatever conflagration consumed the room. A shipwreck in one corner that was once an ocean, a length of train track along the side of the table, a grandfather clock falling from the window of the main house, and a deer, black from its hooves to its tiny antlers but intact, watching him from a shelf with glassy pinprick eyes.
The walls are covered with former wallpaper curled up in strips like birch bark. Next to the shelf with the deer is a door with no doorknob and he wonders if it is the same one he passed by earlier.
The room suddenly feels more like a tomb, the scent of burned paper and smoke stronger.
In the hall the lamp falls, either of its own volition or aided by the cat. The bulb breaks with a soft cracking noise and takes the light with it, leaving Zachary alone in the dark with the charred remains of a miniature universe.
He closes his eyes and