Move On
The house was bolted up. But this difficulty could be elaborated. For the back mudroom, specifically—it was locked. The angular cellar entrance, locked. Every gleaming facet of the New England interior, with fist-tight niches, locked. The antique Volvo in the drive, locked. The charcoal grille, sitting like the tubby inkwell that writes summer suppers, locked. The garage, its vanilla fragrance of degraded concrete and auto fluids, locked. The slim, creaking garden door through the wooden threshold of which children often yanked a rubber hose—it, too, albeit tenuously, was locked. From hedgerow to cornice, the house was plainly and utterly locked.
A short story by Albe Harlow.