xp_logs | [Marie] I choose the rooms that I live in with care,

Dreaming and waking; Friday morning.

"Marie?"

It was an old house and the floors were creaky under her feet. The windows had been papered but light filtered through where the sepia-tinted, crackling newsprint had fallen away. Everything downstairs was silent. Furniture lurked under white shrouds and even the massive chandelier above her head was swathed in veils of gauze, put to sleep. She ran up the stairs, her hand brushing lightly over the dusty bannister.

"Marie?" she called. Where was the girl? She came to the top of the stairs and was faced with a hallway that stretched out before her from the shadows in which she stood into darker places at the end. "Are you up here?"

The carpet under her feet had once been green with a border of roses, but the flowers had faded and the passage of generations of feet had worn the fabric down to the warp and weft in the center. She set her hand on the glass doorknob of the first door and tried to turn it. Locked. She could hear voices now and then and at first she wondered if she were imagining things. She tried another door and found it locked as well. She checked her pockets but couldn't find a key and she wondered how she'd gotten in the house at all. -Someone must have let me in.- What really mattered though was that she find Marie.

Some of the doors frightened her and she was afraid to even try them for fear they'd open and she couldn't say why, except perhaps that the voices she couldn't quite make out warned her away. Sometimes, she could hear a boy's voice above the rest, pleading now and then and she wanted to find him. She went to listen at a door when she thought she heard him, placing her palms against the wood and leaning in to hear. The door was fiercely hot, as though fire raged beyond, and she jerked her hands away with a sharp cry. A boy somewhere behind the door laughed at her and she backed away, watching the blisters form on her palms and fingers.

"Marie, where are you?" she called. It wasn't an adventure anymore. Pain seared through her hands. She was getting angry with Marie for playing this game with her and the boy was still laughing. "Shut up," she cried, furious at having been taken in. "Burn for all I care." He started to cry and she turned her back on him.

The hall led on and she only checked doors at random, still calling Marie's name. Once, standing between two doors, she heard an animal whine and scrape at the door on her left, like a dog asking to be let out, and she paused.

"Don't do it." The raven perched on the lintel cocked his head and gave her a glass-bead stare. "Don't let the animal loose."

"Why not?" After the boy and the fire she was in an ill temper.

"You know the stories about wolves and little girls," the raven said archly. "They always end in tears. Open the other door."

"I'm not a little girl." She grabbed the doorknob, wincing at the pain in her hand, and turned it. To her surprise, it turned easily and the door swung inward enough for a large, black paw to open it all the way.

"Insolent child." The raven launched itself toward the other door. "Consort with beasts and you will be hunted down like one." It passed through the door and only a single feather remained, floating down, to say that it had been there at all. She was alone in the hallway with the wolf.

He was a large wolf, she thought, bigger than she had thought one would be in person. Only her pride and fading anger let her hold her ground as he paced toward her. She held out her hand to him palm open, as she had been taught to do to a strange dog, and to her surprise he dipped his head and swiped his rough tongue over her burned skin. It hurt, but when she looked again, the flesh was healed and new.

"Thank you." She held out her other hand to him and he kissed it in turn, healing her. "Have you seen Marie?" she asked him. But it seemed that he could not speak and instead only whined at her again and shook himself as though he were shedding water. She stared at him, wondering how to make him speak, and he stepped closer to nudge her bare leg with his cold nose, urging her on.

"I'm going to find her," she assured him, and was rewarded by his head pushing up under her hand as they turned to walk further down the hall.

She came at last to an unlocked door; not just unlocked, ajar a little, and she could see a little bit of light in the room, like the light downstairs. She pushed the door and it swung open easily. The wolf sat down at the threshold as though he could not pass it and she went on without him. Inside, the room was almost barren, empty except for a chair at the window and in the chair there sat a man, leaning forward to peer out through a crack in the paper that covered the glass.

"Cody?" It had been so long since she had seen him but she still recognized his profile in the half-light. He didn't turn to see her though, just held up his hand for silence. "Have you seen Marie?" she asked him.

Cody turned to face her then and she stepped back from him when she saw him clearly. He was haggard, aged as though he'd... as though he'd had his youth stolen, she thought, and his eyes were glazed white with cataracts.

"Wait," he told her in a low voice. "She'll come back. She said she had to go home." He turned back to the window and peered out through the little gap in the paper again. She couldn't see what he saw from where she stood but his words were like a key in a lock.

"She's gone home?" She turned to look at the wolf and she could see straight through him. "She can't go home. This is home."

Marie sat upright in bed, clutching the quilt to her. "Logan?" She reached out for him in the pre-dawn darkness and found him already waking next to her. "Logan, I have to go home."

He pulled her against him, one strong arm holding her close, stroking her tangled hair with his free hand. "Whatever y'need, baby." His voice was a reassuring rumble. "Whatever y'need."

quotes from 'Tonight will be Fine', by Leonard Cohen