After Sylvia by Alan Cumyn

several of the windows. It didn’t look safe to enter.
    â€œThe door’s locked,” Andy called out to Eleanor. They were all following now. “You have to go through the window.”
    Eleanor put her hand on the doorknob anyway and pushed hard. The door opened and she stepped inside.
    â€œWatch out for the hole in the floor!” Andy yelled, running after her into the house.
    â€œI don’t want to go!” Sadie said suddenly.
    â€œIt’s all right,” Leonard said, and he took her arm. “She’s very nice — for a ghost.”
    Inside, the light was eerie. Everything was covered in snow and shadows. Eleanor and Andy had both managed to walk around the hole in the floor. Owen and Leonard and Sadie walked around it, too, and approached the red couch, which was where it always was, in the middle of the room. Eleanor and Andy were sitting on it now, quite close together, as if drawn there magnetically. It, too, was full of snow. Owen dusted off a section and sat down carefully, and then all five of them were on it. Owen gazed up at the snowbound forest through the rafters above his head.
    He looked around to see where the Bog Man’s wife might be. Maybe in the winter the house got so cold and lonely that she went somewhere else.
    Owen heard a low whistling in the trees and a rubbing of branches against something.
    A voice came then, soft as falling snow. It was hard to make out. Owen had been shivering but now he felt like he was sitting beside a fire. He couldn’t follow the words exactly. They sounded normal and yet not usual at all, as if spoken in a foreign language or a dream.
    There was the voice, and the silence of the air sifting through the forest — which was in itself a sound, Owen realized. And the sound of snow being quiet, and of the haunted house bearing the slow weight of time. The more he listened, the more he heard — a slight scratching, a tree perhaps giving in, finally, to a dreadful itch, and then the sudden staccato of something, maybe a mad woodpecker knocking after frozen insects. And he heard his own breath sliding in and out, a little furnace of heat and activity in the midst of all this cold and stillness.
    Owen let go his loon call then. It started low and soft and warbly, and slowly took over his throat and chest and shook the flimsy walls of the haunted house until it felt like loose snow was being shivered free. The others stayed where they were and just listened.
    Later they walked home together in silence. Andy was apparently not interested anymore in scaring Eleanor and Sadie, and Eleanor said nothing about the house being boring or ordinary or somehow not worth the hours of cold marching.
    At Christmas dinner Horace muttered over how the little paper skirts Margaret had made for the turkey legs were interfering with his carving, and Leonard spilled cranberry sauce on the pure white tablecloth. The silver of the cutlery shone in the candlelight and turkey gravy pooled in the mashed potatoes and buttered squash, and little bits of cork floated in the adults’ wine glasses. Uncle Lorne drank three glassfuls and agreed to whistle for them all. He filled the house for a time with so many birds that Owen felt like he might have been back in the woods. Margaret wore a red dress that Owen had never seen before, and she kept her apron on during dinner. She never seemed to settle in her seat, but was constantly moving back and forth between the dining-room and the kitchen.
    So many things were the same as every other Christmas, and yet so much was new as well. Even after everyone else was finished, Owen’s plate remained nearly full. Not because he wasn’t hungry, but because he was so busy just looking at all that was new and old. They had never had Eleanor and Sadie and Lorraine for Christmas before, yet now it seemed perfectly natural that they would be there. Lorraine seemed so happy, even though she was fatter than Owen had