The boy, who is really a young man, and not so young a young man, floats through the ruins of the house like he’s an astronaut on a new planet. The topography is gray, unintelligible rubble. He can walk through the walls. The columns that once held up the ceilings remind him of bones, tapering and brittle. All the soft things have gone.
‍
Every now and then, a flash of color conjures back whole rooms. A pearly shard from the powder room mirror, a broken tile from the green marble foyer, a bit of the cherry wood dining table. And the house is briefly alive again. Someone is on the phone in her lilac bed covered in bears. Someone is grinding spices while the TV blares basketball. Someone is watering the plants in the bathroom- the mango tree has reached the top of the window, maybe this will be the year it bears fruit. Someone is pulling into the driveway with a bottle of white and a baby. Someone is skimming the leaves from the pool. It is 1997. It is 2005. It is 1991. It is 2020. The house is engulfed in flames. It is burning to the ground. The rooms are quiet now, gray. There are so many shades; they reveal themselves like eyes adjusting to the dark. The boy walks into his bedroom, which his mother turned into storage years ago. It’s a black sand beach. In the middle, a castle rises from the char. Four brick-effect walls, a tower with a lookout window, a slide, a blue door. His 4th birthday present. Little Tikes, flame retardant.
‍
It is Halloween, and the boy’s mom doesn’t like buying costumes, so she dresses him and his sister in traditional clothes and calls them Aladdin and Princess Jasmine. They’ve done this before, but they’re young enough not to mind. They’re old enough to trick-or-treat by themselves though, and they cover the neighborhood studiously, their plastic orange buckets like flares in the mist. All the driveways are exactly the same length, and they lead to one of four types of houses: the Colonial, the Georgian, the Federal, or the Classic. When they ring the doorbell of Mrs. Zeligman’s house (a Classic), they hear screams. Mrs. Zeligman is chained to the staircase, covered in blood, and her husband is walking around with a chainsaw. He’s wearing a long black cape and a mask, and the lights in the house are flashing red. The boy drops his pumpkin pail and runs into a bush in the side yard. His sister takes two king-size Twix bars and calmly explains to Mr. Zeligman that her brother doesn’t yet understand the difference between real and make-believe.
‍
Snow days for a week during the blizzard of ’99, and the boy is at his friend Todd’s house down the road. He’s already stayed one night, but the moms let the sleepover continue. At midnight, the boys sneak upstairs and eat all the Breyers Cookies n’ Cream. They’re high on sugar and scared after watching Silence of the Lambs, so they put on their parkas and run around in the bright, fresh snow. They were babies together, their moms like to say, but in school they’ve started to pretend to not like each other. They’re in the same 6th grade class, but Todd is twice as big and has a girlfriend. They’re making snow angels, and Todd tells the boy that this is their last sleepover. He calls the boy weird. Todd says he used to be weird too, but now he is normal, and he can only hang out with normal people. The boy grabs a pair of scissors from the kitchen and hacks Todd’s sleeping bag to shreds. Then, he starts sobbing. Todd lets him sleep in his bed. In the morning, the moms are horrified; they make the boy handwrite an apology; they say he has to weed Todd’s mom’s garden for a week after school. The boy doesn’t protest, doesn’t say anything at all. 
‍
On the first day of kindergarten, the boy’s mother dresses him in new khaki shorts and a checkered shirt with a collar. It’s choking me, shouts the boy. He screams until his mother lets him wear his favorite outfit, baggy blue velour pants and a matching sweatshirt embroidered with an airplane. He and his sister pose in front of the red front door for a photo. The boy refuses to smile at first. Then he pulls on his sister’s braids, and she whines and pinches him on the arm; he squeals gleefully, and they are both laughing. Click. Their grandmother dabs red dots and grey dots on their foreheads and recites a prayer. Their dad makes them recite his favorite prayer. “What are you?” he asks. “Happy, healthy, and terrific!” they reply. “What did you say?” “Happy, healthy, and terrific.” “Again?” “We’re not happy, we’re not healthy, and we’re not terrific!” they shout as they run down the hill, forgetting to rub off the sacred powder before climbing aboard the bus. 
‍
The castle is at the end of the driveway now, leaning up against the garbage bins. Tonight the wind will knock everything over, and in the morning, the walls of the castle, and the detachable turret, and the slide that snaps onto the plastic bricks, will be lying on the street when the new kid who lives on the cul-de-sac walks by. He moved to town last year from Dhaka; he’s still getting used to the sidewalks, so wide and clean, and the dogs who live their lives on leashes. He’ll look at the bits of castle and realize that it’s an easy fix, it isn’t broken at all. Later he will reassemble the castle in his backyard. His little sister will wriggle up the slide and sing a song about her invisible friend Donna. She’s wearing a tutu; she refuses to take it off. It’s an afternoon in August, and the light is syrupy and golden, and the grass has just been mowed, like those perfect dreams, like the dream they all shared.

Meara Sharma is a writer and artist with work in The Believer, the Washington Square Review, Ambit, Guernica, Vice, the New York Times, and elsewhere. With roots in Massachusetts and India, she currently lives in London.