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The house had always seemed smaller to her inside than out, the walls and ceiling closing in somehow, as though it would come together one day and crush her flat, as in an Edgar Allan Poe story she had read a long time ago. The idea had taken a stronger hold of her fancy in recent days, so that she felt secure only when she was outside the house. Even her room, which had once been a sanctuary, no longer felt safe.

Sometimes, lying awake in the dark, she had tried to analyse her feelings about the house. Certainly, she thought, once upon a time she had felt better about it. Once, it had felt safe, like everyone felt about their homes, she imagined. So when had it all changed? When had it stopped being a home and become a house, and then, increasingly, on the way to becoming an oppressive prison?

She had vague feelings, not quite memories, which she thought were the product of her imagination. Night, yes, something about night, and darkness, and pain. There was pain involved somehow, and blood. She had tried to examine the feeling, to drag it out and turn it over and over, to look at it and perhaps understand it a little, but it slipped away into recesses of her mind where she could not, or dared not, follow.

Passing her sister’s room, she heard faint noises, things being moved around. Her sister’s room was little more than a glorified wardrobe, really, scarcely containing more than a bed and a set of shelves, but her dad had insisted. "She needs privacy," he had declared. Somehow, though, her sister hadn’t really looked as though she had wanted the privacy, or appreciated it overmuch.

On an impulse, she knocked on the door of her sister’s room. "May I come in, DeeDee?"

"No!" Her sister, just turned thirteen, heartbreakingly pretty with her curls and wide-set eyes. More than once various people had said her eyes were those of a doe, something which never failed to make DeeDee helplessly angry. "No!" she repeated through the door, her voice breaking on a sob.

"DeeDee? What’s wrong?"

"Nothing. Go away!"

She stood in front of the closed door for a moment longer, wondering if she should try to push her way in, but her sister deserved her privacy. DeeDee was growing up, too, and it wasn’t like it used to be when she would come running with a gashed knee, trusting her older sister to make it better. With a small shrug, she went off to the kitchen and made herself an omelette.

Afterwards, she went out. The rain had stopped, and she could no longer bear to remain inside the house. Her parents weren’t back yet, of course. Her mother had gone off for a week, to visit her mother, because her dad had asked her to; her mom never, ever, in her entire life, had done anything of her own initiative. Her dad was out doing something, who knew what, and would be back sometime – she didn’t know when, and didn’t particularly care. What she knew was that she could no longer remain in the house with her sister locked away and crying, and the walls closing in, the roof falling in on her.

The clouds still lay heavy overhead, with occasional patches thinned out just enough for her to glimpse the moon, a huge pale oval patch, its margins blurred and smeared. Obscurely, she realised it must be the full moon or thereabouts.

Once, when she had been much younger, she had loved to watch the full moon. There was a rabbit in the moon, leaning against the edge, its ears stretching across to the top of the disc. Oh, she knew even then that there wasn’t a real rabbit; such a rabbit would have been big enough to tip the moon over if it moved, and then what would it eat or breathe anyway? But she had still loved to watch the moon.

That had all been then, years ago. Nowadays, she hardly spared the moon a glance.

She decided to walk down to the sea and back. The sea at the nearest point was half an hour away – not the beach, just the highway along the rocky coast, on which the waves broke without cease. When the storms came, the waves at high tide would break right over the highway, and sometimes swamp a car or two. Railings had been placed to stop them from being washed out to sea.

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