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On your return from your weekly trips to the park where you walk barefoot in the grass and pretend you are some nice family’s eight-year-old daughter or five-year-old son, you find your bedroom door is unlocked and open. On your bed a dozen or so paper airplanes neatly folded wait, arranged for takeoff. You do not open them. You do not unfold them enough to find out what the weight is at their centers. Rather you nose them out the hole in the screen, watching each catch a gust and slide between buildings and cars and over small thatches of grass. When you are done, your flatmate, who had been standing the whole time behind your lace curtains, steps out and says, Surprise. He has on your bathrobe and though you’re not positive, also your tighty whities. You made the airplanes? you ask. He nods and opens the robe to indeed show you the tighty whities and a dingy pair of athletic socks. Your mother has been sending you letters by post, he says and grins sheepishly, trying to help. You look to the window where all the airplanes have gone and then pick up your hairbrush, forcing your hands against the bristles. You hold on until you’re sure your hands are white with pressure. You let go and drop the brush out the window. Give them to me, you say. Your flatmate takes off your clothes he’s donned. You release these from the window. Then, you grab everything, the lace curtains, the bodice ripper, your computer, three full bags of cheese curls, and force them from the room. You don’t stop until what remains is too large to fit through the window: the mattress, the desk, the office chair, a bookcase, your body and his. You know, you say and the flatmate sits beside you on the nude bed, she gave the gun to my sister and said ‘Do it.’ You bite your lip, rub a swath of cheese curl dust from the hairs of your arm, and wait for the noise, the noise that has shushed you for eight plus months now. But there is nothing, no siren calls of blue jays, no backfiring of jalopies, no wind or insects, no human voices. You finish, And my sister did as she was told.

Laura Madeline Wiseman is working on a dissertation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches English. Her chapbook My Imaginary is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Margie, MississippiReview.com, Permafrost, Blackbird, and Grasslands Review have published her work.