The Quiet House

Chapter 1: House

The first strange thing I noticed at the Bell house was the kitchen clock.

It hung above the stove, round and yellowed, with painted apples around its face. Its hands had stopped at 2:17, but every few minutes it made a soft clicking sound, as if something inside it was still trying to move.

“Daddy says it hasn’t worked since before I was born,” my best friend Mara told me.

“Then why don’t you throw it away?”

She looked at me as if I had suggested throwing away the stove.

“Because it belongs here.”

I was twelve that summer, and it was my first night away from home.

My mother had resisted for weeks. She did not like the Bells. She had never met them, but she knew where they lived: deep in the Appalachian hills, past the abandoned feed store and the creek where the road narrowed to broken gravel.

“They don’t have much,” she kept saying.

What she meant was that they were poor.