By Hayley Shucker
Leo 𖤓 | Taurus ⏾ | Virgo ↑
You’re overjoyed because a secret room is all you’ve ever wanted in a house. It echoes the children’s stories that fed you twice a week at story hour. The ones full of magic and lions. Very unlike real life, the life of babysitting for tuition and making boxed macaroni and cheese with hot dogs instead of dating that popular senior.
Years of hard work. Every missed party, every study-packed weekend led to that Master’s Degree in Finance and clawing your way up, one promotion at a time, which led to the big loan with the great APR, which is so low you feel like a poacher, and finally to you stumbling across this listing and falling in love for the first time. With a house, albeit, but this tunnel is proof dreams do come true.
The house needs work, but so do you. The walls are filled with rotting wood and what used to be pink insulation. It looks like cotton candy you dropped in the dirt that time at the circus. You screamed when you saw the animals. Your parents thought you were afraid. You were, but of the cages and chains not the sharp teeth.
There’s no air conditioning, and the mugginess is almost visible. Last night was so hot you drew the moth-eaten curtains closed and sat shirtless on the couch, your mane billowing in front of a cheap evaporative fan from that website you should be boycotting because billionaires don’t deserve your patronage, but heat stroke isn’t on your to-do list. Remember, it is okay to love a work-in-progress because there’s nowhere to go but up.
Hunch down to enter because the ceiling is too low. Grab your cellphone and turn on the flashlight. Rat shit and piss stain the cement floor, but it might as well be the yellow brick road. Don’t think about calling an exterminator for the rats or termites or other critters roaming around. They were here for years and will be here long after you’re gone. You can share.
It dawns on you that old houses often had servants’ tunnels so they could clean and scatter out of sight like vermin. Push this non-magical thought out of your head. The intrusive thoughts sneak through your cerebrum, and you think: What if they walled someone in alive and there’s a dead body back here?
Breathe. Nice and slow. Because this is not true. It smells a little in this tunnel, sure, but nothing like a corpse. A cockroach skitters in front of you, which makes you jump because you’ve been thinking of dead bodies, and a leaf would have made you jump.
It isn’t clear why your imagination is so hyperactive. It’s been this way forever. Every teacher in elementary school says they love creativity, but that’s bullshit because when you were young, telling stories and drawing pictures, all you got told was to be quiet and that monsters don’t exist in the real world. Of course not! Our monsters are human, and that’s worse.
When you see a smaller door, one you will have to get on your knees and crawl through, you pause. Your neck is tweaked from hunching over in this hallway and every day at a computer. No amount of ergonomic furniture helps with your bad posture. Large chunks of your paycheck have gone to specialty keyboards and mice, a roller chair that boasts lumbar support, a standing desk, and then there are the miracle cures. It’s all snake oil peddled by pretty people, but desperation makes sane people do anything, and so you bought those, too. But your body still hurts. Always. Just a little. The friends you’re too busy for stop inviting you out anyway.
Kneel down. Doubt creeps in. The cement is cold through your jeans. Damp like a swamp. Sticky spider webs cover the door. Abandoned because even vermin know there is nothing good here. Or maybe they are all behind the door, stacked one on top of the other. A pyramid of rats posed like cheerleaders at the football games you never went to, not even when your best friend made the team and you promised.
The little door is jammed. Growl at it. It shouldn’t surprise you. With a house this old, the wood is bound to warp and stick. But it does surprise you because you’ve already done the hard part—found the door buried behind drywall. Drywall! If it weren’t for your crazy desire to renovate over the summer and the even crazier belief that YouTube videos were enough to take on a project this large, you never would have made that trip to Lowe’s and bought the sledgehammer. There’s always something to prove, so you loaded up two roller carts as if you were a foreman.
You’ll eventually call a professional, max out two credit cards to fix what you’ve busted. That’s okay, because on the other side of this door is a treasure no one can imagine, because magic is ineffable. A room that is literally a blank canvas, like a living version of MS Paint.
Don’t break the door. Magic, like life, has rules. Watch another how-to video. Oil the hinges. Be patient. Call out sick from work three days straight and live off pork ribs, licking the meat off the bone. Sleep nestled near the door like a lover. Roar so loud the other lions can’t ignore you.
Try the handle.
Hayley Shucker received her MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence and her MA in English from CSULB. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Etched Onyx, The Mersey Review, Door is a Jar, Los Angeles Review, Reed Magazine, Adanna Literary Journal, and more. She is a screener for BAFF and a reader at Craft Literary Journal. She loves musical theater, cats, and baking. Read her work on hayleyshucker.com, subscribe to hayleyshucker.substack.com for analysis of first chapters, and find her on Instagram @superhayleykaystuff.
A Curious Moon 