On the third floor of the manor, Eleanor West let go of the curtain and turned toward the door while the fabric was still fluttering back into its original position. And slowly, the girl made her way toward the steps. Below, in smaller letters, it continued NO SOLICITATION, NO VISITORS, NO QUESTS.

ELEANOR WEST’S HOME FOR WAYWARD CHILDREN it read, in large letters. Raising her hand to shield her eyes, the girl looked toward the manor, pausing when she saw the sign that hung from the porch eaves. She had not, in all likelihood, purchased it herself. Her small wheeled suitcase was bright pink, covered with cartoon daisies. From the look of her, it had been quite some time since she had seen the sun. Her hair was bone-white streaked with runnels of black, like oil spilled on a marble floor, and her eyes were pale as ice. She wore black-black jeans, black ankle boots with tiny black buttons marching like soldiers from toe to calf-and she wore white-a loose tank top, the faux pearl bands around her wrists-and she had a ribbon the color of pomegranate seeds tied around the base of her ponytail.

She was tall and willowy and couldn’t have been more than seventeen there was still something of the unformed around her eyes and mouth, leaving her a work in progress, meant to be finished by time. The rear passenger door slammed, and the car pulled away again, leaving a teenage girl behind. A single car pulled up, tawdry yellow and seeming somehow shabby against the carefully curated scene. The thin black ribbon of the driveway curved from the distant gate to form a loop in front of the manor itself, feeding elegantly into a slightly wider waiting area at the base of the porch. The grass was perfectly green, the trees clustered around the structure perfectly pruned, and the garden grew in a profusion of colors that normally existed together only in a rainbow, or in a child’s toy box. The manor sat in the center of what would have been considered a field, had it not been used to frame a private home. Narrate the impossible things, turn them into a story, and they could be controlled. Narration came naturally after a time spent in the company of talking scarecrows or disappearing cats it was, in its own way, a method of keeping oneself grounded, connected to the thin thread of continuity that ran through all lives, no matter how strange they might become. THE HABIT OF NARRATION, of crafting something miraculous out of the commonplace, was hard to break.

Every heart a doorway by seanan mcguire