She looks at me, her huge cold sore a shingle over her lip, her eyes narrow and wet and shining with hate, and she starts to scream obscenities.

I haunt a corner where one wall meets another, bathe in the baleful banality of her filthy curses, her madness, her accusations and condemnations, and a piece of me dies as waterfalls of wicked words pour down over me and soak my soul in withering misery.

When it’s over (every horror ends eventually, you can count on that at least) I slink back to my room and open a book.

It’s a strange thing, this book…in fact ‘book’ seems wrong, because what I hold in my paws is very old, bound in leather. It possesses a certain weight, a certain dark light that grows and grows when it’s opened. It has a quality that swallows reality and-

There’s a crash downstairs as she breaks something. I close my eyes, wait patiently for the storm to pass.

Every horror ends eventually. Yes, it does, believe it or not. Nothing lasts forever, not unless you let it, and in time one can come to find that the hurricanes of life eventually break and die upon the shores of the soul if the strength to weather them can be found.

How can you love someone yet hate them? I don’t know, but I know it’s possible. I would have liked to have known her before her own hurricane swept most of her away, before the crack and the madness caused what I call ‘The Crumble’.

Well…wishes and fishes.

Ah, but the book, that beautiful unread thing, that thick and heavy and untold story that shone like a lighthouse of hope in a sea of sorrowful memories. It was waiting, waiting to be read (written?), and it was right there in front of me.

There was enduring quiet now…she’d gone to sleep, perhaps, or…no, don’t think about that. The book, remember? You have the book, the keys to a new world, the bridge to a universe far, far away from this one, and that, of course, was all that mattered.

So I set my paws to the cracked and blasted road of broken dreams and left my life behind, and-