She focuses her camera on the front wall of the house she’s been watching for a week, though that week could’ve been a day, or a month, or all the years of her life. Not a single thing has changed since she first parked her van out front. Nothing has lightened or darkened, opened or closed, arrived or left. The only thing she’s managed to capture is a time-stamped shot of brick and door every day to document her time on the case.

Sure. Clouds have crossed left to right on her viewfinder. The sun’s climbed up and down each day. Inside her van meals have come and gone. But the front of this house? It’s been so still it doesn’t seem real.

In the old days, she could’ve fired bottle rockets at the door to see if she could stir up some movement. Or she could’ve sleuthed around the windows, filmed through the blinds, rang the doorbell to deliver a fake package. None of that’s legal nowadays, though, so it’s just been focusing and waiting and stasis for her.

Her mind wanders to an episode of Twilight Zone she watched when she was a kid. The one where a little girl falls into the fourth dimension through a portal in her bedroom wall. She feels she could fall through the front of this house into somewhere else, just like that little girl. That’s the vibe this house gives off. Especially through her viewfinder, every detail tiny, all the colors washed gray and faded.

She cannot allow herself to believe the house is empty. That there’s nothing, no one, on the other side of this wall. That would be such a waste. Of time—hers, the client’s, the brickmason who laid this wall so straight and true, so solid.

More than anything, she’d like to place both of her palms against this house’s red brick to prove it’s real. To feel the pulse inside it the wall is hiding. Or to have it let her slip right through into a cold blackness where time cannot be conceived. Just lost.

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Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s had pieces included in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Ghost Forest (Mercer University Press, 2024). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.