it groaned in protest but Ella ignored its complaints. She took out a piece of paper and a red crayon—her list. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she considered all the wooden things she had ever seen in her house that could be useful. She added to her list:
A spoon
A grandfather clock case
A log from the fireplace
A pencil
A set of toy blocks
A jewelry box
Ella would have to collect these things quietly and spread her activities out over the seven remaining days. If she wasn’t careful she might get caught. Her parents never paid attention to what she was doing but they did care about their things. They liked to collect them and argue over them and spend entirely too much money on them. Ella’s parents’ things were the only things that mattered to them, the only things they had in common. Thankfully, the fact that they had so many of them meant Ella could manage to take some without being noticed but she still needed to be careful.
Nothing could stop her, or get in her way.
She folded her list and tucked it away in her pocket. Thirteen wooden things would have to do. Thirteen felt like a good number and her instructions weren’t specific enough to suggest otherwise. She surveyed her collection once more before climbing down the rope ladder from the treehouse and into the world below.
***
Ella crept through the house in total silence, collecting. Her parents didn’t notice that she had stopped attending school, stopped talking, stopped eating more than what she needed to survive. They didn’t notice because their lives were like parallel lines, side by side but never intersecting. That night Ella planned to collect her mother’s jewelry box in the master bedroom. The air was thick and still. The room was dark with the quiet regret that filled the whole house but seemed particularly concentrated there. Ella blinked as the feeling stung her eyes. She felt the urge to sweep it away from her face, to hold her breath, but she knew it would do no good because she had been breathing it in for years. She circled the room, stepping lightly on the carpet, her feet barely making an impression. Her mother liked to move things, to rearrange them so there was no telling where the jewelry box would be; in a drawer perhaps, a closet, beneath the bed.