Grandmother's house

Shelley Raye was angry, and when Shelley Raye was angry everyone suffered.

She dunked the cat in the toilet, then set all the milk and eggs out on the back porch in the 98-degree heat. By the time her mother found them there, island-sized chunks floated in the milk. She put a red crayon in the dryer; all her father's white work shirts came out bright pink. She devised a thousand tiny torments to inflict on her family, each one a pointy reminder of her displeasure.

She had not wanted to come to her grandmother's house. She had wanted to stay in her own home where she could play with her own toys, her own friends, and sleep in her own bed. But her parents had told her over and over, in calm and soothing voices, that they had to be out of the house for several weeks while the builders were tearing out part of the house and putting up a new addition. Her grandmother lived halfway across the state, and the drive there had been a barrage of heavy sighs, pouts, and shrieking outbursts. And time had not cooled Shelley Raye's ire; if anything each passing day saw her anger building.

Her father had tried to be stern with her at one point, but he wore the role uncomfortably. Shelley Raye had merely scowled at him the entire duration of his lecture and he eventually went away, shaking his head. Her mother tried to bribe her with trips to the zoo and the ice cream store, with new clothes and candy, but nothing would calm Shelley Raye's fire. And her grandmother simply sat and watched her, with eyes sharp and clear.

Monday morning had been the worst - Shelley had destroyed breakfast for the entire family, and came close to setting her grandmother's house on fire. Her mother had been close to tears when Shelley Raye's grandmother took her aside and handed her the keys to her ancient Cadillac that slept under a cloth in the garage and told her to take the car and "do something nice for herself", and to not come back until dinnertime. Shelley Raye's mother nearly tripped over the mat in her rush to escape.

Shelley Raye was unsure what to make of this development; she had spent little time alone with her grandmother and was uncertain how she would handle her. As she pondered how to gauge the old woman's mettle her grandmother came to her and asked,

"Would you like to see my dollhouse?"

Shelley Raye contemplated this for a moment, then nodded cautiously. If nothing else, she could smash it and reduce the old woman to tears.

Her grandmother led her up the broad staircase to the second floor, then stopped in front of a door Shelley Raye had never seen opened in the weeks she had been there. Her grandmother reached into a pocket in her dress and withdrew a key - and old-timey key of a kind Shelley Raye had only seen in her mother's ancient children's books. It was iron and adorned with curls and loops that seemed to form some kind of elaborate letter, only the shape of the character was so lost in the elaborate whorls and curlicues she could not make out what it might be.

Her grandmother slid the key into the door lock and turned it with a click that was loud, but smooth and oiled. The door opened with a groan and a smell of dust and dry air spilled out into the hallway. Her grandmother started up the steps, then turned to Shelley Raye.

"Be careful up here," she said, and was that a smile trying to tug at the corners of her mouth? Shelley Raye decided then that she would indeed destroy whatever treasure her grandmother intended to show her, but her grandmother continued,

"Some things up here bite."

What? What did she mean by that? There was only one animal in this house: her grandmother's obese siamese that had, until Shelley Raye's arrival, lived a life of indolent sloth and had never, as far as Shelley Raye knew, bitten anything other than kitty chow.

Her curiosity piqued, Shelley Raye followed her grandmother up the creaking steps into the attic. A swath of early morning sunlight cut through a dormer window, reflecting a golden glow into the shadowed corners that crowded with forgotten artifacts. The attic was crowded with old trunks, framed portraits of family members long dead, and several pieces of wooden furniture - dressers and a chest-of-drawers and a wardrobe that reminded Shelley Raye of the doorway to Narnia that her mother had read to her about. All were of a deep burnished wood so dark that Shelley Raye thought for a moment that they were drinking the sunlight.

"Here it is," her grandmother said simply, and Shelley Raye turned to look at the dollhouse.

As soon as she saw it all thoughts of damaging the dollhouse left her.

It sat on the floor, sprawling and majestic. If it had been a real house, it would have been the finest mansion Shelley Raye had ever seen. A broad miniature porch encompassed the structure, held up by exquisitely turned pillars and decorated with a spiderweb filligree. Each window looked to be a tiny work of stained glass, peaked at the top like church arches.

Shelley Raye walked slowly around the dollhouse, drinking in the detail - each gable, every dormer devised with love and cunning.

She reached the corner where a tall octagonal tower stood out from the house, reaching almost to her eye level. At the top of the tower a miniscule balcony ran above four intricately-wrought windows. Shelley Raye started to lean forward then stopped, oddly uncertain, and looked at her grandmother. Her grandmother nodded with that contained smile threatening to break free, and Shelley Raye leaned in to peer through one of the tiny tower windows.

As she had known it would be, the inside was as exquisite as the exterior. She was looking down the shaft of the tower, along the well of a spiral stairway that fell to a polished wooden floor below. Shelley felt almost dizzy as she gazed through the window: the detail on the stairway bannisters was so fine, the individual planks of the hardwood floor so clear, that she suddenly felt as if she were floating in the air above a real house, looking down not two or three feet, but instead a hundred feet to the floor below.

And then Shelley saw something that made her jerk upright and stumble back into a pile of old clothes and hats, and fall to the floor in a tangled heap. Her breath caught in her throat and her heart leaped up to the top of her chest, trying to escape. Shelley Raye stared at the dollhouse for a long moment, then turned to see her grandmother still standing a short ways away, that smile now full and open on her face, her eyes still sharp and clear.

"You saw, didn't you?" her grandmother asked softly.

Shelley nodded numbly.

What she had seen was this: as she had gazed down that stairwell, noting the detail on the tiny carpet and the almost imperceptable grain on the wood, as she had marvelled at the fantastic detail in this most wonderful dollhouse, quite abruptly at the bottom of the stairwell, striding with quiet purpose, a tiny little man had walked across the floor.