Last Day of a Prior Life

Literary Hub shares an excerpt from a new work of fiction, in which a thirty-six-year-old real estate agent, while cleaning a staged mid-century house, finds a seven-year-old boy in a brown school uniform sitting in the kitchen, watching her without blinking. The boy seems to belong to the house itself, and the agent, who has always felt an unusual connection to buildings, feels no fear, only a strange calm. She asks what he wants, but he simply waves goodbye and walks away, and she spends the rest of the day waiting for him to return. She never tells anyone about the encounter, and when her partner asks about her day, she only mentions the house and the two couples who came to view it.

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